Horror Literature Through History [2 Volumes]: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears
Author: Matt Cardin
Date: 2017-09-01 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: History; Social History; Literary Criticism; Horror & Supernatural
Description: This two-volume set offers comprehensive coverage of horror literature that spans its deep history, dominant themes, significant works, and major authors, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice, as well as lesser-known horror writers. Many of today's horror story fans—who appreciate horror through movies, television, video games, graphic novels, and other forms—probably don't realize that horror literature is not only one of the most popular types of literature but one of the oldest. People have always been mesmerized by stories that speak to their deepest fears. Horror Literatur
Publisher: Greenwood
Rights: Copyright © 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

Horror Literature
through History

Horror Literature
through History

An Encyclopedia of the Stories
That Speak to Our Deepest Fears

VOLUME 1

MATT CARDIN, EDITOR

Copyright © 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cardin, Matt, editor.

Title: Horror literature through history : an encyclopedia of the stories that speak to our deepest fears / Matt Cardin, editor.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017000044 (print) | LCCN 2017000211 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781440842016 (set : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781440847561
(volume 1 : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781440847578 (volume 2 : acid-free
paper) | ISBN 9781440842023 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales—History and criticism—Encyclopedias.

Classification: LCC PN3435 .H665 2017 (print) | LCC PN3435 (ebook) |
DDC 809.3/8738—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000044

ISBN:978-1-4408-4201-6 (set)

978-1-4408-4756-1 (vol. 1)

978-1-4408-4757-8 (vol. 2)

978-1-4408-4202-3 (ebook)

21    20    19    18    17        1    2    3    4    5

This book is also available as an eBook.

Greenwood

An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC

ABC-CLIO, LLC

130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911

Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
www.abc-clio.com

This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Guide to Related Topics

Preface

Introduction: Spookhouses, Catharsis, and Dark Consolations

Timeline of Horror Literature through History

VOLUME 1

Part One: Horror through History

Horror in the Ancient World

Horror in the Middle Ages

Horror in the Early Modern Era

Horror in the Eighteenth Century

Horror in the Nineteenth Century

Horror from 1900 to 1950

Horror from 1950 to 2000

Horror in the Twenty-First Century

Part Two: Themes, Topics, and Genres

Apocalyptic Horror

Eco-horror

Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror

Ghost Stories

The Gothic Literary Tradition

Gothic Poetry

Horror Anthologies

Horror Comics

Horror Criticism

Horror Literature and Science Fiction

Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary

Horror Literature in the Internet Age

Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years

Horror Video Games

The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth

Occult Fiction

Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television

Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural

Shakespearean Horrors

Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror

Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond

Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction

Young Adult Horror Fiction

Part Three: Reference Entries (Authors, Works, and Specialized Topics)

Aickman, Robert

Ainsworth, William Harrison

Ajvide Lindqvist, John

Alcott, Louisa May

Alone with the Horrors

Alraune

Ancestral Curse

Arkham House

At the Mountains of Madness

Ballard, J. G.

Barker, Clive

Barlow, R. H.

Barron, Laird

Baudelaire, Charles

“The Beast with Five Fingers”

Beaumont, Charles

Beloved

Benson, E. F.

Bierce, Ambrose

Blackwood, Algernon

Bleiler, E. F.

Bloch, Robert

Body Horror

Body Snatching

Books of Blood

Borges, Jorge Luis

Bowen, Marjorie

Bradbury, Ray

Bram Stoker Award

Brennan, Joseph Payne

Brite, Poppy Z.

The Brontë Sisters

Brown, Charles Brockden

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward

Burnt Offerings

Butler, Octavia E.

Buzzati, Dino

Byron, Lord

Byronic Hero

“The Call of Cthulhu”

Campbell, Ramsey

Carmilla

Carrion Comfort

Carroll, Jonathan

Carter, Angela

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

“Casting the Runes”

The Castle of Otranto

The Ceremonies

Chambers, Robert W.

Charnas, Suzy McKee

“The Chimney”

Cisco, Michael

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Collier, John

Collins, Wilkie

“The Colour out of Space”

Communion

Conjure Wife

Coppard, A. E.

Crawford, F. Marion

Cthulhu Mythos

Dagon

The Damnation Game

The Damned

The Dark Domain

Dark Fantasy

Dark Gods

The Dark Tower

Datlow, Ellen
de la Mare, Walter

“The Death of Halpin Frayser”

“The Demon Lover”

Derleth, August

The Devil Rides Out

Devils and Demons

Dick, Philip K.

Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves

Dracula

Dreams and Nightmares

The Drowning Girl
du Maurier, Daphne

Due, Tananarive

“The Dunwich Horror”

Ellison, Harlan

Etchison, Dennis

Ewers, Hanns Heinz

The Exorcist

“The Fall of the House of Usher”

Farris, John

Faulkner, William

Fear

Féval, Paul

Forbidden Knowledge or Power

Frame Story

Frankenstein

Gaiman, Neil

Gautier, Théophile

“The Ghost Ship”

Ghost Story

The Girl Next Door

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”

Gogol, Nikolai

The Golem

“Good Country People”

Gothic Hero/Villain

Grabiński, Stefan

Grant, Charles L.

“The Great God Pan”

“Green Tea”

The Grotesque

Haggard, H. Rider

Haining, Peter

Hand, Elizabeth

The Hands of Orlac

Hardy, Thomas

Harris, Thomas

Hartley, L. P.

Harvest Home

The Haunted House or Castle

The Haunting of Hill House

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hearn, Lafcadio

Hell House

Herbert, James

Hichens, Robert

Hill, Joe

Hill, Susan

The Historian

Hodgson, William Hope

Hoffmann, E. T. A.

“The Horla”

The Hound of the Baskervilles

The House Next Door

House of Leaves

The House of the Seven Gables

The House on the Borderland

Howard, Robert E.

Hubbard, L. Ron

Hugo, Victor

Huysmans, J. K.

I Am Legend

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

In a Glass Darkly

Incubi and Succubi

International Gothic Association

International Horror Guild Award

Interview with the Vampire

The Invisible Man

Irving, Washington

The Island of Doctor Moreau

It

VOLUME 2

Jackson, Shirley

James, Henry

James, M. R.

The Jewel of Seven Stars

John Silence: Physician Extraordinary

Joshi, S. T.

Joyce, Graham

Kafka, Franz

Keene, Brian

Ketchum, Jack

Kiernan, Caitlín R.

King, Stephen

The King in Yellow

Kipling, Rudyard

Kirk, Russell

Klein, T. E. D.

Kneale, Nigel

Koja, Kathe

Koontz, Dean

Kuttner, Henry

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Lane, Joel

Lansdale, Joe R.

“The Last Feast of Harlequin”

“Lazarus”

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan

Lee, Tanith

Lee, Vernon

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Leiber, Fritz

Lewis, Matthew Gregory

“Ligeia”

Ligotti, Thomas

Link, Kelly

“The Listeners”

Long, Frank Belknap

“Lot No. 249”

Lovecraft, H. P.

Lovecraftian Horror

Lumley, Brian

The Lurker at the Threshold

Machen, Arthur

“Mackintosh Willy”

Mad Scientist

Malpertuis

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

Martin, George R. R.

“The Masque of the Red Death”

Matheson, Richard

Maturin, Charles Robert

Maupassant, Guy de

McCammon, Robert R.

McDowell, Michael

McGrath, Patrick

Melmoth the Wanderer

Metcalfe, John

Meyrink, Gustav

Miéville, China

The Mind Parasites

Misery

The Monk

“The Monkey’s Paw”

Monsters

Moore, Alan

Morrell, David

Morrison, Toni

Morrow, W. C.

“Mr. Arcularis”

Mummies

“The Music of Erich Zann”

The Mysteries of Udolpho

New Weird

Newman, Kim

The Night Land

Night Shift

Nolan, William F.

Northanger Abbey

“The Novel of the Black Seal”

Novels versus Short Fiction

The Numinous

Oates, Joyce Carol

O’Brien, Fitz-James

Occult Detectives

O’Connor, Flannery

The October Country

Oliver, Reggie

Onions, Oliver

The Other

Our Lady of Darkness

“Out of the Deep”

Palahniuk, Chuck

Penny Dreadful

The Phantom of the Opera

“The Phantom ’Rickshaw”

Phantoms

“Pickman’s Model”

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Poe, Edgar Allan

Possession and Exorcism

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Psychological Horror

Pulp Horror

Quinn, Seabury

Quiroga, Horacio

Radcliffe, Ann

The Rats

“The Rats in the Walls”

Ray, Jean

“The Reach”

“The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”

The Return

Rice, Anne

“Ringing the Changes”

“The Rocking-Horse Winner”

Rohmer, Sax

Romanticism and Dark Romanticism

Rosemary’s Baby

Russell, Ray

Saki

Samuels, Mark

Sandkings

“The Sand-man”

Sarban

“Sardonicus”

“Schalken the Painter”

Schulz, Bruno

Schweitzer, Darrell

“The Screaming Skull”

She

Shea, Michael

Shelley, Mary

Shiel, M. P.

The Shining

Shirley Jackson Awards

“A Short Trip Home”

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow”

Simmons, Dan

Smith, Clark Ashton

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Song of Kali

The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror)

Spiritualism

Splatterpunk

“Sredni Vashtar”

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Stoker, Bram

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Straub, Peter

Sturgeon, Theodore

The Sublime

Summers, Montague

Surrealism

Tem, Melanie

Terror versus Horror

Tessier, Thomas

“There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding”

“They”

“Thrawn Janet”

Transformation and Metamorphosis

Trilby

The Turn of the Screw

The Uncanny

Unreliable Narrator

Vampires

“The Vampyre”

VanderMeer, Jeff

Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood

Vathek

Wagner, Karl Edward

Wakefield, H. R.

Walpole, Horace

Wandrei, Donald

Weird Tales

Wellman, Manly Wade

Wells, H. G.

Welty, Eudora

The Werewolf of Paris

Werewolves

Wharton, Edith

Wheatley, Dennis

“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”

“The White Hands”

“The White People”

Whitehead, Henry S.

“The Willows”

Wilson, F. Paul

Witches and Witchcraft

The Woman in Black

World Fantasy Award

Wyndham, John

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn

“The Yellow Wall-Paper”

“Young Goodman Brown”

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”

Zombies

Select Bibliography

About the Editor and Contributors

Index

Guide to Related Topics

Interviews

Laird Barron

Ramsey Campbell

Ellen Datlow

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Joe R. Lansdale

Thomas Ligotti

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Horror Literature through History

Horror in the Ancient World

Horror in the Early Modern Era

Horror in the Middle Ages

Horror in the Eighteenth Century

Horror in the Nineteenth Century

Horror from 1900 to 1950

Horror from 1950 to 2000

Horror in the Twenty-First Century

Horror Types and Subgenres

Apocalyptic Horror

Dark Fantasy

Eco-horror

Ghost Stories

The Gothic Literary Tradition

Gothic Poetry

Horror Comics

Horror Literature and Science Fiction

Lovecraftian Horror

New Weird

Occult Fiction

Psychological Horror

Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond

Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction

Young Adult Horror Fiction

Monsters, Creatures, Threats, and Villains

Devils and Demons

Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves

Gothic Hero/Villain

Incubi and Succubi

Mad Scientist

Monsters

Mummies

Vampires

Werewolves

Witches and Witchcraft

Zombies

Topical Studies

Body Horror

Cthulhu Mythos

Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror

Horror Anthologies

Horror Criticism

Horror Literature in the Internet Age

Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary

Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years

Horror Video Games

The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth

Novels versus Short Fiction

The Numinous

Occult Detectives

Penny Dreadful

Pulp Horror

Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural

Romanticism and Dark Romanticism

Shakespearean horrors

Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror

Spiritualism

Splatterpunk

The Sublime

Surrealism

Terror versus Horror

The Uncanny

Unreliable Narrator

Weird Tales

Tropes, Themes, and Narrative Techniques

Ancestral Curse

Body Snatching

Byronic Hero

Dreams and Nightmares

Forbidden Knowledge or Power

Frame Story

The Grotesque

The Haunted House or Castle

Possession and Exorcism

Transformation and Metamorphosis

Unreliable Narrator

Authors and Works

Aickman, Robert

“Ringing the Changes”

Ainsworth, William Harrison

Ajvide Lindqvist, John

Alcott, Louisa May

Ballard, J. G.

Barker, Clive

Books of Blood

The Damnation Game

Barlow, R. H.

Barron, Laird

Baudelaire, Charles

“The Beast with Five Fingers” by W. F. Harvey

Beaumont, Charles

Benson, E. F.

Bierce, Ambrose

“The Death of Halpin Frayser”

Blackwood, Algernon

John Silence: Physician Extraordinary

“The Willows”

Bleiler, E. F.

Bloch, Robert

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”

Borges, Jorge Luis

Bowen, Marjorie

Bradbury, Ray

The October Country

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Brennan, Joseph Payne

Brite, Poppy Z.

The Brontë Sisters

Brown, Charles Brockden

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco

Butler, Octavia E.

Buzzati, Dino

Byron, Lord

Campbell, Ramsey

Alone with the Horrors

“The Chimney”

“Mackintosh Willie”

Carroll, Jonathan

Carter, Angela

Chambers, Robert W.

The King in Yellow

Charnas, Suzy McKee

Cisco, Michael

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Collier, John

Collins, Wilkie

Communion by Whitley Strieber

Coppard, A. E.

Crawford, F. Marion

“The Screaming Skull”

Dagon by Fred Chappell

Datlow, Ellen
de la Mare, Walter

“The Listeners”

“Out of the Deep”

The Return

“Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen

Derleth, August

The Lurker at the Threshold

Dick, Philip K.

du Maurier, Daphne

Due, Tananarive

Ellison, Harlan

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”

Etchison, Dennis

Ewers, Hanns Heinz

Alraune

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Farris, John

Faulkner, William

Féval, Paul

Gaiman, Neil

Gautier, Théophile

“The Ghost Ship” by Richard Middleton

Gogol, Nikolai

Grabiński, Stefan

The Dark Domain

Grant, Charles L.

Haggard, H. Rider

She

Haining, Peter

Hand, Elizabeth

The Hands of Orlac by Maurice Renard

Hardy, Thomas

Harris, Thomas

Hartley, L. P.

Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

The House of the Seven Gables

“Young Goodman Brown”

Hearn, Lafcadio

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Herbert, James

The Rats

Hichens, Robert

Hill, Joe

Hill, Susan

The Woman in Black

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Hodgson, William Hope

The House on the Borderland

The Night Land

Hoffmann, E. T. A.

“The Sand-man”

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

Howard, Robert E.

Hubbard, L. Ron

Fear

Hugo, Victor

Huysmans, J. K.

The Damned

Irving, Washington

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Jackson, Shirley

The Haunting of Hill House

James, Henry

The Turn of the Screw

James, M. R.

“Casting the Runes”

Joshi, S. T.

Joyce, Graham

Kafka, Franz

Keene, Brian

Ketchum, Jack

The Girl Next Door

Kiernan, Caitlín R.

The Drowning Girl

King, Stephen

It

Misery

Night Shift

“The Reach”

The Shining

The Dark Tower

Kipling, Rudyard

“The Phantom ‘Rickshaw”

“The Recrudescence of Imray,”/“The Return of Imray”

“They”

Kirk, Russell

“There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding”

Klein, T. E. D.

The Ceremonies

Dark Gods

Kneale, Nigel

Koja, Kathe

Koontz, Dean

Phantoms

Kuttner, Henry

Lane, Joel

Lansdale, Joe R.

“Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyev

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan

Carmilla

“Green Tea”

In a Glass Darkly

“Schalken the Painter”

Lee, Tanith

Lee, Vernon

Leiber, Fritz

Conjure Wife

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”

Our Lady of Darkness

Lewis, Matthew

The Monk

Ligotti, Thomas

“The Last Feast of Harlequin”

Link, Kelly

Long, Frank Belknap

“Lot No. 249” by Arthur Conan Doyle

Lovecraft, H. P.

At the Mountains of Madness

“The Call of Cthulhu”

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

“The Colour out of Space”

“The Dunwich Horror”

“The Music of Erich Zann”

“Pickman’s Model”

“The Rats in the Walls”

Machen, Arthur

“The Great God Pan”

“The Novel of the Black Seal”

“The White People”

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki

Martin, George R. R.

Sandkings

Matheson, Richard

Hell House

I Am Legend

Maturin, Charles

Melmoth the Wanderer

Maupassant, Guy de

“The Horla”

McCammon, Robert R.

McDowell, Michael

McGrath, Patrick

Metcalfe, John

Meyrink, Gustav

The Golem

Miéville, China

The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson

“The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs

Moore, Alan

Morrell, David

Morrison, Toni

Beloved

Morrow, W. C.

“Mr. Arcularis” by Conrad Aiken

Newman, Kim

Nolan, William F.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Oates, Joyce Carol

O’Brien, Fitz-James

O’Connor, Flannery

“Good Country People”

Oliver, Reggie

Onions, Oliver

The Other by Thomas Tryon

Palahniuk, Chuck

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Poe, Edgar Allan

“The Fall of the House of Usher”

“Ligeia”

“The Masque of the Red Death”

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Quinn, Seabury

Quiroga, Horacio

Radcliffe, Ann

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Ray, Jean

Malpertuis

Rice, Anne

Interview with the Vampire

“The Rocking-horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence

Rohmer, Sax

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Russell, Ray

“Sardonicus”

Saki

“Sredni Vashtar”

Samuels, Mark

“The White Hands”

Sarban

Schulz, Bruno

Schweitzer, Darrell

Shea, Michael

Shelley, Mary

Frankenstein

Shiel, M. P.

Shirley, John

“A Short Trip Home” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken

Simmons, Dan

Carrion Comfort

Song of Kali

Smith, Clark Ashton

The Songs of Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont

Stevenson, Robert Louis

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Thrawn Janet”

Stoker, Bram

Dracula

The Jewel of Seven Stars

Straub, Peter

Ghost Story

Sturgeon, Theodore

Summers, Montague

Tem, Melanie

Tessier, Thomas

Trilby by George du Maurier

“The Vampyre” by John Polidori

VanderMeer, Jeff

Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest

Vathek by William Beckford

Wagner, Karl Edward

Wakefield, H. R.

Walpole, Horace

The Castle of Otranto

Wandrei, Donald

Wellman, Manly Wade

Wells, H. G.

The Invisible Man

The Island of Doctor Moreau

Welty, Eudora

The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore

Wharton, Edith

Wheatley, Dennis

The Devil Rides Out

Whitehead, Henry S.

Wilson, F. Paul

Wyndham, John

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Preface

Horror is not only one of the most popular types of literature but one of the oldest. People have always been mesmerized by stories that speak to their deepest fears. Horror Literature through History, in both the scope of its coverage and the currency of its contents, is uniquely suited to speak to this primal and perennial fascination.

It is also a pointedly timely work, as it arrives at a cultural moment when horror is experiencing a fierce resurgence after having gone through a relative cultural downswing during the previous decade. It was not that horror had ever actually died, for it is, as many have enjoyed noting, an undying—or perhaps undead—form of art and entertainment. But it had become somewhat sluggish in the mid- and late 1990s, aided by the flaming out of the great horror publishing boom of the previous decade-plus, whose high-water mark on the mass market end was represented by the soaring popularity of novels by the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Ramsey Campbell, and Dean Koontz. And so the revival of the early 2000s constitutes a distinct and discernable phenomenon.

Significantly, this revitalization of horror has not been just a literary matter; in this new era, horror’s chief audience and consumer base, consisting largely of high school–aged and college-aged young people, has begun eagerly absorbing horror, especially of the supernatural variety, from a variety of sources. Along with novels and short fiction collections, there are television programs, movies, comic books, and video (and other types of) games. Weird horror fiction—a form to be defined and discussed in the pages to follow—has entered what some began to call a new golden age, not just in literary form but in film and television, as in HBO’s True Detective, whose first season in 2014 displayed the distinct influence of such authors as Robert W. Chambers, Thomas Ligotti, and Laird Barron. Horror gaming—like other gaming—has rapidly attained new heights of technological and narrative sophistication. Horror movie subgenres both old (such as exorcism) and new (such as “torture porn” and the found-footage world of movies like Paranormal Activity) have become enormously popular and profitable. Armies of zombies have begun to infest the pages of comic books and the proliferating sea of screens both large and small.

And throughout it all, the various nonliterary forms continue to draw deeply on their literary cousins for their basic plots, themes, and ideas. This was always true of horror films, but it is critically important to recognize that it remains equally true during the present era of exploding new forms and media, when it might be possible for a partaker of these new forms—the horror video games, the creepypastas, and so on—to ignore or forget the literary foundations of the whole phenomenon. Literary horror predates all of the other types. It has a vastly longer, and therefore richer and deeper, history. And this is where and why a reference work like the present one comes in: because it serves to illuminate the roots of modern horror, both literary and otherwise, by laying out the field’s deep history and evolutionary development.

To this end, Horror Literature through History is presented in a three-part structure that is designed for maximum usefulness in assisting all kinds of readers, including those who seek a comprehensive overview of horror’s rich literary heritage and those who want to conduct a focused study of specific authors, works, and/or topics. It is also well suited to piecemeal browsing.

Part One, titled “Horror through History,” consists of eight essays presenting a comprehensive chronological overview of horror literature during different historical periods. These essays take the form of narrative and critical surveys that situate literary works within the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual currents of their respective eras, creating a seamless narrative of the genre’s evolution from ancient times to the present

Part Two, “Themes, Topics, and Genres,” contains twenty-three essays that show how otherwise unrelated works of horror have influenced each other, how horror subgenres have evolved, and how a broad range of topics within horror—such as ghosts, vampires, religion, and gender roles, as well as the academic study of these things—have been handled across time.

Part Three, “Reference Entries,” presents nearly 400 alphabetically arranged reference entries on authors, works, and specialized topics. It serves as both a source of stand-alone reference reading in its own right and, importantly, a supplement to the encyclopedia’s preceding sections. In effect, many of the reference entries serve as “close-ups” on information and concepts presented in the preceding two sections, allowing readers to understand specific authors, works, and topics within the wider context of horror literature’s evolutionary history and thematic universe.

Supplementing the main entries are seven original interviews with important contemporary horror authors and editors plus nearly 150 sidebars featuring mini-analyses of literary works, excerpts from primary and secondary works, excerpts from reviews, timelines, trivia, information about media adaptations, and more.

With this unique structure, Horror Literature through History offers a variety of uses both to students and to general readers:

•The excerpts from horror novels and stories exemplify topics discussed in the entries, such as theme, language, and characterization. Students are thus able to read these excerpts critically in light of the entries. This supports Common Core State Standards for English language arts.

•The excerpts from background texts work in tandem with the entries by providing contextual material to help students read the literary works critically and understand how authors have engaged the major scientific, social, artistic, psychological, religious, and other issues of their respective eras.

•The historical overview essays in Part One and the topical essays in Part Two distinguish Horror Literature through History from works consisting of relatively short A–Z entries. These essays prompt readers to consider the nature of horror as a genre and the ways in which horror literature intersects with mainstream concerns such as religion, politics, education, and more.

•The information on such topics as film adaptations, television shows, video games, and other nonliterary matters helps readers connect horror literature to popular culture at large.

•The interviews provide insights from horror authors about what they have written and why, as well as their thoughts on other writers, works, themes, trends, and issues in the field. Students can apply these views and opinions to analyzing and evaluating the work of the interviewees, as well as many additional works, authors, and topics.

In sum, the encyclopedia enables readers to discover the roots of modern horror literature, trace the evolution of horror literature across time, recognize the influence of literary horror on popular culture, examine how works of horror have related to key issues at different periods in history, and conduct focused research on specific authors, literary works, genres, themes, and topics related to horror. Written by seventy scholars and authors from half a dozen countries, Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears offers the reader an in-depth education, in two volumes, about the literary background of popular modern horror entertainments and the rich intrinsic value of this enduring art form in its own right.

Introduction: Spookhouses, Catharsis,
and Dark Consolations

Why Horror?

From the outset, a reference work like this one begs an important question, and one that strikes right to the heart of the stated project: Why horror? Why do people seek stories, novels, movies, plays, and games that horrify? It is an old question, and one that has become virtually clichéd from overuse, as many horror novelists and movie directors can testify after years of having been asked some version of it by multiple interviewers, often with an affected attitude of mild amazement or disbelief: “Why horror? Why do you (or how can you) write, direct, imagine, envision, such unpleasant things? Why do you think your readers/viewers flock to them? Why are we insatiably addicted to tales of horror and dread?”

What Is Horror?

In answering this question, one could immediately jump into offering various theories and speculations, but to do this would be to beg yet another question, one that is usually missed or ignored by those attempting to deal with the “Why?” question, but that is properly prior to it: namely, the question of horror’s definition. The very word and concept of “horror” is a noun, and also an adjective (as in “horror novel” and “horror movie”), that is too often left uninterrogated. Not by everyone, to be sure, but by a great many of the people who read the books, watch the movies, and play the games labeled as “horror” year in and year out. Many such people, if pressed, would likely say something to the effect that horror has something to do with being scared, and leave it at that. They would assert that “horror” is simply another word for “fear.”

But a moment’s reflection is enough to disabuse one of that notion. Certainly, horror does involve fear, but simple introspection shows that the word refers to something more than this, to fear plus something, fear with an admixture or addition of something else. A person may fear losing a job, or facing a tiger, or being mugged or beaten up; this does not mean someone in those positions is experiencing horror. Conversely, one may witness, say, the emotional abuse of a child, or the despoiling of an ecosystem, or the ravaging of a loved one by cancer—things that do not involve the supernatural trappings or operatic violence and gore associated with many books and movies bearing the “horror” label—and yet say in all honesty that one feels horrified. What exactly is it, then, about the emotional response to such situations that warrants the use of the “h” word to describe it?

These, along with a multitude of additional possible examples, may allow us to triangulate the inner element that makes horror horrifying, and to identify this element as some quality of wrongness or repulsiveness—physical, metaphysical, moral, or otherwise—that leads one to shrink from someone, something, some event, some idea, a monster, the sight of blood, a situation of gross immorality or injustice, or any number of other things. Horror, it seems, involves an irreducible element of revulsion or abhorrence, centered on a primal gut feeling, often implicit, that something should not be, that something is somehow fundamentally wrong about a given person, creature, act, event, phenomenon, environment, or situation. (Additionally, and significantly, there is a distinction to be made between horror and terror—another word that is of critical importance to the type of art generally labeled “horror” today—and this is addressed in the pages of this encyclopedia.)

In his 1990 study of the aesthetics of horror titled The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), the philosopher and film scholar Noël Carroll famously noted the interesting and revealing fact that horror as a genre is named for the chief emotional reaction with which it is concerned, the emotional reaction that we have here called into question. Horror horrifies: it sets out to inspire a sense of fear and dread mingled with revulsion. Or, if one follows the lead of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), and other significant representatives of the expressive theory of art, one might argue that the works of horror that actually achieve the true status of art as such (defined as imaginative works possessing and displaying an intrinsically higher level of quality than “mere” genre or formula fiction, whose purpose is to entertain) do not so much seek to inspire horror in the reader or viewer as to communicate a sense of horror that has been experienced by the author. The horror critic and scholar S. T. Joshi, in such books as The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001), has advanced the idea that what distinguishes the most important and enduring authors of weird and supernatural horror fiction is their tendency to imbue their work with a consistent vision or worldview. In keeping with this, and regardless of the overall merit of Joshi’s specific assertion (which some have disputed), it may well be that one of the distinguishing qualities of the greatest authors in this area is an uncommonly and acutely deep personal sensitivity to the more fearsome, dark, and distressing aspects of life, so that these aspects become a true source of fear, suffering, and, yes, horror. Following Tolstoy and Collingwood, one would say that when this quality is present in an individual who possesses (or is possessed by) the inbuilt drive and skill that motivates some people to become writers and artists, it will naturally lead such an individual to tell the rest of us the truth about these dark insights and experiences. And it will empower such a person to use the vehicles of prose fiction, and/or poetry, stage drama, film, television, comic books, or video games, to communicate to others an actual experience of horror by recreating it, to some extent, in the reader, viewer, or player.

Interestingly, and as demonstrated repeatedly over the long history of horror literature, this does not necessarily mean that such writers and artists convey their horror in just a single, easily identifiable type of work that can automatically be given a category or genre label. Horror, as has been persuasively argued—perhaps most famously by Douglas E. Winter in his 1998 speech, and later essay, “The Pathos of Genre”—is not really a genre, defined as a type of narrative that has developed recognizable characteristics through repeated use, which can then be used as a kind of formula for producing other, similar works. Rather, it is “a progressive form of fiction, one that evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times. . . . [S]ometimes it wears other names, other faces, marking the fragmentation and meltdown of a sudden and ill-conceived thing that many publishers and writers foolishly believed could be called a genre” (Winter 2000, 182). In other words, horror in art is not a genre but a mode that can be employed in any form or genre. Horror has thus had a long and fruitful relationship with, for example, science fiction, from such Ur-texts as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), to the advent of the “New Weird” at the turn of the twenty-first century in such works as China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), to the fifty-year reign of zombies over the realm of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic horror that began in 1968 with writer/director George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which was itself partly inspired by Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 horror/science fiction novel I Am Legend. And there are also horror Westerns, horror romance novels, religious horror stories, horror thrillers, horror mysteries, and so-called “literary” horror (with “literary” denoting nongenre writing).

Being so portable, as it were, horror can spread out into all types of storytelling, and indeed, this is what has been happening with increasing visibility and pervasiveness in the horror renaissance of the early twenty-first century, to the point where the creeping spread of horror throughout the literary and entertainment landscape is one of the defining characteristics of this new era. Horror has become unbound, and its fortunes have become those of literature at large. In this new state of things, horror’s reputation has begun to transcend its former questionable status, as some darlings of the literary establishment have produced works that could be considered pure horror even though they do not bear the category label. In fact, if these had been published during the great horror boom of the 1980s, when not just Stephen King and Anne Rice but a host of lesser authors virtually owned drugstore bookshelves and bookstore window displays, they would have been every bit as horrifying as (if not more so than) any 1980s paperback novel with garish Gothic typography and a leering monster on the cover.

Again: Why Horror?

So these, then, are some of the issues involved in identifying and defining horror in life and art. But the question with which we opened still remains: Why horror? Even having answered—perhaps provisionally, arguably, necessarily incompletely—the question of why some writers write it (because they are themselves subject to a deeper-than-average experience of the horrors of life and consciousness), the question remains as to why readers read it. Fear and loathing are conventionally unpleasant emotions. Why do people seek to be subjected to them?

There are a number of customary answers to this question, many of which have been resorted to repeatedly by the interviewees mentioned above, and all of which carry some merit. For instance, what has sometimes been termed the roller coaster or funhouse theory of horror is surely true to an extent. There is something pleasant, even delightful—so this answer has it—about absorbing fictional stories of darkness, danger, and dread while remaining safely in one’s easy chair. There is something purely entertaining and enjoyable about entering an imaginative world of horror, rather like a carnival funhouse ride, in order to enjoy the thrills to be found in such a place. From this point of view, seeking horror in fictional, cinematic, or any other form is no different in principle from seeking an adrenaline rush by reading a thriller or seeking a laugh by watching a comedy. And some people do approach all of these things on this very level. Some horror fiction, including most (but not all) of what appeared in Weird Tales and the other classic horror, fantasy, and science fiction pulps of the 1920s through the 1940s, as well as most of what was published during the late twentieth-century horror boom, seems precisely aimed at fulfilling this function.

There is also surely something to the more profound theory of horror as catharsis, a position first advanced by Aristotle in his Poetics and still invoked more than two thousand years later to explain all kinds of artistic engagements, but especially those of a powerfully stark and unpleasant nature. Aristotle was talking specifically about Greek tragic plays, which brim with grief, betrayal, dark secrets, and unhappy endings, not to mention supernatural horrors and gruesome violence (as in, for example, Euripides’s Medea and Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, both from the fifth century BCE). Such productions, the great philosopher argued, serve to purge viewers of their pent-up emotions of fear and pity in a safely walled-off fictional world, thus preparing them better to deal with the anxieties of real life. One would be foolish and naïve to deny that today’s horror fiction (and other forms) may serve this kind of function for some, and perhaps many, people.

But even granting the validity of these views, there is another and deeper answer to be given, and this is where the possible sensitivity of the reader meets the sensitivity of the writer who uses imaginative literature to convey his or her own sense of profound horror at the vicissitudes and strangenesses of life, the world, consciousness, and everything. Perhaps, for some people, the great works of horror provide a deep, visceral, darkly electrifying confirmation of their own most personal and profound experiences and intuitions. After the spookhouse ride has let out, and after the catharsis has come and gone, horror in art, as Thomas Ligotti put it in his essay “The Consolations of Horror,” may actually, weirdly, provide some readers with a kind of comfort by showing that “someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate” (Ligotti 1996, xxi). What is more, horror accomplishes this artistic-alchemical feat not by denying or diminishing the dark, dismal, dreadful, terrifying, and horrifying elements of life, but by amplifying them. Never mind the possible therapeutic or other conventionally beneficial results that might be imputed to such a thing; the point, for both writer and reader, is simply to confront, recognize, experience, name, and know horror as such, because it is in fact real. It is part of the human experience. We are, from time to time (and some of us more often than others), haunted by horror. The type of art named as such is an expression of this truth, a personal and cultural acknowledgment of and dialogue with it, a means by which we know it, and affirm it, and “stay with” it, instead of denying it and looking away, as is otherwise our wont.

Like all art, horror literature and its associated other forms play out in ways that link up with a host of additional issues: historical, cultural, sociological, ideological, scientific, artistic, philosophical, religious, spiritual, and existential. It is the story of how exactly this has played out over the long span of human history, especially, but not exclusively, since the birth of literary Gothicism in the eighteenth century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), that is the central focus of this encyclopedia. Whatever the reader’s purpose in picking up this work, and whichever the level at which he or she tends to engage personally with horror—as funhouse ride, cathartic tool, or personal consolation—it is hoped that the contents herein will help to clarify and illuminate the history, present, and possible futures of horror in both literary and other forms, while also fostering an enhanced appreciation of the central mystery and core of darkness that lies at the heart of the whole thing. It is in fact this darkness that serves as horror’s source of enduring power, and that makes it an undying and undead form of human literary and artistic endeavor.

Matt Cardin

Further Reading

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Ligotti, Thomas. 1996. The Nightmare Factory. New York: Carroll & Graf.

Winter, Douglas E. 2000. “The Pathos of Genre.” In The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, 176–183. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Also available at http://omnimagazine.com/eh/commentary/winter/pages/0799.html.

Timeline of Horror Literature
Through History

ca. 2100 BCE

The Epic of Gilgamesh

ca. 750–700 BCE

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, featuring tales of gods, monsters, magic, a trip to the underworld; Hesiod’s Theogony, with additional descriptions of monstrous and supernatural entities

5th century BCE

Heyday of Greek tragedy in works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, featuring supernaturalism and grisly scenes of physical horror

3rd century BCE

Apollonius Rodius, Argonautica, showing Jason and the Argonauts encountering multiple monsters and supernatural threats

ca. 200 BCE

Plautus, Mostellaria (“The Haunted House”)

1st century CE

Petronius, Satyricon, featuring the first extant account of a werewolf in ancient literature; Ovid, Metamorphoses, with tales of human beings transforming into plants and animals

2nd century CE

Apuleius, Metamorphosis, a.k.a. The Golden Ass, with transformation, witchcraft, and more

ca. 750–1000

Beowulf

12th century

Romance narratives rise to prominence in Europe, featuring many fantastical elements, including ghosts, fairies, werewolves, supernatural transformations, and mysterious castles

14th century

Middle English romances flourish, including tales of women seduced by demons (e.g., Sir Gowther), werewolves (William of Palerne, translated from Old French), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which teems with supernaturalism and horror

1308–1320

Composition of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, whose second section, Inferno, profoundly shapes Western Christian conceptions of demons, devils, Satan, and hell

1487

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches)—the most famous (notorious) of the witch-hunting manuals

1572

English translation of Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavatar’s Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght

1584

Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft

1587

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

1594

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night; William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

1597

King James I, Daemonologie

1599

John Marsten, Antonio’s Revenge

1600

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

1605

English translation of French scholar Pierre le Loyer’s A treatise of spectres or straunge sights, visions and apparitions appearing sensibly unto men

1607

Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy; William Shakespeare, Macbeth

1612

Thomas Middleton, The Witch

1621

Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton

1623

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

1634

Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches

1667

Publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with a profoundly influential depiction of Christian angels, demons, and Lucifer

1681

Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, an apparition narrative arguing for the reality of both biblical/Christian supernaturalism and witches, revenants, and other horrific supernatural beings

1692

Beginning of the Salem witch trials

1693

Publication of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, focusing on the dangers of witchcraft, and published in the immediate wake of the Salem witch trials

1704

Publication of John Dennis, Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, an essay promoting the terror of the sublime as the most powerful driver of great poetry

ca. 1722–1751

Rise of the so-called Graveyard Poets, who wrote melancholy poetry set in graveyards and reflecting on death and mortality, e.g., Robert Blair’s “The Grave,” Edward Young’s The Complaint: Or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

1727

Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions

1746

Publication of Antoine Augustin Calmet’s “Dissertations on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia”—an exhaustive study of angels, demons, witchcraft, lycanthropy, and related beings and occult phenomena (and a book of major importance in driving popular fascination with vampires for the next century)

1757

Publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, an essay articulating an aesthetics of death, pain, power, and cosmic immensity that proved hugely influential for subsequent Gothic and horror literature

1764

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

1774

August Bürger, Lenore

1778

Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron

1781

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (painting)

1786

William Beckford, Vathek

1787–1789

Friedrich von Schiller, Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer)

1793

Christian Heinrich Spiess, Petermännchen (The Dwarf of Westerbourg)

1794

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

1796

Matthew Lewis, The Monk

1797

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel; Matthew Lewis, The Castle Spectre; Ann Radcliffe, The Italian

1798

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or The Transformation; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

1799

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly

1801

Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer

1816

Lord Byron, John Polidori, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley hold a ghost story contest while staying together for the summer at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, giving rise to the literary vampire (via Polidori’s “The Vampyre”) and Mary’s Frankenstein

1817

E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sand-man”; Lord Byron, Manfred

1818

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

1819

John Polidori, “The Vampyre”

1820

Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

1824

James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

1826

Posthumous publication of Ann Radcliffe’s essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry”

1831

Nikolai Gogol, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka; Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (revised version)

1835

Nikolai Gogol, Mirgorod and Arabesques; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”

1837

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales

1838

Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

1839

J. Sheridan Le Fanu, “Schalken the Painter”; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

1840

Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

1842

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mask of the Red Death” (revised in 1845 as “The Masque of the Red Death”)

1843

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Conqueror Worm”

1844

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; Karl Adolf von Wachsmann, “The Mysterious Stranger”

1845

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

1845–1847

James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, Varney the Vampire (published in installments)

1846

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

1847

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Thomas Peckett Prest, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber (first published as The String of Pearls); Count Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

1848

The young Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, report hearing “spirit raps,” leading to the explosive birth of Spiritualism, which will play a significant role in much supernatural horror fiction

1851

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

1855

Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”

1857

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)

1859

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “The Haunted and the Haunters”; Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; Fitz-James O’Brien, “What Was It?”

1866

Charles Dickens, “The Signal-man” (first published as “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man”)

1869

Comte de Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror; J. Sheridan Le Fanu, “Green Tea”

1872

J. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (includes Carmilla)

1881

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Thrawn Janet”

1882

The Society for Psychical Research is founded in London.

1884

J. K. Huysmans, A rebours (Against the Grain); Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher”

1885

Rudyard Kipling, “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; Robert Louis Stevenson, “Olalla”

1886

F. Marion Crawford, “The Upper Berth”; H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1887

Guy de Maupassant, “The Horla”

1888

Rudyard Kipling, The Phantom ’Rickshaw, and Other Tales

1889

W. C. Morrow, “His Unconquerable Enemy”

1890

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Ring of Thoth”; Rudyard Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast”; Vernon Lee, Hauntings; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

1891

Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Death of Halpin Frayser”; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles; J. K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (published in English as Down There or The Damned); Henry James, “Sir Edmund Orme”; Rudyard Kipling, “The Recrudescence of Imray”

1892

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Arthur Conan Doyle, “Lot No. 249”

1893

Ambrose Bierce, “The Damned Thing” and Can Such Things Be?

1894

George du Maurier, Trilby; Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light

1895

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow; Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors (with “The Novel of the Black Seal”)

1896

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

1897

Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams; Richard Marsh, The Beetle; Bram Stoker, Dracula; H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man

1898

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

1899

Vernon Lee, “The Doll”

1900

Lafcadio Hearn, “Nightmare-Touch”; Robert Hichens, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”

1901

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles; M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud

1902

W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw”

1903

Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars

1904

Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things; M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (with “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”); Arthur Machen, “The White People”

1905

F. Marion Crawford, “For the Blood Is the Life”

1906

Leonid Andreyev, “Lazarus”; Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House

1907

Algernon Blackwood, The Listener and Other Stories (with “The Willows”)

1908

Algernon Blackwood, John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull”; Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider”; William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland

1910

Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo”; Walter de la Mare, The Return; Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera; Edith Wharton, “Afterward”

1911

Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune; M. R. James, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (with “Casting the Runes”); Oliver Onions, Widdershins (with “The Beckoning Fair One”); Saki, “Sredni Vashtar”; Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

1912

E. F. Benson, The Room in the Tower; Walter de la Mare, “The Listeners”; William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

1913

William Hope Hodgson, Carnacki, the Ghost Finder

1913–1914

Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

1914

Saki, “The Open Window”

1915

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

1918

Sax Rohmer, Brood of the Witch Queen

1919

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”; Stefan Grabiński, The Motion Demon; W. F. Harvey, “The Beast with Five Fingers”

1920

Maurice Renard, The Hands of Orlac

1921

A. E. Coppard, “Adam & Eve & Pinch Me”

1922

Walter de la Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt”; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Music of Erich Zann”

1923

Walter de la Mare, The Riddle and Other Stories (with “Seaton’s Aunt” and “Out of the Deep”); launch of Weird Tales

1924

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls”

1925

Franz Kafka, The Trial; Edward Lucas White, “Lukundoo”; Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson

1926

Cynthia Asquith, The Ghost Book; D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner”; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider”

1927

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Short Trip Home”; H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “Pickman’s Model,” “The Colour out of Space,” and Supernatural Horror in Literature

1928

Frank Belknap Long, “The Space Eaters”; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”; Montague Summers, The Vampire, His Kith and Kin; H. R. Wakefield, They Return at Evening (with “He Cometh and He Passeth By”); Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, edited by Dorothy Sayers

1929

Frank Belknap Long, “The Hounds of Tindalos”; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”; Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe

1930

William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness”

1931

Conrad Aiken, “Mr. Arcularis”; Clark Ashton Smith, “The Return of the Sorcerer”

1932

Conrad Aiken, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”; Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street”; launch of Charles Birkin’s Creeps anthology series

1933

Guy Endore, The Werewolf of Paris; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House”; Clark Ashton Smith, “Ubbo-Sathla”

1934

Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out

1936

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and “The Haunter of the Dark”

1937

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”; Edith Wharton, Ghosts (published posthumously)

1938

John W. Campbell, “Who Goes There?”; Robert E. Howard, “Pigeons from Hell”; Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

1939

H. P. Lovecraft, The Outsider and Others—the first published collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, from the newly founded Arkham House; founding of Unknown magazine

1940

John Collier, “Evening Primrose”; L. Ron Hubbard, Fear; Theodore Sturgeon, “It”; Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think

1941

Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost”; H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (published posthumously)

1942

Clark Ashton Smith, Out of Space and Time

1943

Robert Bloch, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”; Fritz Leiber, Conjure Wife; Jean Ray, Malpertuis

1944

Theodore Sturgeon, “Killdozer”; Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser; Sleep No More, edited by August Derleth

1945

Robert Bloch, The Opener of the Way; Elizabeth Bowen, The Demon Lover; August Derleth (and H. P. Lovecraft), The Lurker at the Threshold

1946

Ray Bradbury, “The Homecoming”

1947

Ray Bradbury, Dark Carnival; rebranding of Educational Comics as Entertaining Comics by William Gaines, soon to publish Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, and Vault of Horror

1948

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”; Theodore Sturgeon, “The Perfect Host”

1949

Fritz Leiber, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”

1950

Richard Matheson, “Born of Man and Woman”

1951

Robert Aickman, We Are for the Dark; Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man; John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

1952

Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds”

1953

Sarban, The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny

1954

Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

1955

Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers; Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”

1955

Ray Bradbury, The October Country (revised version of 1947’s Dark Carnival)

1957

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

1959

Robert Bloch, Psycho; Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; the first Pan Book of Horror Stories, edited by Herbert van Thal; The Macabre Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

1961

Richard Matheson, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; Ray Russell, “Sardonicus”

1962

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes; Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

1963

Manly Wade Wellman, Who Fears the Devil?

1964

Robert Aickman, Dark Entries (with “Ringing the Changes”); Ramsey Campbell, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants; Creepy #1, from Warren Publishing

1966

Eerie #1, from Warren Publishing

1967

Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby; Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites; Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

1968

Robert Aickman, Sub Rosa (with “The Cicerones”); Fred Chappell, Dagon; launch of the magazine Weirdbook; creation of modern zombie archetype in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead

1971

William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist; T. E. D. Klein, “The Events at Poroth Farm”; Richard Matheson, Hell House; Thomas Tryon, The Other; The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Aickman

1973

J. G. Ballard, Crash; Ramsey Campbell, Demons by Daylight; Harlan Ellison, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”; Robert Marasco, Burnt Offerings; Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home

1974

James Herbert, The Rats; Stephen King, Carrie; Brian Lumley, Beneath the Moors and The Burrowers Beneath; Karl Edward Wagner, “Sticks”

1975

J. G. Ballard, High-Rise; Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories; James Herbert, The Fog; Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot; establishment of the World Fantasy Award at the first World Fantasy Convention

1976

Ramsey Campbell, The Doll Who Ate His Mother; John Farris, The Fury; Russell Kirk, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding”; Ray Russell, Incubus; Frights, edited by Kirby McCauley

1977

Gary Brandner, The Howling; Stephen King, The Shining; Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness; Joyce Carol Oates, Night-Side; Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff

1978

Stephen King, The Stand and Night Shift; Whitley Strieber, The Wolfen; Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Hotel Transylvania; launch of the Shadows horror anthology series, edited by Charles L. Grant

1979

Ramsey Campbell, The Face That Must Die and “Mackintosh Willie”; Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber; Charles L. Grant, The Hour of the Oxrun Dead; George R. R. Martin, Sandkings; David Morrell, The Totem; Peter Straub, Ghost Story; Thomas Tessier, The Nightwalker

1980

Jonathan Carroll, The Land of Laughs; Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry; Jack Ketchum, Off Season; Russell Kirk, “The Watchers at the Strait Gate”; Michael Shea, “The Autopsy”; Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley

1981

Dennis Etchison, The Dark Country; Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (the novel that introduced Hannibal Lecter); Stephen King, Cujo and Danse Macabre; Robert R. McCammon, They Thirst; Sandy Peterson, The Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game); Whitley Strieber, The Hunger; F. Paul Wilson, The Keep; launch of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, edited by T. E. D. Klein, Michael Blaine, and Tappan King

1982

Thomas Tessier, Shockwaves

1983

William Peter Blatty, Legion (sequel to The Exorcist); Robert Bloch, Psycho 2; Susan Hill, The Woman in Black; Black Water, edited by Alberto Manguel; Fantastic Tales, edited by Italo Calvino; The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, edited by E. F. Bleiler

1984

Clive Barker, The Books of Blood; Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild”; Stephen King and Peter Straub, The Talisman; T. E. D. Klein, The Ceremonies; Alan Moore takes over DC’s Swamp Thing; John Skipp and Craig Spector, The Light at the End; S. P. Somtow, Vampire Junction

1985

Clive Barker, The Damnation Game; Stephen King, Skeleton Crew; T. E. D. Klein, Dark Gods; Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer; Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat; Ray Russell, Haunted Castle: The Complete Gothic Tales of Ray Russell; Dan Simmons, Song of Kali

1986

Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart; Stephen King, It; Brian Lumley, Necroscope; Lisa Tuttle, A Nest of Nightmares; “splatterpunk” coined by David J. Schow

1987

Clive Barker, Weaveworld; Stephen King, Misery; Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Michael Shea, Polyphemus and Fat Face; Whitley Strieber, Communion; founding of the Horror Writers Association (as Horror Writers of America) and establishment of the Bram Stoker Award Dean Koontz, Watchers

1988

Clive Barker, Cabal; Neil Gaiman, Sandman (launch of comic book series); Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs; Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned; John Skipp and Craig Spector, The Scream; Prime Evil, edited by Douglas A. Winter; revival of Weird Tales by George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer

1989

Neil Gaiman, Sandman #1; Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door; Joe R. Lansdale, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks; Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque; Anne Rice, The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned; Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

1990

Robert Bloch, Psycho House; Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart; Thomas Ligotti, “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Robert R. McCammon, Mine; Anne Rice, The Witching Hour; Lovecraft’s Legacy, edited by Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg; Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, edited by Paul Sammon

1991

Clive Barker, Imajica; Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho; Thomas Ligotti, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; Alan Moore, From Hell (issue 1); launch of the Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks; founding of the International Gothic Association

1992

Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls; Tanith Lee, Dark Dance and Heart Beast; Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

1993

Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood; Ramsey Campbell, Alone with the Horrors; Stefan Grabiński, The Dark Domain; Laurell K. Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures

1994

Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon; Jack Ketchum, “The Box”; Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-Tep; Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary and The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales; Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque

1995

Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie; establishment of the International Horror Guild Award (which will run to 2008)

1996

Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse; Ramsey Campbell, The House on Nazareth Hill; Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory

1997

Thomas Tessier, Fogheart

1998

Tom Holland, The Sleeper in the Sands; Caitlín R. Kiernan, Silk

1999

Michael Cisco, The Divinity Student; Thomas Harris, Hannibal; H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (first of three Penguin Classics volumes that help to canonize Lovecraft as a major American author); Peter Straub, Mr. X; launch of the journal Gothic Studies

2000

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves; Stephen King, The Bullet (published online as a freely downloadable eBook for the first week); Sarah Langan, The Keeper; Patrick McGrath, Martha Peake; China Miéville, Perdido Street Station; Jeffrey Thomas, Punktown

2001

Tananarive Due, The Living Blood; Neil Gaiman, American Gods; Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark (first novel in The Southern Vampire Mysteries, later adapted for television as True Blood); Stephen King and Peter Straub, Black House; Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen; Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby; Jeff VanderMeer, City of Saints and Madmen

2002

Matt Cardin, Divinations of the Deep; Neil Gaiman, Coraline; Thomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Done; China Miéville, The Scar; David Morrell, Long Lost

2003

Brian Keene, The Rising; Reggie Oliver, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini; Mark Samuels, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales; Jeff VanderMeer, Veniss Underground; awarding of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King; debut of Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead

2004

China Miéville, Iron Council; Adam Nevill, The Banquet of the Damned

2005

Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian; Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling; John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead; Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts; H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, edited by Peter Straub and published by Library of America; Stephenie Meyer, Twilight; Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

2006

Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War; Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco; launch of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies

2007

Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories; Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box; Sarah Langan, The Missing; John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Reggie Oliver, Masques of Satan; Dan Simmons, The Terror; establishment of the Shirley Jackson Awards

2008

John Langan, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters; Mark Samuels, Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes; Poe’s Children, edited by Peter Straub; launch of Creepypasta.com

2009

Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Red Tree; John Langan, House of Windows; Joe McKinney, Dead City

2010

Laird Barron, Occultation and Other Stories; Matt Cardin, Dark Awakenings; Justin Cronin, The Passage; Joe Hill, Horns; Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race; Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies; Adam Nevill, Apartment 16; Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching; debut of The Walking Dead television series on AMC; launch of the academic journal Horror Studies

2011

Laird Barron, The Light Is the Darkness; Livia Llewellyn, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors; Adam Nevill, The Ritual; Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen; The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

2012

Laird Barron, The Croning; Richard Gavin, At Fear’s Altar; Jack Ketchum, I’m Not Sam; Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir; Adam Nevill, Last Days

2013

Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All; Joe Hill, NOS4A2; John Langan, The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

2014

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners; Adam Nevill, No One Gets Out Alive; Simon Strantzas, Burnt Black Suns; Jeff VanderMeer, the Southern Reach Trilogy

2015

Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels; Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall; Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (Penguin Classics edition with revised texts); Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts; National Medal of the Arts awarded to Stephen King

2015–2016

Alan Moore, Providence

2016

Laird Barron, Swift to Chase; Joe Hill, The Fireman; John Langan, The Fisherman; Livia Llewellyn, Furnace; Jon Padgett, The Secret of Ventriloquism

Part One: Horror through
History

HORROR IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Horror and the supernatural enter literature with one of the earliest extant literary documents, the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1700 BCE), which was a product of ancient Mesopotamian culture. This fragmentary text already features such elements as the superhero, prophetic dreams, a descent into the underworld, and the quest for eternal life. But it was the writers of classical antiquity, especially the Greeks, who, with their prodigal creation of gods and monsters, definitively infused terror and strangeness into literature. The term “classical antiquity” itself refers to the fusion of ancient Greek and Roman culture, lasting from about the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE, a period whose literature, art, and philosophy have exercised and continue to exercise an immense influence on Western civilization.

It is problematical to speak of “ancient Greece” as a unified entity, because the region was for centuries a series of largely autonomous and often warring city-states, chief of which were Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. The commencement of Greek civilization can be dated to around 1200 BCE (the approximate date of the Trojan War), although extant Greek literature does not emerge in abundance until the fifth century BCE. Alexander the Great did unify Greece politically and militarily in the later fourth century, but the Romans subjugated Greece two centuries later.

The Romans dated the founding of their city to 753 BCE, but did not emerge as a world power until the third century BCE. With the establishment and expansion of the Roman Empire in the course of the first and second centuries CE, the entire Mediterranean came under the sway of a single military power. The result was that both Greek and Latin literature flourished throughout the region, with leading writers emerging from Spain, North Africa, and elsewhere. The end of classical antiquity is canonically dated to 476 CE, when the Goths sacked Rome and overthrew the last Roman emperor.

The Greeks and the Romans initiated—and in many ways perfected—some of the major genres of literature, ranging from epic poetry (Homer, Virgil) to the drama, both tragic (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca the Younger) and comic (Aristophanes, Plautus), to lyric poetry (Pindar, Horace), to history (Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus), and even the novel (Lucian, Apuleius). Within these diverse genres there was abundant room for the expression of horrific themes, and both the Greeks and the Romans took occasional advantage of it.

In Homer’s Odyssey (codified around 700 BCE, but based on oral sources extending as far back as the twelfth century), Odysseus provides a first-person account of his travels throughout the known and unknown world that spans three books (books 9–12) and includes encounters with such curious entities as the Laestrygonians (a giant cannibal race who eat some of Odysseus’s men), the sorceress Circe (who can turn human beings into animals), the Sirens (hybrid creatures, half bird and half woman, whose songs are fatally alluring), and Scylla and Charybdis (the one a whirlpool, the other a sea creature with six heads and twelve feet). Perhaps most memorable is Odysseus’s battle with Polyphemus, a creature belonging to a race called the Cyclops (literally “round-eyed,” with the implication that the creature has only one eye in the center of his forehead). Some of these entities are only alluded to in the Odyssey, but they are described more exhaustively in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE), an account of the origin of the gods that is as close as the Greeks ever came to having a sacred text.

A Timeline of Horror in the Ancient World

ca. 750–700 BCE

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey feature tales of gods, monsters, and magic. The Odyssey features Odysseus’s trip to the underworld. Hesiod’s Theogony presents additional descriptions of monstrous and supernatural entities.

5th century BCE

Greek tragedy has its heyday in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, featuring supernaturalism and grisly scenes of physical horror.

3rd century BCE

Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica narrates Jason and the Argonauts’ encounters with multiple monsters and supernatural threats.

1st century BCE

The supernatural plays a significant part in the works of Horace and Virgil.

1st century CE

Petronius’s Satyricon presents the first extant account of a werewolf in ancient literature. Ovid’s Metamorphosis relates tales of human beings transforming into animals and plants. The plays of Seneca the Younger retell Greek stories full of blood and thunder.

2nd century CE

Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, a.k.a. The Golden Ass, includes transformation, witchcraft, and more.

Odysseus’s venture into the realm of the dead (book 11) has a number of curious features. First, this realm is not actually under the earth, as in the standard Greek view, but instead in a remote region far to the west. Homer does not name the region aside from calling it “the house of Hades,” referring to the god who rules the realm; but later sources sometimes use Hades to refer to the place itself. When he encounters the shades of the dead, Odysseus tries to embrace them, but they “fluttered out of my hands like a shadow / or a dream” (11.207–208). The suggestion is that the shades resemble the forms they had in life but are virtually immaterial.

Greek tragedy—flowering especially during the fifth century BCE in Athens, where annual contests were held among dramatists—contributed to the elaboration of Greek myth while at the same time probing human nature and social conflict with unprecedented subtlety and emotive power. Medea (whose name means “the cunning one”) was the focus of Euripides’s great play Medea (431 BCE). When her husband Jason, who brought her from Colchis (a remote city in Asia Minor) to be his wife, takes up with a younger woman, Medea appeals to Hecate (the goddess of magic and witchcraft) and prepares a dress and a golden diadem laced with poison. A Messenger’s speech telling of the grisly deaths of both Creon (Jason’s father-in-law) and Creon’s daughter (Medea, lines 1121–1230) is one of the most vivid passages of physical horror in classical antiquity. Somewhat similar, albeit nonsupernatural, is Euripides’s Bacchae (The Bacchantes; 405 BCE), in which women inflamed by the god Dionysus dismember King Pentheus of Thebes. (This event is also described by a Messenger rather than presented on stage.)

In Euripides’s Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis; ca. 425 BCE), Deianira gives Herakles a robe that has been poisoned by the blood of Nessus, a centaur who had attacked her. Herakles suffers horrible agony when he puts the robe on. The Herakles (Hercules in Latin) cycle, embodied in the twelve “labors” that he was forced to undertake, is largely separate from the Homeric cycle, but features such distinctive creatures as the snake-headed Hydra and the three-headed dog Cerberus, who guards the entrance to Hades.

Ghosts also make striking appearances in Greek literature. In Homer’s Iliad (ca. 750 BCE), the ghost of the slain soldier Patrocles berates his friend Achilles for not burying his corpse, thereby preventing him from crossing “the river” (i.e., the Styx, in Hades) and mingling with other shades in the underworld. Ghosts also appear in Greek tragedy, chiefly as baleful prognosticators of future woe. In Aeschylus’s Persae (The Persians; 472 BCE), a distinctive melding of contemporary history and supernaturalism, the Persian queen Atossa summons the ghost of King Darius, who is unaware that his forces have been decisively defeated by the Greeks in the battle of Salamis (480 BCE). In Aeschylus’s Eumenides (458 BCE—the middle play in the trilogy Oresteia), the ghost of Clytemnestra upbraids Orestes for murdering her and urges the Furies to plague him. The prologue to Euripides’s Hecuba (ca. 425 BCE) is spoken by Polydorus, the son of Hecuba and Priam of Troy, who now “hovers as a wraith over my mother’s head” (line 29).

With Athens’s defeat by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE), Greek literature entered a phase referred to as Hellenistic, when highly sophisticated writers used mythic figures to display their own erudition and exhibit a bland cynicism about life and society. Many of the leading writers of the period flourished in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, although at this point it was thoroughly Greek in culture. Apollonius Rhodius’s epic Argonautica (third century BCE) recounts the quest for the Golden Fleece, as Jason gathers an illustrious band of cohorts for his voyage on the Argo. Along the way he encounters the bronze giant Talos; meets the prophet Phineus, who, having offended Zeus, is plagued by the Harpies (birdlike creatures; their name means “the snatchers”) who pluck his food away just as he is about to eat it; and braves the Clashing Rocks, immense cliffs that, at the Bosporus, clash together, crushing any ships that attempt to make their way through them. But a substantial portion of the Argonautica deals with Medea, who helps Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. At the very outset Medea is described as “something of a witch” (3.89); one of her most distinctive potions is a magic ointment made from the ichor of Prometheus, the demigod whom Zeus punished for giving the secret of fire to human beings.

The defeat of the Greeks at the battle of Corinth in 146 BCE spelled the definitive subordination of the Greek city-states to the increasing power of Rome. The sturdy, practical Romans developed a reputation in antiquity of scorning the fine arts, including literature, for the more “manly” arts of warfare and governance; and while it is true that many Latin authors—including the greatest of them, Horace and Virgil—were heavily reliant upon Greek models, Latin literature does include many imperishable works of poetry, drama, and history; and the supernatural plays a significant part in this array of writing.

Latin drama began in earnest with the comic playwright Plautus (T. Maccius Plautus). One play in particular is of interest in tracing the course of horror literature in the ancient world: Mostellaria (The Haunted House; ca. 200 BCE). Here no ghost actually appears; instead, the play deals with a clever slave, Tranio, who fabricates a ghost as a way of distracting Theopropides, father of the wastrel Philolaches. Tranio tries to maintain that the house in question has become haunted because its former owner had killed his guest (an appalling crime in Greco-Roman civilization), but the ruse collapses very quickly. The play is really a send-up of the superstitiousness and credulity that may have afflicted even wealthy and educated Romans.

In his memorable fifth Epode (ca. 38 BCE), Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) speaks of the witch Canidia, who has “locks and disheveled head entwined with short vipers” and who utters a mad incantation intended to prevent a hapless youth from falling in love with any other woman but her. Then there is the utterly bizarre Poem 63 (ca. 55 BCE) of Catullus (C. Valerius Catullus), written in a highly unusual meter and telling of the hideous self-castration of Attis (spelled Atys by later writers), the son and lover of Cybele, the Great Mother of the gods. While nothing strictly supernatural occurs here, the vivid first-person depiction of religious frenzy and madness makes it virtually unique in ancient literature.

Also unique, but in a very different way, is the Satyricon (ca. 65 CE) of Petronius (T. Petronius Arbiter). What survives of this sprawling novel—if it can be called that—is probably less than one-fifth, and perhaps less than one-tenth, of the complete work. Its centerpiece is the Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’s Dinner), where different speakers tell amusing or fantastic tales for the enjoyment of the guests. It is here that we find the first extant account of a werewolf in ancient literature. This blandly told story depicts a soldier who takes his clothes off, urinates on them, and turns into a wolf. He proceeds to howl and run off into the woods; the clothes, meanwhile, have turned to stone. Later the teller of the tale learns that a wolf has killed many of the sheep on a nearby farm.

Of the Metamorphoses (ca. 10 CE) of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso) it is difficult to speak in small compass, for its very premise is supernatural: the transformation of human beings into all manner of animals, and even into plants. Along the way we have many gripping set-pieces, among them Perseus’s slaying of a sea monster and his rescue of Andromeda (4.663–764), a lengthy account of the witcheries of Medea (7.1–424), a rendering of the transformation of the maiden Scylla into a birdlike monster (8.1–151), and perhaps the most poignant surviving account (although many others must once have existed) of the failed attempt of Orpheus to rescue his dead wife Eurydice from the underworld (10.1–85). Ovid’s purpose is rarely to induce terror; instead, he seeks to evoke wonder at the very process of shape-shifting.

The most celebrated Roman account of the underworld is, of course, the Aeneid (ca. 20 BCE) of Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro), but here we are even farther from terror. The moving passage (book 6) describing Aeneas’s descent into the underworld to seek the shade of his father Anchises, and also that of his dead lover Dido of Carthage, whom he abandoned, is notable for Anchises’s magnificent prophecy of future Roman greatness. A later epic, the Bellum Civile or Pharsalia (ca. 65 CE) of Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus), treating of the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, is notable for the entire absence of the standard pantheon of gods, but features a striking passage (6.419–830) in which Pompey’s son seeks the counsel of the witch Erictho, who uses a “lunar poison” to reanimate a corpse and make him utter a prophecy.

The plays of Seneca the Younger (L. Annaeus Seneca, ca. 4 BCE–65 CE) are full of blood and thunder, among them Hercules Oetaeus, about the Hercules/Deianira story, and Medea. The Metamorphoses (ca. 180 CE) of Lucius Apuleius, usually translated as The Golden Ass, is a deliberate echo of Ovid, but focuses on a single metamorphosis: that of a man named Lucius into an ass. Lucius had seen a reputed witch named Pamphile turn herself into an owl and wished to become one himself; but the slave girl Fotis gives him the wrong potion, and he becomes an ass. The rest of the novel is an adventure story in which Lucius seeks to eat roses that will (for some unexplained reason) turn him back into a human being.

Terror and the supernatural are not absent from the work of otherwise sober historians. The Greek biographer Plutarch (46–120 CE) mentions ghosts with some frequency, as in Brutus (where Brutus confronts his “evil spirit”), Cimon (where the ghost of a murderer is seen haunting the public bath where he was killed), and elsewhere. Pliny the Younger’s famous letter to Licinius Sura (7.27; ca. 100 CE) speaks with apparent belief of a haunted house in Athens. The curious Peri thaumasion (On Wonderful Events; second century CE) by the Greek writer Phlegon of Tralles recounts the tale of Philinnion, a young woman who returned from the dead six months after her funeral because of her love for Machates, spending several nights with him before dying again.

Ancient Greek and Roman civilization established a number of the major motifs that would be used in subsequent horror literature, including the ghost, the haunted house, the werewolf, the sorcerer/sorceress/witch, and monsters emerging from the depths of hell. While classical literature was largely the preserve of a small segment of the population during the Middle Ages, when literacy was restricted to a tiny intellectual elite, the horrific motifs in that literature were ripe for use whenever the heavy hand of Christian orthodoxy would be loosened to allow the appreciation of this “pagan” writing. While individual writers of the Middle Ages did find inspiration in classical writing, it took the radical scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic revolution of the Renaissance to restore this literature to a position of centrality in Western culture.

S. T. Joshi

See also: Horror in the Middle Ages; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part Three, Reference Entries: The Haunted House or Castle; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. 2008. “Introduction: From Prometheus to Faust.” In Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, 5–24. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Felton, D. 1999. Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Mark, Joshua J. 2014. “Ghosts in the Ancient World.” Ancient History Encyclopedia, October 30. http://www.ancient.eu/ghost.

Ogden, Daniel. 2009. Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman World: A Sourcebook. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

HORROR IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The Middle Ages (or medieval period) is the term used to designate the period of European history between the end of antiquity and the beginning of the early modern era. As neither of these transitions occurred on a fixed date, there are no definitive dates for the beginning and end of the medieval period. Broadly speaking, the Middle Ages begins with the fall of the Roman Empire, usually classed as occurring with the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476 CE. The end of the Middle Ages is harder to place, as there are substantial regional differences in political, religious, and social development. Some historians suggest that the Middle Ages ended with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas (1492); others suggest that the endpoint comes with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (ca. 1440), or with the Protestant Reformation (beginning in 1517). When attempting to characterize the entirety of the European medieval period, it is most common to use 1500 as an approximate endpoint—thus delineating a Middle Ages that lasted roughly 1,000 years.

In order to give more focus to the study of a millennium-long era, medievalists now frequently divide the Middle Ages into two or three subperiods. Some historians use the terms “high” and “low” to distinguish between the earlier and later parts of the era. English-speaking historians use “early,” “high,” and “late” to differentiate the periods of the Middle Ages, and this is the result of linguistic shifts across the era. Thus, the early Middle Ages refers to the period before 1066, when Old English (the Anglo-Saxon language) was the dominant spoken and written language in England. The High Middle Ages are the years following the Norman Conquest, when Anglo-Norman was the dominant language. An early form of Middle English began to develop toward the end of the High Middle Ages, leading to a decline in Anglo-Norman and the dominance of Middle English in the late Middle Ages (toward the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth).

It used to be common to find the term “Dark Ages” used to describe the medieval period. In fact, this term is still sometimes used to refer to the early Middle Ages. The phrase emerged as a way to differentiate the period from the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment that followed, and it was intended to conjure an image of a superstitious, ignorant, and barbaric period of European history. Developments in our understanding of the time have changed this perception, and more sensitive understandings of religious, intellectual, and social history have questioned this characterization. Although contemporary popular culture still often depicts the “darkness” of the period, scholarship has focused some attention on the cultural and intellectual achievements of the so-called Dark Ages. It is common nowadays to find medievalists challenging persistent misconceptions about the era, which include the myth of the “flat earth” belief, the idea that the Catholic Church suppressed scientific development, and the belief that diseases were universally misunderstood and mistreated.

The extent of time and space encompassed by a conception of the Middle Ages makes it difficult to summarize the significant shifts in religious, political, scientific, and literary culture during this time. However, there are some important developments that are worth noting for their impact on fiction writing. In 800 CE, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor, the first time the title had been used in Western Europe since 476. Charlemagne’s coronation marked the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire (though it was not explicitly called this until the thirteenth century). The Holy Roman Empire claimed ascendancy through its descent from the Roman Empire, and Charlemagne used his title to expand the lands of the Carolingian kings and to further develop a close allegiance with the papacy. The Holy Roman Empire was a powerful—though not undisputed—complex of territories in the Middle Ages, which came to include the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy. Charlemagne himself is a key figure in both history and literature, as his legendary exploits were recounted in numerous narratives.

Along with the formation of the Holy Roman Empire and the coronation of Charlemagne, the Crusades would also play an important part in shaping European literature. The Crusades were a series of religious wars that were fought in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. While contemporary popular culture imagines these wars as a conflict between Christians and Muslims, taking place entirely in what is now the Middle East, there were, in fact, multiple conflicts involving Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Mongols—among others—and taking place in Asia, Africa, and Europe. While ostensibly a battle for the Holy Land, initiated in 1096, the Crusades had a huge impact on the political landscape of Europe. Not only did these wars lead to anti-Semitic violence across Europe, inflame tensions between Western and Eastern Christians, and enable the sacking of cities such as Antioch and Constantinople, the financial and military burden on Crusading territories was not insubstantial. Crusades in Northern Europe saw regions such as Livonia annexed and converted to Christianity, and the papacy was able to expand its control (and taxation) of the West through its success during the wars. Crusading nations were able to use seized and stolen property to fund local developments, and trading principalities (such as Genoa and Venice) were able to capitalize and prosper. In addition to this, the Crusades elevated the role of “knight” from that of a military horseman to a figure of elite aristocratic power. The Crusades added a religious dimension to the burgeoning code of chivalry first introduced by Charlemagne and his descendants.

This background is necessary for understanding some of the important changes in literature that occurred during the Middle Ages, which would have a big impact on the fiction that followed in later centuries. Some of the changes in literary trends as a result of events such as the Crusades are still clearly visible in contemporary literature.

There was no concept of “horror” as a genre in medieval writing. However, there are a number of tropes in contemporary horror fiction that have their ancestors or predecessors in medieval writing. Distinctions between “fiction” and “nonfiction” are also a more modern concept, so it is necessary to look at a broader range of types of writing in order to discern elements of horror in medieval narratives.

Literary storytelling in the Middle Ages took a number of different forms, including histories, chronicles, epics, and (later) romances. Medieval historiography worked differently than its modern counterpart, and so there is some crossover between these forms. A narrative that was designated as a “history” might, to modern audiences, seem like a work of fiction; the idea was that it revealed some “truth” about the world, even if it was not grounded in precise adherence to actual circumstances and events. In this way, some of the earliest stories of King Arthur were entitled histories, though the character later appeared in epic and romance narratives as well.

One of the best-known pieces of Old English literature is the epic poem Beowulf. Composed between 750 and 1000 CE (the exact date is unknown), this narrative describes the adventures of the eponymous Geatish king as he destroys the monsters besieging the Danish kingdom, ascends to the throne of Geatland, rules peacefully for fifty years, and then dies in a final battle with a dragon. The narrative makes a number of allusions to historical individuals, but also creates a fictional hero for whom there is no “real life” counterpart. The poem survives in only one manuscript, and there is little evidence of its being known in the later Middle Ages; however, it was rediscovered in the early modern era and successfully translated in the nineteenth century. At first, the poem was studied for its linguistic and historical implications, but in 1936 J. R. R. Tolkien gave a groundbreaking lecture in which he argued that the poem is, at its heart, about monsters. The monsters of Beowulf—Grendel, his mother, and the dragon—have been of abiding interest to scholars and creative writers ever since.

A Timeline of Horror in the Middle Ages

ca. 441–451

Beginning of Anglo-Saxon incursions and migration to Britain.

476

Deposition of Romulus Augustulus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

ca. 750–1000

Composition of Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem about kings and monsters.

800

Charlemagne crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome.

1066

Norman conquest of England.

1096–1099

First Crusade: Pope Urban II sends military assistance to Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos to fight the Turks.

1147–1149

Second Crusade: Pope Eugene III, Louis VII of France, and Conrad III of Germany are defeated by Seljuk Turks.

ca. 1170

Erec and Enide, the first of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance poems, is completed.

1189–1192

Third Crusade: King Henry II of England, King Philip II of France, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa attempt to conquer the Holy Land. Henry dies and is succeeded by King Richard I (known as Richard the Lionheart). Frederick Barbarossa also dies en route to the Holy Land.

ca. 1190–1200

The lais of Marie de France, short romance tales of chivalry and the supernatural, are completed.

1202–1204

Fourth Crusade: Crusaders sack the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Christian-controlled Byzantine Empire, destroying relations between Western and Eastern Christians for centuries to come.

ca. 1340

The Auchinleck Manuscript is produced, including the Middle English romances of Sir Degaré, Floris and Blancheflour, Sir Orfeo, and Amis and Amiloun.

1347–1350

The Black Death ravages Europe, killing about a third of the population.

ca. 1380

Composition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle English Arthurian romance.

ca. 1440

Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press.

1476

William Caxton introduces the printing press to England.

Despite its modern popularity, Beowulf is somewhat unusual as a piece of medieval epic poetry, though it does share some key concerns with later Norse poetry and Icelandic sagas, and there is little evidence of its influence on later narratives. The more influential forms of epic that circulated in Europe were tales of the military exploits of historical (and legendary) kings, and of the men who served them. In the late eleventh century, a form of Old French narrative poetry called chansons de geste (literally “songs of deeds”) began to emerge, telling stories about the exploits of Charlemagne (the “Matter of France”), King Arthur (the “Matter of England”), and the heroes of the Trojan War (the “Matter of Rome”). As the genre developed, the knights who served the legendary kings began to be the central focus of the chanson de geste (reflecting the growing power of the aristocratic knight in the wake of the Crusades). Fantastic and supernatural elements also began to be added, including monstrous enemies—particularly giants—and the use of magic. These elements were introduced as part of the hero’s development: monster-slaying was an important attribute of heroism, and the world of adventures began to incorporate exotic and preternatural realms.

However, the chansons de geste cannot really be characterized as “horror” fiction, as they lack a fully developed psychological component. There are numerous descriptions of fear in these texts, but this is most commonly presented as a straightforward and easily overcome response to a life-threatening situation. It was only with the development of a new type of fiction that emotions of dread and terror would start to be explored.

In the twelfth century, the first romance narratives started to circulate in Europe. The earliest examples of romance include the Arthurian stories of Chrétien de Troyes and the lais of Marie de France (short narrative poems that combined chivalric and supernatural themes). The rise of the knightly class in twelfth-century France, partly as a result of the Crusades and partly as a result of political power shifts, meant that this fiction, while often written by clerical and monastic writers, was commissioned and owned by royalty and the aristocracy. The figure of the knight (rather than the king) was central to this new fiction, and the stories abounded with fantastical elements, including monsters, ghosts, fairies, werewolves, magical weapons, supernatural transformations, and mysterious castles.

The increasing power of the aristocracy led to the development of “courtly” culture, including romanticized “codes of conduct” for knights, elaborate entertainments, and an increased desire for fiction that reflected this idealized self-image. Hand-in-hand with this, however, were shifts in theological thinking, particularly in terms of the conceptualization of the figure of Christ. Early medieval representations of Christ had focused on his divine strength and his role as the “King of Heaven” (and it is possible that Beowulf was intended to reflect this all-powerful masculine Messiah). By contrast, the twelfth century began to see a focus on Christ’s suffering as the “Man of Sorrows,” with iconography drawing attention to his wounds and his pain. As a figure of idealized masculinity, the romance knight also suffered—both physically and mentally. Later medieval narratives are often concerned with the interior life of the knight, and with the toll his adventures might take on his mind, body, and soul.

The first Middle English romances appeared in the late thirteenth century, but the genre really flourished in the fourteenth century. In the 1330s, a number of narratives appeared that told of fairy knights and kings who threatened and attacked the human realm, including Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré, and of women seduced by demons, including Sir Gowther. Old French romances were adapted for English-speaking audiences, including William of Palerne, a werewolf story translated in the mid-fourteenth century. For modern audiences, one of the best-known Middle English romances is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century), which tells the story of a monstrous intruder at Arthur’s court at Camelot. The hero’s battle with the monster, the desolate and terrifying landscape through which he must travel, the constant indications of the man’s fear, and the final supernatural denouement are all features that connect this poem to contemporary horror fiction. Less well known—at least to modern audiences—is the later, shorter version of the same story, known as The Greene Knight, in which the inner thoughts and motivations of the supernatural intruder are presented, paving the way for many of horror fiction’s monstrous antiheroes.

When looking at medieval fiction, it is important to view it in relation to broader cultural concerns. These narratives did not occur in isolation, and various elements—for example, ideas about monsters, the physical body, and death—are reflected in all sorts of contemporaneous cultural productions, from religious sermons to medical writing, and from architectural decoration to maps of the world. It is possible to discern cultural patterns and trends, and to situate romance fiction, with its terrifying monsters, sadistic fairies, and traumatized werewolves, within this broader picture. Like a lot of horror fiction, these narratives reveal a profound concern with understanding the human condition, and with determining the limits to which a person can be pushed.

Hannah Priest

See also: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part Three, Reference Entries: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Bildhauer, Bettina, and Robert Mills, eds. 2003. The Monstrous Middle Ages. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Database of Middle English Romance. 2012. University of York. http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk.

Heng, Geraldine. 2004. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press.

Pernoud, Régine. 2000. Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths. Translated by Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Priest, Hannah. 2014. “Christ’s Wounds and the Birth of Romance.” In Wounds in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr, 131–150. Farnham: Ashgate.

Steinberg, Theodore L. 2003. Reading the Middle Ages: An Introduction to Medieval Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Tolkien, J. R. R. 2006. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins.

HORROR IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA

The early modern era is generally defined as between 1500 and 1800, although many disciplines consider the eighteenth century the period of the Enlightenment. As a literary period, the early modern era is renowned for the output of what used to be called the Renaissance (a term that has fallen out of fashion because what is understood by “Renaissance” took place at different times in different parts of Europe) and is dominated by major canonical figures such as Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. Traditionally horror is considered to begin after this time, with many studies citing Edgar Allan Poe as the first writer of true horror. More recently, however, critics have begun to highlight the rich veins of horror texts to be found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The period as a whole is characterized by upheaval—both social and religious. Although encompassing the artistic achievements of the Renaissance, the early modern era also contained persecution, torture, and colonization on a massive scale. The uncertainties created by radical shifts in religion, science, and exploration created a space in which writers of various literary modes could utilize the embryonic motifs and tropes of horror to comment on and interrogate the issues of their time.

The main forms of literature in the early modern era all utilize early notions of horror. Drama and poetry have been the focus of most critical attention over the centuries, but prose writing and ballads are becoming more important in understanding the concerns and ideas of the time. The increased visibility of these popular forms enables the recognition of the more sensationalist aspects of early modern horror. As can be seen in later periods, horror literature took a range of forms and approaches, each of which can be linked to particular anxieties in the wider culture of the time.

One of the key sources of horror in the early modern era was the religious domain. Conflicts between the worldviews of traditional Catholicism and the newer reformed Protestant theologies led to fault lines that were explored in literary works (and that have continued to be explored even today). Religion was a fundamental part of early modern society and identity, and therefore the ruptures of the Reformation were powerful and long lasting. This can be seen in the popularity of supernatural and demonic figures such as ghosts, demons, and witches throughout the period.

A series of important prose works set out the parameters of early modern supernatural belief and therefore its implementation in horror. The demand for such writing can be seen by the translation into English of several prominent European examples, although surprisingly not the most infamous, Malleus Maleficarum (1487). Perhaps the two most influential of these translated works are Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, and of strange noyses, crackes, and sundry forewarnynges, which commonly happen before the death of menne, great slaughters & alterations of kyngdomes (1572) by the Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavatar, and French scholar Pierre le Loyer’s A treatise of spectres or straunge sights, visions and apparitions appearing sensibly unto men (1605). Important vernacular works include Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), in which the skeptical author reveals the misconceptions and artifices that lie behind many superstitious ideas, and King James I’s Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books (1597). Although these texts are not traditionally considered to be horror, the lurid details and fascination with the darker aspects of human behavior contained within speak to a similar desire on the part of the reader. In fact, these “nonfiction” texts work in the same way as modern-day true-crime narratives in which information and sensationalism sit side-by-side. The potential for such texts to be intended as entertainment can be seen by the popularity of Thomas Nashe’s satirical Terrors of the Night (1594), a convincing parody of the kind of beliefs described in the other works.

Accounts of hauntings and suspected witchcraft were not restricted to large published tracts, however. Scores of cheap, popular ballads and chapbooks (small, cheap, paper-covered books of mass popular appeal) recounted supernatural happenings of every imaginable kind, clearly illustrating the demand for horror as entertainment. This demand can also be seen by the popularity of supernatural horror in the dramatic works of the time. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is probably the most famous example, but there were also hugely popular plays by other playwrights, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594), featuring a cast of demons that infamously caused contemporary audiences to believe they were real, and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1612), a play largely overshadowed by its textual links to Macbeth. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621) and Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) were both dramatic versions of “real” accounts of witchcraft. This “true-horror” subgenre shows the closeness between literature and other cultural uses of horror in the period. Alongside these plays centered on aspects of haunting or demonology, the tropes and devices of supernatural horror became widely used on stage, with ghosts in particular being a defining characteristic of the hugely successful genre of revenge tragedy.

Revenge tragedies are perhaps the clearest horror texts of the time, featuring as they do lurid representations of blood, death, and mutilation. Even William Shakespeare was not immune to the savage delights of the form, as can be seen in his blood-drenched Titus Andronicus. The origins of the revenge tragedy can be traced to a particularly English combination of the ghosts and described atrocities of classical drama and the highly visual and physical staging of the medieval mystery plays. The result was a style of drama that pushed the limits of taste and decency much as horror continues to do today. Although all revenge tragedies contain some element of supernatural or physical horror, particular exemplars illustrate the extremes to which playwrights took the horror. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587) is the most famous early revenge tragedy and is often considered alongside Titus. Detailing the mental disintegration and torment of the Knight Marshal of Spain, Hieronimo, the play contains a litany of mutilations and murders, including an onstage glossectomy (removal of a tongue) and the Saw-like (2004) display of Hieronimo’s murdered son’s corpse. The play also popularized the metatheatrical ideas of plays-within-plays and a supernatural observer on stage—here both in the personification of Revenge and a Ghost. The inevitable bloodbath at the conclusion of the play brings to mind the tagline to the classic horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): “Who will survive, and what will be left of them?” Indeed, this question can be applied to the entire genre of revenge tragedy.

A Timeline of Early Modern Horror

1440

Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press, signaling the beginning of the literary early modern period.

1487

Malleus Maleficarum is published in Germany.

1517

Martin Luther posts his Ninety-five Theses on the door of Wittenburg Cathedral, generally seen to be the formal beginning of the Reformation.

1576

The Theatre is built in Shoreditch, London.

1587

The Spanish Tragedy is first performed.

1594

Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night is published, showing a demand for literary treatment of demonological ideas.

1607

Shakespeare’s Macbeth stages horror and witchcraft.

1623

Webster’s Duchess of Malfi cements his role as playwright of horror.

1649

The English king, Charles I, is executed. The civil wars that follow bring a new kind of horror to the population.

1701

The Age of Enlightenment commences, in which science and skepticism replace the superstition of what came before. Such a view, despite its reductive aspects, does provide an end point to the early modern period.

The development of revenge tragedy can be compared to that of horror cinema, as writers competed to include ever more bloodthirsty and horrific content. Antonio’s Revenge (1599) by John Marston repeats the cannibalistic banquet utilized earlier by Shakespeare in Titus (and taken from the classical tragedian Seneca’s Thyestes, ca. 62) but furthers the horror by the meal being made from a young child—a choice made even more horrific by the fact that the play was written for one of the boy’s companies. Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (ca. 1607), a play often considered to be a commentary on the entire genre, features a poisoned and disguised skull used to murder a corrupt duke, and the line that perhaps best sums up the particular blend of sensationalism and moralizing that defined the revenge tragedy: “When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good” (Middleton 1988, Act 3, Scene 5, line 200).

Despite their surprisingly modern approach to violent representation, early modern revenge tragedies are clearly steeped in the conventions of the period. Revengers generally receive fatal punishment for taking matters into their own hands rather than leaving justice to the state or God (an approach often rendered impossible due to the villain being in a position of power), and the final words are invariably spoken by the highest ranked character left alive. The fate of almost all female characters in revenge tragedies also predicts their treatment in horror cinema as figures of desire but with little chance of survival.

Following from these hugely successful plays, the mantle of horror passes to John Webster, a writer so infamous for his macabre approach that he features as a child cameo in the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), declaring: “Plenty of blood. That’s the only writing.” Alongside the obligatory mutilations, stabbings, and poisonings of revenge tragedy, Webster further adds to the horror in his masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi (1623), through use of contemporary ideas of lycanthropy as an extreme form of mental disorder. The villainous Ferdinand, brother to the titular Duchess, conspires to have her killed out of a mixture of jealousy and family pride when she takes a lover he does not approve of. Following her death, he rapidly descends into madness, a madness that finally manifests itself in wolf-like behavior: “Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside” (Webster 1996, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 16–17). Such use of creature horror was in part influenced by the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ca. 8 CE) as a school text and also in part by anxieties and uncertainties about the barriers between human and animal brought about through accounts of strange beasts in travel narratives.

Horror’s existence on the boundaries can also be seen in early modern literature’s treatment of the closeness of horror and laughter. Modern expectations of comedy as funny and tragedy as sad do not apply to early drama, in which moments of extreme bloodshed and atrocities were punctuated with dark humor and a plethora of puns. This clear literary awareness of the proximity of horror and laughter is a defining characteristic of many forms of horror literature from revenge tragedies onward. The laughter, whether genuine or the result of discomfort at what is being witnessed, becomes a key part of audience response, and the high moral purposes of tragedy described by early modern theorists such as Sir Philip Sidney are subsumed into sensationalism and spectacle.

The influence of early modern horror literature can be seen across many aspects of later writing, as the period continues to be a popular setting for films and books that set out to exploit the superstitious pretechnological world. In fact, the rural European settings of later classics of Gothic horror such as Frankenstein and Dracula enable an atmosphere that has far more in common with the sixteenth century than the increasingly urbanized and industrialized England. Modern films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Van Helsing (2004) emphasize this difference through costume and setting. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) plays on these cinematic conventions, depicting a primitive community that shares beliefs and traditions that set them aside from the modern setting of the film. More specifically, horror texts set in the early modern era continue to be popular, particularly within the subgenre of folk horror. Notable examples include the novels Deliver Us from Evil (1997) by Tom Holland and The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones (2013) by Jack Wolf, and films ranging from the early classics Hexen (1922) and Day of Wrath (1943) to later standouts such as Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and, more recently, A Field in England (2013). The success, critically and commercially, of writer/director Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) demonstrates that the popularity and influence of horror in the early modern era is still strong.

Stephen Curtis

See also: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Eighteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Shakespearean Horrors; Part Three, Reference Entries: Devils and Demons; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Clark, Stuart. 1999. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Middleton, Thomas. [ca. 1606] 1988. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In Five Plays, edited by Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, 71–160. Houndsworth: Penguin.

Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan.

Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Directed by John Madden. Universal Studios.

Simkin, Stevie. 2006. Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walter, Brenda S. Gardenour. 2015. Our Old Monsters: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Webster, John. [ca. 1614] 1996. The Duchess of Malfi. In The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, edited by René Weis, 103–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

HORROR IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The roots of horror literature run back through the Middle Ages, the classical age of the ancient world, and beyond, to the fireside stories and cave paintings of our Paleolithic ancestors. And while “horror fiction” would not be used as a generic label until the mid-twentieth century, there is nevertheless ample justification for stating that it was in the eighteenth century that horror as a popular fictional genre emerged. During the last decade of this century—roughly contemporaneously with the French Revolution—that crucial precursor to modern horror, the Gothic novel, became among the most widely consumed literary forms.

A wide variety of literary developments earlier in the century fed into the Gothic and the development of horror as a genre. Indeed, most early eighteenth-century writings that focused on the supernatural as a source of fear and excitement were not conceived as fiction at all. In reaction to the loss of religious faith occasioned by the rise of skeptical philosophy, empirical science, and materialism, the closing decades of the seventeenth century saw the publication of a variety of books and pamphlets dedicated to persuading their readers of the reality of supernatural beings, including ghosts, revenants, and demons. Later termed “apparition narratives,” such texts sought to combat growing skepticism toward religious, and specifically Christian, teachings, using supposedly empirical accounts of supernatural beings and occurrences to defend the reality revealed by scripture against the encroachments of Enlightenment science and philosophy.

Probably the most influential of these was Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). Written by English cleric Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) and published shortly after his death, the book is a compendium of witchcraft and related subjects that is ultimately a defense of the truth of Christian scripture. As suggested by the title, which can be translated as “The Triumph over Sadducism”—with the latter term coming from the ancient Jewish sect of the Sadducees, which held a skeptical viewpoint about supernatural matters such as angels and the afterlife—Glanvill aligns skepticism toward supernatural menaces including witches and revenants with skepticism toward the Bible. Heavily influenced by Glanvill, American Puritan theologian and prolific writer Cotton Mather (1663–1728) published his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) shortly after the conclusion of the Salem witch trials. A work of natural theology that catalogues a wide variety of supernatural phenomena in the New World, Wonders focuses particularly on the dangers of witchcraft and the need to punish and prevent its practice, drawing on the cases presented during the Salem trials and serving as a justification for the trials themselves. Tremendously influential at the time of their publication, in the succeeding two centuries both Glanvill’s and Mather’s works would continue to exert an influence quite unlike anything their authors had intended, as they would be drawn upon by many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers who would reweave these accounts into fictional fabrics.

Many eighteenth-century writers speculated about the attraction such supernatural terrors held, often tying them both to the important role folklore and superstition played in the development of national and cultural identities, and to the supposedly more universal concept of the sublime. An affective state combining awe and terror, the sublime became a major aesthetic category in Britain and throughout Western Europe following the rediscovery of the ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus’s Peri Hypsous and its translation into modern languages. (Nicholas Boileau’s 1674 French translation was probably the most influential, but the most widely read in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century was William Smith’s 1739 translation, titled On the Sublime.) Longinus saw the elicitation of great passion, ekstasis, as both the hallmark of genius in a writer and as a way of elevating the reader, and this concept of the sublime became widely discussed by critics and philosophers, and even more widely aspired to by writers and artists. English dramatist and critic John Dennis (1658–1734) explained the importance of sublime terror in poetry and theater in his 1704 essay “Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,” claiming that no passion is more “capable of giving a great spirit to poetry” than the “enthusiastic terror” of the sublime (Dennis 2000, 101). Dennis went on to iterate some sources of such terror in what amounts to an ingredients list for later Gothic writers: “gods, demons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine, etc.” (102). Dennis concluded that such terrors are important both morally and theologically, as “of these ideas none are so terrible as those which show the wrath and vengeance of an angry god” (102). Building on Dennis’s ideas, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) provided a more psychological account of sublime terror in his journal The Spectator in 1712, claiming “it does not arise so properly from the description of what is terrible, as from the reflection we make on our selves at the time of reading it,” situating those things that terrify us at the center of our attempts to understand our own identity (Addison 2000, 105).

Following such critical statements, more writers would come to see the creation of a feeling of terror in readers as a worthy aspiration. One crucial example was prolific English writer Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Best remembered for his protorealist novels Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), Defoe also wrote numerous tracts, pamphlets, and books about the reality of supernatural phenomena, and this work occupies a prominent position between the apparition narratives of the late seventeenth century and the Gothic fictions of the latter half of the eighteenth. His longer and more influential works in this vein include The Political History of the Devil, As Well Ancient as Modern (1726), A System of Magic, or the History of the Black Art (1726), and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). Presenting itself initially as a compendium of apparition narratives in the tradition of Glanvill, the latter essay is particularly ingenious in its blending of encyclopedic and narrative elements, tied together by a narrating theologian who serves as a modest witness while creating an uncanny atmosphere through an eye for eerie details. Defoe brings to bear his verisimilar skills here just as he did with Robinson Crusoe, making the Essay important as much for its literary techniques as for its apparition accounts.

French Benedictine monk and researcher Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) took an approach similar to Defoe’s in producing what is probably the most influential collection of eighteenth-century apparition narratives. Calmet undertook an exhaustive study of the apparitions of angels, demons, various other spirits, and related occult phenomena, including witchcraft and lycanthropy. The fruits of his labor, Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie (Dissertations on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia) was published in 1746 and in an expanded revised edition in 1751, and was quickly translated into English and numerous other languages, reaching a wide audience. Calmet’s work, though it ultimately attempts to discount the reality of many of these phenomena on Catholic theological as well as on empirical grounds, was often read for the vivid and chilling details of its accounts. In particular, his description of the supposed vampires and revenants of Eastern Europe continued to fuel the popular fascination with such creatures for well over a century, serving as a major source for vampire narratives from Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) through John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

The middle decades of the eighteenth century also saw a number of British poets produce religious ruminations on mortality that relied heavily on images of death and decay, ostensibly to serve as memento mori (reminders of mortality) and aids to pious meditation. The earliest and most influential example was Anglo-Irish poet Thomas Parnell’s (1679–1718) “Night-Thoughts on Death” (posthumously published by his friend Alexander Pope in a 1722 collection of Parnell’s poetic works). The popular success and critical attention paid to Parnell’s work would inspire many later poets to work in a similar mode. Other important examples include Scottish poet Robert Blair’s (1699–1746) blank verse poem “The Grave” (1743), English poet Edward Young’s (1683–1765) The Complaint: Or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (serially published between 1743 and 1745), and English poet Thomas Gray’s (1716–1771) “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Critics of some of the later and more formulaic examples of what would come to be known as the “Graveyard” or “Boneyard” school of poetry, however, saw the gruesome images of such poems as ultimately exploitative, and their supposed moral and theological purpose as an excuse to revel in morbidity, an accusation that would also be frequently leveled against later Gothic and Dark Romantic writers who learned vital aesthetic lessons from the poets of the “Graveyard school.”

In 1757, the literary aesthetics of death, pain, power, and cosmic immensity that continue to play a vital role in modern horror were influentially articulated when Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) published his treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Building extensively on the work of earlier writers including Addison as well as philosophers Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, and exemplifying his ideas through the work of great writers including William Shakespeare and John Milton, Burke drew on empirical psychological principles to argue that terror was the most powerful emotion a human being was capable of experiencing, and thereby provided an aesthetic justification that would be seized upon by writers devoted to inspiring awe and terror in readers. Burke could not have anticipated the tremendous influence his Enquiry would have in shaping literary tastes for centuries to come. It would be read, referenced, and reacted to not only by early Gothic writers including Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, but also by later writers including Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the latter of whom would paraphrase Burke in declaring fear to be “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind” (Lovecraft 2012, 25).

A Timeline of Horror in the Eighteenth Century

1681

Joseph Glanvill publishes Saducismus Triumphatus.

1692

The Salem witch trials commence.

1693

The Salem witch trials continue. Cotton Mather publishes Wonders of the Invisible World.

1711–1712

Addison and Steele publish their journal The Spectator, including essays on the role of the sublime and fantastic in literature as well as short Orientalist narratives such as “Santor Barsisa” that will later inspire Gothic writers.

1727

Daniel Defoe publishes An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions.

1746

Augustin Calmet publishes his “Dissertations on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia.”

1757

Edmund Burke publishes his Philosophical Enquiry.

1762

The Cock Lane Ghost becomes the subject of popular fascination and is investigated by notable intellectuals including Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith.

1764

Horace Walpole publishes The Castle of Otranto.

1787–1789

Friedrich von Schiller’s unfinished novel Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) is serially published in the journal Thalia.

1789

The storming of the Bastille occurs ten days after the Marquis de Sade is transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton. The French Revolution continues until 1799, contemporaneous with the peak popularity of the Gothic novel.

1793

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette killed by the Revolutionaries. William Godwin publishes his rationalist Gothic novel Caleb Williams.

1794

Ann Radcliffe publishes her wildly popular Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho.

1796

Matthew Lewis publishes his Gothic romance The Monk, retrospectively recognized as the first novel of supernatural horror in English.

It was Horace Walpole (1717–1797) who invented the Gothic as a literary form. Inspired by the medieval revivalism of poets including James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton, Walpole combined his antiquarian enthusiasms with an interest in folkloric superstitions and a desire to explore his own dreams and nightmares, and the result was his pseudo-medieval romance The Castle of Otranto (1764). He presented the first edition of the book as a translation from a thirteenth-century Italian manuscript, and even as historians and philologists decried it as an obvious hoax, the book became a popular success. Walpole appended an apology to the book’s second edition (1765), coining the term “Gothic story” for this new literary form that combined history with fantasy in a manner meant to evoke both wonder and terror, one that would become a vital precursor to modern horror literature.

By the 1780s in Germany, another precursor emerged in the form of Schauer-romane (shudder-novels). An extension of the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) aesthetic of early romanticism, these novels combined tragedy with mystery and supernaturalism, often focusing on conspiracies, secret societies, and black magic. Despite never being completed, one of the most influential was Friedrich von Schiller’s (1759–1805) Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer, serially published between 1787 and 1789). Also seminal was Christian Heinrich Spiess’s Das Petermännchen (1793; translated as The Dwarf of Westerbourg). Like Walpole’s Otranto, this was a ghost story set in the thirteenth century. These and other Schauer-romane anticipated the British Gothic novels of the 1790s in both subject matter and style, and in some cases would be directly imitated by British writers including Matthew Lewis.

Lewis was a young English aristocrat whose first and only Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), has a strong claim to be considered the first novel of supernatural horror in English. Partly inspired by the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose popular Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Lewis had devoured and sought to imitate, The Monk draws heavily on the Sturm und Drang writers Lewis avidly consumed as a student of German literature. With its frenetic style, florid descriptions of sexuality and violence, and its unapologetic portrayal of a world in which satanic supernatural powers conspire against humanity, The Monk rejected both Radcliffe’s decorum and the Enlightenment values that led her to explain the seemingly supernatural occurrences in her fictions according to rational, materialist principles. These excesses led a scandalized Radcliffe to distinguish between her own moralistic “terror” Gothic romances and Lewis’s “horror” Gothic in an essay titled “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826) that in many ways serves as the first critical attempt to distinguish “horror” as its own literary genre. Radcliffe’s distinction between terror and horror corresponds closely with how horror as a literary genre evolved in the two centuries to come, and would be echoed by later studies including Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) and by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981).

Lewis’s novel became an international sensation, its scandalous success carrying it not only throughout Britain, but to France, Germany, and the New World. In Britain, it would inspire more transgressive and horror-focused Gothic fictions including Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). In France, it spurred the popular appetite for the roman noir, inspiring writers including François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil and the Marquis de Sade, and later nineteenth-century writers of horrific fiction including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Guy de Maupassant. In America, though Charles Brockden Brown’s early Gothic novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) took a psychological approach informed by William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1793), they would nevertheless echo The Monk’s use of a vicious and religiously deluded antihero, whereas Poe’s later forays into the Gothic would share Lewis’s emphasis on overt supernaturalism and the grotesque.

Sean Moreland

See also: Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Gothic Poetry; Part Three, Reference Entries: Brown, Charles Brockden; The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Psychological Horror; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Vampires; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Addison, Joseph. [1712] 2000. “Joseph Addison (1672–1719), The Spectator, No. 419 (1712).” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 104–107. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Bloom, Clive. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Crawford, Joseph. 2013. Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Dennis, John. [1704] 2000. “John Dennis (1657–1734), The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704).” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 100–104. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

HORROR IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

As the nineteenth century began, it seemed, at least in Europe, to mark a new beginning following the upheaval of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s empire, which occupied Europe until 1815. America was relatively unconcerned with such developments, which seemed distant in spite of their repercussions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United States seemed relatively well settled after its own revolution, in spite of seething disputes between the North and South that would remain in uneasy balance for the first sixty years of the century, the continuing conquest and taming of the West providing a safety-valve of sorts.

France was not done with revolutions yet—it was to have two more in 1830 and 1848, and another, albeit brief and localized, in 1871—and other European nations, even when they kept the lid on ever-seething domestic social upheavals, were by no means done with international wars, the Crimean War providing a particularly bloody midcentury interlude, and the traumatic reverberations of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 extending beyond France, especially in their apparent implications as to the probable shape of wars to come. The imaginative significance of those two European wars and the American Civil War of 1861–1865 went far beyond the political questions they appeared to settle temporarily, by virtue of the innovative newspaper reportage that brought the horrors of war to the domestic hearth in an unprecedented fashion and complemented their dire reality with a new urgency that sowed fear for the future as well as horror.

The news in question revealed, all too clearly, that war was something that affected civilians as well as soldiers in devastating fashion, and that as weaponry became more powerful, civilians were being moved ever closer to the battle lines as increasingly easy cannon fodder. Writing about the horrors of war became much more intimate and immediate in the nineteenth century, not merely because the images of death and devastation became sharper but because they became much closer in time and space. For the first time, people began to produce fictional images of wars that were historically very recent, or even still in progress, sometimes even yet to come. Such fiction is not generally categorized as “horror fiction” because that genre tends to be defined primarily in terms of supernatural horror and the horror of psychological aberration, but no shift in the spectrum of horror, considered in its broadest sense, can occur without reverberations in other parts of the spectrum.

Supernatural horror fiction did not slide toward oblivion as the spectrum of real horrors began to take a much greater place in the popular imagination—after war, the most newsworthy topic by far was murder, the more gruesome the better, and murder involving passion and rape the best of all—but it did mutate, as it had to do, to adapt to the new imaginative ambience. To some extent it did so by absorption; as the news suffered from the effects of melodramatic inflation, having to pile on increasing amounts of agony to procure the same level of shock and awe, so horror fiction reached for new extremes of gruesomeness, passion, and violation, but it was hampered and shackled in so doing by standards of literary decency. Even the news was censored of actualities too nasty to be reported, but fiction, devoid of the justification of accurate reportage, was more severely constrained by prudishness.

Inevitably, therefore, the most prominent strategy of adaptation was not a matter of taking real horrors aboard, but a matter of seeking and discovering oblique approaches to stimulation that could achieve telling effects without too much crudity. Even in France, which did not suffer from English Victorianism or American prudishness, the Marquis de Sade’s reckless indulgence in the horrors of rape and cruelty remained banned throughout the century, and it required special circumstances for a catalogue of physical atrocities like the one featured in Louise Michel’s Les Microbes humains (1886; translated as The Human Microbes) to slip through the net. The supernatural was, in that regard, something of a literary refuge, offering abundant scope for the creation of horror by implication, but it did not take long for writers to begin to exploit the inevitable hesitation of any character confronted with apparently supernatural manifestations, as to whether they were to be construed as objective facts or as symptoms of madness—or, in the most sophisticated works of all, the hesitation over whether that supposed difference ultimately really matters.

Against the background of this overall pattern of evolution, the Gothic novel was already doomed by the time the nineteenth century began. One of the first reflections of the developments of the philosophical and literary movement of romanticism, it had already reached its peak in the 1790s and was entering a phase of decline by 1801. The precedents laid down by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis were still influential, but anyone intending to achieve something new in the genre was required at least to broaden it out somewhat, and in so doing begin its transformation.

Most of the nineteenth-century novels subsequently to be labeled Gothic and established retrospectively as landmark works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), are considerably more sophisticated, psychologically and conceptually, than the eighteenth-century Gothic classics and helped mark a transition toward narrative that aspired both to more profundity and delicacy. Radcliffe, Lewis, and their imitators had given the imaginative lexicon of Gothic horror a new location on the literary map, from which the writers of the nineteenth century were to take selected items of that lexicon in several new directions, often refining its horrific element, both in the detail of its imagery and the imagined subtlety of its psychological effect.

By 1825 the Gothic vogue in Britain was well and truly past, although it lingered in the lowest strata of the marketplace, continuing to fuel “penny dreadfuls” like Varney the Vampire (1845–1847) for some time thereafter. When imported into America in the work of Charles Brockden Brown, it had already undergone a psychological adaptation that fitted it for the kinds of endeavors that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were to carry forward with such artistry, and a similar sophistication occurred, even more flamboyantly, in Germany, largely due to the endeavors of E. T. A. Hoffmann. It was Hoffmann who produced the most crucial exemplars of supernatural horror fiction in the first two decades of the century, not merely in his own country but in France, where his works were enormously popular. Hoffmann was the writer who first blurred the boundaries between manifestation and hallucination so completely that it became impossible to discern, and thus set the direction and the tempo for the development of modern horror fiction.

A Timeline of Horror in the Nineteenth Century

1815

The Battle of Waterloo ends Napoleon’s imperial ambitions for good.

1818

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein establishes one of the key archetypes of modern horror fiction.

1820

Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer brings down the curtain on Gothic horror.

1824

James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner begins the new era of psychological horror in English-language fiction.

1839

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” reaches new depths of psychological symbolism.

1842

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni helps to lay the foundations of the occult revival.

1853–1856

The Crimean War is the first to be extensively reported in newspapers as it happens.

1857

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal establishes the key exemplar of the Decadent style of consciousness.

1861–1865

The American Civil War brings the horrors of war to the United States.

1870–1871

The Franco-Prussian War ends with the bombardment of Paris and the brief establishment of the Paris Commune.

1886

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde establishes another key archetype of horror fiction, and Louise Michel’s Les Microbes humains illustrates the extent to which no one else was allowed to go in the depiction of fictitious horrors.

1890–1891

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray adds a further petal to the flower of Decadent aesthetics.

1895

Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow imports the Decadent style to American horror fiction, following precedents set by Ambrose Bierce.

1897

Bram Stoker’s Dracula supplies the last of the great nineteenth-century archetypes.

If there is one dominant theme in the post-Gothic weird fiction of the nineteenth century, it is the theme of the dead returning to pester the living, not necessarily literally, but insistently. Some authors stuck to the traditional motives of waiting to reveal the truth of hidden crime and to harry the guilty, but ghostly visitations were often more enigmatic than that, and the fright they caused more heavily impregnated with puzzlement and mystery.

Death had changed its social status in the nineteenth century; funerals, funereal monuments, and mourning became more ostentatious, to the extent that their extravagance could not help but be seen by many as gross hypocrisy. Thus, efforts made to soothe consciences by making more fuss of the dead often inflamed anxiety, and the angry psychological sores that resulted can be seen in the supernatural fiction of the period, as well as the remarkable growth of Spiritualism.

In America, the Fox sisters, who began to open new channels of communication between the forgiving dead and the reassurance-seeking living in 1848, were put on public display by P. T. Barnum. Their career as mediums served as the origin point for the Spiritualist movement, and as the century progressed it became increasingly difficult for people to let the dead rest in peace, especially as they seemed to be clamoring for attention with insistent rappings, levitating tables, and clouds of ectoplasm, while they waited their turn to use the overstrained vocal cords of entranced mediums, who responded as best they could to audiences’ demands to have their guilty anxieties soothed away. Their clients wanted to be told that their loved ones were safe in heaven, and that they—the living—had been forgiven for all their petty trespasses and sins of neglect. Horror fiction, which told a very different story, was the other side of the coin of conscience.

Skeptics fought to demonstrate that the apparitions of Spiritualism were merely products of fevered imagination. If they hoped by that means to drive out anxiety, however, they had mistaken their enemy; sufferers who were convinced that the cause was internal rather than external simply became haunted by demons within rather than demons without. In the nineteenth century the phenomena of madness were brought decisively into the context of medical research and medical explanation, and the idea of “mental illness” achieved its final victory, in order that the fear of the diseased psyche could take on its modern aspect. In stories of derangement written after 1825, therefore, an advancing clinicality was inevitable. The transformation that clinicality wrought sharpened rather than blunted the horrific aspect of tales of disturbing encounters with enigmatic apparitions. The medical association of madness with tertiary syphilis, under the euphemistic label of “general paralysis of the insane,” remained largely submerged in fiction by prudishness, but it lurks beneath the surface of nineteenth-century horror fiction, detectable to the psychoanalytic eye.

Because of its preoccupations with extraordinary extrapolations of guilt and medically defined madness, the history of the horror story throughout the nineteenth century is largely an account of growing introversion, as the moaning specters and deformed monsters of the Gothic were gradually relocated within the psyche, graphically depicted in such archetypes as Robert Louis Stevenson’s monstrous Mr. Hyde, lurking within the personality of the respectable Dr. Jekyll. Where ghosts and monsters retained independent existence, their connection with the people they haunted grew gradually more intimate and at least covertly sexual—a pattern particularly obvious in classic vampire stories from John Polidori, Théophile Gautier, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu to the full flowering of Dracula (1897).

There is nothing surprising in that growing intimacy, given the social dramatization of death and the clinicalization of madness. However the horrid specters of nineteenth-century supernatural fiction manifest themselves, there is something in the mind of their victim that summons them; the eye of the beholder is already prepared to catch sight of them. The Gothic villain, especially in his Byronic mode, was already an ambivalent figure, seductive as well as cruel; after 1825 his literary descendants evolved in two opposed directions, sometimes becoming more human and sometimes surreal, but they retained the power of the predisposition of their victims to be perversely fascinated by their symbolic status and force. There is a third line of development, in which the Gothic villain moves toward heroic status, foreshadowed in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rosicrucian romances, which served as an inspiration to many of the lifestyle fantasies of the occult revival that played such a prominent role in British and European (particularly French) culture during the Victorian period.

Brian Stableford

See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Part Three, Reference Entries: Baudelaire, Charles; Bierce, Ambrose; Brown, Charles Brockden; Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Chambers, Robert W.; Dracula; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Gautier, Théophile; Gothic Hero/Villain; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; The King in Yellow; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Maturin, Charles Robert; Melmoth the Wanderer; Penny Dreadful; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Psychological Horror; Radcliffe, Ann; Shelley, Mary; Spiritualism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.

Further Reading

Frayling, Christopher. 1996. Nightmare: The Birth of Horror. London: BBC Books.

Hennessy, Brendan. 1979. “The Gothic Novel.” In British Writers, vol. 3, edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert, 324–346. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan.

Scarborough, Dorothy. 1917. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York: Putnam.

Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum.

HORROR FROM 1900 TO 1950

Culturally, socially, and artistically, the first decade or so of the twentieth century in America and Britain actually belonged to the nineteenth. It was effectively an extension of the Victorian Age, and this holds equally true for the significant horror literature of the period. In 1900, Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) Dracula was three years old. Robert W. Chambers’s (1865–1933) groundbreaking The King in Yellow was five years old. As the new century was beginning, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories of the late 1800s, wrote a variety of weird and ghostly stories. Indeed, his Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, published in 1901, is rich with a Gothic atmosphere and seems to promise the supernatural before its rationalized resolution.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a number of significant new horror authors in Britain. One of the most important new writers of the age was M. R. James (1862–1936), who had been reading his ghost stories aloud to friends and groups of schoolboys (he was a British scholar and academic, later Provost of Eton) since about 1893. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, appeared in 1904, and others followed, with all of them ultimately assembled as the still-standard Collected Ghost Stories (1931). James’s hallmark was a refined subtlety of technique, in which a series of clues and hints usually led to an explicit (and often distressingly physical) encounter with some menace from the past better left buried. His work represented the highest development of the classical English ghost story, and it has been enormously influential on a whole school of followers and on such moderns as Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman. A contemporary and similar figure was E. F. Benson (1867–1940), who is best known today for social comedies comparable to those of P. G. Wodehouse, but whose ghost stories, beginning with the collection The Room in the Tower (1912), form a significant and surprising appendage to his main career.

Another Englishman, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), also did much of his best work about this time, producing the psychic-detective sequence John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) and such collections as The Empty House (1906) and The Lost Valley (1910). Blackwood is notable for his nature mysticism and his use of outdoor settings, as is seen in his most famous stories, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” H. P. Lovecraft rated the former as the finest weird story in the English language. The great Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany, 1878–1957) published his first book, The Gods of Pegana, in 1905. While most of his work would be classified as fantasy or even as comic, he could be eerie or horrifying when he chose, and his influence on subsequent writers, particularly Lovecraft and his school, is tremendously significant. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) published a supernatural novel, The Return, in 1910 and became notable for such short stories as “Seaton’s Aunt” and “All Hallows,” which blended the ghostly and the psychological powerfully and subtly.

The literary impact of the First World War (1914–1918) extended well beyond killing off such talented writers as William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), who excelled at both cosmic and nautical horror stories (such as The House on the Borderland, 1908), and Saki (the pen name of H. H. Munro, 1870–1916), whose short, ironic horror stories are found scattered through his larger collections. Effectively, the twentieth century begins in 1919, in the wake of the war. One of the most important social changes of this transitional period was a blurring of class distinctions, and this is reflected in literature, both in Britain and in the United States. Thus the polite, elegant ghost story for upper-class audiences—and featuring upper-class characters—began to merge with something a bit earthier and less sophisticated. In Britain this meant the appearance of such lowbrow anthologies as Charles Birkin’s Creeps series (1932–1936), as well as novels of occult horror such as Dennis Wheatley’s (1897–1977) The Devil Rides Out (1934). In America, it meant pulp magazines.

“Pulp” is a technical term that refers to the quality of paper used, in which flecks of wood pulp are visible, but it became synonymous with cheaply printed and often luridly illustrated popular magazines. Pulps soon began to specialize in particular genres, with magazines featuring detective stories, Westerns, sea stories, and the like. The first weird fiction magazine was actually German, Der Orchideengarten (1919–1921), but the first in English, and the most important, is Weird Tales (1923–1954 plus several revivals, with the most recent issue published in 2014).

The earliest issues of Weird Tales may have seemed none too promising to readers at the time, since much of the contents were crude, material horror that was badly written by any standard. However, the magazine persisted and began to develop important writers, so that much of the story of English-language horror, particularly in the second quarter of the twentieth century, is the story of Weird Tales.

By far the most important Weird Tales writer was H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), whose popularity and influence made him the central figure in horror fiction for much of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Lovecraft’s first appearance in Weird Tales was with the short story “Dagon” in 1923. His “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) must have had a tremendous impact on the readership at the time, as it was so obviously superior to most of what appeared around it. The first editor of Weird Tales, Edwin Baird, accepted anything Lovecraft sent him, but Lovecraft’s relations with Baird’s successor, Farnsworth Wright, who edited the magazine from late 1924 to early 1940, were sometimes difficult. Wright was a brilliant editor who not only raised the magazine to greatness, but kept it going through the Great Depression, even when at one point the magazine’s assets were wiped out in a bank failure. However, Wright could be overcautious. For example, he first rejected Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” because he was afraid his readers would not understand it, but then asked to see it again, and published it in 1928. He also published the majority of Lovecraft’s work, including such classics as “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), “Pickman’s Model” (1927), and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), and singled out “The Outsider” (1926) for editorial praise in the highest possible terms. Wright rejected some of Lovecraft’s longer narratives, including At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” which severely damaged Lovecraft’s self-confidence and slowed down his creativity in his last years. (At the Mountains of Madness was eventually published in another magazine in 1936, the same year that “The Shadow over Innsmouth” was published as a stand-alone book with a miniscule print run.) When Wright published Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” in two successive issues (December 1936, January 1937), it must have seemed that all was suddenly well again, but by March of 1937, Lovecraft was dead.

A Timeline of Horror from 1900 to 1950

1904

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James. First collection.

1906

The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood. First collection.

1907

“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, published in The Listener and Other Stories.

1908

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

1912

The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson. First collection.

1923

Weird Tales founded (March). First Lovecraft story published in Weird Tales, “Dagon” (October). The Riddle and Other Stories by Walter de la Mare published (includes “Seaton’s Aunt”).

1924

Weird Tales publishes Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (March). Farnsworth Wright takes over as Weird Tales’ editor (November).

1926

“The Abominations of Yondo,” first weird story by Clark Ashton Smith, published in The Overland Monthly (April).

1927

Early version of Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” published in The Recluse.

1928

Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” published in Weird Tales (February).

1929

Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” published in Weird Tales (April).

1933

The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore.

1936

Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth published as a limited edition book. M. R. James dies.

1937

Lovecraft dies. To Walk the Night by William Sloane published.

1939

Unknown magazine founded (March).

1940

Dorothy McIlwraith succeeds Farnsworth Wright as editor of Weird Tales. Jack Williamson’s “Darker than You Think” (short version) published in Unknown (December).

1943

“The Wind” by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales (March). Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife published in Unknown (April). Unknown folds (October). “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” by Robert Bloch published in Weird Tales (July).

1947

Dark Carnival by Bradbury published. First collection.

1948

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson published in The New Yorker (June 26).

1950

“Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Summer).

In the meantime, Lovecraft had managed to gather a whole circle of colleagues around him, including such established contemporaries as Henry S. Whitehead (1882–1932), Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), as well as a host of newcomers such as Robert Bloch (1917–1994) and Fritz Leiber (1910–1992), whom he encouraged and mentored with great generosity. His influence extended further through his revision clients. Stories in Weird Tales by Hazel Heald, Zealia Bishop, and others read a lot like Lovecraft and even mentioned his forbidden books and elder gods—because Lovecraft had, in fact, ghost-written those stories. Two of Lovecraft’s younger colleagues, August Derleth (1909–1971) and Donald Wandrei (1908–1987), not only wrote stories in the Lovecraftian tradition, with Derleth more or less taking over the “Cthulhu Mythos” in the 1940s and 1950s and putting his own quite un-Lovecraftian spin on it, but they changed the history of horror fiction profoundly by creating the publishing firm of Arkham House, first to preserve Lovecraft’s work in book form, and then to reprint other Weird Tales writers.

Of Lovecraft’s contemporaries and colleagues, Robert E. Howard is certainly the most popular and widely reprinted, though he is primarily an action-adventure writer, best known for his stories of Conan the Barbarian (who also made his debut in Weird Tales in 1932). Howard could evoke the supernatural and horrific powerfully in his fiction, but it was often tangential to his main interests. Clark Ashton Smith, on the other hand, was a strikingly original writer, obsessed with the grotesque and the cosmic. He often expressed a desire to reach “beyond the human aquarium” in his fiction and to depict alien worlds and beings on their own terms. This led him, as it did Lovecraft, to something approximating science fiction, but he also wrote of vampires, ghouls, and dire sorcery in such realms as Averoigne (medieval France), prehistoric Hyperborea, or Zothique, Earth’s last continent, which will arise sometime in the remote future.

By the early 1940s, Wright had died and his successor Dorothy McIlwraith did her best to keep the magazine going. It slowly declined, but continued to publish fine work, including many notable early stories by Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and numerous others. Bradbury (1920–2012) became one of the dominant figures in twentieth-century science fiction, but he also made significant contributions to horror in his Weird Tales stories, some of which were later collected in the Arkham House book Dark Carnival (1947) and its later transformation into The October Country (1955). Where many of the Weird Tales writers tended to be a bit old-fashioned, even Victorian in their approaches, Bradbury was thoroughly modern and addressed emotions directly through a style derived more from Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe than from pulp fiction. He and other such writers helped give horror fiction a broader appeal, which made the tremendous horror boom of the 1980s and 1990s possible. Many of Bloch’s 1940s Weird Tales stories, including the famous “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943), were widely reprinted and adapted for television in later decades.

In the 1940s Weird Tales began to suffer serious competition from the magazine Unknown (later called Unknown Worlds), which ran thirty-nine issues between 1939 and 1943 and was edited by John W. Campbell Jr. (1910–1971), who is better remembered as one of the great science fiction editors for his work on Astounding and Analog. Campbell’s approach was radically different from Weird Tales: he wanted stories that were thoroughly modern in style and content. Except for a few with historical or imaginary settings, most Unknown fiction was firmly set in the contemporary world. Much was humorous, but Unknown did publish two particularly notable horror novels. Jack Williamson’s (1908–2006) Darker Than You Think (1940; expanded 1948) tells of werewolves, a distinct, shape-changing species that has always coexisted with humankind, but that has gained a terrible advantage now that people no longer believe in them. Similarly, in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943), set in a college, the faculty wives are all secretly witches who use their spells to advance their husbands’ careers and curse their rivals. Again, skepticism puts the hero in grave danger. Both of these novels, and a good deal of Unknown’s short fiction, are the immediate predecessors of what today is marketed as “urban fantasy.”

Outside of the pulp magazines, horror sank to a low ebb by the middle of the twentieth century, but some continued to appear. William Sloane (1906–1974) published two outstanding novels on the borderline of science fiction and horror. To Walk the Night (1937) concerns an alluring woman who seems to be an alien entity possessing the body of a human idiot, and The Edge of Running Water (1939) is about a scientific attempt to contact the dead. Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber cited To Walk the Night as a particular favorite. Both novels are superbly atmospheric and written in a fully literate style, without any of the crudities typical of much pulp fiction. However, Sloane wrote no more, instead becoming a publisher. The mid-twentieth century also saw the birth of horror comics, most notably those published by EC comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror), which went on to form their own important substream within the larger tradition of purely literary horror fiction.

Horror could still slip into the mainstream on occasion. Shirley Jackson’s (1919–1965) famous story “The Lottery,” about a rural town where one person is ritually stoned every year, caused a sensation in 1948 when it was published in The New Yorker. In 1950, Richard Matheson (1926–2013) published “Born of Man and Woman,” his first story, told from the point of view of a monster child kept chained under the basement stairs. Both of these stories are completely modern in style and approach, remaining subtle and understated, with great psychological depth, but told in deceptively plain prose.

The development of horror in the first half of the twentieth century can be defined as the evolution that went from M. R. James to Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson. Jackson went on to write The Haunting of Hill House (1959), one of the greatest ghost novels ever published. Matheson, for his part, defined horror for the generation of Stephen King and his contemporaries, and has been second only to Lovecraft in subsequent influence.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Comics; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Arkham House; Benson, E. F.; Blackwood, Algernon; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; de la Mare, Walter; Derleth, August; Hodgson, William Hope; Howard, Robert E.; Jackson, Shirley; James, M. R.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Matheson, Richard; Pulp Horror; Saki; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wandrei, Donald; Weird Tales; Wheatley, Dennis; Whitehead, Henry S.

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Everett, Justin, and Jeffrey H. Shanks. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Weinberg, Robert. 1999. The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

HORROR FROM 1950 TO 2000

Between 1950 and 2000 horror literature underwent a major shift in focus and direction that contrasted with approaches to the tale of horror in the first half of the twentieth century. In the immediate postwar years horror fiction shed many of the crudities of style and content that had distinguished pulp horror in favor of more sophisticated storytelling. The second half of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of Stephen King, whose best-selling fiction had an incalculable impact on horror fiction written in the wake of his phenomenal success, including the popularization of the novel over the short story as the most important vehicle for horror fiction.

In the 1940s, wartime paper shortages killed off most pulp magazines that published short horror fiction. Weird Tales, the longest-lived of all pulp magazines that catered to tastes for weird fiction, struggled on into the 1950s and published its last issue in September 1954. By that time not only Weird Tales but the type of horror fare that it offered had fallen out of vogue. As Les Daniels observed in Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media, “The Second World War, climaxing with the explosion of nuclear weapons and capped by the hideous revelations unearthed in a beaten Germany, had temporarily exhausted the public’s appetite for horrors of any kind” (Daniels 1975, 156).

Horror fiction written by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, and other Weird Tales alumni continued to be published in science fiction magazines (then enjoying a postwar boost in popularity) and in mystery magazines, where it frequently absorbed influences from those very different genres. At the same time, horror stories from Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, and other writers whose careers were launched in the 1950s began appearing in the burgeoning men’s magazine market, whose publications demanded a higher level of literary sophistication and maturity than the pulps. Their work bore out the perception that, in the aftermath of World War II, the traditional monsters of horror fiction were now irrelevant to contemporary readers. “Sad, but true,” Beaumont wrote flippantly in his introduction to the anthology The Fiend in You, “after centuries of outstanding service to the human imagination, the classic terrors—the ghosts, the vampires, the werewolves, the witches, the goblins, all the things that go bump in the night—have suddenly found themselves unable to get work, except as comedians” (Beaumont 1962, vi). A world contending with the very real anxieties over the dawning nuclear age demanded horror stories that were more believable than fantastic.

Horror fiction had already been moving in that direction via the stories of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. Throughout the 1940s Bradbury published horror stories in Weird Tales set in familiar small-town America, whose ordinary characters leading their mundane lives share more of a kinship with the everyday people of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, than they do with the creepy residents of H. P. Lovecraft’s legend-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts. More often than not the horrors in these stories grow out of ordinary human experience rather than some horrific incursion of the supernatural. In his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), a distillation of themes and ideas that he had addressed in his Weird Tales stories, Bradbury describes the people of Green Town, Illinois as “tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again” (Bradbury 1998, 24). The unrelieved frustration and disillusionment with life expressed in this passage proves a magical incantation that summons Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a dark carnival that magically appears in town one October, on the cusp of Halloween, to mock the residents and their unfulfilled dreams with Faustian temptations.

The fiction of Shirley Jackson can be read as a complement to Bradbury’s weird tales. Jackson’s work appeared mostly in mainstream publications such as the New Yorker, Charm, and Good Housekeeping, and a very thin line separates her stories of amusing characters’ mishaps from those in which similar mishaps prove more ominous. At the core of much of Jackson’s writing is a vision of the individual perilously out of step with his or her society and the status quo, most evident in such stories as “The Lottery” (1948), about a small New England town where long-established traditions have deteriorated into menacing rituals, and “The Summer People” (1951), in which a vacationing family discovers the terrible fate that awaits any out-of-towners who overstay the summer season. Her best-known novels—The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—are modern Gothics in which characters who are usually more sensitive and self-conscious than others around them retreat to insular environments that bring their feelings of personal dislocation sharply into focus and concentrate what critic S. T. Joshi refers to as the “pervasive atmosphere of the odd” that pervades all of her work (Joshi 2001, 13).

The “banalization” of the macabre seen in the writing of Bradbury and Jackson became commonplace in much of the better horror fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in the work of Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. The leitmotif in all of Matheson’s stories, as he described it in his introduction to The Collected Stories of Richard Matheson, is “the individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive” (Matheson 2005, 252–253). In the paranoid world of Matheson’s fiction, even the most common situations and settings have the potential to threaten: household appliances turn murderous toward their owner in “Mad House” (1953), and every slight or unwanted encounter in the everyday world is proof of a sinister conspiracy again the individual in “Legion of Plotters” (1953). In his novel The Shrinking Man (1956), a character shrinking in size daily as the result of a toxic exposure suddenly finds the house he has lived in comfortably for years to be full of dangerous snares and pitfalls—among them the household cat and a spider in his basement—as his diminishing size renders him more vulnerable. In Charles Beaumont’s fiction, horror often grows out of the stultifying effects of social conformity. In his story “The New People” (1958), a couple newly moved into an upper-crust community are horrified to discover that all of their neighbors participate in a black magic coven to alleviate the boredom of their successful lives. “The Dark Music” (1956), “The Hunger” (1955), and “Miss Gentibelle” (1957) all are concerned with sexual repression and the strange forms that its expression can assume. Matheson and Beaumont became two of the most prolific screenwriters for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), a television program that frequently focused on the dark side of ordinary human experience. The interplay between horror stories and representations of horror in extraliterary media such as television and film was another influence that shaped horror fiction in the postwar years in a way that it never had before.

The familiarizing of horror also extended to its most iconic tropes as writers sought to adapt and reconceive classic horrors to fit a postwar sensibility. Fritz Leiber, for instance, had begun doing this in the 1940s through short stories such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941), which conjured spectral presences out of the smoke and grime of industrial cities, and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949), in which an advertising model feeds vampirically off the sexual passions that she arouses in men. In his novel The Sinful Ones (1980), a man and woman awaken one day from their routine lives to discover that the world and all of its people are zombie-like automatons who go mechanically about their routines, oblivious to anything that deviates from the prescribed program. Another American writer, Jack Finney, reimagined the tale of supernatural possession in terms of extraterrestrial invasion in The Body Snatchers (1955), in which aliens from outer space appropriate the bodies of residents of a small California town, depriving them of their emotions and free will and forging a community through rigid social conformity. In his controversial novel Some of Your Blood (1961), Theodore Sturgeon expanded on the vampire theme, dispensing with traditional representations of the vampire as a creature of supernatural evil and presenting, instead, a case study of aberrant psychology in which a young man’s craving for menstrual blood provides him with the emotional fulfillment denied him by the norms of society. Norman Bates, the psychologically disturbed young man in Psycho (1959), who periodically assumes the persona of his overprotective dead mother to kill women who arouse his passions, was arguably Robert Bloch’s refurbishing of horror’s shape-shifter or werewolf theme for the tale of the modern serial killer. In Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Ira Levin reimagined the witch’s coven of gothic horror fiction as a clique of tenants in a modern Manhattan apartment building who worship Satan in order to reap advantages crucial to their social advancement.

A Timeline of Horror from 1950 to 2000

1954

Weird Tales publishes its final issue in September. Richard Matheson publishes I Am Legend.

1955

Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers.

1959

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House.

1959–1964

Robert Bloch publishes Psycho. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone brings high-quality horror, SF, and fantasy to a prime-time American television audience, featuring scripts written by the likes of Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson.

1960

Alfred Hitchcock directs his iconic film adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Psycho.

1962

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

1963

Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan; director Robert Wise’s The Haunting; a cinematic adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

1967

Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby.

1968

Writer/director George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, partly inspired by Matheson’s I Am Legend, creates the modern zombie archetype. Roman Polanski directs a film adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary Baby.

1971

William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist;

Thomas Tryon, The Other.

1973

Nine months after the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in March, director William Friedkin’s film adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist—with a screenplay written by Blatty himself—becomes a cultural sensation and launches the era of the modern movie “blockbuster.” Ramsey Campbell publishes Demons by Daylight.

1974

Stephen King publishes his first novel, Carrie.

1976

Anne Rice publishes her first novel, Interview with the Vampire.

1977

Stephen King, The Shining.

1979

Stephen King, The Dead Zone; Peter Straub, Ghost Story.

1983

Stephen King, Pet Sematary and Christine.

1984–1985

Clive Barker, Books of Blood.

1987

David G. Hartwell edits The Dark Descent.

1991

Kathe Koja’s The Cipher launches the Dell Abyss line of contemporary horror novels.

1992

Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls.

1998

Caitlín R. Kiernan, Silk.

2000

The publication of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station marks the advent of the “New Weird.”

Levin’s novel, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were all marketed as mainstream novels that gradually revealed undertones of horror in varying degrees. They epitomize the degree to which the horror tale embraced mainstream conventions through the familiarization of its themes, settings, and characters. These novels, all popular best-sellers, laid the foundations for the modern horror boom and set the stage for the meteoric ascent of Stephen King, whose phenomenal popularity is understandable in part in terms of the achievements of these novels. Like Levin, Tryon, and Blatty, King uses horror fiction effectively as a vehicle for exploring fundamental human dramas. Perhaps more than any other writer of contemporary horror fiction, King is the preeminent creator of fables that use fantasy to transform ordinary individuals into archetypes, and the personal, social, and political conflicts that shape their lives into struggles with mythic resonance. As a member of the baby boom generation, he became a mouthpiece through his tales of horror for the anxieties of his peers as they matured from rambunctious childhood to doubt-ridden adulthood. His novels Carrie (1974) and Christine (1983) are both powered by their insights into the cruelty of teenage peer groups. The Dead Zone (1979) presents its protagonist with a difficult moral choice that sums up the political dilemmas facing the counterculture of the 1960s. The Shining (1977) is concerned partly with the devastating effects that one individual’s personal demons can have on a family, and Pet Sematary (1983) with the devastating grief that comes with the death of a loved one. At the same time, King’s very contemporary tales of horror often nod to or reprise ideas and themes from classic horror fiction in a way that shows his keen understanding of the mechanics of the horror story and his appreciation of horror’s ideas and formulas as an endlessly interpretable set of myths that can be resurrected and reshaped to fit the anxieties of each new age.

Although King’s success was one of the main drivers of the horror boom of the 1980s, the movement was also catalyzed to some degree by the era’s social and political realities. King emerged as a popular writer in the years immediately following America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War (1955–1975) and the political turmoil of the Watergate scandal, when distrust of authority and paranoia about once-sacred institutions were at their highest in the United States. Horror fiction spoke to the anxieties of the generation that had come of age in the 1960s and that was now wrestling with apprehensions about the state of the world that they were inheriting. Abetted by publishers who, rightly or not, interpreted King’s success as a sign of the reading public’s appetite for horror fiction, rather than for King’s inimitable style of storytelling, a new generation of writers began turning out works of horror, some of which specifically addressed the fears and concerns that readers felt as both individuals and members of their society, but much of which simply reworked the themes of classic horror, albeit with a contemporary spin. Several writers, including Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Dean R. Koontz, Clive Barker, and Robert R. McCammon, achieved best-seller status, a reality all but unthinkable before the phenomenon of Stephen King. The proliferation of horror fiction and the profusion of writers devising new approaches to horror themes helped to transform several of the fiction’s classic monsters in these years. Anne Rice, with her novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), aided by the scores of vampire novels by other writers that it inspired, helped to transform the vampire into a sympathetic individual marginalized by his society. And the zombie, once a relatively innocuous entity resurrected by voodoo, was reinterpreted by writers nurtured on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead films as a relentless, mindless, undead, flesh-eating predator.

The rise of the zombie in late twentieth-century horror fiction coincides with the emergence of “splatterpunk,” a horror literature distinguished by graphic and occasionally gratuitous revels in gore and violence. Splatterpunk found its impetus in the fiction of Clive Barker, whose six Books of Blood collections published in 1984 and 1985 were notable for their artful but explicit depictions of sex and violence. Splatterpunk was also a response to the dark fantasy movement—promulgated at the start of the horror boom and popularized by Charles L. Grant through his Shadows anthologies—which encouraged the crafting of subtle horror stories with mainstream literary appeal. Splatterpunk’s most talented contributors—David J. Schow, John Skipp, and Craig Spector—produced work of indisputable merit, but the vast amount of splatterpunk fiction’s violation of taboos, for no better reason than to shock or revolt, constituted a new decadence, not unlike that seen at the twilight of the Gothic novel era two centuries before. The controversies the fiction raised among readers and writers foreshadowed the implosion of horror markets in the 1990s, as publishers retrenched from a genre label and a glut of fiction most of which never achieved the same success as the work of horror’s standard bearers.

Two trends that developed in horror publishing in the final decades of the twentieth century have persisted into the new century. A vibrant and dedicated small press, which helps to nurture new writers and assist developing writers in honing their craft, has become an indispensable fixture in horror publishing, one with fewer aesthetic constraints or reservations than commercial publishing. And the horror periodical has been largely replaced by the original anthology, whose varying thematic and nonthematic orientation has resulted in a renaissance for the short horror story. The legacy of horror fiction in the second half of the twentieth century is best measured by the profusion of works published and the pervasive presence of horror fiction in Western popular culture (and also world popular culture) at large. Once a subliterature that catered to the tastes of a small audience of devoted readers, horror emerged during the postwar years as a vital fiction that reflected the anxieties of its age and became a part of that age’s culture. Any literature of the next century that would present an accurate portrait of its time would have to contend with horror fiction as a ubiquitous presence in the modern literary landscape and a regular part of the general cultural vocabulary.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Beaumont, Charles; Bloch, Robert; Books of Blood; Bradbury, Ray; Brennan, Joseph Payne; Campbell, Ramsey; Dark Fantasy; Derleth, August; The Exorcist; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Grant, Charles L; Harris, Thomas; Herbert, James; Interview with the Vampire; Jackson, Shirley; Ketchum, Jack; King, Stephen; Klein, T. E. D.; Koontz, Dean; Lansdale, Joe R.; Leiber, Fritz; Matheson, Richard; McCammon, Robert R.; Novels versus Short Fiction; The Other; Rice, Anne; Russell, Ray; The Shining; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Splatterpunk; Straub, Peter; Sturgeon, Theodore; Vampires; Weird Tales; Wellman, Manly Wade; Zombies.

Further Reading

Beaumont, Charles. 1962. The Fiend in You. New York: Ballantine.

Bradbury, Ray. [1962] 1998. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon.

Daniels, Les. 1975. Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. New York: Scribners.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1999. “Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950–1998.” In Fantasy and Horror, edited by Neil Barron, 199–343. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” In The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction, 13–49. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

King, Stephen. 1981. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House.

Matheson, Richard. 2005. Collected Stories, Vol. 2. Colorado Springs: Edge Books.

Skal, David J. 1993. The Monster Show: A History of Horror. New York: Norton.

HORROR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The twenty-first century has seen an accentuation and continuation of events, trends, and inventions begun or created in the twentieth century that came to fruition in the 2000s. The widespread use and development of communication and digital technologies, the completion of the Human Genome Project, terrorist panic after the attacks of 9/11, and the culmination of neoliberal agendas and globalization have led to a consolidation of mistrust in governments and corporations. Horror has been affected by these events and shows a clear tendency toward apocalyptic scenarios, best captured by the zombie pandemic narrative, a form of dystopian fiction that focuses on the lives of survivors in a world of little hope and much suffering. But horror has also been positively affected, on a practical side, by the development of digital books. A significant number of out-of-print horror novels, especially from the 1980s’ “boom” period, have gradually become available as eBooks at low prices that make them easily accessible and affordable. At the same time, the possibility of self-publishing, via platforms like Amazon, means that horror novels have multiplied. In fact, it is safe to say that, although not as mainstream as it was in the 1980s, horror is undergoing a species of second golden age, with hundreds of horror novels having been published in the new millennium.

If horror literature is, indeed, experiencing a revival, this is partly because horror writers such as Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Tanith Lee, and Dean Koontz, all of whom began writing in the 1970s or 1980s, have acted as role models for a new generation. Their establishment as auteurs, regardless of their (in some cases) dwindling or niche readerships, have made horror writing an appealing venture. Stephen King, in particular, with his tireless championing and promotion of the genre, whether through book tours, encouraging reviews, or talks at universities, has become a spearhead figure for the indefatigable horror writer and has even received recognition from outside horror circles; he was awarded the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and, in 2015, the National Medal of Arts. King has also managed to produce a string of successful novels, novellas, and short stories, including Under the Dome (2009) and A Good Marriage (in Full Dark, No Stars, 2010), that have been or are being swiftly adapted to television or film.

Although some of these writers, such as Barker, have switched gears and now work in genres such as YA (young adult) fiction—or else, like Caitlín Kiernan, have never considered themselves to be horror writers—they have still managed to produce significant works of literary horror, such as Kiernan’s haunting novel The Red Tree (2009) and Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels (2015), which chronicles the return of the iconic Pinhead (best known from the Hellraiser movies). This exodus or evolution of some writers of genre horror has also helped “clear” horror’s image, so that more literary or mainstream writers, such as Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park, 2005), Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted, 2005), Mark Z. Danielewski, who actually began his career with the labyrinthine postmodernist horror novel House of Leaves (2000), and David Mitchell (Slade House, 2015), have successfully turned to horror at occasional points. The perennial return of the Gothic, in novels by the likes of Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger, 2009), Susan Hill (Dolly, 2011), Jeanette Winterson (The Daylight Gate, 2012), Lauren Owen (The Quick, 2014), and Kate Mosse (The Taxidermist’s Daughter, 2014), has also been important in keeping the flame of subtle horror burning bright.

While the twenty-first century has seen the death or retirement of more than one key figure—such as Richard Matheson, James Herbert, and Poppy Z. Brite, to name a few—these have been swiftly replaced with young blood. A remarkable example of this new generation is Joe Hill, who, despite beginning his career by hiding the fact that he is Stephen King’s son, has quickly built up a significant bibliography that tackles ghosts (Heart-Shaped Box, 2007), devils (Horns, 2010), vampires (NOS4A2, 2013), and world-changing plagues (The Fireman, 2016). Importantly, Hill has also worked in another medium that has seen a rise in horror-themed volumes: comics. His Locke and Key series (2008–2013) deserves particular praise for its innovative magical “keys” premise, which rethinks the haunted house narrative.

Adam Nevill is another writer on the rise who has consistently produced solid works and is developing an ever-growing readership. His brand of supernatural horror, high on suggestion and cinematic in style, features horrific creatures that range from evil presences such as the Brown Man (The Banquet of the Damned, 2004), to a pagan beast looking for sacrificial prey (The Ritual, 2011), to heretic ghosts awaiting remanifestation (Last Days, 2012), to an ancient fertility rite spirit (No One Gets Out Alive, 2014), to deadly portals (Apartment 16, 2010). The occult cult, a recurring trope in Nevill, is also present in House of Small Shadows (2013).

A few other noteworthy contemporary horror writers are Sarah Pinborough, Gillian Flynn, John Shirley, Alison Littlewood, Jonathan Maberry, David Moody, Glen Duncan, Conrad Williams, Joseph D’Lacey, Nicole Cushing, Graham Joyce, Joel Lane, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, Sarah Langan, Brian Keene, Tom Fletcher, and Tim Lebbon.

Monsters continue to play a significant role in horror fiction, and none have been a more steady focus of attention than the vampire and the zombie. The vampire, despite largely having been co-opted by the romance genre and YA fiction, especially after Stephenie Meyer’s record-breaking Twilight series (2005–2008) established sparkling Edward Cullen as the vampire du jour, has also been at the heart of several notable twenty-first-century horror novels. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2007), a work that aligns its child vampire, Eli, with another social outsider, twelve-year-old incontinent and bullied Oskar, develops pity for the monster, who in turn becomes a savior and, as we find out in Ajvide Lindqvist’s short story “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2009), even a lover.

But apart from exploring “human” bonds and the modern sympathetic monster, Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel is representative of the gradual change that monsters experienced in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when their monstrosity became linked to the idea of disease and infection, an idea first explored at length in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Vampires, for instance, became the result of viral infections and partially shed their religious connections to a Manichean notion of evil (that is, the idea that vampires are simply and purely evil, as absolutely opposed to good). Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) takes this trope to the extreme and merges it with the postapocalyptic narrative, itself particularly popular after Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for The Road. Market forces aside, it could be argued that vampires are becoming viral as a result of an increased awareness of pandemics and their spread, following recent international disease crises such as the various outbreaks of AIDS, mad cow disease, avian flu, and Ebola.

The contemporary fascination with infection has also traveled underground, deep into the graves of the restless undead. If late 1960s cinema saw the birth of the nuclear, meat-eating zombie in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, then the twenty-first century has fathered the viral zombie, the rabid subject that is human but shows all the signs of being a traditional flesh- and/or brain-craving zombie. Apart from the obvious filmic, comic, and television influences—the films Resident Evil (2002) and 28 Days Later (2002), and Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead (debuted in 2003) and its corresponding AMC television series (debuted in 2010) have all been seminal—two novels have been key in the establishment of zombie fiction, which was never predominant in the twentieth century, as the postmillennial subgenre par excellence: Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) and Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). The former followed scrupulously the template of the global pandemic and showed that horror could still be well written and politically committed, while the latter kick-started the mash-up parody subgenre, which splices together literary classics with pulp horror fiction. The zombie has, like the vampire, proved very versatile. Novels such as Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) have given prominence to the zombie romance, and others, such as M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), have explored the possibilities of fungus-based plagues and of zombies retaining mental powers. Most likely, zombie fiction is popular not just because of the simple laws of supply and demand; the zombie resonates with the hyperconnected masses of the twenty-first century. Its alienation, horde-like qualities, and, ultimately, helplessness constitute a strong metaphor for the feelings of disenchantment brought about by late capitalism and the invigoration of multinational corporations.

The other main horror subgenre to develop strongly in the twenty-first century is the weird, particularly following the rehabilitation of its flagship writer, H. P. Lovecraft. Three volumes of his stories were published by Penguin Classics between 1999 and 2004. Then, in 2005, a selection of his tales appeared in a prestigious edition by the Library of America, effectively canonizing him as a major American author. The weird, “a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring non-traditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)” (Miéville 2009, 510), may be seen to be thriving in the work of writers such as Simon Strantzas, Quentin S. Crisp, John Langan, Richard Gavin, Paul Tremblay, Livia Llewellyn, Mark Samuels, Matt Cardin, and Laird Barron. The latter’s fictional universe, largely constructed through intricately crafted short stories and in the novel The Croning (2013), has been gathering such attention that an homage anthology of stories by various writers, The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, was published in 2014. Samuels received a similar treatment in 2016 with a tribute anthology titled Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels.

A Timeline of Horror in the Twenty-First Century

2001

Terrorists attack the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth hijacked airliner crashes in Pennsylvania. A coalition of U.S.-led forces invades Afghanistan.

2003

Mapping of the human genome is completed. The first issue of The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, is published.

2004

Exploration rovers land on Mars.

2005

H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales are published in a Library of America volume.

2006

Max Brooks publishes World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

2007

John Ajvide Lindqvist publishes Let the Right One In.

2007–2008

The world is rocked by a cascading series of global financial crises.

2008

The first season of HBO’s True Blood airs, indicating a growing interest in high-budget horror television.

2010

The first season of The Walking Dead premiers on AMC.

2011

Thomas Ligotti publishes The Conspiracy against the Human Race.

2013

Stephen King publishes the long-awaited sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep.

2014

Anne Rice returns to her vampire chronicles with Prince Lestat.

2015

Clive Barker kills off his most famous character, Pinhead, in The Scarlet Gospels. Stephen King is awarded a National Medal of the Arts. Mark Z. Danielewski publishes the first book in his ambitious 27-volume The Familiar series.

Another writer of weird horror who rose to prominence in the early years of the century and who exerted a profound influence on the new crop of writers is Thomas Ligotti. Having established a cult reputation during the 1980s and 1990s with his extremely literary and philosophically pessimistic style of horror fiction, Ligotti was a key progenitor of the weird renaissance at the turn of the millennium, even as he continued to produce work of his own, including The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010), a nonfiction book of horror-centered philosophical and literary commentary. Ligotti’s significance was then amplified in 2014 when his name suddenly came to mainstream awareness as the first season of HBO’s True Detective drew on the tradition of weird supernatural horror fiction, and in particular the work of Ligotti (along with Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, 1895), as a chief inspiration.

The weird has also played a major role in the speculative turn in horror philosophy, especially in the work of media scholar Eugene Thacker, author of three books comprising a trilogy on the “horror of philosophy”: In the Dust of This Planet (2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (2015), and Tentacles Longer Than Night (2015). Another significant writer in this vein is philosopher Graham Harman, author of, among others, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012).

The extent to which the “new weird,” understood as a hybrid of the science fiction new wave of the 1960s and the new horror of the likes of Clive Barker—and practiced by, for example, China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer—is “new” (innovative) or simply a periodic marker (of the modern or contemporary) is still very much up for debate. In any case, the new weird shows how horror has, in some cases, hybridized to the point where its generic allegiance becomes less interesting than a specific writer’s own style and influences.

All in all, horror fiction in the twenty-first century is in good health, a situation that is surprising considering that written fiction now has to compete with other, similarly immersive horror products, such as comics and video games. Although the rise of the zombie and the interest in an impending apocalypse demonstrate a marked pessimism and skepticism about global capitalism and the neoliberal triumph of free trade—Žižek has astutely referred to the current period as “living in the end times” (in a 2010 book of that very title)—it would be unfair to say that all horror fiction shows signs of a social and political engagement with the zeitgeist. The continuations and further mutations of well-known myths, alongside the nurturing of subgenres such as the weird, as well as the arrival of a new generation of writers who are influenced by the horror “boom” of the 1980s—all of this makes twenty-first-century horror, still in its infancy, a fascinating and multiple-headed beast.

Xavier Aldana Reyes

See also: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Comics; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Ajvide Lindqvist, John; Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Campbell, Ramsey; Hill, Joe; House of Leaves; Keene, Brian; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; King, Stephen; Koontz, Dean; Lee, Tanith; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Miéville, China; New Weird; Palahniuk, Chuck; Rice, Anne; Samuels, Mark; Straub, Peter; Vampires; VanderMeer, Jeff; Zombies.

Further Reading

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 189–214. London: British Library.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction. Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion.

Miéville, China. 2009. “Weird Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–515. London and New York: Routledge.

Nelson, Victoria. 2013. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. 2016. The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2008. The New Weird. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications.

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2008. “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’” In The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, ix–xviii. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

Part Two: Themes, Topics,
and Genres

APOCALYPTIC HORROR

Apocalyptic horror is concerned with the end of the world or the end of humanity. It has been a popular subgenre of horror fiction since the nineteenth century, though its antecedents are much older. The word “apocalypse” comes from Ancient Greek and means “revelation” or “uncovering.” It is the name (in Greek) of the final book of the New Testament, known as the Book of Revelation in English, in which the ultimate destiny of the world is revealed by Jesus Christ to John of Patmos. As a result, “apocalypse” has come to be used as a catch-all term to describe various end-of-world scenarios, with the earlier sense of “revelation” being obscured. Given the cataclysmic and terrifying nature of the apocalypse(s), almost all apocalyptic fiction is, in one way or another, horror fiction.

Theological conceptualizations of the final events of history, “end times” or “end of days,” are called eschatology. Many religions include eschatological writings within their scriptures, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In a number of cases, this eschatology is concerned with the completion of the world’s preordained life cycle or the attainment of some ultimate state of existence, thus rendering any further human endeavor unnecessary. In many eschatological scriptures, this end point is signaled by a period of degeneration, the coming (or return) of a messianic figure, the resurrection of the dead, the collection or redemption of the pious, and the violent destruction of the remains of humanity and (in most cases) the world itself. In some literature, including Christian and Hindu writings, this destruction includes a final battle (at Armageddon and Keekatpur respectively) in which the unrighteous are massacred. This last battle signals the end of history, leading either to the obliteration of the earth or the transition to another phase of existence. The “final battle” motif is also found in other apocalyptic myths, including the Viking myth of Ragnarök, which has led to the theorization of a common Proto-Indo-European source for these myths.

Eschatological writing treats the degeneration and destruction of the Earth as the means to an end, as the true significance of the event lies in the spiritual transcendence or elevation that comes in the aftermath. However, artistic representations and responses to the apocalypse commonly focus on the events leading to transcendence, rather than on the endpoint itself. In medieval representations of the Book of Revelations, for example, it is common to find detailed (and often lavish) depictions of the beast (Rev. 13:1–10), the dragon (Rev. 12:9, 20:2), “Babylon the Great” (also known as the “Whore of Babylon,” Rev. 17:4–20), and the lake of fire (Rev. 19:20). One of the more famous examples of this type of representation is Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.16.2 (ca. 1250), known as the Trinity Apocalypse, in which the various stages of the destruction of sinners are represented in colorful illuminations alongside biblical text and commentary. Significantly, medieval illuminated manuscripts often incorporate contemporary concerns into visual representations of biblical figures, including depicting “Babylon the Great” in Muslim dress, despite the fact that most Christian interpretation claims the figure is intended to represent Rome.

Illuminated medieval apocalypse manuscripts, and the wealth of other visual and textual material that was produced at the same time, reveal some of the foundations on which the subgenre of apocalyptic horror is built. These manuscripts reveal an enthusiasm for vivid scenes of pain, suffering, and terror, but representations can vary dramatically. This, along with the inclusion of contemporary political and social issues, reveals a tradition of artists interpreting and redefining religious texts in individual ways. Moreover, the artistic focus on degeneration and destruction (rather than on spiritual transcendence) points to the didactic purpose of the eschatological texts. If illustrations and elaborations were to depict only the successful survival of the righteous, the warning message would be lost. Medieval apocalypses were not intended to present reassurances about the aftermath of Armageddon; they were intended to present a stark (if often entertaining) message about what would happen to the majority of humanity at the end of days.

As well as illuminated manuscripts, the medieval (Christian) apocalypse was also known to wider audiences through the performance of mystery plays. These public performances told stories from the Bible, from the Creation to the Last Judgment, with musical accompaniment. These plays were often performed in “cycles,” which included the full spread of “pageants,” and performances would sometimes take place over several days. In some areas of England, the cycle would be performed during the Feast of Corpus Christi (the festival following Trinity Sunday, usually falling in late May or early June), and each pageant would be performed on a decorated wagon by a local trade or craft guild. One of the best-known cycles of English plays comes from York, and this is the only cycle that has completely survived. In the York cycle, the “Doomsday” play was performed by the guild of mercers (merchants of luxury cloth and textiles) and represented the spectacular climax of a long day of popular street entertainment. The mercers were wealthy and powerful citizens of York, and records show that their pageant was particularly lavish. As well as hiring professional actors and laborers to stage the play, the mercers decorated their pageant wagon with specially constructed artificial angels and banners decorated with gold and silver leaf. The players performed in costumes and masks as devils, sinners, and redeemed souls, and Christ’s costume included a diadem and gilded mask. Surviving records also show that later performances of the play included two additional carts that represented the mouth of Hell and a coffin from which the resurrected dead would emerge. The mercers’ Doomsday play depicts the glorious terror of the apocalypse, and, like all the mystery plays, its official purpose was a didactic one: the pageant cycle was intended to bring the (mostly) nonliterate audiences into close proximity to biblical teachings and to encourage personal reflection on the meaning of these teachings, particularly during a Eucharistic holiday. However, surviving civic records and criticisms of the Corpus Christi cycles reveal that concerns were raised over incidents of drunkenness, revelry, and “wantonness” during the performances, suggesting that the message of the Doomsday play (and others) may have been obscured at times by its entertainment.

Performance of mystery plays was banned during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, but apocalyptic art did not go away. Early modern theater, literature, and visual art continued to develop the fascination with the end of days. While this was still conceived in terms of religious eschatological writings, there was an increasing focus on situating historical and contemporary events into the timeline of the apocalypse. For example, millenarianism, or the belief in an impending cataclysmic event that will effect a transformation of the world, flourished during the English Civil War (1642–1651) and its aftermath, which is reflected in literature such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Additionally, in various parts of Protestant Europe, popular entertainment (particularly carnivals) raised the specter of the “Antichrist” of Christian eschatology, or the false prophet who will face Christ at Armageddon. Religious thinkers and writers of the time, such as Martin Luther and John Knox, identified this figure as the Roman Catholic papacy, and more popular responses followed in the form of vulgar broadsheets, effigy burning, and public celebrations such as Elizabeth Day and Guy Fawkes Day in England. As with the earlier Doomsday plays, it is clear (from the secular continuation of Guy Fawkes Night, for example) that the eschatological message was often concealed by the apocalyptic entertainment.

Early modern European apocalyptic art and entertainment continued to draw directly on Christian eschatology. However, the advent of the Industrial Age saw the birth of a new vision of the end of days: the secular apocalypse. This new type of apocalypse would come to be represented in artistic works, but it would also become a focus of science and ethics. The secular apocalypse is the basis of much contemporary apocalyptic horror, though it can take many forms.

One of the earliest examples of secular apocalypse fiction is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which humanity is destroyed by a plague. Shelley’s introduction to the book suggests it is a prophetic story, but notably the author claims she found the tale among writings of the Cumaean Sibyl, a legendary priestess of the Apollonian oracle whose messianic prophecies were of interest to both pre-Christian and Christian writers. By linking her fiction to this mythic figure, Shelley is able to both connect and disconnect from the traditions of presenting the apocalypse. Elements of Christian eschatology remain embedded in the apocalypse, but these are overwritten by broader (and older) concerns about how humanity will be destroyed. The mention of the Cumaean Sibyl is a literary conceit on Shelley’s part (The Last Man is her own work of fiction); however, it sets the stage for a new type of horror fiction, which foregrounds its prophetic nature over its biblical allusions (though these are still present). The Last Man also presents a number of narrative tropes that will recur throughout apocalyptic horror fiction. A specific date is given (the end of the twenty-first century); characters initially ignore warning signs, believing that the plague will not affect them; growing panic and chaos threaten to cause almost as much damage as the pandemic itself; society divides into violent factions; a group of survivors die as a result of the selfish actions of their leader.

Types of Apocalypse in Horror Fiction

•Alien Invasion and Animal Uprising. Human beings are annihilated or enslaved by extraterrestrials or the accelerated evolution of a terrestrial species.

EXAMPLES: The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (1958), Zoo by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge (2012)

•Anthropogenic Environmental Disaster. Human activity disrupts the earth’s climate or ecosystem, destroying life as we know it.

EXAMPLE: The Burning World by J. G. Ballard (1964)

•Astronomical or Natural Disaster. The destruction of earth and/or humanity by a large-scale natural event, such as asteroid impact or volcanic eruption.

EXAMPLES: Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1978), Ashfall by Mike Mullin (2011)

•Global Warfare and Genocide. Annihilation of the human race through military aggression, often involving nuclear or chemical weapons. Global warfare often acts as the catalyst for other apocalyptic horrors, such as postnuclear contagion, environmental disaster, and the rise of tyrannical regimes.

EXAMPLE: Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien (1974)

•Pandemic. An outbreak of a disease afflicts the world’s population, including engineered viruses, zombie contagion, and extraterrestrial contagion.

EXAMPLES: The Stand by Stephen King (1978), World War Z by Max Brooks (2006)

•Revelations and Rapture. The apocalypse as imagined in religious writings, usually Christian, reimagined from a contemporary perspective.

EXAMPLE: Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (1995)

•Rise of the Machines. Artificial intelligence reaches the point of sentience and overthrows humanity.

EXAMPLE: R.U.R. by Karel Čapek (1921)

•Tyranny and Dystopia. Often facilitated by a previous apocalyptic event, a totalitarian regime dictates the limits of human existence and experience.

EXAMPLE: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

Shelley’s protagonist, Lionel Verney, is the only survivor of the plague and ends the novel as the last man on Earth. In this respect, the novel is both apocalyptic and postapocalyptic. This is also a feature that resonates with later apocalyptic horror. While the ultimate endpoint of eschatology is the transcendence or redundancy of human endeavor, the secular apocalypse has revealed an increasing interest in the possibility of survival and continuation. Other nineteenth-century forerunners of this type of fiction include Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), in which two spiritual beings discuss the annihilation of the Earth by a comet after the event; Richard Jefferies’s novel After London (1885), in which the apocalypse itself is never described and the narrative focuses on the postapocalyptic lifestyle of a small group of survivors; and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), which features a successful alien invasion of Earth followed by humanity’s last-minute diversion of the apocalypse. Like medieval and early modern apocalypses, these nineteenth-century fictions draw on religious, historical, and political ideas to inform their vision of the end of days; however, these secular apocalypses also clearly and directly address contemporary scientific developments, including vaccinology, astronomy, Darwinism, and early environmentalism. These fictions also indicate an increasing interest in the anthropogenic apocalypse, in which the end of the world is brought about, not by the supernatural forces of evil, but by the hubristic endeavors of human development. Nevertheless, they also reveal a new strategy of decentering humanity, suggesting that the world—and, in some cases, the universe—will go on even after human life is destroyed.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, apocalyptic horror proliferated with potential ends of the human race. Alien invasion remains a popular trope, as does environmental disaster, including both anthropogenic climate change and astronomical catastrophe. The pandemic is also a common cause of apocalyptic horror, and since the mid-twentieth century this has also included the “zombie apocalypse” (a mixture of contagion narrative and supernatural terror). Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are reflected in technological apocalypses, in which computerized or (bio-)robotic machines enslave, destroy, or mutate the human race. Christian eschatology is not absent entirely from these narratives—and some fictions continue to draw directly on (or retell) the biblical apocalypse—but, overwhelmingly, religious elements are reimagined and incorporated into a more secular end-of-world view. Thus, “Armageddon” can be used to refer to a number of violent scenarios, including global and extraterrestrial warfare, genocide, and cosmological collision. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rev. 6:1–8), the biblical harbingers of Christ’s Last Judgment, are reimagined as avatars of human self-destruction, with “War,” “Pestilence,” “Famine,” and “Death” all being key themes in apocalyptic horror.

Apocalyptic horror in the twenty-first century remains an important vehicle for exploring the nature of human existence and the nature of our relationship to other species, the planet, and the universe. Whether a narrative focuses on the period of degeneration and destruction or the postapocalyptic aftermath, whether the characters are overwhelmed by the cataclysm or survive to wander a depopulated wasteland, apocalyptic horror consistently addresses and exploits humanity’s existential fears. Nevertheless, the sheer number of popular and creative responses to these fears reveals humanity’s persistent ability to revel in the specter of its own demise.

Hannah Priest

See also: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Cthulhu Mythos; I Am Legend; The Night Land; Shelley, Mary; Zombies.

Further Reading

Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.16.2 (Trinity Apocalypse, digitized). ca. 1250. Accessed March 19, 2016. http://trin-sites-pub.trin.cam.ac.uk/james/viewpage.php?index=1199.

Carey, Frances, ed. 1999. The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Himmelfarb, Martha. 2010. The Apocalypse: A Brief History. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Johnston, Alexandra F., and Margaret Dorrell. 1972. “The York Mercers and Their Pageant of Doomsday.” Leeds Studies in English 6: 11–35. http://digital.library.leeds.ac.uk/122/1/LSE1972_pp11-35_JohnstonDorrell_article.pdf.

Rosen, Elizabeth K. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham, MD, and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books.

Wagar, W. Warren. 1982. Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Williamson, Arthur H. 2008. Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World. Westport, CT: Praeger.

ECO-HORROR

The idea that nature can be frightening is certainly not new. Yet “eco-horror,” the subgenre of horror that deals most explicitly with these fears, is comparatively modern. Eco-horror—also known as “natural horror,” “environmental horror,” or “green horror”—is now a widely known term. But despite this, there is still some uncertainty and inconsistency in its usage. Broadly understood, an eco-horror text is any text in which the natural environment is in some way horrific: it may exploit “obvious” fears of violent and repulsive nature, or it could more subtly address the gloomy and pervasive sense that now, in the age of modern sciences and technologies, humans have somehow severed themselves from the natural world. More specifically, there are two main elements that define eco-horror narratives. First, there is a central theme of nature’s revenge exacted on humankind. This “golden rule” of eco-horror is always as follows: humans harm nature, and nature, in turn, delivers its own bloody retribution. Second, the eco-horror text is always intended to encourage its audience toward a more ecocentric (naturecentric), rather than anthropocentric (humancentric), viewpoint. In other words, it is designed explicitly to increase environmental awareness.

Though eco-horror has quite wide delineations—and so should, in theory, encompass a multitude of literary and cinematic texts—the term is used almost exclusively in relation to horror films, and usually in relation to a specific cluster of horror films from the 1970s. This subgenre, for whatever reason, has blossomed onscreen, and is, ordinarily, never discussed within the context of horror literature. This is surprising considering the fact that eco-horror finds its origins in horror literature and has continued its existence, alongside its filmic counterparts, in this literary form. Though seldom discussed, the subgenre of eco-horror holds a significant place and history inside the canon of horror literature. In order to examine this, however, it is first necessary to become aware of how exactly “eco-horror” has come to be understood in the history of horror cinema.

The general consensus holds that the eco-horror film was not truly born until the 1970s. This is due to the fact that the eco-horror genre has been intimately tied to the environmental movement, which only fully surfaced in the 1960s. There was a widespread popularization of environmental issues in this decade. For example, 1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a work on conservation that focused on the indiscriminate and dangerous use of pesticides. Most importantly, the book brought environmental concerns to the American public and has been lauded as the very first example of ecocriticism. The 1960s also saw such seminal measures as the passing, in the United States, of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which became operative in 1970. It makes sense, then, that while there were such seminal eco-horror texts as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in this decade, the true deluge of eco-horror titles came subsequently, in the 1970s, in reaction to this suddenly widespread eco-awareness.

Indeed, natural horror—along with body horror and satanic horror—was one of the three main cinematic horror genres in this period. There were countless nature nasties, such as Willard (1972), Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), The Bug (1975), Killer Bees (1974), Jaws (1975), Grizzly (1976), Squirm (1976), Orca (1977), Day of the Animals (1977), Piranha (1978), and Nightwing (1979), to name just a few. In these stories, viewers were warned again and again that if they disturb, depredate, and destroy the natural world, this will have devastating results, and Mother Nature will turn darkly against them. For example, in Frogs (1972), various amphibians and reptiles (and even the occasional butterfly) turn violently on the humans who are releasing pesticides into the natural environment. In Orca (1977), the titular whales only become violent after they have been harpooned and harmed by human fishermen. Though the sheer volume of eco-horror films made in the 1970s has never been rivaled, there has been a steady production of such texts in subsequent years. Titles such as Cujo (1983), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Arachnophobia (1990), Lake Placid (1999), and The Happening (2008) collectively confirm the tenacity of this onscreen subgenre.

A Timeline of Eco-horror

1800s

Texts: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, “Young Goodman Brown,” Walden, “The Great God Pan,” Dracula

Events:

•1816: Mount Tambora global disaster

•1854: Walden by Henry David Thoreau

•1892: John Muir forms the Sierra Club

Early 1900s

Texts: “The White People,” “The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” “The Shunned House,” “The Colour out of Space”

Events:

•1905: Formation of the Bureau of Forestry

1950s/1960s

Texts: The Birds (short story and film), Silent Spring, The Night of the Grizzly

Events:

•1964: Wilderness Act

•1968: Publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich

•1969: Santa Barbara oil spill

1970s

Texts: Jaws (novel and film) Willard, Night of the Lepus, Grizzly, Tarantulas, Tentacles, Piranha, The Swarm, etc.

Events:

•1970: Formation of EPA

•1970: Clean Air Act

•1971: Formation of Greenpeace

•1972: Clean Water Act

•1973: Endangered Species Act

•1979: Nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island

1980s

Texts: Cujo, The Rats, The Ceremonies, Croaked, Little Shop of Horrors

Events:

•1980: World population hits 4.5 billion.

•1982: Nuclear Waste Policy Act

•1985: Evidence confirms hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.

•1988: NASA warns Congress about global warming.

•1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill

1990s

Texts: Outbreak, Aberration, Sphere, Bats, Lake Placid

Events:

•1990: Oil Pollution Act

•1990: Pollution Prevention Act

•1996: Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act

•1997: Kyoto Protocol is signed by 38 industrialized nations

2000s

Texts: Seeders, Uprooted, The Last Winter, The Happening, Birdemic, Cloverfield, The Thaw, The Bay

Events:

•2001: President George W. Bush refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

•2006: The documentary An Inconvenient Truth is released.

•2007: Energy Independence and Security Act

•2010: Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill

•2014: IPCC release a devastating report promising dire environmental consequences if leading economies do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

•2016: The Paris Agreement, within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is signed by 193 UNFCCC member nations.

It is this cinematic background that illuminates the intriguing and less well-known subject of eco-horror literature. When examining eco-horror themes in a literary context, the parameters are much broader than those in the discussion of film. The horror of nature has been depicted since the very beginning of literature with Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE) and has continued as a dominant theme throughout the human traditions of myths, fairy tales, and countless other literary narratives. Most relevantly, it has held a consistently prominent place in Gothic and horror literature, right from the outset. The emphasis on truly sublime landscapes is central to many of the classic Gothic novels: vast terrains of ice, mountains, and forest create the awesome and eerie ambience in such classic texts as The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Monk (1796), Frankenstein (1818), and Dracula (1897). This extends beyond the European Gothic and into the American Gothic, where the darkness of the natural world is equally prevalent, while the image of the fearsome forest, inspired by inherited fears of the New World wilderness, is even more dominant. This is seen, for example, in the works of writers such as Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Indeed, critics such as Lisa Kröger have convincingly argued that the trope of the “Deep Dark Forest” is so recurrent that it is as much a central tenet of the Gothic text as the castle, crypt, or convent.

The two main elements of the eco-horror text as outlined above—the revenge of nature and the focus on an ecocentric perspective—have been utilized, both subtly and explicitly, by many of the most esteemed authors of the horror genre. Recently, there has been some discussion of the environmental themes to be found in the works of H. P. Lovecraft. In particular, stories of his such as “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Shunned House” (1924) have been retrospectively read in light of fears of widespread pollution. The Day of the Triffids (1951) has been read as the epitome of “plant horror” (a subset of eco-horror). A key figure, due to his somewhat unique position as both nature and horror writer, is Algernon Blackwood. In his infamous tale “The Willows” (1907), two men fatally underestimate the majesty of nature and are consequently terrorized by the trees that surround them; in “The Temptation of the Clay” (1912), a man is horribly punished for viewing the natural world in material terms; in “The Transfer” (1912), human greed is rewarded by an all too literal demonstration of nature’s voracious appetite; and in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), the imagined “union” between humans and nature is made truly monstrous. T. E. D. Klein has strong elements of eco-horror in his fiction, too, as for example in The Ceremonies (1984). Here, the main antagonist is aligned firmly with nature, and the protagonist, Jeremy, seems to be truly endangered only when he disrespects the natural environment. He poisons small creatures and bugs with insecticide and later—in a pure moment of eco-horror revenge—is slowly poisoned himself by the same insecticide, which is used in his food. Many “obvious” examples of eco-horror literature can also be found in literary examples of animal horror, including such classic texts as James Herbert’s The Rats (1982) and Stephen King’s Cujo (1981). (In fact, many examples can be found throughout King’s work, such as the haunted hedge in 1977’s The Shining). It is also important to note that two of the most infamous eco-horror films of all time, The Birds and Jaws, each originated as horror literature: Daphne du Maurier wrote the short story “The Birds” in 1952, and Peter Benchley wrote Jaws in 1974. There is more symbiosis between eco-horror film and eco-horror literature than many might first imagine.

Currently, the genre of eco-horror is still dominated primarily by filmic texts such as The Bay (2006), The Happening (2008), and The Last Winter (2012). These recent films carry a very different tone from what might be considered the “classic” eco-horror films of the 1970s. Instead of giant insects, mutant rats, and killer sharks, the threat of nature is shown to be much more insidious and pervasive; it is now often nature itself that is depicted as the collective and malevolent force, turning unanimously on a transgressive and now unwelcome humankind. This is representative of an increasing sense that humans have severed themselves from the natural world, which they are consciously—and continually—destroying. In this battle of humans vs. nature, it is clear that people, collectively, are the monsters.

When it comes to the place of contemporary eco-horror literature, the emphasis is not so much on the production of new books (although there are interesting examples to be pointed to, such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy) but on the attention that horror literature is now receiving within the context of eco-horror themes. Indeed, there has been a general increase in academic interest in visions of nature and environment in fiction. This has, significantly, resulted in the birth of the “ecoGothic,” which is firmly related to (and at times imbricated with) eco-horror. However, this term refers not to a genre of text but to the means of its deconstruction: in other words, the ecoGothic is the heading under which ecocritical and environmental themes may be interrogated within horror fictions. Eco-horror texts have always provided an important social and political commentary on environmental issues, but now—in a time when humans have affected everything in nature, from the ozone layer down—they are more relevant and essential than ever before. This is only emphasized by the fact that humans are, as Anil Narine credibly attests, collectively experiencing “eco-trauma”: a state in which people are so terrified by the overwhelming seriousness of environmental issues that they paradoxically deal with these fears not only by ignoring them, but by actively repressing them (Narine 2015). It is more important than ever, therefore, to examine in detail the texts in which these fears may still find expression.

Elizabeth Parker

See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Blackwood, Algernon; The Ceremonies; “The Colour out of Space”; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Lovecraft, H. P.; Mad Scientist; The Rats; The Sublime; “The Willows.”

Further Reading

Gambin, Lee. 2012. Massacred by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film. Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press.

Hillard, Tom J. 2009. “‘Deep into the Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) 16, no. 4 (Autumn): 685–695.

Muir, John Kenneth. 2007. Horror Films of the 1970s. London: McFarland.

Narine, Anil. 2015. Eco-trauma Cinema. London: Routledge.

Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. 2013. EcoGothic. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Tabas, Brad. 2015. “Dark Places: Ecology, Place, and the Metaphysics of Horror.” Miranda 11. https://miranda.revues.org/7012.

GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE MONSTERS OF
LITERARY HORROR

From its inception, horror has offered an ambivalent space for the construction and exploration of gender and sexuality. On the one hand, anxieties about gender roles and sexuality are cast off onto the monsters of horror fiction and social norms are constructed through the “othering” of “deviations” and “perversity.” On the other hand, horror also provides a space for the expression of transgressions of sexual and social norms. Hence, for example, the vampire’s long history as a figure of both repulsion and fascination, of fear and desire. In terms of its critical reception and history, horror is a literary form split along gender lines, often conceived of by critics as comprising two distinct traditions. At the “feminine” pole lies “Gothic Romance,” which includes the novels of Ann Radcliffe in the eighteenth century as well as the “paranormal romance” of the twenty-first. This “feminine” form is characterized by stories of monstrous (yet desirable) male antagonists, of the incarceration and flight of the heroine, and the struggle over the control and possession of her body and property. At the “masculine” end of the pole lies the horror tradition inaugurated by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which includes works that blend adventure, science fiction, and body horror, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Fred Botting suggests that this tradition contrasts with its feminine counterpart because it “subordinat[es] love adventure” and “licens[es] more ‘masculine’ tendencies towards power and violence” (Botting 2008, 11). Botting’s delineation of these two gendered traditions also reveals the way in which the “masculine” form (characterized by its transgression and violence) has been critically valued to the detriment of the “feminine.” The latter is often seen as conservative and clichéd, and Botting dismisses it accordingly as an “embourgeoisif[ied]” form traceable “through the Brontës, Collins, Corelli, du Maurier and the host of popular romantic fictions packaged as ‘Harlequins’, ‘Gothics’, ‘Mills and Boon’ . . . and on” (Botting 2008, 11). However, it is not so easy to delineate a “feminine” tradition from a “masculine” tradition in horror, nor should either be valued over the other as a space in which ideas of gender and sexuality are constructed and critiqued.

Horror provides an interface for the traversing and crossing of such gender boundaries as those drawn in critical accounts of the form. As Judith Halberstam’s study of monstrosity shows, horror narratives never “turn so neatly around gender identifications” (Halberstam 1995, 18). In its exploration of sexuality, perversity, and monstrosity, horror provides a space for the negotiation of the extremes of ideas about gender, often revealing the constructed and fluid nature of gender in the process. Feminist scholars have noted the way that horror can express frustration with the lot of women and is able to critique the polarization of women through binary sexual categories such as virgin and whore, victim and monster. Yet, horror can also reinforce gender stereotypes and express misogyny, pathologizing women who fail to conform. For example, Barbara Creed’s study of horror film argues that the “monstrous feminine” expresses “male fears” about female sexuality (Creed 1993, 7). Thus, horror is always ambivalent; it is not simply a patriarchal and oppressive space, but nor is it easily recuperable by feminist politics. The afterlives of horror literature’s most enduring monsters reveal this ambivalence. Frankenstein’s monster, the vampire, and the werewolf are all sites of monstrosity that continue to negotiate between the extreme poles of masculinity and femininity and offer a fantasy space for the expression of anxieties and desires surrounding sexuality.

The monsters of horror literature have often been read as ciphers for “perverse” sexuality and non-normative gender identities, the expulsion of their monstrous otherness serving to reinforce social norms. However, the long literary afterlives of Frankenstein’s monster, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the werewolves of Victorian horror fiction in numerous rewritings and adaptations show how the monster has served as a way of negotiating and celebrating aspects of gender and sexual identity not often given expression in mainstream culture and society.

Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is cited by critics as the inception of a masculine horror tradition (as above in Botting’s 2008 Gothic Romanced) and the beginning of a female tradition (as in Ellen Moers’s 1978 essay in which she coins the term “Female Gothic”). The novel explores both a repressive feminine sphere of domesticity and a masculine sphere of scientific discovery. Yet, as Moers insists, the relationship between its male antiheroes is an exploration of the trauma (and failure) of motherhood as much as it is of Promethean rebellion. The birth of Frankenstein’s monster reimagines the birth myth through the images of body horror, and the death of Frankenstein’s own mother looms large both in his decision to create his creature and to destroy its female mate. In this latter episode in particular, the novel registers anxieties about the power of generation. Frankenstein refuses to make the monster a mate for fear that together they will produce a “race of devils” (Shelley 1992, 170). It is the sexual reproductive power of the female monster that Victor fears most, suggesting that any female monster may be “ten thousand times more malignant than her mate” (Shelley 1992, 170). Marie Mulvey-Roberts argues that through Victor’s brutal destruction of the monster, Frankenstein exposes the violent misogyny of fears about female sexuality (Mulvey-Roberts 2016, 111). The idea that Frankenstein explores the cultural construction of “monstrous” female sexuality has a long afterlife in twentieth-century horror film, notably in works such as Alien (1979).

Drawing on this influence, feminist writers have found Frankenstein a rich text for adaptation and rewriting. Shelley Jackson’s hypertext revision of the novel, Patchwork Girl (1995), reassembles the fragmented female monster and imagines a narrative for each body part, giving voice to the female monster so brutally silenced in the original. In a more recent rewriting of the novel, Chris Priestley considers the construction of masculinity and links the destruction of the monster’s mate thematically to another act of misogynist violence in nineteenth-century literature, the murder of Nancy in Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839). Priestley’s Mister Creecher (2011) pairs the monster with a young Bill Sykes in an exploration of how masculine violence is culturally and socially produced. Frankenstein has also been read as a queer text into which might be read the repression of homosexual desire. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the novel as “a tableau of two men chasing each other across the landscape,” their relationship ambiguously amorous and/or murderous (Sedgwick 1986, ix–x). The queer subtext of the novel is developed in Kate Horsley’s recent novelistic adaptation, The Monster’s Wife (2014), which focuses on the friendship and desire between two young women, one of whom is taken by Frankenstein for his experiments. It is the bond between two female protagonists that is foregrounded here, and the antagonism between Shelley’s male antiheroes plays out in the background of Horsley’s novel.

Whereas the sexual appetites of Frankenstein’s monster are denied, those of the vampire run rampant in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. Stoker’s predatory Count Dracula represents a perverse sexual desire that disturbs middle-class systems of marriage and offspring and passes as a contagion to his victims. Though most famous of the vampires of horror literature, Dracula was not the first and is predated by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla by twenty-five years. In Carmilla (1872) Le Fanu depicts a more sympathetic vampire whose lesbian desire for her friend Laura comprises the text, rather than the subtext, of the story. Stoker’s tale acts as a corrective to Le Fanu’s, recasting the vampire as male (and so placing sexual agency in the realm of masculine virility) and violently punishing the count’s female progeny for their perverse manifestations of sexual appetite. The most obvious recipient of Stoker’s punitive violence is Lucy Westenra, who is staked, decapitated, and has her mouth stuffed with garlic by the three men who had previously competed for her affections. As a vampire, Lucy is able to express sexual appetites and refuse the confining structures of bourgeois femininity. When the “Crew of Light,” as Christopher Craft has characterized them (Craft 1984, 130) encounter her in Kingstead cemetery, she callously throws aside a child she has fed from and makes overt advances to the waiting men. This scene reveals what Gina Wisker notes is typical of female vampires: they are able to critique and problematize received notions of femininity, but negotiate a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressions (Wisker 2016, 150).

Yet Dracula has also proved a more ambivalent and open symbol than he was perhaps intended by his creator. Though a masculine sexual predator, against whom the Crew of Light must safeguard their women, he is also feminized as a degenerate, racial other. Patrick Bratlinger notes that through the count’s advances on Lucy and Mina, Dracula constructs the myth of a “demonic invasion” from the colonies of the British Empire (Bratlinger 1988, 234). Halberstam also notes that Dracula’s perverse sexuality is racialized as Jewish, showing that Stoker’s description of the count reflects the anti-Semitism of the period. Feminist and queer rewritings of Dracula often seek to make plain the punitive misogyny and racism of the source material, or else to draw out its ambiguities. Angela Carter’s story “The Loves of Lady Purple” (1974) shows the female vampire a victim of abjection and othering before she turns on her creator and revives herself by drinking his blood. Lady Purple offers a model for a host of powerful lady vampires in horror fiction ever since, from Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned to the fiction of Poppy Z. Brite. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel White Is for Witching (2010) also concerns itself with female vampirism and tackles racist fears still extant in British culture. Set in a British border town at the forefront of contemporary discussions of immigration, White Is for Witching casts white Miranda as a vampiric figure who cannot help but drain her black girlfriend, Ore. As well as suggesting the continuing damage racist discourses do to nonwhite subjects, White Is for Witching also resurrects the figure of Carmilla in Miranda’s desire for Ore. The two girls experience their vampiric coupling as pleasurable, and Miranda’s desire to consume Ore works to transgress both racist boundaries between self and other, as well as norms of femininity and heterosexuality.

In contrast to the feminized figure of the vampire, the werewolves of horror fiction often serve as an image of unambiguous hypermasculinity. However, the hypermasculine werewolves of contemporary horror fiction such as Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2014) (popularized in HBO’s television adaptation, True Blood [2008–2014]) or Underworld (2003) belie the complex history of the werewolf in horror literature. In Victorian fiction, female werewolves were as common as their male counterparts. In Clemence Housman’s “The Werewolf” (1890), a wandering stranger called White Fell uses her feminine sexuality to seduce a Scandinavian warrior before revealing herself as a fierce and deadly wolf, luring him to his doom. Frederick Marryat’s “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” (1839) portrays a similarly transgressive female, who seduces a widowed trapper in order to consume his children. Though they kill the wolf, the father and remaining son are punished for their transgressions against nature and women (it is revealed that the widower killed his first wife) with madness and death. Chantal Bourgault du Coudray notes that female werewolves in these early stories are characterized by “unrepentant hedonism and physicality,” whereas their male counterparts are “psychologized . . . reflecting the widespread association of masculinity with the mind.” This mind/body division in werewolf fiction guarantees the male’s salvation, “whereas the demonic female werewolf was always destroyed” (Bourgault du Coudray 2006, 55–56). Similar to the stories of female vampires, these tales of the werewolf construct and condemn “aberrant” female behavior and sexuality, but at the same time reveal transgression as an empowering possibility.

The 2001 B-movie horror film Ginger Snaps offers an interesting reworking of the complex gender politics of the werewolf in its reimagining of the werewolf as an adolescent girl. The film knowingly offers multiple readings of its monster: a metaphor for incipient teenage female sexuality, a response to the double standards in what feminists have called Western rape culture (that is, the normalization of sexual coercion and violence against women), and a morality tale about the dangers of unprotected sex, among others. The film opens with a montage of images of fetishized young female victimhood common in horror film as the protagonists reenact sexualized and horrific death scenes for a school art project. As the film progresses, however, its teenage protagonist, Ginger, morphs from a fetishized victim of horror into a violent, hedonistic, and sexually voracious monster, a transformation that is both psychological and physical. The film flirts with images of the monstrous feminine, but also critiques these images as well as bitterly commenting on the limited social roles into which girls and young women are asked to place themselves. Ginger’s death at the climax of the film means that the figure of the werewolf retains its essential ambivalence. For Ginger, becoming a werewolf is neither definitely empowering, nor wholly punitive.

Halberstam argues that the monsters of Gothic and horror fiction are radically open to interpretation. Monsters are “overdetermined” because they incorporate fragments of otherness from a multitude of sources into one body (Halberstam 1995, 92). Because its monsters cause such “interpretive mayhem” (2), horror, in both its classic and contemporary incarnations, offers a space to interrogate and challenge normative constructions of gender and sexuality. As a form it is available to any number of readings of gender and sexuality, even where individual texts may initially seek to reinforce gender norms or punish transgressions. Through the continued reinventions of its monsters, horror fiction offers a space in which to negotiate, challenge, and reimagine ideas about sexuality and gender into the contemporary moment.

Chloé Germaine Buckley

See also: Horror Criticism; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond; Part Three, Reference Entries: Brite, Poppy Z.; Carmilla; Carter, Angela; Dracula; du Maurier, Daphne; Interview with the Vampire; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Rice, Anne; Shelley, Mary; Stoker, Bram; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Botting, Fred. 2008. Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions. London: Routledge.

Bourgault du Coudray, Chantal. 2006. The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within. London: I. B. Tauris.

Bratlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Craft, Christopher. 1984. “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8: 107–133.

Creed, Barbara. 1993. Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Easley, Alexis, and Shannon Scott, eds. 2013. Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction. Kansas City, MO: Valancourt.

Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 2006. “Introduction” to Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 1–14. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Moers, Ellen. 1985. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 2016. “The Female Gothic Body.” In Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 106–119. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Priestley, Chris. 2011. Mister Creecher. London: Bloomsbury.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1986. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen.

Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1992. Frankenstein. London: Penguin.

Wisker, Gina. 2016. “Female Vampirism.” In Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 150–165. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

GHOST STORIES

In its strict sense, the ghost story genre includes tales of haunting that rely upon supernatural or unexplained presences to invoke fear, create suspense, and challenge rationality. Intuitively, the ghost story may be considered a literature of terror rather than horror. Full of occluded spaces and unspoken secrets, the mode often relies upon suspense or creeping fear, which are perhaps followed by revelations, to invoke and maintain its macabre effects. Yet, in a number of examples from the long history of ghost stories that have come to constitute the “classic” tradition, horrific figures are rendered at the corner of the reader’s vision, so to speak. Even the most formalistic of ghost story writers, the influential Cambridge don M. R. James, invokes the horrific, for instance, in the white, obscure apparition that pursues the antiquarian Parkins in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), or in the dark figure that creeps and steals along the living painting of “The Mezzotint” (1904). Forming a particularly important strand to Victorian, modern, and contemporary Gothic, the short ghost story very rarely explains away the supernatural in its pages, and the malignity that propels the narrative often resonates with readers long after they have finished the tale’s last line. Yet, ghost stories are not merely contained in the short story form, and many of the texts mentioned below are novellas or have film, television, or radio adaptations that are just as powerful as their literary originals.

The first modern ghost stories may be credited as being published in the German tradition. Perhaps the most famous is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (1816). Hoffmann’s story is a horrific tale of doubling that Sigmund Freud would come to draw from in his formulation of the “uncanny” in 1919 when he was particularly intrigued by two of Hoffmann’s central, strange figures: Coppelius and Olympia. A discomforting return of the repressed for Freud, the feeling of the uncanny arises when a sense of the homely is invaded by the unhomely. Purists may not regard “The Sand-man” as the same type of story that we associate with the British ghost story tradition, but the ghost as an unhomely guest within a narrative is a well-established trope, and many of the early ghostly British tales themselves appear within longer host narratives; for instance, Sir Walter Scott’s embedded narrative “Wandering Willie’s Tale” within his Redgauntlet (1824). The ghost story as it came to be recognized as a distinct literary genre in the British tradition dates back to Scott’s short story “The Tapestried Chamber” (1828), which was penned for the Christmas annual The Keepsake for 1829.

Of course, ghosts are folkloric in origin, and the oral tradition of telling such stories was the genesis of two key texts in the development of horror: those monstrous tales that arose from the retreat of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816. After evenings of German ghost story telling, followed by discussions of galvanism between Byron’s guests, Mary Shelley was visited by the monstrous visions of the waking dream that inspired Frankenstein (1818/1831), while the physician John Polidori drew inspiration from Bryon’s own writing to pen “The Vampyre,” the first modern vampire tale. The opening decades of the nineteenth century were just as important to the American tradition of horror. Washington Irving published his “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in 1820. In the years that followed, the ghost story as a genre developed fully alongside the literary magazine cultures of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods, as well as resonating with practices of spiritualism investigated by, for instance, the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in London in 1882.

The exact temporal framing of the ghost story genre’s heyday or high point is disputable—reasonable estimates tend to lie within the period 1840–1930—but, certainly, from the late Victorian period into the mid-twentieth century there was a conscious theorizing of the form in Anglo-American letters, one that engaged with many of the cultural anxieties of the age. In an essay arguing that the ghost story should employ an unexplained supernatural or malign force, Henry James, one of the greatest writers of the ghostly tale, suggests the skill and care—indeed, the literariness—with which the best of these stories have been fashioned. In the “Author’s Preface” to his The Turn of the Screw (1898), James professes his aesthetic preference for rendering what he termed the “withheld glimpse,” a technique that allows readers’ minds to create the horror in a story for themselves: “Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications” (James 2001, 8). For James, readers may be most disturbed by a tale when they furnish it with horrors made complete in their own imaginations.

Published half a century after Henry James’s “Preface,” a particularly cogent theorization of the ghostly tale is found in the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s preface to a 1952 collection of ghost stories edited by Cynthia Asquith. Bowen, whose most well-read collections of stories include her debut Encounters (1923) and the post–World War II collection The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), contends that the ghost story addresses the unspeakable: that which cannot be uttered without trepidation and fear. As with Henry James, it seems that Bowen takes a typically modernist approach to understanding the ghost story: understatement and aesthetic refinement are privileged over horror in her formulation that “modern” ghost stories should “abjure the over-fantastic and grotesque, operating, instead, through series of happenings whose horror lies in their being just, just out of the true” (cited in Foley 2011). Yet there are modernist writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, and Edith Wharton, who generate a sense of dread and disease that are close to horror.

A Timeline of Important Ghost Stories, 1816–1945

Summer 1816

Recognized as the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831) and John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the famous ghost story competition occurs at the Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva.

1817

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story collection Die Nachtstücke (The Night Pieces) is published in Berlin. It opens with his influential “The Sand-man.”

1820

Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” appears in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

1829

Sir Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber” is published in the Christmas annual The Keepsake for 1829.

1842

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death” (later revised in 1845 as “The Masque of the Red Death”) appears in the May volume of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine.

1843

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is published by Chapman & Hall on December 19 in London.

1855

Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” is commissioned by Dickens for the Christmas issue of Household Words.

1866

Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” is published in the Christmas number of All the Year Round.

1872

J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly is published; it includes M. R. James’s favorite Le Fanu ghost story, “The Familiar.”

1898

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is published in his The Two Magics by the Macmillan Company in New York.

1904

M. R. James’s first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, is published, which includes “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”

1910

Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” is first published in The Century Magazine in January.

1914

Arthur Machen’s ghostly war story “The Bowmen” is published on September 29.

1926

Cynthia Asquith’s The Ghost Book is published. It includes contributions by May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence. Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood.

1945

Elizabeth Bowen’s collection of wartime ghost stories, The Demon Lover, is published.

Somewhat misguidedly, James once wrote of his distaste for what he termed the “primitive” mindset of those who indulged in the writings of the American master of the Gothic horror short story: Edgar Allan Poe (Gargano 1990). Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), with its bodiless specter, can be considered a ghost story in the strictest of terms. Yet, more generally, when the repressed returns in Poe its nature is intentionally ambiguous. In “The Black Cat” (1843), his gruesome tale of haunting that stages the return of the seemingly vanquished, the protagonist of the story is overcome by a dark, psychological force—what he terms in the opening meditation of the story as “the spirit of PERVERSENESS”; in turn, he becomes compelled to mutilate his cat Pluto by gouging out one of its eyes and then hanging the feline from a tree. The narrator soon encounters an uncanny double of Pluto in a tavern: this cat, missing an eye, has a patch of mutable white hair on its chest that soon takes on the shape of a noose. As the narrator tries to murder Pluto’s double with an axe, his wife intervenes, only to be murdered herself. The story’s supernatural element, its claim to being a ghost story, is validated when the vengeful apparition of Pluto’s double reveals the whereabouts of the narrator’s wife to police. By the end of the narrative the law restores order but there is an ambiguous, Gothic remainder left over: just what gave Pluto’s uncanny double its powers of malignity?

Affirming its intimate relationship with the evolution of the Gothic from the Victorian period onward, the ghost story has also been said to continue the Female Gothic mode: a genre that critics identify as beginning during the Romantic period in novel form. The critic Diana Wallace argues that the ghost story “allowed women writers special kinds of freedom” with which “to offer critiques of male power and sexuality” (Wallace 2004, 57). The more nuanced appropriations of this standard involve “a rewriting of the Gothic elements of the Bluebeard story, especially the figure of the husband” (Wallace 2004, 58). Such an example is found in May Sinclair’s “The Villa Désirée,” which, collected by Cynthia Asquith for her The Ghost Book (1926), includes a paradoxical figure of ghostly monstrosity. Alone in the bedroom of the Villa Désirée, the space in which a murderous calamity had once befallen her husband Louis’s first betrothed, Mildred is visited by a composite and monstrous apparition, “its body . . . unfinished, rudimentary, not quite born” (Sinclair 2006, 438), with a face that gives the impression of absolute horror. In this otherwise restrained ghost story, horror comes to signal the danger posed to independent, feminine identity by patriarchal tyranny.

The ghost story need not only be cautionary in theme; it relies, too, upon nuanced psychological and temporal techniques to unnerve its reader. Many of the most popular ghost stories are associated with the festive period: a time at which the ghosts of the past visit to intervene in the present. A prominent example in this regard, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), now predominantly remembered for the redemption of its central miserly character Ebenezer Scrooge, contains, too, a series of disturbing passages that culminate in death’s apparition as a ghost from the future (to cite Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, “the time is out of joint” in Dickens’s famous tale). Perhaps the most unnerving of Dickens’s short ghost stories is “The Signal-Man” (1866). In this uncanny tale, a horrific apparition appears to an isolated signalman only to lure him to his death. The BBC’s adaptation of this story, with a screenplay provided by Andrew Davies and direction by Lawrence Gordon Clark, is one of the highlights of the corporation’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. Other adaptations in this series include tales originally penned by M. R. James and his important nineteenth-century precursor, writing in the Irish tradition, Sheridan Le Fanu. The continued adaptation of these classics of the genre suggests that their themes still resonate with contemporary anxieties surrounding the return of the repressed.

Indeed, since the 1950s, many modern, enduring ghost stories have been added to the literary canon, and these often invite film and television adaptations. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) continues and updates the Female Gothic; Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) returns to the Gothic tradition of M. R. James; and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) draws from a range of nineteenth-century American, Victorian, and Edwardian ghostly standards in its charting of the fall of the aristocratic Ayres family in Clement Attlee’s post–World War II England. American modern and contemporary horror is replete, too, with powerful stories in which ghostliness, or the return of the dead, is intertwined with the psychological dissolution of characters, including Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005). Thus, even if we may regard the ghost story as a genre that was most welcomed by readerships of the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, its endurance and influence upon modern Gothic and horror literature remains significant and its possibilities barely exhausted.

Matt Foley

See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Ancient World; Part Three, Reference Entries: “The Demon Lover”; Ghost Story; Hartley, L. P.; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; House of Leaves; In a Glass Darkly; James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; “The Sand-man”; The Shining; Spiritualism; The Uncanny; Wharton, Edith; The Woman in Black; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Further Reading

Briggs, Julia. 1977. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber and Faber.

Foley, Matt. 2011. “Bowen’s Thoughts on the Ghost Story.” The Gothic Imagination at University of Stirling, January 5. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/bowens-thoughts-on-the-ghost-story.

Gargano, James. 1990. “Henry James and the Question of Poe’s Maturity.” In Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, 247–255. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society. http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19901x.htm.

Hay, Simon. 2011. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

James, Henry. 2001. “Author’s Preface to The Turn of the Screw.” In Ghost Stories of Henry James, edited by Martin Scofield, 3–10. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

“Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Ghost Story Challenge.” 2014. British Library, May 15. http://www.bl.uk/teaching-resources/shelley-frankenstein-the-ghost-story-challenge.

Sinclair, May. [1926] 2006. “The Villa Désirée.” In H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, edited by Stephen Jones, 427–442. New York: Pegasus Books.

Smith, Andrew. 2010. The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Wallace, Diana. 2004. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6.1: 57–68.

THE GOTHIC LITERARY TRADITION

Horror fiction, as we understand it today, would be unthinkable without the genesis of a Gothic literary tradition in the eighteenth century and its development throughout the nineteenth and twentieth. In fact, after the cinematic successes of Universal’s horror films in the 1930s and Hammer Horror in the 1950s and 1960s, the most relevant of which were adaptations of the Gothic novels Dracula (1897) and Frankenstein (1818), the term “Gothic” is often used to designate work that would be more easily defined as “horror.” Even then, a distinction is often traced between the Gothic, perceived as a subtle and suggestive literary form connected to the uncanny and the sublime, and horror, understood as its more graphic, visceral, explicit, and shocking cousin. This also means that horror is often devalued as a descriptive term in favor of the more sober and literary Gothic. It is possible, however, to distinguish between the two and to see the Gothic as an artistic mode that conjures up a series of recognizable tropes, characters, settings, images, and stock situations, and horror as constituting a solid genre, that is, a type of artistic manifestation marked much less clearly by its constituents than by the overall emotion it attempts to convey, namely, fear in its various manifestations (shock, dread, suspense, and disgust, among others). This terminological difficulty is, however, proof of the extent to which the Gothic literary tradition and horror fiction overlap.

The Gothic is roughly agreed to begin with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), although certain aspects of William Shakespeare’s plays, revenge tragedies, and graveyard poetry have been identified as clear precursors by critics. A purely historicist view would insist that the Gothic ends in 1820 with the rather late Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin, but the more popular view is that the Gothic is best understood as an artistic mode that has been present in literature throughout the last 250 years and which has adapted to various societal changes to maintain its relevance, and has further hybridized with genres like science fiction or noir. Walpole’s novel initially pretended to pass for an English translation by the fictional William Marshall of a 1529 manuscript by one Onuphrio Muralto, canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto, printed in Naples but found in the north of England. It was only after the success the novel experienced that Walpole felt daring enough to include his name on the second edition and explain his intention of “blend[ing] the two types of romance, the ancient and the modern” (Walpole 2014, 9), that is, the fantasy of the chivalric romance with the social accuracy of the novel of sensibility. This second edition of 1765, more importantly, bore a significant subtitle: A Gothic Story. Many of the trappings of the Gothic, literal and figurative, are already present in this early novel, from the underground passages and the lugubrious medieval castle to the presence of the ghost of the past and the persecution of the damsel in distress. The reception of the novel would sour, however, after the fake manuscript ploy was revealed, for there was no follow-up Gothic novel for more than a decade until The Champion of Virtue (1777) was published anonymously, first by Clara Reeve and subsequently under the new title of The Old English Baron.

It would be in the hands of several female writers—Reeve, but also Sophia and Harriet Lee, Regina Maria Roche, Eliza Parsons, and Charlotte Turner Smith—that the Gothic would develop throughout the late eighteenth century, sometimes incorporating heavy didacticism and moralistic messages. No writer contributed more to the development of the Gothic than Ann Radcliffe, who, with the publication of her fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), became the best paid novelist of her time. She is seen as the writer who popularized the use of “the explained supernatural” in her own brand of Gothic fiction, where seemingly supernatural phenomena eventually would be revealed to have been tricks, hoaxes, or coincidences. It was precisely this preference for a technique that would dispel horrors, rather than hone in on them, that has, retrospectively, been understood to differentiate her writing (taken to be a token of Female Gothic) from that of more visceral and shocking authors like Matthew Lewis, whose The Monk (1796) was a convoluted tale of the demonic seduction of a priest interspersed with gory episodes that include a bleeding apparition, a decomposing child, and a trampled nun. Lewis’s novel, which caused a massive uproar upon publication and had to be purged of its most sacrilegious passages, infused new blood into the Gothic and is a key book in the so-called German School of Terror, influenced by German romances. Its notorious shock ethic means we could rethink The Monk as a first example of the horror novel, but always in retrospect, for, as Dale Townshend has noted, horror “was yet to be generically formulated as such, and was unthinkable outside of the broader ‘Gothic’ mode in literature in which it first took shape” (Townshend 2016, 20).

This is not to say that there were no contemporary debates around horror and terror. In fact, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are precisely when these debates began to germinate, if not coalesce. Works by Anna Laetitia Aikin, James Beattie, and Nathan Drake began to sound the possible pleasures of horror, as well as its workings, especially after the publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). This treatise included a lengthy discussion of the sources of terror (and thus, of the sublime, the highest expression of which is astonishment), and included sections dedicated to “obscurity,” “vastness,” or “pain.” Its ideas would hold sway, and the sublime has become both a tool through which to understand eighteenth-century Gothic and a theoretical concept worth studying in its own right. Radcliffe herself, in an excerpt from her posthumous novel Gaston de Blondeville (1826) that was published in New Monthly Magazine that same year, attempted a first distinction between terror and horror, a distinction premised on affect (the emotional effects of the literary piece) that, it would seem, has partly evolved into the twenty-first-century misconception that the Gothic should be connected to the eerie and the uncanny, and horror with the shocking and explicit.

Major Gothic Novels: A Timeline

1764

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

1778

The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (first published anonymously as The Champion of Virtue in 1777)

1786

Vathek by William Thomas Beckford

1794

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

1796

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

1798

Wieland, or The Transformation by Charles Brockden Brown

1818

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

1820

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin

1845

The Mysteries of London by George W. M. Reynolds

1847

Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

1859

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

1886

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

1897

Dracula by Bram Stoker; The Beetle by Richard Marsh

1910

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

1938

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

1954

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

1976

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

1979

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

1983

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

1987

Beloved by Toni Morrison

1995

Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson

2000

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

2001

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

2004

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

2005

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

2009

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Matt Cardin and Xavier Aldana Reyes

After the famous ghost story challenge at the Villa Diodati yielded two of the most significant and long-living of horror monsters, Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the aristocratic vampire in John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the Gothic would travel in two directions in the mid-to-late nineteenth century: inward, in order to explore the dark recesses of the mind—especially in Edgar Allan Poe’s paranoid fictions and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—and toward urban centers, especially in penny dreadfuls like George W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1845) and James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire (1847), cheap serial publications that included lurid topics and sometimes supernatural phenomena. The Gothic would hybridize with the suspense story in the sensation novel, the best examples of which are Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and would be further shaped by the Decadent movement (especially Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans) and by fears directly connected to degeneration (H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast,” 1890) and the fall of the British Empire (Richard Marsh, H. Rider Haggard). By the end of the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction had largely shed its medieval trappings and adopted modern ones, to the point where we might want to question why novels like The Beetle (1897) are referred to as Gothic and not as straightforward horror. However, horror had yet to coalesce into a distinct genre. H. P. Lovecraft’s study Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), where recent “weird” (another interstitial, slippery term) writers like William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, or Arthur Machen are presented as part of a longer literary tradition reaching back to Walpole, would be the first to connect the various strands of the Gothic–horror continuum, albeit with the main purpose of claiming the value of the weird, and not of theorizing horror as a category.

A precedent was set in 1937 with the development of the “H for Horrific” certificate, used to identify the films that followed Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, and which was intended to inform audiences about the dangerous nature of that material. It is safe to say that horror developed much more readily as a cinematic category and was subsequently applied to certain types of fiction, even when some of these, as was the case with a number of the short stories collected in The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959–1989), would have been referred to previously as Gothic or weird. The banning of horror comics in the 1950s, again on the grounds that these texts could have deleterious effects on the young, brought the debates more readily onto the publishing industry, and by the 1980s, it is possible to speak of a burgeoning and “booming” horror market, with designated genre spaces in bookshops and publishers like Tor developing horror lines. The success throughout the late 1970s and 1980s of horror auteurs like Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Ramsey Campbell, as well as extreme fiction (“splatterpunk”), served to entrench the dividing line between the Gothic (Anne Rice, Angela Carter) and horror, even when a number of “splatterpunk” (extreme horror) novels would seemingly return to well-known Gothic monsters like the vampire.

Where exactly the Gothic and horror may lie within the modern and contemporary period has been the subject of much debate. Gothic studies has been steadily institutionalized in academia through a dedicated stream of publications since the early 1980s, but especially in the 1990s, which saw the founding of the International Gothic Association and the publication, in 1999, of the first issue of the specialist journal Gothic Studies. This interest in the Gothic has permeated education, to the point where the Gothic is an option in British A-levels (high school examinations), it is present in most degrees in Britain and the United States, and it can be further studied through specialist master’s degrees. The Gothic has also experienced a public resurgence, with the British Film Institute and the British Library running Gothic-themed seasons and exhibitions (2013–2014 and 2014–2015, respectively). All this investment in the legitimization of the Gothic has naturally led to a concomitant reevaluation of horror fiction (and film), and to studies on its history, such as Darryl Jones’s Horror: A Thematic History in Film and Fiction (2002), Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005), and the edited collection Horror: A Literary History (2016), as well as S. T. Joshi’s Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2014), which includes a number of horror texts.

For all that, the difference between the Gothic and horror is still less than clear. It would seem that we must either extricate the Gothic (as an aesthetic and thematic marker) from horror (as an emotive and affective one), or else celebrate their overlaps.

Xavier Aldana Reyes

See also: The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Eighteenth Century; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Carter, Angela; The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Numinous; Penny Dreadful; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; Rice, Anne; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Bloom, Clive, ed. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Botting, Fred. 2013. Gothic. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Chaplin, Sue. 2011. Gothic Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections. York: Longman.

Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror, Volume 1: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Edwardian Age and The Literature of Terror, Volume 2: The Modern Gothic. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Punter, David, ed. 2015. A New Companion to the Gothic. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Spooner, Catherine. 2007. “Gothic in the Twentieth Century.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 38–47. London and New York: Routledge.

Townshend, Dale. 2016. “Gothic and the Cultural Sources of Horror, 1740–1820.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 19–51. London: British Library.

Walpole, Horace. 2014. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

GOTHIC POETRY

Gothic poetry began in the eighteenth century and accompanied the rise of Gothic architecture. The poetry was partly the product of the rediscovery of medieval history, exemplified in the building of Strawberry Hill House by Horace Walpole, and partly an interest in what Walpole called “gloomth,” that mysterious half-understood world of shadows and bizarrerie that could be experienced from visits to ruins, and that was attached to the personal universe that the eighteenth century called sentiment. Sentiment was an irrational and highly subjective emotional response to the sublime, which itself inspired both terror and horror and could only be felt in extreme situations.

Gothic poetry emphasized this interior world and especially dealt with the feelings accompanying the attractions of fear and disorientation when faced with a universe devoid of the rationality preached by Enlightenment thinkers. The best way to experience such feelings was to revisit the ruined world of the past in one’s mind, or to inhabit a supernatural world where God was no longer present.

Gothic literature was originally inspired by the world of Shakespeare, but Gothic poetry had a slightly different trajectory. Memorial poetry of the time produced by England’s metaphysical poets in the seventeenth century, stripped of its word play and religious intention, soon became the memorial elegy as produced by Thomas Gray. This in turn led others to take a more sanguinary view of decay, and the new vogue for tourism sent crowds to ruins such as Netley Abbey, where they mused and wrote sonnets on the picturesque charms of death and decay.

Poets as different as Lord Byron and Susan Evance produced poetry on decay and ruination, while novelists such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794) incorporated poetry of meditations on the picturesque. Her own blandly soothing poems on nature (“The Glow-Worm”) and scenery were accompanied by poems of dead brides (“The Mariner”), murdered pilgrims (“The Pilgrim;” originally “The Traveller”), and the mountain abyss (“Storied Sonnet”), in which there is a decided hint of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan.”

Nevertheless, Byron was the most famous poet of Gothic thrills for his generation, supplying vampires in “The Giaor” (1813) and metamorphosing into the first vampire character in “The Vampyre” (1819) by his doctor John Polidori. Yet it was Coleridge whose influence was eventually the strongest. The French Revolution deeply influenced both William Wordsworth and Coleridge, and through its prism they discovered the sublimity of nature and nature’s resonance with human emotion in a world in which nature is supreme. Coleridge’s interest in the border ballad form, then current, led to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), in which the death of an albatross has to be atoned for by the sailor who has murdered the bird. The moment the mariner fixes his unknowing listener with his tale of woe, and thereby curses him to repeat the story to the reader, became the spine of Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein (1818).

Nevertheless, it was the German writer August Bürger’s poem of doomed love that was to become the most influential of all Gothic poems. Bürger was the son of strict Lutheran parents, and he was set to join the church. But he rebelled, and his interest in law gained him a magistrate’s position while his interest in British border ballads led him to become a poet. His most famous poem, “Lenore,” was translated into English by William Taylor for the March 1796 edition of The Monthly Magazine as “Lenora.”

The story follows Lenore as she waits for her William to return from the Crusades. Her despair leads her to renounce God despite her mother’s entreaties. Suddenly, in the night, William, although clearly a specter, appears on a steed and carries off Lenore in her night shirt to be his bride. At cock crow they plunge to earth, William returning to his tomb and Lenore left dying amid the graves.

Walter Scott translated Bürger’s “Der Wilde Jager” as “The Wild Huntsman” and published it to great acclaim in Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder in 1796, while Lewis himself produced his own version of the ballad in his scandalous Gothic novel The Monk (1796). “Lenore” introduced the “corpse bride,” the girl who dies when she is about to marry, a character trait reproduced in the characters of Victor Frankenstein’s bride Elizabeth in Frankenstein and Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) and reproduced in such films as Tim Burton’ s The Corpse Bride (2005). The poem’s most famous line, “stil Denn die Todten reiten schnell” (“for the dead travel fast”; Bürger 1900, 27), was used by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) when Jonathan Harker first encounters the count.

Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was the last great Gothic novel of the Romantic period (ca. 1760–1830, with romanticism as such surviving several decades longer). It also set the tone for a different sort of Gothic sensation. Instead of the horrors attendant on the supernatural world, there was a greater attention to material fears made manifest by the cruelty of authority and the perversity of human nature. It was to human nature that the writers of the late Romantic Gothic would turn their attention. Theirs would be a world where horror was not a consequence of violating nature, but instead would be a consequence of mental disturbance. Such mental disturbance was first analyzed by James Prichard in A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835). He called the condition “moral insanity,” a term for those whose outward signs are perfectly normal, but who are insane within.

Coleridge had led the way in the exploration of the imagination in Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he proposed a new way of understanding the world. This was through pure imagination, which to Coleridge had the power to transform base reality and transcend material being. This “new” world was opposed to the merely combinational aspects of our perception, which he called “fancy.” To get to the imagination one might use drugs or other hallucinogens, the point being to reconnect with the spiritual aspect of human existence. This was Coleridge’s poetic solution to the loss of God, which had taken place with the secularization of French life amid the upheavals of the French Revolution (1789–1799). Nevertheless, if a person were to reconnect with the supernatural and what amounted to a natural religiosity, there was nothing to stop him or her from simply imagining a reality that was at odds with experience. In simple terms, this might lead a person to impose his or her will through perverse and hallucinatory desire brought on by mania or drug addiction or both.

The first English writer to understand this contradiction and to become fascinated by it was Thomas De Quincey, who published a satiric article in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827 titled “On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts.” In it he proposed a “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder” whose aim was to analyze the “design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade” (De Quincey 2006, 10) and “poetry” essential to study the “great artists” (4) of murder whose lives were eaten up by the secret passions of “jealousy, ambition, vengeance and hatred” (4).

De Quincey’s proposal, absurd though it seemed, suggested a new heightened interest in criminal psychology, the murders themselves creating a world only a fraction apart from normality, determined by secret passions harbored by all people. It was simply too “vulgar” and unimaginative to knock someone on the head for his money bag. From now on there had to be “sympathy” for the murderer rather than the victim.

De Quincey had been drawn to the subject by his fascination with the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders, which occurred in 1812 between December 7 and 19. An unknown assailant had butchered two families, including their young children, beating them senseless and cutting their throats. John Williams was apprehended and charged, but hanged himself in prison before any proof could be brought. His body was buried with a stake in its heart at a crossroads near the scene of the crime. This interest in the psychological aspects of Gothic mentality greatly influenced two of the most important Gothic poets of the years 1830 to 1850, Robert Browning and Edgar Allan Poe.

Browning’s great gift was for psychological monologues, a term applied later to the series of poetic narratives he created between the middle 1830s to 1842, when he published the collection Dramatic Lyrics (1842). Such monologues are interior conversations with the reader, who is drawn into the mad world of the speaker to the point where it is impossible to escape the knowledge that is imparted, a technique invented years earlier by Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Porphyria’s Lover, which Browning wrote in 1836 and published in the January edition of the Monthly Depository (but without its present title), was an early attempt to understand the mind of a killer who yet believes he is a lover. It was reprinted in Dramatic Lyrics under the title “Madhouse Cells.” The tale is told as Porphyria returns to her lover at night through a rainstorm. Although wet, she sits next to the narrator and puts her arm around his waist as she gently lays his cheek on her bare shoulder. The eroticism is heightened by the disheveled nature of her clothes and by her “yellow hair” and “white shoulder bare” (Browning 1836, 43). The narrator meditates on her absolute love for him and that at the moment of their silent clinch “she was mine” (44). The reader might expect a kiss or vow of love from the narrator, yet what he does next is both shocking and inexplicable:

. . . I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. (44)

The infantilized tone, “I found a thing to do,” and the use of diminutives such as “little” suggest an innocence about the narrator’s actions that speak directly of moral insanity. Indeed, he even rationalizes the assumption that

No pain felt she;

I am quite sure she felt no pain. (44)

However, murder now has no moral consequence as the poem pointedly finishes with the cynical “God has not said a word!” (44). It is no coincidence that Porphyria is a disease of the blood and skin that may lead to manic depression in sufferers. This hint at medical complications nevertheless leaves a world where perverse desire (in this case, possibly fetishistic sexual desire: Porphyria’s hair) and the personal will of the narrator override spiritual elements and confuse moral certainties, replacing material reality with the inner disorientation consequent upon absolute loss of faith.

The same effect is to be found in Browning’s more famous “My Last Duchess,” which was anthologized in 1842. It takes place in the corridors of the Duke of Ferrara’s palace during 1564. The duke is showing an ambassador around his picture collection while discussing his next potential bride. Everything is told in an urbane and disinterested tone created by the technique of enjambment (the continuation of a sentence or clause across a poetic line break, without a pause), which gives the poem a conversational tone, the better to disarm its reader before the denouement.

The duke begins the conversation by stopping at a portrait behind a curtain that he has drawn back and pointing out his “last duchess.” Sinisterly, he notices that she is presented “looking as if she were alive” (Browning 1842, 25), and that, even more disturbingly, the ambassador is privileged to see what is shown. The duke points out the way the painter has caught the “half flush that dies along her throat,” but this aesthetic detail sends the duke off into a reminiscence regarding the duchess’s perceived overfamiliarity with those around her and her apparent disregard of his gift to her of “a nine-hundred-years-old name” (26). The duke turns to his interlocutor and admits that something in the duchess “disgusts him.” It appears he has had her murdered, something of so little consequence to him that he continues his tour oblivious of his revelation. The implication, however, is clear: the next duchess will meet the same fate, and the duke will continue with the same casual disregard.

Browning was the master of insidious intent. His exploration of perverse states of mind rationalized beyond sense was a symptom of mid-century concerns regarding the nature of human consciousness in a world beset with existential doubts, social upheaval, rapid industrialization, and class conflict. These concerns found their greatest expression in Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1842).

All of these conflicting problems seemed unwittingly to focus on women. Edgar Allan Poe, although an American, was influenced by the currents of British thought regarding mental hygiene and psychological well-being. In a series of short tales—“Berenice” (1835), “Eleonora” (1842), and “Ligeia” (1838)—Poe explored the nature of that male monomania that he named “the imp of the perverse.” It was Poe who first integrated previously written poems into his tales to give greater psychological insight into the characters and the way they experienced the world. It was also Poe who integrated assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) and sibilance (the repetition of s, sh, z, and related sounds) into his prose to give it a dreamlike feeling, which Poe remarked had the effect of language and imagery recalled from reverie or the moment between waking and sleeping.

Ligeia occupies this dreamlike and hallucinatory world, in which an unnamed narrator sits with his dying wife (a wife who may be a hallucination brought about by opium consumption), who intones the poem “The Conqueror Worm.” The poem concerns a “theatre” of human woes where “puppets” act out “mimes” “at [the] bidding of vast formless things” (Poe 2008, 88). The action of the poem is that of humanity (or, at least, sentient beings) manipulated by the mindless entities of a meaningless universe in an endless cycle of anarchy and chaos. Into this terrifying world crawls “the Conqueror Worm,” a fanged and gory entity to whom all must submit. Against this disaster Ligeia poses the overriding importance of the human will, all that is left of the spiritual possibilities of Coleridge’s imagination. When Ligeia returns at the end of the tale, it is not merely the triumph of her will, but that of the narrator’s, who literally wills her into life out of the corpse of his second wife. As with Browning, it is the fetish of her raven hair that is the symbol of her resurrection.

Poe again made use of the incorporated poem in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where “The Haunted Palace” is a metaphoric description of Roderick Usher’s mental decline, the Gothic imagery of the castle serving as a perfect foil for the disintegration of Roderick’s mind, where red eyes and a humorless laugh betray mental disorder.

The poem most associated with Gothic goings-on is Poe’s “The Raven” (1845), whose central character, the raven itself, may have been suggested by Grip, the talking raven in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). The poem’s complicated rhyme scheme may have been further suggested after Poe reviewed the trochaic octameter poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” by Elizabeth Barrett, published in 1845. Regardless of its sources, the poem follows the incident of a raven landing on a bust of Pallas inside the door of a young scholar who is reading books of occult knowledge while mourning his lost love, who is called Lenore (a clear reference to Bürger’s poem). It begins,

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm”: Horror the Soul of the Plot

While Poe’s “The Raven” may be the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they try to think of a Gothic poem, his “The Conqueror Worm,” which allegorically portrays conscious life as a hideous play presided over by incomprehensible powers and performed for an angelic audience, delivers a dose of Gothic gloom that at least equals that of its dark-feathered cousin.

Lo! ‘t is a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years—

A mystic throng, bewinged, bedight

In veils, and drowned in tears,

Sit in a theatre, to see

A play of hopes and fears,

While the orchestra breathes fitfully

The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,

Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly—

Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast shadowy things

That shift the scenery to and fro,

Flapping from out their Condor wings

Invisible Wo!

That motley drama—oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased forevermore,

By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in

To the self-same spot,

And much of Madness and more of Sin,

And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,

A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!

It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs

The mimes become its food,

And the angels sob at vermin fangs

In human gore imbued!

Out—out are the lights—out all!

And, over each dying form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

While the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”

And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 1914. Vol. 10. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 34–35.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.” (Poe 1845, 143)

The poem became an instant success, as its theatricality made it a parlor performance favorite. It brought Poe fame, but little money, and created a host of parodies, remaining still the most famous Gothic poem ever written. With its raven intoning the meaningless “Nevermore,” the public loved the mysterious nature of the work, so much so that Poe attempted to cash in on his success with an explanation of the poem’s creation. Nevertheless, his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) did little to explain away the mysteries of what was intended. The main theme seems to be the perverse desire to both forget and remember a traumatic event, but beyond that, the narrator’s need to make sense of the raven’s meaningless repetitions suggests the loss of an irretrievable past. Beyond all this remains the attraction of the poem’s mesmeric alliteration and its verbal dexterity, which is both formulaic and yet surprising.

Poe’s work represents the end for Gothic taste in poetry, although the taste for medievalized Gothic poetry continued up to the end of the nineteenth century, with the work of Browning and Poe evolving into the work of Decadents such as Charles Baudelaire and Symbolists such as Algernon Swinburne, with poetry that catered to urban and perverse tastes unaccompanied by any interest in Gothic trappings. Gothic poetry was finally sublimated into the imaginative world of the silent movie and European cabaret.

Clive Bloom

See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Eighteenth Century; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Baudelaire, Charles; Byron, Lord; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; “Ligeia”; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; “The Vampyre”; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Bloom, Clive, ed. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Browning, Robert. 1836. “The rain set early in to-night.” Sixty lines signed “Z,” in Monthly Repository, vol. x., N.S., 1836, pp. 43–44.

Browning, Robert. (1842). Bells and Pomegranates. No. III. – Dramatic Lyrics. London: Edward Moxon.

Bürger, August Gottfried. [1774] 1900. Lenore. Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Ellis and Elvey.

De Quincey, Thomas. 2006. On Murder. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duggett, Tom. 2010. Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kendrick, Walter M. 1991. The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1845. “The Raven.” American Review, February, 1:143–145.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 2008. The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Signet Classics.

Punter, David. 2014. “Gothic Poetry, 1700–1900.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 210–220. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Andrew. 2013. Gothic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wagner, Corinna, ed. 2014. Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory. Ontario: Broadview Press.

HORROR ANTHOLOGIES

An anthology is a collection of thematically linked works by different authors. (In the modern publishing industry, the term “collection” itself is used for books consisting of works by a single author.) The thematic linkages can be weak, and, importantly, the works do not have to be prose fiction but can include material from other forms of literature—verse, drama, essays, correspondence—as well as such other genres as music and theology. Anthologies have played a significant role in the history of horror literature and the establishment of a canon, helping to shape the field by shaping assumptions about which works are important to reprint, read, and remember.

Those wanting to establish horror as a many-rooted genre would do well to look at the depictions of horrific punishments and general bloodlust in the collections of Christian sermons and homiletics that were at one time popular. If one concentrates on fiction anthologies, it helps to remember that although short fiction predates the invention of movable type, the printing press, and even the Christian era, it was Christians’ development of the codex—the progenitor of the modern form of the book, created from separate pages bound together along one edge—that permitted different works by different authors to be cumulated into one binding. The earliest known anthologies would thus be manuscript collections, and arguably the earliest horror anthology is MS. Cotton Vitellius A XV, which dates from prior to 1631 and collects not only Beowulf, the earliest monster story in English, but Christian apocrypha such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, as well as containing numerous illustrations of monsters and the monstrous.

Despite such an auspicious beginning, and despite the appearance of horrific elements in the works of such widely read medieval authors as Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Dante Alighieri, it was not until the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment that formal collections of thematically linked works began to be systematically published, although it must be emphasized that such literary genres as horror and fantasy did not then exist and are relatively recent in invention. One of the earliest print collections was the English writer Thomas Bromhall’s marvelously titled A Treatise of Specters, or, An History of Apparitions, Oracles, Prophecies, and Predictions with Dreams, Visions and Revelations and the Cunning Delusions of the Devil to Strengthen the Idolatry of the Gentiles and the Worshiping of Saints Departed, with the Doctrine of Purgatory: a Work very Seasonable for Discovering the Impostures and Religious Cheats of These Times, Collected out of Sundry Authors of Great Credit and Delivered into English from Their Several Originals by T.B. (1658). While hardly free from religious argumentation, Bromhall’s book nevertheless would have provided its susceptible readers with horrific chills. The eighteenth century likewise had such works as The History of Apparitions, Ghosts, Spirits or Spectres; Consisting of Variety of Remarkable Stories of Apparitions, Attested by People of Undoubted Veracity (1762), whose author is listed simply as “Clergyman.” However, perhaps the most significant work to emerge from this period was Daniel Defoe’s often anthologized and still occasionally read ghost story, A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, the Next Day After Her Death, to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705 (1706)—a book that, despite its title, is fiction.

It was during the nineteenth century that anthologies of horrific literature—which is to say, literature deliberately written to a specific sensationalistic aesthetic—began to be consciously compiled. There was a contemporary awareness that this material was different in content and approach from other works, and editors recognized that such material could be cumulated and collected. Such a collection was the five volumes of the Gespensterbuch, edited by Johann August Apel and Friedrich August Schulze (as F. Laun) and published between 1811 and 1815. The title means Ghost Book, and it included not only works of Germanic folklore but also works of supernatural horror. This is an especially significant book in the history of horror anthologies, for in 1812 a selection of the tales was translated into French and published as Fantasmagoriana; ou Recueil d’Histoires d’Apparitions, de Spectres, Revenans, Fantômes, &c., after which a selection of these along with the introduction to the French volume were translated into English as Tales of the Dead (1813) by one Sarah Utterson. Her introduction is well informed, revealing a historical awareness of the literature of the horrific, and the French introduction recognizes the existence of horrific literature and provides an argument for its existence: “the wonderful ever excites a degree of interest, and gains an attentive ear; consequently, all recitals relative to supernatural appearances please us” (iv). Moreover, the French introduction provides bibliographic discussions of and references to those eighteenth-century works that discuss aspects of the supernatural. As if this were not significant enough for one small volume, Tales of the Dead was one of those books read by Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Percy and Mary Shelley during their legendary 1816 sojourn at Lake Geneva, and thus almost certainly helped inspire Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819).

The lack of an international copyright meant that, for most of the nineteenth century, works could be published in England and Europe and almost immediately reprinted in America, and vice versa. This led to the first multivolume fantastic fiction anthology in English, the Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823; 3 volumes). Also having a thoroughly cosmopolitan set of contents were John Y. Akerman’s Tales of Other Days (1830) and Henry St. Clair’s Tales of Terror (1835). In addition to a number of anonymously translated European tales, the latter also included American writer William Austin, whose widely anthologized “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man” (1824) is an American utilization of the idea of the Flying Dutchman, a man cursed to travel forever, unable to recognize when he arrives at his destination, and horrifying by implication.

The nineteenth century saw numerous anthologies of horrific work, and there was no social stigma against authors, whether men and women, writing works that were fantastic and horrific. Reprints of anthologies, often with expanded contents, became more common. This was the case with Akerman, mentioned above, and it included such later works as A Stable for Nightmares, whose 1867 English edition contained twelve stories, only some of which were reprinted in an 1896 edition, which added new material. American writers began to vie for space with the English and Europeans; in Strange Happenings (1901), the American regionalist (a writer focusing on conveying the “local color” of a specific region of the United States) Hamlin Garland could rub shoulders with such male English writers as Grant Allen and W. Clark Russell and such women as Beatrice O’Connor, Mrs. Fleming, and Clara Savile-Clarke. The Victorian love of the supernatural led to such collections as Stories with a Vengeance (1883), which was also sold as the Bow Bells Annual for 1883. Similarly, individual magazines began to be mined for their fantastic contents: Strange Doings in Strange Places (1890) reprinted eighteen stories that had appeared in Cassell’s Sunday Journal during 1888.

The subject matter of the stories remained essentially static, however, and although there were significant stylistic differences, and individual authors such as Fitz-James O’Brien and J. S. Le Fanu could and did offer unique approaches, the material published in the early nineteenth century was essentially the same as the material published at its conclusion: stories of hauntings, punishments natural and supernatural, covenants with demons and devils, premature burials, and the ever-popular stories of adventures with vampires and werewolves. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the advent of such magazines as Weird Tales in the United States, coupled with the prescience of English editors and the rivalries of various English newspaper chains, that the subject content of horrific anthologies began to be consciously expanded. English editor Christine Campbell Thomson began the trend with Not at Night (1925), which reprinted a number of stories that included several first published in Weird Tales. The series lasted for eleven volumes, concluding with Nightmare by Daylight (1936). The next year, 1937, saw the publication of The Not at Night Omnibus (1937), collecting thirty-five selected stories from the previous volumes. Starting in 1928, with Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928), Dorothy Sayers began editing a series of massive collections, whose title indicates its mix of genres. The horrific and fantastic writers included many of the finest writers then alive, and Sayers continued to edit similar anthologies until the early 1940s. H. R. Wakefield and Charles Birkin, editors at the publisher Philip Allan, began what is now popularly known as the Creeps series in 1932 with the publication of Creeps (1932), Shivers (1932), and Shudders (1932). Ultimately, some fourteen titles were published, with the contents either horrific or dark fantasy, and The Creeps Omnibus (1935) cumulated the contents of the first three volumes. (The latter contained seven stories by Wakefield.)

While the above were being published, the rival English newspaper chains began offering subscribers inexpensive sets of historically important writers and also massive subject-based anthologies that collected material old and new. Readers interested in the horrific could thus acquire, among many others, A Century of Creepy Stories (1934), A Century of Thrillers from Poe to Arlen (1934), The Mystery Book (1934), A Century of Thrillers: Second Series (1935), The Great Book of Thrillers (1935; revised, 1937), Century of Ghost Stories (1936), and A Century of Thrillers (1937, 3 vols.).

Although some of the above had American editions, anthologies of horror and the fantastic published originally in America were much less common during this period, though one of the more significant works was The Moon Terror (1927). Anonymously edited by Farnsworth Wright, who was then editing Weird Tales, The Moon Terror reprinted four stories published in the original Weird Tales and was offered as a subscription premium for new subscribers. It apparently did not attract many, but it is the first American fantastic anthology whose contents were derived completely from a genre magazine. During the 1940s, however, several events occurred roughly simultaneously. More anthologies began to be published, their contents derived from the genre magazines, and because most major publishers did not wish to commit themselves to publishing what they undoubtedly did not consider literature, these anthologies were published by the fans and the smaller publishers, who were more inclined to take risks. Perhaps the most notable of these was The Garden of Fear (1945), edited by William L. Crawford, consisting of five stories originally published in Marvel Tales, which was also owned and edited by Crawford. Forty-eight thousand copies were printed, and had this book received the newsstand distribution Crawford had been promised, horror anthologies might have been accorded more respect.

A Selective Timeline of Horror Anthologies

1813

Tales of the Dead, translated from the French by Sarah Utterson

1835

Tales of Terror, edited by Henry St. Clair

1867

A Stable for Nightmares, edited by John Y. Akerman

1883

Stories with a Vengeance

1925

Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson (first of eleven volumes)

1927

The Moon Terror, edited (anonymously) by Farnsworth Wright

1928

Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, edited by Dorothy Sayers (first of a series)

1932

Creeps, Shivers, and Shudders (three separate volumes), edited by Charles Birkin

1944

Sleep No More, edited by August Derleth; Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser

1945

The Garden of Fear, edited by William L. Crawford

1947

Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (first anthology from Arkham House); The Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald Wollheim

1967

Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

1973

Demon Kind, edited by Roger Elwood

1980

Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley

1983

Fantastic Tales, edited by Italo Calvino; Black Water, edited by Alberto Manguel

1987

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell

1988

Prime Evil, edited by Douglas A. Winter

2011

The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

One of the few anthologies to be published by a major press was Sleep No More (1944), edited by August Derleth, a well-respected Wisconsin regionalist writer. Derleth, however, was also co-founder in 1939, with Donald Wandrei, of the publishing firm Arkham House. Originally intended to put into print the works of the recently deceased and much missed H. P. Lovecraft, Arkham House rapidly began to publish dark fantasies and weird science by such living writers as Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long, and Derleth himself. Its first anthology was Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947). Another anthology from a major press was Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944), edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser, which collected fifty-two stories by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Algernon Blackwood, and Guy de Maupassant, as well as such contemporary mainstream writers as Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Sayers. Its publication as part of Random House’s Modern Library helped it to achieve, like Sayers’s anthologies mentioned above, the status of a genre- and canon-defining book.

Unbound and softcover books—if not exactly paperbacks—had existed almost since the existence of movable type, and during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the German Tauchnitz imprint was well known for providing English-language editions of books for European readers. Furthermore, the American readers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were familiar with such paperbound works as dime novels and the book-sized imprints of Street & Smith. Nevertheless, no standardizations existed for size or pagination, and it was not until 1939—coincidentally, the year in which Arkham House’s first book was published—that publisher Robert de Graaf partnered with American publisher Simon & Schuster to issue the Pocket Books imprint, thus creating what has become known as the “mass market paperback.” Pocket Books proved sufficiently successful that other publishers rapidly followed suit, including, during the Second World War, the Council on Books in War Time, which issued paperbacks for the U.S. military and thus prepared an entire generation of readers for small and portable paperback books. Many of the Armed Services Editions were genre literature, but so far as is known, only one was horrific: H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales (1945?). Perhaps not coincidentally, a paperback collection of Lovecraft’s writings was already in existence from another publisher, The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1944).

Accompanying the development of the paperback was the realization that fiction could be anthologized and reprinted only so many times, and that purchasing audiences existed for paperbacks that printed original material. It would seem that American publisher and writer Donald Wollheim was the first to extend this recognition to fantasy and horror, with the series that became The Avon Fantasy Reader (1947). Other publishers followed suit.

From the late 1940s forward, then, horror anthologies existed in hardcover and paperback, their contents as likely to be original as reprint, and editors tended not to be too restrictive on definitions. Indeed, although representing ostensibly edgy science fiction, many of the stories in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967) were fantastic, and some, such as Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones” and Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels,” were overtly horrific. Starting in the late 1960s, American editor Roger Elwood edited a number of anthologies, beginning with reprints in The Little Monsters (1969) and Horror Hunters (1971), and rapidly progressing to original contents in such works as Demon Kind (1973) and The Berserkers (1974). Furthermore, although children had often been protagonists in fairy tales and horror fiction, genre anthologies intended for a younger readership interested in horror literature had not previously been published. But these, too, began to appear at this time.

English-language horror anthologies were thus relatively widely available from the 1970s, in paperback as well as hardcover, and published by small presses as well as major publishers. Two events occurred to change the concept of anthologies. First, although numerous editors had compiled numerous horror anthologies, and a number of series had existed since Donald Wollheim’s Avon Fantasy Reader, nobody had attempted to combine a widespread systematization of the selection of the contents with the systematic marketing of genre-specific anthologies. In 1974, Martin Harry Greenberg, a recent PhD in political science, compiled (with Patricia Warrick) Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader (1974) to assist with a class they were co-teaching. Recognizing that a market existed, he soon compiled other anthologies dealing with science fiction, and then he began branching into other subjects. He assembled a group of scholars and enthusiasts who were willing to assist him in compiling the contents, and found numerous writers willing to write genre-specific stories. The former included such people as Stefan Dziemianowicz and Robert E. Weinberg, and the books they co-edited included such titles as Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors (1988), 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories (1993), 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (1994), and Miskatonic University (1996, only by Greenberg and Weinberg). At the time of his death in 2011, Greenberg had edited nearly 1,300 books, the majority of them fantastic, with a sizable percentage of these being fantasy and horror.

Changes in printing technology—the birth of so-called “desktop publishing”—and the near simultaneous digital revolution of the 1990s and beyond likewise changed the concept of anthologies. The former meant that costs of printing and binding could be minimized, there would be no costs for storage, and material could be distributed directly to purchasers rather than through intermediaries (bookstores). The latter initially meant that horror anthologies could be made available on CD-ROM at a fraction of the cost of a printed volume, and the new technology meant that not only could anthologies offer more stories, but their contents could include audio and video files to supplement the reading experience. Although CD-ROMs remain available, active horror anthologists who wish to avoid traditional print technologies now distribute their fiction via the World Wide Web and may use text, images, and sound in combination. Horror anthology websites exist for apparently all tastes. The traditional-minded will find fictive homages to such writers as Bram Stoker, William Hope Hodgson, and H. P. Lovecraft; the technologically inclined will find science fiction horror anthologies; and there is a great deal of erotic horror.

Finally, the digital revolution has allowed self-publishing to become reinvented and achieve a semi-respectability. While for some the term “self-publishing” implies an obsession with a photocopy machine—and before this, either a mimeograph or a hectograph—self-publishing is an enormous business, with such multinationals as Amazon competing with such companies as Lulu and Xlibris and iUniverse to deliver fiction to the reader, either in traditional book form or to such ereaders as Kindles and Nooks. That readers may likewise determine the contents of their anthologies, downloading and swapping out stories at will, not only guarantees the future of the anthology but permits the creation of communities of like-minded enthusiasts. The horrific anthology is, like so many monstrous and horrific beings, effectively immortal.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Horror Literature in the Internet Age; The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Arkham House; Derleth, August; Ellison, Harlan; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; O’Brien, Fitz-James; Wakefield, H. R.; Wandrei, Donald; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Ashley, Mike, and William G. Contento. 1995. The Supernatural Index: A Listing of Fantasy, Supernatural, Occult, Weird, and Horror Anthologies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Chalker, Jack L., and Mark Owings. 1998. The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Bibliographic History, 1923–1998. Westminster, MD, and Baltimore: Mirage Press.

Fraser, Phyllis, and Herbert Wise. [1944] 1994. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. New York: Random House.

Hartwell, David G., ed. 1987. The Dark Descent. New York: Tor.

Hartwell, David G., ed. 1992. Foundations of Fear. New York: Tor.

Joshi, S. T. 2009. Classics and Contemporaries: Some Notes on Horror Fiction. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Utterson, Sarah. 1813. Tales of the Dead. London: White, Cochrane. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/EtAlia/tdtp.html.

HORROR COMICS

Horror comics have long been a staple in the comic book industry, and they also have a curious history. Born in the 1940s as an offshoot of mainstream comic books, horror comics went on to color the imaginations of generations of readers, with an impact extending beyond comic books as such to influence the wider world of horror entertainment at large. They were also implicated in the mainstreaming of formerly “outsider” viewpoints in American society beginning in the 1970s.

In 1933 publisher Max Gaines (ca. 1895–1947) created the pamphlet-style “comic book” form. A decade later, in 1944, he founded Educational Comics (EC), which published such fare as Picture Stories from the Bible and other titles meant to ground children in morality. But this was not what his audiences wanted to read. Instead, they desired mainly tales of action and adventure. Gaines was also instrumental in the history of another early comics company, All-American Publications, which was later consolidated—along with National Comics and Detective Comics—into DC. He was also centrally involved in bringing both Wonder Woman and Superman to market. On his own, he tried new methods and continually worked to refine his approach, despite the lackluster performance of his overtly moralistic efforts.

Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947 while on vacation, and his son, William M. Gaines (1922–1992), known as Bill to his friends, became the president of the failing EC brand that same year, at the age of 25. One of the first things Bill Gaines decided to do was to change the company’s name from “Educational Comics” to “Entertaining Comics,” which signaled an internal shift of focus while retaining the recognizable EC logo. Ironically, the new EC would become—in a sense—even more instructive than its former incarnation, presenting readers with stories far more educational than any verbatim reading of Bible tales or classic literary fare.

After changing the company’s name, the younger Gaines’s next initiative was to carve away the titles that underperformed while adding others that appeared to have greater potential. The staff was not exempt from this reform: some of the existing artists and writers did not appeal to Gaines’s personal aesthetic (he was an atheist, and also an ardent reader of science fiction and horror), and so he put out a call for interested novices to send their portfolios to his attention at EC’s New York City headquarters. The resulting shakeup in the creative lineup at EC led to groundbreaking results, with a wholesale shift to publishing horror, science fiction, war, and satirical comics.

Of course, EC, although today it is the most recognizable brand name associated with the original golden age of such comics, was not the first comic book company to tackle these types of stories. Others had laid the groundwork by taking the elder Gaines’s notion of the comic book and attempting to create sales through an assortment of approaches, including supernatural offerings and other popular trends, such as detective and crime stories. With a large debt to the pulps that had preceded them, these adventure-oriented comics were tinged with spectacular and often horrific elements. The first dedicated horror comic was likely Gilberton Publications’ Classic Comics #13 (1943), which adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Later, Avon Publications produced Eerie #1 (1947, the same year of Max Gaines’s untimely death), which was comprised of all original horror content (and which is not to be confused with Warren Publishing’s identically named title of the 1960s through the 1980s).

In light of these developments in the market, and freed from his father’s overly moralistic influence, the third thing Bill Gaines did was to permanently move away from Max Gaines’s vision and concentrate instead on the types of stories that interested him personally: tales of a speculative nature. Before he came to understand the real desires of his readership, Bill Gaines had played it cautious and tried to straddle the line between his ideas and those of his father. But this new and complete shift of focus was a stroke of genius all his own. Though it took some time to transition the old vision to the new, by about the end of 1951, the trajectory had been set and Gaines had assembled an amazing collection of new artists, writers, and editors for the EC stable: Al Feldstein, Johnny Craig, Jack Kamen, Ray Bradbury, Joe Orlando, Bernard Krigstein, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Graham Ingels, Al Williamson, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eder, siblings John and Marie Severin, and more.

During this productive time for Gaines and EC, other companies played catch-up with Gaines’s successful formula, though several of them had been dabbling in these areas prior to the conversion of EC from “Educational” to “Entertaining.” EC, though now the most popular of these companies, was being eroded in the market due to competition from its rivals, who upped the ante with respect to the salacious and graphic images they were willing to offer. EC and Gaines, along with his support staff, such as Craig and Feldstein, were less interested in outdoing their competitors with gore and smut, and more interested in ensuring the quality of their stories and final product. They even began an exclusive partnership with the very popular author Ray Bradbury to adapt his works in comic book format with his approval and input.

Adding to these pressures of success were the condemnations of Dr. Fredric Wertham, an eminent American psychiatrist who turned his attention to the study of the comic book industry. As a senior psychiatrist with the New York Department of Hospitals, he focused on the very successful EC (which was also based in New York City) and its more lurid imitators, drawing bogus conclusions that boredom and entertainment, and comic books in particular, were the root causes of the rise in juvenile delinquency in the United States during this time. For good or ill, the foundations of his arguments—laid out in his shocking book Seduction of the Innocent (1954)—still resonate today, though the stress has now shifted away from comic books to sexuality and violence in video games, television, music, film, and other artistic and entertainment forms; and the criticism has expanded to encompass not just juvenile delinquency but an erosion or coarsening of the culture as a whole. Ironically, Wertham later renounced some of his beliefs; unfortunately, the die was cast.

Later in 1954, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency convened hearings to address these concerns. Bill Gaines admirably defended the practices of the industry in general and EC particularly, but in spite of his strong performance in this battle, he and the rest of the trade would ultimately lose the war. As a result of the intense political pressure, the industry capitulated to self-regulation rather than risking further government intervention, and in the same year established the so-called Comics Code Authority (CCA), which oversaw a strict new “Code of Conduct” modeled on the motion picture Hays Code. These restrictions were solely for comic books; magazines—defined as an oversized format not aimed at children (though many of EC’s most ardent readers were adult males)—were exempt. This would actually prove to be a boon for DC and Marvel Comics, two companies that had already mined the superhero concept to great effect, since the loss of, and refocus away from, horror and science fiction titles was less onerous for them than for some other publishers, especially Gaines’s EC empire. As a result of these developments, EC was forced, after a brief and failed attempt at rebranding, to cancel all of its titles due to the burdensome restrictions. Only their popular MAD magazine survived, as it was already published in magazine format.

Later in the 1960s, one publisher decided to tackle the underrepresented horror comics market by staying in the larger magazine format, thus avoiding the quicksand of the CCA seal. Warren Publishing, owned by James Warren, was already successful in the magazine business as the publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, edited by the now-legendary Forrest J. Ackerman. Warren would eventually go on to publish several magazines—including the horror titles Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella (a female vampire character created by Ackerman)—and to employ a number of EC alumni, including Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta (by then a well-respected fine artist), Al Williamson, John Severin, Joe Orlando, Johnny Craig, and others.

Significant Events in the History of Horror Comics

1933

Creation of the familiar pamphlet “comic book” by publisher Max Gaines (ca. 1895–1947).

1943

Gilberton Publications’ Classic Comics #13 adapts Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

1944

Max Gaines founds Educational Comics (Picture Stories from the Bible, etc.).

1947

Avon Publications produces Eerie #1, comprised of all original horror content. Max Gaines dies in a boating accident, and his son, William M. Gaines, inherits Educational Comics.

1949–1950

William Gaines changes the direction of the company toward more genre-related works (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, war, Western, etc.); the name is changed to Entertaining Comics (commonly known as EC).

1954

Dr. Fredric Wertham publishes his bombshell book Seduction of the Innocent. U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency convenes. The comic book industry agrees to self-regulate rather than risk further government intervention, establishing the Comics Code Authority (CCA) seal and a “Code of Conduct” modeled on the motion picture Hays Code.

1955

Due to CCA restrictions, EC cancels all titles except MAD, which is exempt from the CCA restrictions since it is in magazine format. Other companies comply with the CCA seal.

1957

James Warren founds Warren Publishing.

1958

Warren Publishing releases the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland.

1964

Warren Publishing: Creepy #1.

1966

Warren Publishing: Eerie #1.

1960s–late 1980s

Marvel and DC publish “light” horror titles (CCA approved): House of Secrets (DC), House of Mystery (DC), Werewolf by Night (Marvel), Tomb of Dracula (Marvel). Smaller independent houses such as Charlton and Gold Key publish dark or sci-fi fare (CCA approved): The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, Ghost Manor, etc. Non-CCA fare flourishes as Underground Comix (counterculture in nature).

2011

The CCA is effectively abandoned.

Beginning during this same era and peaking in the mid-to-late 1970s (as well as extending into the 1980s), Marvel and DC published lighter horror titles, including House of Secrets (DC), House of Mystery (DC), Werewolf by Night (Marvel), and Tomb of Dracula (Marvel). Some of these even boasted a “horror host” in the vein of the Crypt-Keeper, Vault-Keeper, and Old Witch characters that had provided introductions and closing commentary for EC’s classic horror titles. Other independent houses such as Charlton and Gold Key continued offering dark or sci-fi fare (The Twilight Zone, Ghost Manor, Star Trek, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, and more). Some of the proper superhero titles even got into the supernatural on occasion as the market and taste for “real” horror returned. Interestingly, comic book treatments (as opposed to magazines) burgeoned for the first time in years, causing their new creators to chafe at the restrictive CCA. The Code continued to exert a stranglehold on the mainstream comics industry, even as a few iconoclasts tried to push the envelope, most notably the Code-less “Underground Comix” in the late 1960s and 1970s, which, in keeping with the era’s counterculture vibe, tried to stun the establishment awake by dealing overtly with themes, characters, situations, and images of sex, drug use, and violence, as opposed to using mere sociopolitical implication. Most of these eventually folded or morphed into something more “respectable,” though a number of fine writers and artists—Greg Irons, William Stout, Robert Williams, Dan O’Bannon, Moebius, and others—were involved throughout this period of civil and artistic upheaval, arriving on the far side to enjoy larger rewards as their prescient outsider viewpoints were finally ingested and assimilated by society as a whole, and by popular culture specifically.

By the dawn of the 1980s, several new independent companies had sprung up, pushing the boundaries of eroticism/sexuality, violence, and conceptualism to fill the horror/sci-fi/mature comics void, among them Vortex (Black Kiss), First (American Flagg!), Eclipse (The Rocketeer), and Pacific (Twisted Tales, Alien Worlds). Eschewing the CCA, they would use artists and writers from EC and Warren on occasion, but would also highlight individuals greatly influenced by EC’s long shadow, as well as the Underground Comix movement, including Dave Stevens, Bruce Jones, Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, and Jeff Jones.

Ironically, the final blow for the end of self-censorship and the resurgence of horror comics into the world of “acceptable” fodder for mass entertainment would not come from indie publishers, most of whom would collapse under their own ambitions, though Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, and DC’s more mature-oriented Vertigo still exist and are still publishing at the time of this writing. The real progress was foreshadowed by one venerable DC title that had originally been created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson in the early 1970s: Swamp Thing. In 1982 this was revamped and relaunched under the title The Saga of the Swamp Thing. In the hands of the writer Alan Moore (who would go on to work further revolutionary changes on the comic book form with the likes of From Hell and Watchmen), Saga lived up to its full potential, though Moore, a Brit, found it difficult to work under the strictures imposed by the CCA. Saga soon stopped carrying the seal, becoming the first comic to do so since the industry’s adoption of the code in 1954. DC followed suit four years later with Frank Miller’s groundbreaking Batman limited-series The Dark Knight Returns (1986). The CCA self-regulating code and seal have since been abandoned entirely.

The impact of horror comics on extraliterary forms of horror entertainment has been significant. In the 1970s the British film company Amicus released two anthology films (part of a wider series of horror-themed anthology films) based on EC comics, Tales from the Crypt (1972) and Vault of Horror (1973), starring major name actors such as Joan Collins, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Ralph Richardson. Tales from the Crypt was also adapted as a popular HBO television series (1989–1996) and two accompanying feature films, Demon Knight (1995) and Bordello of Blood (1996). EC comics have also been adapted for radio and children’s television cartoons. Novelist Stephen King and film director George Romero collaborated on a well-received anthology movie consisting of EC-style stories, 1982’s Creepshow, which was followed five years later by a (distinctly lesser) sequel. The production company behind Creepshow, Laurel Entertainment, went on to produce two popular American horror television series in the same vein, Tales from the Darkside (1983–1988) and Monsters (1988–1991). Swamp Thing has been the subject of two feature films (1982 and 1989) and a cable television series on USA Network (1990–1993). Alan Moore’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, From Hell, was adapted as a major Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp in 2001. Both artistically and socially, horror comics have a long, large, and important legacy.

Jason V Brock

See also: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Three, Reference Entries: Bradbury, Ray; Moore, Alan; Pulp Horror.

Further Reading

Arndt, Richard J. 2013. Horror Comics in Black and White: A History and Catalog, 1964–2004. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

Benton, Mike. 1991. Horror Comics: The Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor.

Gifford, Denis. 1984. The International Book of Comics. New York: Crescent Books.

Goulart, Ron. 1986. Great History of Comic Books. Chicago: Contemporary Books.

Hajdu, David. 2008. The Ten-Cent Plague. New York: Picador.

Round, Julia. 2014. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

HORROR CRITICISM

Although horror studies is generally seen as a component of or a tool for evaluating cultural history, its significance alongside other, more “established” disciplines is seen by certain disciplines as somehow outside the study of intellectual ideas and patterns. However, modern developments over the last four decades have featured a broadening of the range—and acceptability—of inclusion in intellectual history, revealing in the process a rich sense of communication between “high” and “low” culture. The study of horror both in literature and in film was, in many ways, seen as outside the study of intellectual ideas and patterns perhaps because scholars failed to see the ways in which more established disciplines and horror criticism have mutually appropriated ideas and subject areas from one another. However, history has shown that horror’s critical relegation would not stay that way for long.

Horror films are narratively constructed under an elaborate, self-cognizant, yet continuously evolving sociopolitical system of ideas and beliefs, a system that was not, to use the words of Peter E. Gordon, “developed chiefly by intellectuals,” but that was developed collectively through empowered groups and individuals before diffusing into culture (Gordon 2014, 10). It is interesting to note that, in addition to culture, intellectual history, according to Gordon, is also concerned with politics, yet both culture and politics are inextricably tied to horror and vampire films. It may be speculated that, in part, intellectual history discounts horror and vampire studies because their particular objects of intelligent study are first mass culturally circulated and consumed, that is, dirtied or sullied, in “the realm of public discourse” before they are taken up for examination by scholars (Gordon 2014, 10). This may or may not be the case, but what can be said, with relative certainty, is that horror and vampires, when treated by intellectuals, reveal an elaborate design that has existed since their inception.

Horror studies, to cite the “Editorial” of the inaugural issue of the academic journal Horror Studies, examines “all cultural manifestations of horror, from the more familiar forms it assumes in literature and film, through to such lesser-known modes of expression as fashion, dance, fine art, music and technology” (Horror Studies 2010, 3). In the discipline’s early years, however, it focused almost exclusively on the study of horror cinema, a subject area that, until the 1970s and 1980s, made only sporadic appearances in film studies journals and other discourses. This changed with the work of film critic Robin Wood, whose influential essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1979) is commonly credited with jumpstarting the discipline. Until that point, the horror genre itself had been treated like a second-class citizen, despite its apparent success among theater houses. In fact, little has changed today: the horror genre is still deemed “lowbrow,” yet it has not lost its ability to draw in audiences. Wood’s real scholarly achievement, notes contemporary horror studies scholar Adam Lowenstein, was in organizing (with Richard Lippe) “The American Nightmare,” a special retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1979 that screened films by, and included discussions with, directors such as Wes Craven, Brian De Palma, George A. Romero, Stephanie Rothman, and David Cronenberg. Wood introduced horror cinema to Marxism and psychoanalytic theory (his essay “The American Nightmare: Horror in the ’70’s” [1986] continues this tradition), arguing that the horror genre’s true subject is the recognition of all that is repressed or oppressed by civilization. He located at the center of American culture the contemporary American horror film and its conventions. Lowenstein adds:

The American Nightmare bravely sought to move beyond the conventional associations attached to the horror genre: heartless exploitation, slipshod filmmaking, gratuitous violence, unrelieved misogyny, and an inherent silliness that precludes any substantial aesthetic or political ambitions. Against all odds, Wood wanted to take the horror film seriously. In fact, he titled his wide-ranging essay that opens the program notes “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” with its unmistakable connotations of wiping the slate clean, of showing us anew something we thought we understood perfectly well (or never deigned to understand at all). (Lowenstein 2016, 260)

Australian film studies professor Barbara Creed debuted her influential essay “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine” in 1986 (expanding it to a book-length project in 1993), and it, like Wood’s work, relied heavily upon psychoanalysis (as well as psychosexualism), locating horror within childhood. By 1987, film studies professor Carol J. Clover published “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” (expanding it to a book-length project in 1992), which introduced the relatively new discipline of gender studies to the study of horror cinema. Finally, philosophy professor Noël Carroll rounded out what has become the canon of horror criticism with his The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), which examined philosophically, as well as cognitively, the aesthetics of horror fictions from film and radio to novels and short stories. In doing this, Carroll began to push the boundaries of horror studies beyond mere film.

Through the 1990s and mid-2000s, several scholars took up the proverbial torch by following Carroll’s lead and moving beyond film, all the while relying upon the initial, seminal studies. Not least among these scholars are (in no particular order): Tony Williams, Adam Lowenstein, David J. Skal, Cynthia Freeland, Ken Gelder, Harry Benshoff, Richard J. Hand, Gregory A. Waller, Steffen Hantke, Rick Worland, Peter Hutchings, James Kendrick, Isabel C. Pinedo, I. Q. Hunter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Mark Jancovich, Steven Jay Schneider, Ian Conrich, Kendall R. Phillips, Stephen Prince, Caroline Picart, Linda Badley, Jeffrew Andrew Weinstock, and many others. Yet, curiously, a closer look at the work of many of these same scholars shows a preoccupation with the much older discipline of literary studies and the Gothic. Fundamentally, Gothic studies are horror studies’ older brother, though it is not unusual nowadays to see these two disciplines grouped together in trade publications and anthologies. Gothic studies are primarily concerned with both literature and the Gothic conventions established during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The two primary schools are the English and American Gothic, though in the last ten years these schools subdivided into more specialized units, such as the Southern Gothic, Asian Gothic, Irish Gothic, Australian Gothic, Spanish Gothic, and the more holistic Global Gothic. Yet it is not unusual to see the Gothic conventions and discourses of these schools appropriated by scholarship in horror studies, simply or especially because horror’s cinematic roots are chiefly Gothic until the period of the 1940s. Scholarship on Gothic fiction (“horror” to modern eyes) is almost as old as the genre itself; consider, for example, Ann Radcliffe’s 1826 essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” in The New Monthly Magazine. However, the first modern studies of the Gothic, both critical and laudatory alike, appear in the 1920s in such distinguished literary journals as the PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), and again in the 1930s at the hands of André Breton and Montague Summers. Today, Gothic studies boasts of a critical and scholarly empire grander even than horror studies, with works from such scholars as Fred Botting, David Punter, Benjamin F. Fisher, Charles Crow, S. T. Joshi, Glennis Byron, Jerrold E. Hogle, William Hughes, Andrew Smith, Glennis Byron, Dale Townsend, Angela Wright, and Carol Margaret Davison, as well as several newer, equally accomplished scholars, not least among them Johan Höglund, Brigid Cherry, Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Catherine Spooner, and Xavier Aldana Reyes, who are bridging the divide between horror and the Gothic.

Monstrous Pedagogies: Seven Texts about Teaching Horror

Burger, Alissa. 2016. Teaching Stephen King: Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Golub, Adam, and Heather Richard Hayton, eds. 2017. Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Tamar Heller, eds. 2003. Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions (Approaches to Teaching World Literature). New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Moreland, Sean, and Aalya Ahmad, eds. 2013. Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Nevárez, Lisa A., ed. 2013. The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Powell, Anna, and Andrew Smith, eds. 2006. Teaching the Gothic (Teaching the New English). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, and Tony Magistrale, eds. 2008. Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry (Approaches to Teaching World Literature). New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Queer studies has also seen several key players, from Linda Williams, Jack Halberstam, and Harry Benshoff, to Patricia MacCormack, Steven Bruhm, and George Haggerty, who have focused on theories of deviant representation and difference both in horror cinema and in literature of the Gothic(s). Queer writings share a long and curious history with horror and the Gothic. Richard Dyer (1998) notes in “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism” that one of the first gay stories to be published was indeed a vampire story. Early (as well as relatively later) Gothic fiction, when it was not the product of women, Dyer points out, was predominantly written by gay men. Benshoff’s work on twenty-first-century queer horror cinema in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997) argues that monsters in American cinema were, and continue to be, framed in accordance with the socialized conception of homosexuality—“or more broadly queerness”—of the particular era in which they appear (Benshoff 1997, 131). In a 2012 update to his book, Benshoff examines how queer monsters continue to come out of the closet, and these days in much greater numbers. Studies like Benshoff’s are important, for without the use of a queer studies lens, these developments might have remained hidden from horror studies. Moreover, without acknowledging their queer status, or the queer status of certain other past and future monstrous figures, queer studies will remain decidedly limited.

Just as the late 2000s through early 2010s saw a “vampire renaissance” (then, subsequently, a “zombie renaissance”) in fiction and film, horror criticism also saw a golden age, which is currently still unfolding with no end in sight as yet. Today, horror criticism has branched out into more disciplines than ever, and the last decade alone has seen an almost daunting number of books and articles going to print in the field. Publishers are finding horror studies more lucrative now than ever, especially university presses, which are finding themselves in need of titles that will keep them afloat. These days, scholarly self-justification for studies in horror is starting to become more and more passé given the mass of critical materials on the subject that have appeared since the late 1970s. However, if one publishes in a media studies journal or queer theory journal an analysis of, say, the sexual representations in Jeepers Creepers (2001), then the analysis is “media studies” or “queer theory.” But if it is published in the journals Horror Studies or the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, or in the University of Wales Press’s new “Horror Studies” book series, then the analysis is labeled “horror studies.” Publishing in horror studies journals can thus still carry with it a certain taboo, perhaps because horror cinema’s grim nature and populist appeal has a tendency to blind some critics to horror studies’ intellectual capacity. However, the kinds of contributions horror and Gothic criticism are able to offer to both film and literary studies, as well as queer studies, more than evidence their legitimacy as a division of intellectual history.

Indeed, horror criticism not only broadens film and literary studies, it can help to change minds as well. Educators who use horror studies and criticism in their curricula do not have to limit themselves to giving a historiography of horror fiction, poetry, and film, but can instead help their students to observe and understand horror’s functionality within a much broader cultural framework. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen aptly notes in his seminal work Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996) that monsters do cultural work. Helping students to understand monsters through this particular critical lens can incite in them the desire to begin the process of divorcing their minds and actions from oppressive ideologies and promote inclusivity. Few other disciplines have the ability, let alone the capacity, for stimulating such a rich sense of communication between “high” and “low” culture. In the end, perhaps therein lies the real dilemma: that such a restrictive hierarchization is not preserving intellectual history but rather impeding it.

John Edgar Browning

See also: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Part Three, Reference Entries: Monsters; Vampires.

Further Reading

Benshoff, Harry M. 1997. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Browning, John Edgar. 2012. “Towards a Monster Pedagogy: (Re)claiming the Classroom for the Other.” In Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror, edited by Sean Moreland and Aalya Ahmad, 40–55. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer, Richard. 1998. “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism.” In Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and Popular Fiction, edited by Susannah Radstone, 47–72. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

“Editorial.” 2010. Horror Studies 1, no. 1: 3.

Gelder, Ken, ed. 2000. The Horror Reader. New York: Routledge.

Gordon, Peter E. 2014. “What Is Intellectual History? A Frankly Partisan Introduction to a Frequently Misunderstood Field.” Paper presented at the Future of the History of Ideas Workshop, University of Sydney, Australia August 12.

Lowenstein, Adam. 2016. “A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film.” In American Film History: Selected Readings, Vol. II: 1960 to the Present, edited by Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon, 259–274. Malden, MA Wiley-Blackwell.

Nelson, Victoria. 2013 Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Skal, David. J. 1993. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Penguin Books.

HORROR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE FICTION

Horror and science fiction have far more in common than purists of either genre may initially realize. It has been argued that science fiction works from the premise that the universe is inherently knowable. If that is so, then horror is one of the many possible responses to what that knowledge reveals, and the most powerful. Conversely, horror and its associated emotion, dread, blossom when the rationalist perspective often prioritized in science fiction is found wanting, or when that rationalism leads to a place where it undoes itself. In this sense, horror and science fiction are complementary, if differing, means of knowing the world.

Horror and science fiction are distinguished first and foremost by the marketing strategies of publishers. This was not always the case. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, nonrealist literature appeared in numerous magazines and serials, often with no established generic distinctions. It was not until 1926, when Hugo Gernsback published Amazing Stories, that a specific market space was created for science fiction. Gernsback established in the pages of his pulp magazine a back history for his preferred story type (then referred to as “scientifiction”) that excluded supernatural-flavored fiction in favor of the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and the engineering speculations of Jules Verne. This historical moment of divergence is a result of a business model based on marketing factors and editorial concerns, including pedagogical concerns, since Gernsback wanted to prepare young men for a technologically rich future that included space travel.

Amazing Stories, however, was not so much a point of genre demarcation as it was a moment of thematic sublimation. Put another way, horror moved forward as a literature preoccupied with the supernatural and otherworldly in publications not devoted exclusively to science fiction even as it continued to play a fundamental role in what was otherwise marketed as science fiction. An example of this sublimation is Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), first published in another of Gernsback’s pulps, Wonder Stories. The story follows a scientist who propels himself through various stages of human evolution, with each development ever more horrifying to the two colleagues who watch his progression. The end result of this forced evolution is a return to the primordial protoplasm from which life on Earth sprang. This knowledge drives one of the observers mad while the other is just barely able to escape with his life and sanity. “The Man Who Evolved” is an early example of how the trappings of scientific rhetoric and reasoning work in science fiction, yet its narrative devices are firmly grounded in the supernatural or ghost story of the preceding century. Similarly, C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau,” first published in Weird Tales in 1933, is grounded in the tone and imagery of the horror tale and can be read as a precursor to the body horror that emerged in literature and film in the second half of the twentieth century. The titular Shambleau, a vampiric Medusa-like alien creature that devours the soul of any man unlucky enough to fall in love with it, is a throwback to the supernatural creatures of older literary traditions even as it reconfigures them in a science fictional landscape, in this case Mars.

The stories by Hamilton and Moore are foundational texts in science fiction and demonstrate how horror elements were deeply ingrained in science fiction’s generic origin point. This should perhaps come as no surprise given that science fiction, it has been argued, first by Brian Aldiss and subsequently by many others, has its thematic origin in the Gothic, specifically Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; revised 1831). Scholars will undoubtedly continue to deliberate the beginning point of science fiction—either 1818, 1926, or hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier—but what is important to note is that horror is at once the genre’s precursor and its simultaneous offshoot. This position is not contradictory, but rather indicative of how the genres inform and influence each other.

Situated between Frankenstein and Amazing Stories is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907). It is hard to overestimate the influence and importance of this story of two men who are terrorized by an unseen force. The language and tone is that of supernatural horror, but the underlying science fictional conceit is that of an agency, which is antithetical to the well-being of the human species, that originates from an unknown yet material dimension. It is Blackwood who introduces the idea of these Other spaces as organic properties of the knowable universe and not as visitations from its opposite, the nonmaterial or spiritual realm. This notion of a hostile universe is not new, but it is science fictionalized by Blackwood and later amplified to great degree and effect by H. P. Lovecraft in stories published from 1921 to 1937, which later came to be associated with the Cthulhu Mythos cycle and which in turn created the cosmic dread subcategory of horror and science fiction that remains popular to this day. That Lovecraft is so often thought of as a writer of horror gives some insight into the power of tone, language, and style. Lovecraft is a horror writer, but he is every bit a science fiction writer, too, with his rich treasury of extraterrestrial and pan-dimensional beings and his mutated, hybrid country folk.

A Selective Timeline of Horror and Science Fiction

1818

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

1886

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

1896

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells

1897

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

1901

The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel

1907

“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood

1912

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

1927

“The Colour out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft

1928

“The Call of Cthulhu” by H. P. Lovecraft

1929

“The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long

1931

“The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton

1933

“Shambleau” by C. L. Moore

1936

At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” by H. P. Lovecraft

1944

“Killdozer” by Theodore Sturgeon

1951

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

1954

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

1957

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

1967

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison; The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson

1972

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

1979

Sandkings by George R. R. Martin

1980

“The Autopsy” by Michael Shea

1981

The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas

1984

“Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler

1987

The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

2000

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville; Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas

2001

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

2002

The Scar by China Miéville

2003

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

2004

Iron Council by China Miéville

2005

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

2007

Deadstock by Jeffrey Thomas

2008

Blue Wars by Jeffrey Thomas

2009

Under the Dome by Stephen King

2011

11/22/63 by Stephen King

2014

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

A rich cadre of genre writers emerged in the mid-twentieth century who proved themselves adept at writing horror, science fiction, fantasy, or some hybrid of all three. Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, Fredrick Brown, John W. Campbell, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, Richard Matheson, Frank M. Robinson, Theodore Sturgeon, Manly Wade Wellman, and John Wyndham all moved rather effortlessly between at least two if not all three modes. Writers who have since followed include Clive Barker, Laird Barron, Harlan Ellison, Dennis Etchison, Kelly Link, George R. R. Martin, and Lucius Shepard. But this small sampling of mid- and late-century writers is hardly indicative of the degree to which horror and science fiction overlap. Any attempt to produce an exhaustive list would be impossible and fruitless, and would indicate how on some level the distinction between horror and science fiction is largely one of rhetorical stratagems, narrative devices, and marketing. The work of Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby (1967), serves as a good example. His The Stepford Wives (1972) develops its science fictional theme, robots, into a novel of escalating horror, while The Boys from Brazil (1976) works its science fictional premise, cloning, into a mainstream thriller narrative with political overtones. More central to the horror tradition is Stephen King, whose Carrie (1974) is grounded in its titular protagonist’s (pseudo) scientific telekinetic ability, a theme revisited in Firestarter (1980). Of his many novels, The Stand (1978, revised 1990), which depicts human civilization decimated by an engineered plague; The Tommyknockers (1987), which depicts how an alien spaceship creates a hive mind out of a local population; Under the Dome (2009), which shows alien children trapping a small town within a dome; and 11/22/63 (2011), a time travel story that revolves around the Kennedy assassination, are his most overtly science fictional in their premise, but there are other examples in both his long and short fiction.

Another way of thinking about horror and science fiction is to consider how writers such as Levin and King use genre in the service of ideas, stylistic decisions, or social trends. Such an approach uses the science fictional premise as a springboard toward some other form of narrative play. Other writers, however, seem more invested in core horror and science fiction aesthetics for their own sakes. Contemporary examples include China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Jeffrey Thomas. Miéville is certainly the most political of the three, as expressed in his New Crobuzon sequence of novels Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004). VanderMeer is the most stylistically conscious, as exhibited by City of Saints and Madmen (2001), Veniss Underground (2003), and the Southern Reach Trilogy (2014). And Thomas is the most—in a good way—pulpish, as conveyed in the thematic collection Punktown (2000, expanded 2003) and the novels Deadstock (2007) and Blue War (2008). These three writers, radically different and singular, nevertheless share one encompassing trait: a disdain for generic divisions that is exceeded only by their commitment to and embrace of the generic treasury of images, themes, styles, and tropes that together define what is thought of most broadly as nonrealist literature. Whatever anxiety may arise from violating generic distinction is totally absent from this group of writers and others like them, and is instead replaced by a sense of freedom and play. Ironically, it may be this complete obliteration of generic distinction that ultimately characterizes horror and science fiction in its purest mode.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Apocalyptic Horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition; The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: At the Mountains of Madness; Ballard, J. G.; Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Beaumont, Charles; Blackwood, Algernon; Bradbury, Ray; Butler, Octavia E.; “The Call of Cthulhu”; “The Colour out of Space”; Communion; Cthulhu Mythos; Datlow, Ellen; Derleth, August; Dick, Philip K.; Ellison, Harlan; Etchison, Dennis; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Hand, Elizabeth; I Am Legend; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; The Invisible Man; The Island of Dr. Moreau; King, Stephen; Kneale, Nigel; Kuttner, Henry; Leiber, Fritz; Link, Kelly; Long, Frank Belknap; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lumley, Brian; Mad Scientist; Matheson, Richard; Miéville, China; The Mind Parasites; Morrow, W. C.; New Weird; Newman, Kim; The Night Land; Pulp Horror; Sandkings; Shea, Michael; Shiel, M. P.; Simmons, Dan; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Sturgeon, Theodore; VanderMeer, Jeff; Weird Tales; Wellman, Manly Wade; Wells, H. G.; “The Willows”; Wyndham, John; Zombies.

Further Reading

Aldiss, Brian, and David Wingrove. 1986. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz.

Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Freedman, Carl. 2002. “Hail Mary: On the Author of Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 29: 253–264.

Lawler, Donald. 1988. “Reframing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Gothic Science Fiction.” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, 247–261. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nelson, Victoria. 2012. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Oakes, David A. 2000. Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, and King. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Rauch, Alan. 1995. “The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 34: 227–253.

Skal, David J. 1998. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. New York: W. W. Norton.

Stableford, Brian. 2009. “Horror in Science Fiction.” In Gothic Grotesques: Essays on Fantastic Literature, 11–23. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press.

Tibbetts, John C. 2012. The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. “Evaporating Genres.” In Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, 18–53. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130722/2wolfe-a.shtml.

HORROR LITERATURE AS SOCIAL CRITICISM
AND COMMENTARY

From primordial cosmogonic myths (myths about the origin of the cosmos) to early modern fairy tales, from the Christian theological purpose of seventeenth-century apparition narratives to the liberal working-class ethos of Stephen King’s fictions, narratives that use fear and horror to instill moral lessons and provide social commentary have an ancient provenance and a tremendous variety. A brief, partial survey of the history, prospects, and potential problems of such narratives, focusing particularly on those that have had a large role in shaping modern English language horror fiction, can provide valuable insight into the workings of horror fiction as a whole.

Among the oldest extant literary works, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (approximately 2100 BCE) presents a mythic protagonist whose initial cruelty to his subjects leads the gods to seek his punishment, and whose later despair at the prospect of his own inevitable death serves both to make him more sympathetically human and to call into question the association between worldly power and divine immortality. The epic thereby both inscribes and interrogates cultural values and social norms, and its focus on the fear of death invests it with a resonance that is practically universal. Recognizing the potency of pathos, many ancient Greek poets and playwrights used horror to both stir audiences and interrogate their beliefs. Tragedies including Aeschylus’s The Oresteia (approximately 458 BCE), Euripides’s Hecuba (approximately 424 BCE) and The Bacchae (approximately 405 BCE), and Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (429 BCE) present powerful syntheses of physical violence, emotional extremity, and supernatural control over human affairs, using them to frame questions about Greek religion, culture, and social values in ways that make them key precursors to works of modern horror literature.

Even more pointedly, the final book of Roman poet Lucretius’s De rerum natura (55 BCE), whose vision of universal atomic transformation and decay had a profound effect on the development of modern cosmic horror, provides a harrowing account of the effects of the plague at Athens derived from the historian Thucydides. Its horrors, however, are wielded as didactic weapons by Lucretius, who uses the inevitable terror and sufferings of death as the capstone for his attempt to persuade the reader of the value, even the necessity, of rejecting religious superstitions and accepting Epicurean epistemology and ethics. Lucretius emphasizes that it is the lack of comprehension of the nature and necessity of death that leads the plague’s victims to their violent and irrational behaviors.

However, Lucretius’s modern reception also suggests the degree to which horror’s visceral manifest content can entirely overshadow its ability to function as social criticism, as it is the poem’s visions of suffering and disintegration that made the greatest impression on most of its readers throughout the intervening millennia, to the extent that its vision of panicked putrescence is echoed by two of the most important early examples of literary body horror, Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) and H. P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) “Cool Air” (1928). In both these tales, the attempt to prolong human life through (pseudo) scientific means leads to putrid conclusions.

Some literary works use horror to effect social criticism more overtly and explicitly than others, often through an emphasis on the allegorical or symbolic dimensions of supernatural threats. In works of literary horror from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which satirizes Roman Catholic beliefs, to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), which crystallizes and interrogates Cold War and civil rights–era anxieties, to Joe Hill’s The Fireman (2016), which connects a deadly infection to the escalating role of outrage in contemporary cultural politics, elements of supernaturalism are often used to frame social issues.

When handled this way, horror as a form of social criticism can potentially be pointed and specific, and tends to function much like satire; where the latter targets certain beliefs, behaviors, or types of people by ridiculing them, the former transfigures anxieties about certain beliefs, behaviors, or people into objects of terror. The use of supernatural threats as allegories of social crisis goes back at least to the early modern era; one striking example occurs in the early eighteenth century, during the apparent epidemic of bloodthirsty revenants in Eastern Europe that helped spark the popular rise of the literary vampire. In response to various accounts of corpses rising from their graves and attacking their family and neighbors, one anonymous commentator wrote to the British journal The Craftsman: “These Vampyres are said to torment and kill the Living by sucking out all their Blood; and a ravenous Minister, in this part of the World, is compared to a Leech or a Blood-sucker, and carries his Oppressions beyond the Grave, by anticipating the publick Revenues, and entailing a perpetuity of Taxes, which must gradually drain the Body Politick of its Blood and Spirits” (Butler 2010, 53).

Of course, the history of horror fiction, like the history of literary satire, offers many examples of social criticism that are more likely to be understood as reactionary rather than radical. For example, The Monk notably propagated a wide variety of specious Anglican stereotypes about Roman Catholic belief; Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is inseparable from its author’s patriarchal, Victorian anxieties about the social dangers of female sexuality and the “dangers” of foreign immigration into England; Lovecraft’s obsession with the “corrupting” dangers of multiculturalism and his desire to police the boundaries of white, Anglo-American culture are writ large even in many of his least polemical fictions; and Dean Koontz’s (1945–) conservative family values are obvious in many of his horror novels. This prevailing tendency led King, in his influential autobiographical study of horror, Danse Macabre (1981), to compare horror writers to Republican bankers in three-piece suits, exploiting social anxieties for their own gain.

On the other hand, there are many examples of classic horror fictions producing positive social change through pointed criticism. While her best-known tale, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), is a chilling psychological variation on the ghost story often reprinted in Gothic anthologies, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) expressly wrote it as a critique of the Victorian medical profession’s damaging, infantilizing treatment of women diagnosed with hysteria. Though the story became widely read and vitally influential, Gilman was aware that many readers, appreciating it primarily as a work of fictional horror, remained unaware of the story’s autobiographical and social-critical context, and wrote the brief essay “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (1911) nearly two decades later in an attempt to counter this. The tendency of Gilman’s readers to understand “ghost story/horror story” and “literary social criticism” as mutually exclusive categories anticipates a prevailing critical tendency through much of the twentieth century to see horror fiction, as well as related speculative genres, as purely pop-cultural entertainment, and therefore divorced from the probing social and moral scrutiny associated with and expected from “high” literature. This misperception of horror, as well as the other speculative genres, is both as widespread and as mistaken today as it was in Gilman’s time. As influential American writer Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) states, “The essential horror springs from life—fiction is a mirror of life, sometimes distorted in the interests of meaning, sometimes raw and unmediated. There is no fiction so horrifying as the horror of actual life—not just life in wartime, or life amid violence, but the incursions of our ordinary lives upon us: aging, illness, gradual loss of family and friends. Sometimes to tell a realistic story, you must choose a non-realistic form to emphasize a point—this is the power of genre” (Morton 2014).

Despite this recognition, the perceived association between horror and, on the one hand, purely sensationalistic entertainment and, on the other, a departure from realism and an embrace of fantastic and supernatural elements, has led many modern and contemporary writers to query or outright reject the label “horror” as applied to their work. American writer Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), for example, known for her use of Gothic and grotesque elements, viewed classification of her stories as “horror” as misguided, writing, “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror” (O’Connor 1988, 90). Contemporary weird fictionist Caitlín R. Kiernan has similarly rejected the term “horror” for her fiction, precisely because she sees it as antithetical to her desire to pose ethical questions and challenge the reader’s ability to empathize and identify with the Other.

If “horror” is defined primarily as the intention to elicit a strong emotional response from readers that combines fear and disgust with other affective, ethical, or aesthetic concerns viewed as only secondary effects, then surely O’Connor and Kiernan are right to reject the label. Understood this way, horror is necessarily an exploitative genre, predisposed to demonize and denigrate difference and change, converting it into a transient “buzz” of subjective intensity. While this description surely seems suited to some works of horror fiction, it is ultimately reductive. If, however, influential film theorist Robin Wood’s view that what constitutes “radical,” and therefore valuable, horror is that it cultivates the audience’s (or reader’s) sympathy for the monster, and uses this sympathy to challenge normative and hegemonic assumptions, then the possibilities for horror’s functioning as a form of radical social commentary are greatly expanded.

The Heresy of the Didactic

In his posthumously published essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850), Edgar Allan Poe articulated what he called the “heresy of the didactic,” rejecting the idea that literature should provide moral instruction; instead, the province of art, he said, was the creation of beauty, of effect, of atmosphere. Thus Poe anticipated much of the art for art’s sake sensibility of the later Symbolist and Decadent movements, as well as twentieth-century movements including Dada and surrealism, which influenced twentieth-century horror and weird fiction.

However, the rejection of overt didacticism and the possibility of literature as social criticism are not mutually exclusive. Poe’s attack on the nineteenth century’s idol of didacticism was itself a social criticism. As many readers have noted, Poe’s tales are not without moral undercurrents or social engagements. Indeed, the question of moral culpability is one Poe turns to time and again in tales like “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). The social relevance of such tales is amplified as they were written at a moment when British and American jurisprudence wrestled with the complex issue of legal culpability in cases where mental illness was a factor, an issue that would lead to the M’Naghten rules in British law in 1843, and one that continues to haunt, and be haunted by, contemporary horror fictions including Patrick McGrath’s Spider (1990) and Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995).

Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Literary Criticism IV. Edited by James A. Harrison. New York: Society of English and French Literature.

While they are arguably examples of science fiction as much as of horror, vampirism-focused fictions including Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980), Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), and Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005) demonstrate this possibility by using many recognizable tropes of horror fiction to produce salient and nuanced examinations of the way racial and sexual difference is constructed in contemporary American society. Both of these novels suggest and problematize parallels between their “supernatural” protagonists and marginalized social groups, refusing easy allegorical interpretations while still vividly reframing widespread cultural concepts.

The critical role played by horror literature also need not be limited to its overt framing of particular topics. Indeed, if Poe’s rejection of the “heresy of the didactic” and his criticisms of allegory are taken seriously, horror, like any literary form in which affect, tone, and atmosphere are crucial, will tend to be more effective when its social-critical or symbolic aspects are an undercurrent, however forceful. More broadly, critics and theorists of horror including Barbara Creed and Noël Carroll have argued that horror can itself best be understood through the work of abjection (confrontation with the fear and loathing of the rejected “other”) and the transgression of cultural categories, in which case horror only exists as a literary mode when it offers unsettling challenges to accepted cultural norms.

As Gina Wisker writes, “the objects and subjects of horror are not always what they appear to be and are very often socially, politically, and culturally transgressive and challenging. Restoring order, which is itself dubious and questionable, destructive, and illegitimate (oppressive gender roles, slavery, imperialism, capitalism, etc.) is not always the aim of the radical horror writer” (Wisker 2005, 10). This view is shared by influential British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, who states: “Horror fiction is in the business of going too far, of showing the audience things they’ve avoided seeing or thinking. Very much like humour, it’s in the business of breaking taboos, and it follows that once those taboos are broken the fiction tends to lose power, to become ‘safe’” (quoted in Joshi 2001, 20).

Sean Moreland

See also: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; Horror Criticism; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Three, Reference Entries: Butler, Octavia E.; Campbell, Ramsey; Charnas, Suzy McKee; Hill, Joe; I Am Legend; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Koontz, Dean; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Monk; Oates, Joyce Carol; O’Connor, Flannery; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Further Reading

Butler, Erik. 2010. Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Unnumbered). Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Morton, Lisa. 2014. “Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Nightmare Magazine 25. http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-joyce-carol-oates.

O’Connor, Flannery. 1988. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. Collected Works XI. Edited by James A. Harrison. New York: Crowell. 71. See also X, 60–71; XI, 67–85; and XIII, 148–155.

Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An introduction. New York: Continuum.

HORROR LITERATURE IN THE INTERNET AGE

The Internet age is the current period of contemporary history. Alternatively referred to as the computer age, the digital age, or the new media age, this period is marked by the computerization of information and the growth of online connectivity via social, financial, and informational networks. In addition, it also corresponds to the growth of digital technology. Though much of the relevant technology has its origins in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the Internet age is largely considered an umbrella term for the twenty-first century so far. The advent of Web 2.0 is of particular significance, since this saw the Internet change from a largely static information source to a fluid, user-generated, networked community. It was crucial in the movement toward an interactive online “life.”

As with all technological and cultural developments, the Internet age and its attendant technologies has had a profound impact on the landscape of horror. The increasing power of digital technology has afforded filmmakers, game designers, and artists the means to create horror with unprecedented visual sophistication. Equally, online networks provide both a marketplace for global sales of horror media and the opportunity for fans of the genre to meet, discuss, and create. The Internet is full of websites devoted to horror in all its guises.

In addition to advancing both the production and promotion of horror, the Internet has also become the focus of horror in its own right. Horror has always exploited anxieties about new technologies, and in recent years the Internet has become a recurrent trope, particularly in cinema. Recent horror films such as Fear.com (dir. William Malone, 2002), Pulse (dir. Jim Sonzero, 2006), Unfriended (dir. Leo Gabriadze, 2014), and Friend Request (dir. Simon Verhoeven, 2016) emphasize the terrifying potential of the Internet’s indistinct relationship with reality. The more recent films dwell much more heavily on the inherent menace posed by social media, imposing a supernatural horror aesthetic over real-world concerns about privacy, anonymity, and the misuse of information.

In comparison with cinema, horror fiction’s engagement with the Internet initially appears relatively slight. At first glance the Web seems to have gained less of a foothold in horror fiction than it has in science fiction or the mainstream techno-thriller. However, closer scrutiny reveals a significant link between online culture and the horror writing of recent years. Though the Internet has yet to become as common a trope within horror fiction as it has within the horror movie, there are a number of important contemporary novels that either feature the Internet as a major concern or that are influenced by its formal properties.

One of the first horror novels to interact with the Internet was Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). The novel is now widely considered a key text in twenty-first-century horror, due largely to its reorientation of what a “book” can do. Much of the attention is focused on the novel’s experimentation with text and its interest in modern media. Though House of Leaves makes little direct reference to the Internet, it is worth noting that much of the early interest in the novel was raised by its online presence. Before the book was bought for mainstream publication, Danielewski uploaded a fifty-page excerpt to his own website in 1997. The file was copied and appeared in various places around the Web in an early (and unplanned) example of viral proliferation. Encountering House of Leaves in this way effectively furthered the blurring of realities that is so crucial to the novel’s plot and form. Danielewski’s novel maintains the pretense that it is a “found” document, in which competing narratives consistently query each other’s authenticity. Indeed, it directly addresses a parallel concern of the digital age: the waning of trust in the photographic or video image. House of Leaves’ central narrative behaves like an urban legend, in which not only is verification impossible, but that impossibility is the point. Danielewski’s novel is not about the Internet per se, but it does construct a terrifying narrative around the very anxieties that mark the Internet era: worries about accuracy, authenticity, and basic truth.

These same issues recur in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh Trilogy. Comprising Feed (2010), Deadline (2011), and Blackout (2012), the trilogy depicts the aftermath of a zombie uprising in which online blogging has usurped conventional journalism. The story follows a team of young bloggers who are invited to cover a presidential campaign, during which they stumble across a major political conspiracy. While the postzombie backdrop is well developed and fairly original (insofar as the world has come to terms with the outbreak and civilization endures), Grant’s major innovation is in using the outbreak to reveal the inadequacy of mainstream journalism as an information source. In this way the Newsflesh trilogy can be read as a commentary on real-world media responses to global issues, especially relating to politics and disaster scenarios. In Feed in particular, the importance of firsthand accounts via professional bloggers corresponds to the media’s increasing reliance on amateur footage and the way that traditional news channels fail to keep pace with user-generated sources such as YouTube and Twitter.

This same phenomenon is addressed in “found-footage” horror movies, such as Cloverfield (2008), in which horror is viewed through the firsthand lens of a personal video camera. The exploding popularity of found footage horror seems to reflect the fact that amateur recordings are now the standard way of encountering real-world horror. Cinema broke ground first in this regard, but horror fiction has begun to explore the same concerns. Novels such as those by Danielewski and Grant drive this home, as does the more recent A Head Full of Ghosts (2015). This Bram Stoker Award–winning novel by Paul Tremblay has been compared to House of Leaves and features a self-conscious commentary on the negative impact of mass media, particularly that driven by the Internet and reality television. It follows the trials of an American family whose daughter, Merry, is the purported victim of demonic possession. Merry becomes the subject of an exploitative TV show, which only worsens the supernatural episodes. Added to this mix of competing realities is a series of online blog posts that further critique and complicate any sense of objective experience. Tremblay’s novel may not be as elaborate or as profound as Danielewski’s, but it has the benefit of hindsight where the Internet is concerned. As such it is perhaps the most focused treatment of new media in horror fiction so far.

A Timeline of Horror in the Internet Age

1972

Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sends the first email.

1974

Computer scientist Larry Tesler first programs the copy and paste function into computer text-editing software.

1989

Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, develops the World Wide Web as a new way of sharing information across computer networks.

1997

Mark Danielewski uploads a fifty-page excerpt of House of Leaves to his own website for friends to read. This is copied and reappears across the Web, garnering interest.

1999

The Blair Witch Project is released in cinemas. It is one of the first films to use online “viral” marketing. This includes a website that presents the cast members as authentically missing, complicating the audience’s understanding of whether the film is real or fictional.

2000

House of Leaves is published in book form.

2004

The emergence of “Web 2.0” (the transformation of the World Wide Web into a user-generated online community of social networking, blogs, wikis, and so on) is widely hailed in the mass media.

2005

YouTube is founded. This later proves essential to the development of Web-based multimedia fiction.

2006

The term “copypasta” is used for the first time on the online forum 4chan.

2008

Creepypasta.com is launched.

2009

Victor Surge uploads two doctored photos to the somethingawful.com competition. This marks the first mention of the online figure known as Slender Man.

2010

Creepypasta experiences peak popularity when it is the focus of an editorial piece in the New York Times.

2014

Creepypasta achieves notoriety following the attempted murder of a twelve-year-old Wisconsin girl by two twelve-year-old school friends who allegedly committed the attack as a sacrifice to Slender Man.

2015

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay wins the Bram Stoker Award for best novel.

This is only one half of the Internet’s impact on horror fiction, however. Perhaps more important still is the way that the Internet has provided the space for a new (or at least resurgent) form of horror writing, one that relies on the Internet’s tendency toward ambiguity and elusive origins. These online horror stories are known collectively as “creepypasta.”

The term is a horror-inflected variation on “copypasta,” which originally referred to any material that was copied and shared around the Web. One of the earliest examples is smiledog, which consisted only of an image of a husky dog and the accompanying warning of a curse that threatened anyone who saw the photograph with madness and/or imminent death. This type of “cursed artifact” is a common trope in early creepypastas and constitutes little more than a macabre version of chain emails and spam that infested communication channels in the early years of the Web. Soon, however, creepypastas became more substantial and sophisticated. They are now a recognized online phenomenon, and entire websites and online forums are devoted to creating and analyzing the stories. Major websites include creepypasta.com and the No Sleep section of Reddit.com. Some breakout stories have since been published in traditional book form. One notable example is Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, which originated on the No Sleep forum but was subsequently self-published by the author to acclaim within the horror community.

The stories themselves tend to cluster around themes, with nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s media being a major trend. Many creepypastas center on video footage, usually a television program or old video game that they present as having either sinister content or dangerous consequences. Two famous examples are “Ben Drowned” and “Candle Cove.” The former tells of a teenager who buys a secondhand copy of a video game at a yard sale. The game turns out to be haunted by the spirit of a drowned boy, whose presence manifests in technical glitches in the game. Some recent versions of the story include video footage of the supposed glitches. “Candle Cove” is written in the form of an online forum thread, in which numerous parties discuss episodes of a fictional children’s television show from the 1970s. The “conversation” turns increasingly to disturbing aspects of the show, involving a monster known as the Skin Taker. At the close of the thread a final contributor reveals that once he asked his mother about the show, only to be told that no such show ever existed and that he merely used to sit in front of the television and watch static for thirty minutes.

Both stories are representative of creepypasta’s interest in the uncanny or spectral nature of digital content. They exploit ignorance about how such content is actually created and stored, as well as gesturing to the issues of nostalgia and faulty memory. At the heart of creepypasta’s effectiveness is the inability of readers to verify the extent of truth involved. Was Candle Cove a real TV program? The writer describes it as “half-remembered,” and it is reminiscent enough of actual children’s shows of the time that it could well be conflated in readers’ memory with another “real” show. Similarly, “Ben Drowned” features an existing Zelda game. Creepypastas blur the lines between reality and fiction, and their folklorish proliferation, copied and told across online communities, further complicates their dismissal as fiction.

One creepypasta stands above all others in its reach and impact, however. This is the modern phenomenon known as Slender Man: a figure who has been termed “the first great myth of the Web,” and who has, in disturbing fashion, effectively breached the Web’s fourth wall to influence acts of real-world violence: in 2014 two twelve-year-old girls in Wisconsin lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her multiple times, later explaining their actions by saying they had been trying to become Slender Man’s “proxies” or followers, and that in order to do this, they had to murder someone. Ironically, unlike most creepypastas, the origins of the Slender Man myth are known and documented. In 2009 Victor Surge, a forum user on somethingawful.com, entered a competition to make a Photoshop monster. Surge (real name: Eric Knudson) doctored a pair of photographs of children to include an elongated, tentacular figure. Both photographs were accompanied by fragmented prose suggesting that something evil befell the children. From this obscure beginning the Slender Man has grown in stature to become a recognizable cultural icon, the subject of fiction, movies, video games, and merchandise. His story is now told across multiple platforms, including an interlocking network of digital narratives that use both video and text to build the mythology. The main narratives are Marble Hornets, EverymanHybrid, and Tribe Twelve, each of which uses a mixture of text websites and YouTube videos in the construction of narrative.

Slender Man is the strongest example of the Internet’s impact on horror fiction. Freed from the constraints of traditional storytelling, creepypastas are able to expand beyond the confines of a single authorial vision. As such, creepypastas, and Slender Man in particular, are representative of a newly democratic, collaborative form of storytelling that evolves over time and across cultures. Thomas Pettitt suggests that creepypasta signals the closing of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis.” By this he means that it ends the period of literary history in which conventional printing (beginning with the Gutenberg printing press) cemented stories in specific forms. The Internet, in contrast, has created the opportunity to return to the campfire tale in a globalized oral tradition. Horror stories have always flourished in the oral tradition, and they have been given a major boost by the technology of the Internet age.

Neil McRobert

See also: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Video Games; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Bram Stoker Award; House of Leaves; New Weird; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Auerbach, Dathan. 2012. Penpal. N.p: 1000Vultures Press.

Blake, Linnie, and Xavier Aldana Reyes, eds. 2015. Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon. New York and London: I. B. Tauris.

Blank, Trevor, ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Boyer, Tina Marie. 2013. “Anatomy of a Monster: The Case of Slender Man.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2/2: 240–261.

Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsome. 2015. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Edwards, Justin D., ed. 2015. Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics. New York: Routledge.

“The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies.” 2010. MIT Communications Forum. http://cmsw.mit.edu/thomas-pettitt-gutenberg-parenthesis.

Jones, Abigail. 2014. “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man.” Newsweek, August 13. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-kill-slender-man-264218.html.

Krotoski, Alex. 2012. “Tales.” Digital Human, Series 2, Episode 5, October 29. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nl671.

Pettitt, Thomas. 2013. “Bracketing the Gutenberg Parenthesis.” Explorations in Media Ecology 11: 95–114.

Wiles, Will. 2013. “Creepypasta.” Aeon, December 20. https://aeon.co/essays/creepypasta-is-how-the-internet-learns-our-fears/.

HORROR PUBLISHING, 1975–1995:
THE BOOM YEARS

The great “Horror Boom” of the late twentieth century began slowly. Before it, there was no such thing as a “horror category” in publishing. Publishers had no “horror editor” the way they might have a science fiction editor or a mystery editor. There was no horror section in a bookstore.

Change began in the early 1960s. While there had always been ghost story anthologies and books now recognized as classics of horror published in the mainstream, such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), there was a significant difference in Donald A. Wollheim’s paperback The Macabre Reader (Ace, 1959) and More Macabre (1961). These began to define what a horror paperback looked like. Soon Ballantine Books followed with the first discernable line of horror paperbacks, all of them with Richard Powers covers of semi-abstract, swirling menace. Some books in this line included a paperback of H. R. Wakefield’s Arkham House collection, The Clock Strikes Twelve (1961), Fritz Leiber’s Shadows with Eyes (1962), and some others. Such packaging is very important in commercial publishing. Books aimed at a specific readership must be made to resemble other books aimed at that readership. What these were doing, cautiously, was determining that a horror audience actually existed, and that books made to look like “horror books” could be pitched to it. Meanwhile, during this period, the only press specializing in horror or weird fiction continued to be Arkham House, which issued the occasional new volume and began repackaging all of the works of H. P. Lovecraft in hardcover, opening up a new readership through library sales.

Things remained in this state for about a decade. Meanwhile, as horror scholar S. T. Joshi has suggested, the public’s taste for and familiarity with supernatural or horror motifs was being built up through the films of Alfred Hitchcock and such TV shows as Thriller, Way Out, and especially Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

The horror explosion was the result of three blockbuster novels and their associated film adaptations: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (1967), The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971), and The Other by Thomas Tryon (1971). These, followed by the enormous success of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975), changed the publishing scene completely. With King the publishing industry had a writer who could produce not just one fluke bestseller, but a whole series of bestsellers in a repeatable fashion, often more than one a year. The industry, as it inevitably does in such instances, suddenly began looking for more books of the same type, or more books to be pitched to the same audience. Suddenly lucrative careers could be made by writing only horror, and writers as varied in temperament and ambition as Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Robert R. McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, Charles L. Grant, John Farris, J. N. Williamson, Rick Hautala, Bentley Little, Richard Laymon, and John Saul were cranking out enormous quantities of material. (McCammon is a rare example of a writer who began as an obvious King imitator, but broke free and discovered a significant and powerful voice of his own.) Dean Koontz, formerly a midlist science fiction writer, reinvented himself as a horror/suspense writer, and his best-seller status continues to this day.

Packaging had changed with the times. Now a horror paperback was thick. It usually featured a dark or black cover, often see-through, with something brighter (a drop of blood or the grinning face of a demonic child) on the inner cover. There was a growing section of such volumes in the bookstore, as distinct as the sections for other genres. While there were some who predicted a flood of formulaic drivel followed by a bust, for a time such voices were not heard, and horror seemed to have conquered the commercial marketplace.

This caused expansions in other areas beyond mass-market paperbacks. While there had been some attempts at horror magazines in the past, the most significant since the demise of Weird Tales in 1954 had been Robert A. W. Lowndes’s low-paying and mostly reprint The Magazine of Horror (1963–1971) and its companion, Startling Mystery Stories (1966–1971), which published Stephen King’s first fiction. But by 1981 there was a high-budget, and initially high-circulation, publication, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, edited by T. E. D. Klein, Michael Blaine, and Tappan King, which lasted until 1989. It had a digest-sized companion, Night Cry, edited by the writer Alan Rodgers, which was even more explicitly a horror magazine. Most of the leading writers of the period appeared in these magazines, and Twilight Zone also featured many interviews and a great deal of media coverage.

There were also many small-press horror magazines, ranging from the Lovecraft-oriented fanzines edited by Robert M. Price, Crypt of Cthulhu and its companions, to Stuart Schiff’s elegant Whispers and W. Paul Ganley’s less flamboyant but excellent Weirdbook, and many others, such as Cemetery Dance (still being published), Grue, Eldritch Tales, The Horror Show, Fantasy Tales, and more, all of which encouraged a new generation of writers, including such eccentrics as Thomas Ligotti and W. M. Pugmire, whose work did not fit easily into commercial molds. On a somewhat larger scale, Weird Tales was revived on a solid basis by George Scithers, John Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer. This was the most sustained of all revivals of Weird Tales, which only began to become seriously erratic in its schedule in 2014.

Anthologies proliferated. Two of the most important were edited by the anthologist/agent Kirby McCauley, Frights (1976) and Dark Forces (1980). This last was something of a Dangerous Visions of horror (Dangerous Visions having been a groundbreaking and genre-defining science fiction anthology edited by Harlan Ellison in 1967), showcasing the finest talents, new and old, and containing everything from one of the last stories of Theodore Sturgeon to an original short novel (“The Mist”) by Stephen King. Poppy Z. Brite (now known as Billy Martin) was inspired by this book to become a horror writer, because it showed so many possibilities of the form. Charles L. Grant’s eleven-volume Shadows series was a showcase for “quiet” as opposed to loud and splashy horror, and published numerous excellent stories by a wide variety of writers.

In contrast to Grant’s “quiet horror,” the “splatterpunk” movement arose about 1989–1990. It was very short-lived, and some of the writers associated with its hype notably distanced themselves from it (particularly David J. Schow), but for a time there was a distinct school of self-proclaimed rude, crude, gross-out horror fiction that might be described as the horror fiction equivalent of death metal rock music. There were two anthologies edited by Paul Sammon, Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror (1990) and Splatterpunks II (1995). The leading novelists of the splatterpunk movement were undoubtedly John Skipp and Craig Spector, whose vampire novel The Light at the End (1984) was the first of several such books. Skipp and Spector (and later Skipp by himself) also edited the 1989 anthology Book of the Dead and sequels, which mark the beginnings of modern zombie fiction, itself almost a subfield of its own. Such stories and novels featured zombies of the apocalyptic, brain-eating variety, as popularized by George Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead and similar films, not the shuffling, undead slaves of Haitian folklore.

Horror had a huge impact on the small press book market. Driven by hysterically high prices paid by collectors for first editions of, in particular, Stephen King, specialty publishers turned out more and more for the collector. Donald M. Grant, who had previously specialized mostly in the works of Robert E. Howard, published a deluxe “limited” edition of King’s The Gunslinger (1984), which, in addition to the genuinely limited signed version, had at least two printings of the trade edition, making it the commonest “rare” book of its generation. But this sort of thing proliferated. Dennis Etchison’s first book, a collection of stories called The Dark Country published by Scream Press in 1982, reportedly sold out 16,000 copies in four hardcover printings, very quickly. The conventional publishing wisdom was that a book of stories by a writer who did not have any novels would not be commercially viable at all, but a one-man small publisher had just done vastly better than a regular New York publisher would have with that book. Scream Press was one of many such horror-only imprints of the boom years. It also got into the Stephen King business with a deluxe, limited edition of King’s short fiction collection Skeleton Crew illustrated by J. K. Potter. For a time, fortunes were being made in the horror field at all levels, and there seemed to be no end to the public’s appetite for such product.

Phenomenon followed phenomenon. The works of Anne Rice, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976), opened up vast new areas of erotic horror fiction, and virtually turned vampires into a genre all to themselves. (Indeed, Warren Lapine, the publisher of Weird Tales in the 1990s, had an all-vampire magazine titled Dreams of Decadence going for a while.) All manner of other vampiric fiction proliferated, among the most notable being Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s long series about the immortal Comte St. Germain, beginning with Hotel Transylvania in 1978; Les Daniels’s series about Don Sebastian de Villanueva, beginning with The Black Castle (1978); and Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981). Vampire fiction became historical, romantic, and even occasionally funny. A notable funny example is I, Vampire by Jody Scott (1984). Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980) brilliantly analyzed the character of its vampire, but with a quasi-science fictional rationale. Michael Talbot’s The Delicate Dependency (1982) was one of the outstanding vampire novels of the period, with a claustrophobic atmosphere, surprisingly little explicit violence, and a gay subtext. His vampires are secret masters, Illuminati, wiser than mankind and always feared. S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) tells of a vampire who is perpetually a child with an ethereally beautiful voice. In the twentieth century, he is a rock star.

Explicitly erotic horror fiction also became a recognizable category. Jeff Gelb’s Hot Blood series of anthologies proved successful and long-running, and Cecelia Tan’s Circlet Press became an entire imprint devoted to erotica, much of it horror.

The early career of Clive Barker was almost unprecedented in the history, not only of horror fiction, but of all literature. An unknown writer suddenly came out (in England) with six volumes of stories, the Books of Blood (1984–1985), most of them previously unpublished. They were soon an international sensation, and, as the originals had been paperbacks, specialty presses raced to publish deluxe hardcover editions for the collectors. Barker certainly had the field’s attention. Stephen King proclaimed him “the future of horror.” When his first novel, The Damnation Game, came out in 1985, his continued success was assured, but, as with Etchison, it was established that a writer could make a successful career with short fiction before he had a novel published.

Even an extremely brief and selective list of significant authors and titles from the great horror boom of the late twentieth century demonstrates the extent to which this striking publishing and literary phenomenon affected popular perceptions of horror literature, for many of these titles have become iconic, even legendary, in the collective mind of two and three generations of readers:

1975

Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

1976

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

1977

Stephen King, The Shining

1979

Peter Straub, Ghost Story

1984–1985

Clive Barker, The Books of Blood

1986

Stephen King, It

1988

Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

Matt Cardin

Anything seemed possible. Horror was prospering in many categories. It was on the best-seller lists. It was in the collector’s market. Small press horror magazines came and went at a bewildering rate. There was loud horror, quiet horror, erotic horror, erotic romantic horror, historical horror, contemporary horror, whole subgenres about zombies and vampires, with the occasional werewolf thrown in. Laurell K. Hamilton began a long series of vampire, erotic, noir, detective fiction with Guilty Pleasures (1993), the first novel in her series titled Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter.

The stage was at this point set for the institution of a high-budget, high-prestige horror publishing project, and it came in the form of the Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks, edited by Jeanne Cavelos and launched in 1991 with very high expectations. The first books seem to have done well, but before long it was clear that the majority of them did not. To make matters worse, the publisher took the one really successful discovery, Poppy Z. Brite, out of the line, to be published as mainstream instead of horror, so that thereafter, on paper at least, the entire enterprise looked even less profitable than it was. For a brief time Brite (Martin) was a genuine cultural phenomenon, with two vampire novels, Lost Souls (1992) and Drawing Blood (1993), which appealed strongly to a young, alienated, Goth audience, but this did Dell Abyss little good. In any case, two books, no matter how successful, could not sustain a failing imprint or genre for long. The last Abyss books were published in 1995 with much smaller print runs and far less publicity than the earlier ones.

The obvious conclusion was that the horror bubble had burst. The horror sections in bookstores shrank or disappeared altogether. There would, of course, be survivors, revivals, and new trends. In the late 1990s there was a flurry of nonsupernatural serial-killer novels, inspired by the success of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988), and many horror writers tried to save their careers with a leap into the lifeboat of “dark suspense.” Others ended up writing media fiction, or fell silent. The really major figures, King, Straub, Campbell, Koontz, Rice, and a few others, rode out the collapse. The revival of interest in all things Lovecraftian, which was marked by the centennial anthology Lovecraft’s Legacy, edited by Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg in 1990, was just getting started. But horror bestsellers were rare. Much of it retreated to the small presses. The boom had definitely gone bust.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Horror Anthologies; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Three, Reference Entries: Arkham House; Barker, Clive; Books of Blood; Brite, Poppy Z.; Campbell, Ramsey; Charnas, Suzy McKee; The Damnation Game; Etchison, Dennis; The Exorcist; Farris, John; Grant, Charles L.; Harris, Thomas; Interview with the Vampire; Joshi, S. T.; King, Stephen; Klein, T. E. D.; Koontz, Dean; Ligotti, Thomas; McCammon, Robert R.; The Other; Rice, Anne; Rosemary’s Baby; Schweitzer, Darrell; Splatterpunk; Straub, Peter; Wilson, F. Paul; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn; Zombies.

Further Reading

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1999. “Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950–1998.” In Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet, edited by Neil Barron, 199–344. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Glover, John. 2016. “The Life and Afterlife of Horror Fiction.” Postscripts to Darkness, June 12. https://pstdarkness.com/2016/06/12/1707.

Hantke, Steffen. 2008. “The Decline of the Literary Horror Market in the 1990s and Dell’s Abyss Series.” Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 1: 56–70.

Joshi, S. T. 2012. Unutterable Horror, a History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing.

HORROR VIDEO GAMES

From the outset, horror video games have been indebted to horror cinema. Indeed, famous game designers such as Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark, Infogrames, 1992) and Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Capcom, 1996) have overtly acknowledged that they take their inspiration from film and wish to give gamers the feeling of being the main character in a horror movie. As both Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil depict a mansion where the action takes place through predetermined camera angles, the connection could not be clearer. However, such a link should not obscure the bearing of literature on horror games. Fully as much as cinema, the horror video game—especially the third-person action-adventure games labeled as survival horror—borrows many of its themes and narratives, and much of its iconography, from the Gothic and from fantastic short stories and novels recast in an interactive media. As the Gothic is known to actively involve the reader in the construction of a story to provoke strong emotions of horror, fear, and terror, video game scholars have underlined how natural was its adaptation into games, what Tanya Krzywinska calls the “gamification of Gothic” (2015). The dominant tropes of the Gothic have found a renewed breath in games.

The old mansion, the crypt, the sewer, the graveyard, or the abandoned public building, the deserted laboratory, the subway tunnel—all of these locales have to be explored by the horror gamer. The gloomy and oppressive mood described in detail in Gothic novels is transposed in a forthright manner to the videoludic realm (that is, the realm combining the visual [video] with gaming and play [the ludic]). Horror video games privilege atmosphere over action, providing a dreadful experience that needs to be lived, rendering the surroundings unsafe or likely to become dangerous without warning. This relationship to spatial exploration is intimately linked to the history of video games. As early as the 1970s, Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther, 1976) and Zork (Infocom, 1979) offered adventures in mysterious caves, dungeons, and houses to gamers who typed commands in textually depicted environments. Far from being disadvantaged compared to graphical representation, the use of words allowed the creation of vivid and deep fictional worlds. At a time when technology was a great obstacle to the pioneering attempts at the horror genre, text adventures offered great opportunities for ambiance and plot development. British video game publishing company CRL Group released games mostly based on landmark Gothic tales, such as Dracula (Pike & Ellery, 1986), Frankenstein (Pike & Derrett, 1987), and Wolfman (Pike & Derrett, 1988). Previously, The Rats (GXT, 1985), based on the eponymous novel by James Herbert, not only relied on the text adventure’s tools but also integrated simulation elements, allowing the gamer to organize the governmental response to the rat outbreak. Rodents would swarm the text as well, clouding the perception of the action and conveying the panic afflicting the characters. Such ludic experimentations became more and more frequent as the downfall of text adventures brought by technological advancement permitted the development of other types of games.

The actional dimension of video games asks for an embodiment of the threat. Unlike the student filmmakers in The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), the player-character encounters actual evil foes during the videoludic adaptation Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (Terminal Reality, 2000). In side-scrolling platform games such as Ghost House (Sega, 1986), Castlevania (Konami, 1986), or Vampire: Master of Darkness (SIMS, 1992), the gamer faces the whole Gothic bestiary: ghosts, vampires, mummies, demons, skeletons, zombies, demons, and so on. While those monsters do not breed fear, as they are more obstacles to be destroyed in order to move on instead of monstrous evil threats, 3-D action games do stage frightening confrontations. This change is salient in the first-person shooters Clive Barker’s Undying (DreamWorks Interactive, 2001) and Clive Barker’s Jericho (Mercury Steam Entertainment, 2007). Additionally, with Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Action Game and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie, developed by Impact Software Development in 1990, the author of Cabal (1988) and writer-director of Hellraiser (1987) is one of the very few writers to have his name upfront regarding his involvement in the video game industry. Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Dreamers Guild, 1995) is another notable example.

That said, one of the most influential authors on horror video games is, undoubtedly, H. P. Lovecraft. Since the famous text adventure The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987), dozens of adaptations of the Cthulhu Mythos have been made, demonstrating an important compatibility between Lovecraft’s horrific fictional universe and adventure video games: Lovecraft’s cosmic fear works well with, and makes up for, the slow pacing and lack of sensory-motor challenges in adventure games. Plus, their basic dynamic—putting together clues in order to unlock new areas with more mysteries—is at the heart of the Lovecraftian plot, and these mechanics remain an essential part of horror video games. Here, the literary influence is expressed in a manner specific to the videoludic medium. Lovecraft’s emphasis on the loss of cosmic landmarks and sanity allows for much experimentation: sanity meters, inherited from a first ludification of his universe through the role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium, 1981), appear in both Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, 2002) and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Production, 2005), and may lead the gamer to see the image on the screen distorted by hallucinations when his or her character loses his mind. More psychological than gore-oriented, the vision may be interpreted as obscured or unreliable, and the clear-mindedness of the protagonist questioned (like the loss of consciousness leading to the Otherworld in Silent Hill [Konami, 1999]). The unreliable narrator from fantastic literature, such as those found in so many stories by Edgar Allan Poe—whose short stories were adapted in The Dark Eye (Inscape, 1995)—has become an unreliable playable character. The testimony form cherished by this genre has also proved to be quite amenable to horror video games, which are filled with written texts and hidden secrets scattered everywhere, explaining what took place or giving access to a lost history (as with the many files and documents found in Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion). In Fatal Frame (Tecmo, 2001), the camera obscura allows the gamer to fight off or liberate ghosts by taking pictures of them, while in Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013) the gamer can use a video camera to record dreadful events.

The subversion of aesthetics that is used to immerse the reader in literary horror has become characteristic of survival horror games, which merge the adventure and action genres. While adventure games rely mainly on finding objects and solving puzzles, horror games use these moments to trigger the appearance of the aforementioned embodied threats. Such is the case in Silent Hill, where the discovery of the first key item (a radio) leads to a creature bursting through the window. While action games emphasize confrontation and empowerment, games like Alone in the Dark make controls so clumsy, combat so difficult, and ammunition so scarce that players are better off avoiding fighting. They are forced to forsake their habits and circle around monsters rather than overcome them. Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005) created a new trend of horror games in which reflex and precision are required to defeat numerous enemies. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010)—whose engine is called “HPL,” after Lovecraft—transformed the genre once again by setting its action in the first-person perspective with enemies that cannot be looked at without draining sanity. Hence, the agonistic progression in first-person shooters in which the gamer always points a weapon at what he or she looks at eventually led to disarmament and a Lovecraftian perilous gaze. Going one step further, the “playable teaser” P.T. (Kojima Productions, 2014), developed for the canceled game Silent Hills, offered an experience voided of any confrontation: the gamer explores a never-ending corridor, filled with strange events and apparitions, and must solve its mysteries in order to escape. Fear and enigmas are the main obstacles within this impossible architecture of looping rooms, with doors leading to different places each time, and with inverted floors, ceilings, and walls. Such experiences renew horror video games with the literary heritage of horror as they throw the gamer into dark and strange worlds that she or he tries to understand in order to reconstitute the story.

A Timeline of Significant Horror Video
(and Computer) Games

1985

The Rats (GXT), based on James Herbert’s 1974 novel

1986

Castlevania (Konami); Dracula (CRL Group); Ghost House (Sega)

1987

Frankenstein (CRL Group); The Lurking Horror (Infocom), based on H. P. Lovecraft’s 1923 short story

1988

Wolfman (CRL Group)

1990

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Action Game and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie (Impact Software Development)

1992

Alone in the Dark (Infogames); Dark Seed (Cyberdream); Vampire: Master of Darkness (SIMS)

1993

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (Sierra On-line, 1993)

1995

The Dark Eye (Inscape), based on the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe; Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Dreamers Guild)

1996

Resident Evil (Capcom)

1999

Silent Hill (Konami)

2000

Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (Terminal Reality)

2001

Clive Barker’s Undying (DreamWorks Interactive); Fatal Frame (Tecmo)

2002

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights)

2005

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Productions); Resident Evil 4 (Capcom)

2007

Clive Barker’s Jericho (Mercury Steam Entertainment)

2010

Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment); Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games)

2013

Outlast (Red Barrels)

2014

P.T. (Kojima Productions)

Matt Cardin

Perhaps because of its relationship with imagination and investigation, the writer figure abounds in horror video games, from the author of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (Sierra On-line, 1993) or of Silent Hill to the would-be novelist in Dark Seed (Cyberdream, 1992) or the best-selling thriller author à la Stephen King in Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment, 2010).The gamer is not only put in the shoes of such a character, but is somehow always writing her or his own story of the game itself. Perhaps in the end this makes the player of such games assume the role of the famous “wreader” (the intermingling of writer and reader) that interactive fiction authors have been talking about since the 1990s.

Bernard Perron and Jean-Charles Ray

See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Cthulhu Mythos; Ellison, Harlan; Herbert, James; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Psychological Horror; The Rats; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Kirkland, Ewan. 2012. “Gothic Videogames, Survival Horror and the Silent Hill Series.” Gothic Studies 14, no. 2 (November): 106–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/GS.14.2.8.

Krzywinska, Tanya. 2015. “Gamification of Gothic.” In Diversity of Play, edited by Mathias Fuchs, 21–38. Lüneburg: Meson Press.

Perron, Bernard, ed. 2009. Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

THE LEGACY OF FRANKENSTEIN: FROM GOTHIC
NOVEL TO CULTURAL MYTH

Frankenstein is a Gothic novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The novel was published in 1818 when Mary was just twenty years old. Though it received little immediate recognition, theatrical adaptation raised the profile of Frankenstein, and it was issued again in 1831 in a revised form. It has never been out of print since and has become horror’s most enduring myth. The novel itself has been reimagined, reinvented, parodied, and recontextualized in countless ways, and numberless texts have been derived from its central themes. The figure of the Creature, the theme of science gone awry, and the Faustian power struggle between Creature and creator underpin a whole spectrum of modern narratives, both within the horror genre and more widely.

Brian Aldiss has described Frankenstein as the “first great myth of the industrial age” (Aldiss 1973, 23), but it could be argued that Mary Shelley’s novel is in fact the most fundamental of all modern myths. Itself a modernization of Faustian and Promethean myths—the former about a learned magician who sells his soul to the devil, the latter about an ancient Greek deity who incurs drastic punishment by stealing fire from the gods to give to humans—Frankenstein is in turn the model for all subsequent attempts to present the dangers of hubris (that is, foolish pride or arrogance) and the threat of unfettered scientific ambition.

The story of Frankenstein is among the most famous in Western literature and is well known to any student with even a passing interest in horror. In brief, it tells of Victor Frankenstein’s scientific ambitions and his ruin at the hands of the Creature he has constructed from the fragments of corpses. Victor is driven to understand the principles of life, but once he has given life to his Creature he abandons it in disgust. The Creature is cast out in solitude to face the cruelty of the world. Lonely, he asks Victor to make him a mate, and when Victor changes his mind—horrified at the prospect that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth” (Shelley 1994, 121)—the Creature vows to destroy the man he sees as the architect of his misery. The remainder of the novel is filled with violence and death as the Creature embarks on his revenge.

The story has been adapted and altered innumerable times. Its first adaptation was in Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823). Peake’s play was largely responsible for the growing success of Mary Shelley’s novel after it had an initial lukewarm reception. Presumption is perhaps most significant for establishing the emphasis on the Creature’s nameless status. The playbill famously represented the Creature merely as a series of dashes, foreshadowing the postmodern interest in the Creature as a representation of the unrepresentable.

There were other theatrical adaptations, but it was cinema that established Frankenstein’s place in the fabric of popular culture. The first cinematic treatment of the novel is Edison Studios’ silent film (1910), but by far the most famous early cinematic version of Frankenstein is James Whale’s 1931 adaptation for Universal Studios. Whale’s film is considered a classic of the early era of horror cinema, and almost all subsequent representations of the Creature are derived from Boris Karloff’s appearance as a rectangular-headed giant with bolts through his neck. Whale’s film, which was not based on Shelley’s novel but on a 1927 stage adaptation by the British playwright Peggy Webling, deviates significantly from the original source, and in doing so it introduces numerous motifs that have since become enshrined as part of a parallel, cinematic mythology. These include the hunchbacked henchman, Igor, the use of electricity to give life to the Creature, and the pitchfork-wielding villagers who destroy the monster.

Whale’s sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), is considered by many critics to be superior to the first film, though it now has only tangential links with the source material. Elsa Lanchester’s portrayal of the titular Bride, with her iconic, lightning-patterned beehive hair, has entered the modern horror pantheon in its own right. The Bride of Frankenstein is also noteworthy for its inclusion of a prologue depicting Mary, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron discussing Mary’s novel. The film is thus introduced by Mary’s claim that there is more story to tell. The scene highlights the way in which the biographical background of Frankenstein is often indivisible from the novel itself.

There are literally hundreds of other cinematic adaptations. Most of them adhere loosely (if at all) to the source material and frequently represent the Creature as a brutish monster, stripped of the subtlety and sympathy that was so integral to the original story. Some of the more outlandish examples include I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Frankenstein Versus Dracula (1971), and Blackenstein (1973). These, like most modern treatments, apply the name Frankenstein to the monster rather than his creator.

Frankenstein has proved ripe for parody as well. Famous examples include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), and the stage show and subsequent film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

As well as direct revisions of Shelley’s novel, the legacy of Frankenstein can be identified in any narrative in which scientific ambition has dangerous, uncontainable consequences. Thus, Frankenstein can be seen as the fundamental science fiction narrative, and it is widely regarded as the first example of the genre. Its influence can be seen in such prominent science fiction films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982), both of which question the nature of life and intelligence, as well as the dangers of technology. Frankenstein has reemerged in the contemporary era as a referent for the potential pitfalls of scientific progress. In particular, anxieties about the ethics and consequences of advances in genetics have found fertile ground in the Frankenstein myth. Horror films such as The Fly (1986), Species (1995), and Splice (2009) each center on the horrific results of meddling with the natural order of life. In real-world terms, the prefix Franken—as in “Frankenfoods,” referring to foods that have been genetically modified or otherwise changed by human intervention; and “Frankenstorm,” a term coined for the possible “monstrous” merging of Hurricane Sandy with other violent weather in 2012—is now synonymous with the threat of unrestricted human interference. As science progresses toward artificial intelligence and human-technological interfaces, and further exerts an ostensible control over the natural world, the legacy of Frankenstein continues to be useful as an expression of anxiety.

However, alongside this particular perpetuation of the Frankenstein narrative, the novel’s genesis has itself accrued mythical overtones. There is no other novel whose composition is so famous. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816 while holidaying on the banks of Lake Geneva. That year was famously the “year without a summer,” when meteorological anomalies meant poor weather and confinement indoors. Mary was spending the summer in Geneva with a literary gathering that included her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; the iconic Lord Byron, another of the era’s most famous poets; and his physician John Polidori. Trapped in the gloomy Villa Diodati by the weather, it was suggested that they each attempt to write a ghost story. Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s contribution.

There are many suggestions as to what inspired Mary to write Frankenstein. Critics point to the revolutionary attitude of the time, which Mary’s parents—the political philosopher William Godwin and the novelist and feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft—had helped shape. The theme of rebellion against authority is laced throughout the novel, most spectacularly in the Creature’s violence against his master. Equally, some see the death of Mary’s infant daughter in 1815 as the wishful inspiration for a story focused on overcoming the restrictions of mortality. Frankenstein is filled with symbolic resonance and is open to seemingly limitless interpretation. It is perhaps this very adaptability that has perpetuated its importance in contemporary culture, whereas other monstrous myths have been exhausted.

Frankenstein’s Monster: Adam or Satan?

The monster as originally portrayed in Mary Shelley’s novel differs dramatically from the mute, shambling version of it that was burned into public consciousness by Universal Studios’ 1931 film adaptation. Mary’s monster learns to speak and read, and it ponders the nature of its own existence with intense emotional agony. Here are its reflections as it reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost and relates that epic cosmic story of Satan, God, Adam, and Eve to its own circumstance:

But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions [than the other books I had read]. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors [a poor family whom the monster spied on to learn about human behavior], the bitter gall of envy rose within me. (Shelley 1823, 36–37)

Matt Cardin

Source: Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1823. Frankenstein. A New Edition. London: Printed for G. and W. B. Whittaker, Ave Maria Lane.

What is clear is that Mary was interested in the scientific principle of galvanism, the application of electrical current to organic tissue. It was at the time being practiced in London by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles). In the foreword to the 1831 edition of her novel, Mary recounts a conversation between Byron and Percy Shelley that touched upon the subject of Darwin’s experiment, in which a piece of vermicelli was galvanized into “voluntary motion.” Mary goes on to wonder: “perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a Creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth” (Shelley 1994, xv). Famously, Mary would then go on to dream of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together . . . the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion” (Shelley 1994, viii). Mary had her story, and two years later it was published.

Significantly, Frankenstein was not the only horror legacy to be birthed in that friendly competition. Both Byron and Polidori wrote stories based upon the folklore of the vampire that they had heard while touring the Balkans. Byron abandoned his attempt, but Polidori went on to complete a draft of “The Vampyre” (1819) a full eighty years before Bram Stoker would create his own horror icon in Dracula (1897). And though Dracula is credited with introducing the notion of the vampire as an urbane and seductive monster, Polidori’s vampire is all this and more, being based largely on Byron himself.

As with Frankenstein itself, the most famous depictions of these events at the Villa Diodati are cinematic. As mentioned, Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein features a conversation between Shelley and her circle as an introduction to the film. The most famous fictionalization of the events at Villa Diodati is director Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986). Like the later Haunted Summer (1988), Russell’s film presents the gathering as a hedonistic, psycho-sexual degeneration. The film won several awards and has since garnered a cult following.

Both Frankenstein and the story of its creation live on in popular culture. Increasingly, postmodern meta-inclinations have led to a blurring of the lines demarcating these two distinct stories. For example, Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound (1973) features a time-traveler who visits 1816, where he encounters both the monster and a young woman named Mary Shelley. Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008) similarly conflates the world of the story and the figures involved in its creation. In Ackroyd’s novel, Victor Frankenstein meets the Shelley circle and is inspired to create his monster by their revolutionary zeal. Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes (2009) is presented as the diary of the monster who, having lived through the ages since the publication of Shelley’s novel, looks back at his own role in its inspiration.

Interestingly, all of this blurring of boundaries has been present since the publication of the 1831 edition of the novel. In her foreword Shelley clearly outlines the association between her book and the sutured Creature it contains, both of which could be referred to by her famous phrase “my hideous progeny” (ix). Frankenstein is a novel about creativity, and it is therefore unsurprising that the novel has been employed in contemporary fiction’s tendency toward self-consciousness. Shelley’s novel has endured so long and remained so central to popular culture because of its adaptability. In the current cultural moment, it is a useful metaphor for tortured literary creation and frightening scientific advancement.

Neil McRobert

See also: Eco-horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part One, Horror through History: Horror Literature in the Nineteenth Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Body Snatching; Byron, Lord; Frame Story; Gothic Hero/Villain; Koontz, Dean; Mad Scientist; Monsters; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary; “The Vampyre.”

Further Reading

Aldiss, Brian. 1973. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Doubleday.

Baldick, Chris. 1987 In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Friedman, Lester, and Allison B. Kavey. 2016. Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

Glut, Donald F. 2002. The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More. London: McFarland.

Graham, Elaine L. 2002. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. 2007. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York and London: W. W. Norton.

Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. 2006. The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein. New York: Little, Brown.

Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. 1979. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mellor, Anne K. 1988. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge.

Shelley, Mary. [1831] 1994. Frankenstein. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Tyler Hitchcock, Susan. 2007. Frankenstein: The Cultural Legacy. New York: Norton.

OCCULT FICTION

The field of occult fiction is immensely wide and reflects the ongoing concern, spread across all ages and all cultures, with magic. A very short definition of magic would focus on the possibility of change: change of shape, change of the future, change of perception. All science has to do with change, but magic proposes to effect change through means that do not conform to rational standards, typically in the West through alchemical process and through ritual. Figures such as Simon Magus (from the first century CE), Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280), Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), Paracelsus (1493–1541), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and Eliphas Levi (1810–1875), among many others, are frequently cited as the precursors and progenitors of occult fiction, along with the apocryphal “Hermes Trismegistus.” All of these are thought to have been involved in “practical magic,” attempts to influence the world’s affairs through unorthodox means, which are often said to be secret except to the initiate.

The more modern attempts to speak of the history of the world as having been influenced by magicians and occult forces beyond our control have a rich history, involving the “Illuminati,” Rosicrucianism, and freemasonry; a recent flowering of this attitude is seen in the popularity of works by Dan Brown and his many imitators. But in the nineteenth century, there was a particularly strong crossover between notions of the occult and the practice of Gothic and horror fiction in the hands of such writers as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), Annie Besant (1847–1933), and Marie Corelli (1855–1924).

Probably the best-known “occult association” is still the Order of the Golden Dawn, which counted among its members Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats, and which still flourishes today across many continents, as does its darker brother, Ordo Draconis. Six crucial works that display the development of occult fiction as a genre are Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894); Crowley’s Moonchild (1917); Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934); M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart (1992); Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee (1993); and F. G. Cottam’s The House of Lost Souls (2007).

Occult Fiction since the Nineteenth Century:
A Selective Chronology

1842

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni

1889

Marie Corelli, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self

1892

Helena Blavatsky, Nightmare Tales

1894

Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan

1903

Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars

1917

Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

1926

Dion Fortune, The Secrets of Dr Taverner

1934

Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out

1941

H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

1992

M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart

1993

Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee

1993

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

1995

Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

2003

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

2007

F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls

2013

Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate

“The Great God Pan” was described by the Westminster Gazette on its first publication as “an incoherent nightmare of sex” (Spender 2016, 101) but it is actually a work of the occult, in which one Dr. Raymond proposes to use magical means to open up human perception in order to see the spiritual world. His “patient,” Mary, is exposed to this operation and becomes reduced to idiocy. Later, various characters encounter a woman known as Helen, and terrible results ensue. It is then revealed that Helen is in fact the daughter of Mary and the Great God Pan, who has been allowed into the human world through Dr. Raymond’s occult practices. Helen is eventually cornered and confronted, and dies an extraordinary death, in which she appears to return to various states between beast and human before finally dying.

The concern with the occult here is, as so often, with transgression: Raymond has breached the gap between ordinary human operation and a different, amoral, and finally destructive world which reveals humanity as a thin skin stretched between different realms. In the search for knowledge, he has gone beyond that which is permitted, and what is then revealed is a state where we find our place in a wider swathe of being, but one in which humanity as such can no longer continue.

Aleister Crowley is probably the most famous magician in the Western tradition, a man who was proud to boast of himself as the Great Beast and as the “wickedest man in Europe.” It may be that a certain irony is needed when dealing with Crowley; he was widely regarded as a charlatan, but in the world of the occult it is difficult to know what this means, since such a judgment in fact reflects unwittingly the possibility that there may indeed be such a thing as “true magic” even if it is not that which is ritualistically practiced by the Order of the Golden Dawn. With Crowley, magic becomes inextricably confused with drugs and addiction, as he says in his Diary of a Drug Fiend (1970).

Moonchild centers on a battle between white (benevolent and selfless) and black (malevolent and self-serving) magicians. Various magicians of the day figure in the novel, including MacGregor Mathers, A. E. Waite, the theosophist Annie Besant, Mary D’Este, the companion of Isadora Duncan, and others; and intriguingly, the conclusion of the book bends occult practice back toward the dread actualities of history, with the white magicians appearing to support the Allies in the First World War, while the black magicians are on the side of the enemy, thus asserting that the occult is not without practical effects. The heart of the book is also quite similar to that of “The Great God Pan,” since the essence of magical practice is claimed to be the ritual birth of a “savior,” thus justifying “sexual magic” as being the essential ingredient in the search for superhuman powers.

In Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, the Duc de Richleau and Rex van Ryn find that their friend Simon Aaron has become involved with a group of devil-worshippers, whose leader is the highly ambiguous Mr. Mocata. Aaron is rescued from a Sabbath ritual held in one of the most magical of sites, Stonehenge, but although until this point the reader may well believe that the scenario is one of fake magic, what happens next as unearthly forces begin to appear and gain strength suggests that occult powers are not so easily disposed of.

This suggests one of the principal aspects of occult fiction, which is that of belief. Is the reader encouraged to believe that, as with so much late nineteenth-century spiritualism and fortune-telling, magic is mere illusion, a set of conjuring tricks designed to impose on minds weakened by drugs and promises of eternal life? Or is the reader instead encouraged to believe that, on the contrary, magical practices can genuinely cleanse the doors of perception and lead into a wider, fuller view of life where the human is merely one aspect of a set of universal truths, wider than history, deeper than reason? The best of occult fiction remains ambiguous about this: obviously the reader might say that there is no such thing as “genuine” magic at all, but the occultist will riposte that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth—and in hell—than we customarily imagine, and it is clear that there is a cultural appetite for belief, even if this involves the thought that to discover new worlds might involve the death of the soul as we usually know it.

M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart follows the lives of three Cambridge students who meet a man named Yaxley, who may—or may not—be a magician. In any case, under his direction they perform a series of magical experiments, and although the processes and results of these experiments are entirely unclear, it appears that this subsequently puts an occult curse on their lives. In order to help his friends—who have married, but whose relationships are bedeviled by depression, recurring hallucination, and worse—the third of the students, who is the narrator, invents a mythical country, the “Coeur,” and much of the novel is spent in a fruitless search for this unreal land. Across twenty years, it is supposed that failed magic—if indeed it has failed—is directing the friends’ lives and condemning them to various kinds of misery; meanwhile Yaxley himself continues with his attempts to enter forbidden realms, which results in his extremely ugly death.

It is suggested at several points in the book that what is happening is only doing so in a realm of dream; but the question thrown up is whether magic can in fact operate to counter a recurring sense of drudgery and tedium, or whether it is merely that our more depressive encounters with the repetitions of quotidian life are what feeds our constant desire to believe in and engage with the paranormal, even in its seediest aspects.

The Course of Heart is resolutely set in an inescapable present; Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee takes us back to one of the heartlands of the occult tradition, the sixteenth century, and to perhaps the most celebrated of all Renaissance magicians, John Dee. Dee himself was an impressive intellectual, an astronomer and mathematician, an adviser to Queen Elizabeth, as well as being an astrologer and occultist; he spent a great deal of time trying to converse with angels. He became a feared figure as well as a respected one, and in his novel Ackroyd develops this view of Dee by counterpointing his life and intellectual struggles with those of a contemporary character, Matthew Palmer, who has inherited his house.

The brilliance of the book consists in the way Ackroyd uses magic to illustrate the complexities of history and time. Although Dee and Palmer are separated by four centuries, it appears that something in the house—or in the spells that Dee wrought, which may by now be unshakeable—prevents history from moving forward and ties the characters into an entirely different chronology in which everything is repeated and they are bound into an interminable, and perhaps impossible, search for a realm beyond the human. The power of magic here is frightening, although whether there is any objective basis for this power remains a hovering thought, unsusceptible of final proof; perhaps, again, it is simply a desire for escape and transcendence that motivates our fascination with the occult, although clearly Dee, at his peculiar juncture of history, saw magic as an essential extension, or deepening, of the developing sciences.

F. G. Cottam’s The House of Lost Souls is a fair representation of contemporary engagements with magic and the occult. Four students visit a derelict house, known as the Fischer House, which has been the scene of a number of magical experiments involving well-known figures from the occult tradition including Wheatley, but also tying this in with a different account of “secret history” involving ghosts, Nazis, and the history of the Second World War. Klaus Fischer has hosted a Crowley-esque gathering devoted to magic, and its reverberations continue to roll down through the decades. The mystery remains whether a real disruption of conventionally imagined historical processes has taken place, or if the protagonists are the victims of a series of hallucinations.

None of this becomes entirely clear, but the themes are evident: the conflict between a malevolent use of magic and the possibility that a version of “enlightenment” might dispel the haunting effects of a previously laid and entrenched magical plot; the relations between dark magic and the recurrence of “evil” throughout history; the question of whether impressionable minds can ever serve as reliable witnesses to events that never fully emerge into clarity; and other questions as to whether the effects of magic are simply produced by drink, drugs, and fear.

Reading on through the history of occult fiction could take us to the other secret histories embodied in the work of authors such as Dan Brown and Donna Tartt, although here the emphasis is not so much on magic as on conspiracy, two themes that are perhaps not so far apart since magic involves the idea that history can be, and perhaps always has been, manipulated by powers operating in the shadows, outside the rational consensus. At its best, as in Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012), magic (here in what is perhaps its alternative guise as witchcraft) may be regarded as a kind of empowerment; at its worst, as in historical assumptions and prejudices about the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati, it may be seen as an occult means by which those already in positions of authority preserve, spread, and strengthen their influence over society. Either way, the occult is intrinsically connected with the exercise of power. It is for the writer to persuade the reader that these beliefs are tenable or that they are the very substance of delusion, and here occult fiction has, through the ages, patrolled or hovered over the boundary between the real and the imagined, desire and the defeat of desire, the will toward the superhuman and the draw back toward the bestial.

David Punter

See also: Part Three, Reference Entries: Blackwood, Algernon; Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; “Casting the Runes”; The Devil Rides Out; Devils and Demons; “The Dunwich Horror”; Ewers, Hanns Heinz; The Golem; “The Great God Pan”; “Green Tea”; Haggard, H. Rider; John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; Machen, Arthur; Meyrink, Gustav; The Monk; Occult Detectives; Vathek; Wheatley, Dennis; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Bloom, Clive. 2007. “Introduction: Death’s Own Backyard.” In Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers, edited by Clive Bloom, 1–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cowan, Douglas E. 2015. “The Occult and Modern Horror Fiction.” In The Occult World, edited by Christopher Partridge, 469–477. New York: Routledge.

Geary, Robert F. 1992. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Killeen, Jarlath. 2009. “Ghosting the Gothic and the New Occult.” In Gothic Literature 1824–1914, 124–159. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Messent, Peter B., ed. 1981. Literature of the Occult. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Spender, J. A. [1895] 2016. The New Fiction: (A Protest against Sex-Mania) and Other Papers. Routledge Revivals. New York: Routledge.

Willard, Thomas. 1998. “Occultism.” In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 165–167. New York: New York University Press.

PAGE TO SCREEN: THE INFLUENCE OF LITERARY
HORROR ON FILM AND TELEVISION

Modern horror grew out of Gothic literature but was transformed by film and television, which added sights and sounds to the guilty pleasures of dark stories. In the early twentieth century, as film grew from a curiosity that recorded spectacle to a narrative art form, filmmakers turned to written fiction to provide plots and characters for their movies, and horror writers provided moviemakers with dramatic narratives that quickly became a staple of the new industry. Although early screenwriters of horror drew on folklore and mythology for some films, popular horror fiction provided the filmmakers with their richest source of ideas.

Horror Fiction and Horror Films

Prior to the development of the cinema, novelists often secured the dramatic rights to their work because in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many popular novels were turned into plays. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was one of the earliest works of horror adapted to the screen, remains one of the most popular and often adapted, and provides a textbook example of the problems and possibilities of adaptation. Stoker secured the dramatic rights to Dracula with a public reading on the day the novel was published. Two early film adaptations, the Russian Drakula and the Hungarian Drakula halala (Dracula’s Death), are now lost. F. W. Murnau’s classic German Expressionist film Nosferatu: eine Simphonie des Grauens (1922), starring Max Schreck, was both successful and influential. Murnau did not secure permission to use the novel, and Stoker’s widow sued to have the film destroyed. Fortunately, some copies remained, and the film was successfully restored in 2005. Despite Murnau’s changes in character and location, many critics today consider Nosferatu the most successful adaptation of Dracula, with Schreck’s portrayal of the vampire as a disease-like predator being especially horrific. The first authorized adaptation of Stoker’s novel was Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula for Universal Pictures, starring Bela Lugosi as a caped, romantic, seductive Dracula. The film was Universal’s most successful picture of 1931 and spawned a host of other Universal monster movies, including Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Wolfman (1941), and The Invisible Man (1933), all based at least in part on earlier works of fiction. In addition, Universal released numerous sequels based on the original adaptations.

In the 1950s Britain’s Hammer Films remade many of the Universal features, including Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee as a powerful and attractive Dracula and Peter Cushing as an intelligent and aggressive Abraham Van Helsing. Over the next decade and a half, Hammer Films released eight sequels of the popular film, with Christopher Lee starring in six of them. Dracula continued to be adapted throughout the twentieth century. Many of these are forgettable, but some are of continued interest, such as Philip Saville’s 1978 Dracula, made for BBC television and starring Louis Jourdan as a tragically romantic vampire; and John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, based on the Deane/Balderston play commissioned by Stoker’s widow, which served as the screenplay for Universal’s 1931 adaptation. In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola released Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, Wynona Ryder as Mina Harker, and Gary Oldman as Dracula. As much a love story as a horror narrative, Bram Stoker’s Dracula remains the most expensive and financially successful Dracula adaptation to date. A telling indicator of the significance of Stoker’s Dracula among horror adaptations is that Dracula has been adapted more times than any other character; Sherlock Holmes is second (Guiley 2005, 108; Melton 2011, 210).

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was first adapted to film by Edison Studios in 1910, and later as Life Without Soul in 1915. The most famous and influential adaptation was James Whale’s for Universal Studios in 1931. Starring Boris Karloff as the monster, Whale’s Frankenstein shifts the focus from Dr. Frankenstein’s ethical dilemma to the pathos of the creature he created, and in the process foregrounds the sympathetic monster. Karloff’s performance here, and in the Universal sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), created the iconic image of the monster that remains embedded in popular culture. Frankenstein has been adapted more than seventy times, including seven adaptations by Hammer Films, the best of which is The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), directed by Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the monster. Other notable adaptations include Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), starring Robert De Niro as the monster, and Mel Brooks’s comic masterpiece Young Frankenstein (1974), starring Gene Wilder as Victor Frankenstein’s grandson and Peter Boyle as the monster.

Some Notable Cinematic Horror Adaptations

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897):

•Nosferatu (1922), dir. F. W. Murnau

•Dracula (1931), dir. Tod Browning, starring Bela Lugosi

•Dracula, a.k.a. Horror of Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing

•Dracula (1978), dir. Philip Saville, starring Louis Jordan

•Dracula (1979), dir. John Badham, starring Frank Langella

•Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), dir. Francis Ford Coppola, starring Gary Oldman

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818):

•Frankenstein (1910), Edison Studios

•Frankenstein (1931), dir. James Whale, starring Boris Karloff

•Bride of Frankenstein (1935), dir. James Whale, starring Boris Karloff

•The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), dir. Terence Fisher, starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

•Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), dir. Kenneth Branagh, starring Robert De Niro

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886):

•Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), starring Lionel Barrymore

•Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), dir. Rouben Mamoulian, starring Fredric March

•Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), dir. Victor Fleming, starring Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954):

•The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price

•The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston

•I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith

Other notable horror adaptations:

•The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) → The Haunting (1963), dir. Robert Wise and The Haunting (1999), dir. Jan de Bont

•Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (1967) → Rosemary’s Baby (1968), dir. Roman Polanski

•The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971) → The Exorcist (1973), dir. William Friedkin

•Carrie by Stephen King (1974) → Carrie (1976), dir. Brian De Palma

•The Shining by Stephen King (1977) → The Shining (1980), dir. Stanley Kubrick

•Misery by Stephen King (1987) → Misery (1990), dir. Rob Reiner

•Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976) → Interview with the Vampire (1994), dir. Neil Jordan

Matt Cardin

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), with its dramatic transformation of the morally upright Dr. Jekyll into the depraved Mr. Hyde, attracted numerous film adapters. As early as 1912 James Cruze directed and starred in a twelve-minute version of the story. John Barrymore starred in a 1920 silent adaptation, and in 1931 Paramount Pictures released a sound version directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, who won an Academy Award for his performance. The film was so successful that in 1941, when MGM bought the rights to the story, the studio attempted to buy and withdraw all copies of the 1931 film before releasing their adaptation, starring Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman, which was not as critically or popularly successful. There have been more than thirty film adaptations of Stevenson’s novel, and aside from the 1931 Fredric March film, the most acclaimed is Mary Reilly (1996), starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovich.

Several other notable adaptations of horror fiction were released in the 1930s. In 1933 Universal Pictures released The Invisible Man, loosely based on H. G. Wells’s popular novel. Directed by James Whale and starring Claude Raines, The Invisible Man, like its source novel, explored the boundaries between horror and science fiction. Universal Studios’ two other classic monster movies, The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff, and The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr., were not directly adapted from novels but were influenced by them. The Mummy was made in response to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (“King Tut”), but the film has strong similarities to Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Lot No. 249” (1892) and Bram Stoker’s novel Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903). The Wolf Man, for its part, was inspired by European folklore, but two early novels, Alexandre Dumas’s The Wolf-Leader (1857) and Erckmann-Chatrian’s Hugues-le-Loup (1869), translated into English as The Man-Wolf, may have influenced the filmmakers.

Two studios, Universal Pictures and Hammer Films, dominated the horror market during the studio era (ca. 1930–1948), but with the breakup of the studios after the Second World War (1939–1945), outstanding horror films were produced by many companies, although American International Pictures cornered the market on grade B horror thrillers such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, both in 1957. AIP also released better films, including four adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), all starring Vincent Price. In the postwar period and the years following, both horror fiction and horror films moved from the margins of the popular to the mainstream, no longer being a genre defined by grade B films and cheap paperback novels. The popularity and quality of the horror adaptations that have appeared since the 1960s reflects the renewed interest of writers, filmmakers, and audiences.

Two horror novels published in 1954 became film horror classics when adapted. Jack Finney’s horror science fiction novel The Invasion of the Body Snatchers captured the paranoid mood of Cold War America when released by Allied Artists as a film in 1956, and Richard Matheson’s classic I Am Legend, about the lone human survivor of a worldwide plague of vampires, was adapted three times: as The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price; The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston; and I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith. Robert Bloch published Psycho in 1959, and in 1960 Paramount released Alfred Hitchcock’s memorable adaptation starring Janet Leigh as the unwitting victim of Anthony Perkins’s homicidal mania. Hitchcock’s masterful control of mystery and horror elevated the film to the status of a cultural icon. Also published in 1959 was Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a chilling story of a group of psychic explorers who visit a house that may or may not be haunted. Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation, The Haunting, starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, effectively combines elements of horror and psychological thriller. In 1999 MGM released a second, and decidedly inferior, adaptation starring Liam Neeson.

In 1968 Paramount released Rosemary’s Baby, based on Ira Levin’s best-selling 1967 novel. Directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow, the film successfully combines psychological realism with supernatural horror as a young woman slowly discovers the child she is carrying may be Satan’s. Another successful adaptation that combined elements of the occult with psychological realism was William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of demonic possession in modern Washington, D.C. Both films were financially and critically successful, establishing the genre of cinematic occult horror. In 1974 Peter Benchley released Jaws, his wildly successful novel of a vengeful great white shark terrorizing a Long Island beach community. For the film adaptation Universal Pictures hired director Steven Spielberg, who worked quickly through production; the film was released the next year to popular success. In 1976 Anne Rice reinvented the vampire novel with Interview with the Vampire. Set in New Orleans, Rice’s novel revolves around the relationships among three vampires—Louis, Lestat, and Claudia—and begins to develop a cultural history of vampires that Rice continues to expand through her Vampire Chronicles. In 1994 Warner Brothers released the film adaptation, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, to positive reviews. Another film adaptation from the series, The Queen of the Damned (2002), was not as successful.

If earlier periods of horror film were dominated by studios such as Universal Pictures, Hammer Films, and American International, the latter part of the twentieth century was dominated by the novels and adaptations of the work of one man, Stephen King, who in addition to writing more than seventy books has had over one hundred films and television programs adapted from or based on his work. Several works, such as The Shining and Carrie, have been adapted more than once. Adjusted for inflation, King’s films have grossed nearly eight hundred million dollars. Five of his highest grossing films are horror adaptations: The Shining (1980), Carrie (1976), Misery (1990), Pet Sematary (1989), and Secret Window (2004). Three of these films have become cultural icons, defining film horror in the late twentieth century. In adapting King’s 1974 supernatural horror novel Carrie, Brian De Palma emphasized the terror of a young abused girl who discovers her telekinetic ability when she has her first period, and the horrific results of bullying by her high school classmates. Sissy Spacek received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in the title role. Director Rob Reiner directed the adaptation of King’s 1987 psychological horror novel Misery. James Caan plays Paul Sheldon, writer of romance novels, who writes a manuscript killing off the series heroine. Kathy Bates plays Annie Wilkes, a nurse who rescues Sheldon after an automobile accident, and while helping him recover discovers his intentions to kill her favorite character. She imprisons him, eventually hobbling him by breaking his ankles with a sledgehammer. Sheldon eventually kills his tormentor. Bates received an Academy Award for her performance. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s 1977 novel The Shining starred Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duval, Danny Lloyd, and Scatman Crothers. Kubrick’s depiction of the descent of Jack Torrance, played by Nicholson, into madness and murder in an isolated and haunted resort hotel stands as one of the most terrifying films ever made, and Nicholson’s performance has become legendary.

Early filmmakers found stories to adapt in other literary forms, drama and history being the most obvious examples, but they also drew upon comic strips and comic books. Later, graphic novels joined these other forms in serving as source material. Science fiction and fantasy filmmakers have adapted these sources early and often, as the long relationship between the Superman, Batman, and now Marvel Universe characters in print and on the large and small screens clearly demonstrates. Directors of horror films have recently explored this genre. Stephen Norrington in Blade (1998) and its sequels, and Guillermo del Toro in Hellboy (2004) and its sequel, both provide successful horror/fantasy crossovers. Another recent trend has been the adaptation of young adult fiction, especially popular mixed-genre fiction combining horror with either fantasy or romance, such as the film adaptations of J. K. Rowling‘s seven Harry Potter novels and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga.

Horror Fiction and Horror Television

Television began and survived with adoption and adaptation, borrowing formats and content from radio, drama, film, and literature. Commercial television modeled news, musicals, comedy, and dramatic programming on that of radio, which permitted frequent advertising breaks, and when, in the mid-1950s, film studios began to make their pre-1948 content available to television networks and stations, many of the Universal horror films, such as Dracula and Frankenstein and their sequels, began to appear on television, often as late-night or weekend content.

Television adopted another format, the anthology, from literature. Drawing on the growing popularity of science fiction and horror films in the late 1950s and early 1960s, American networks presented genre material, some original and some adapted from fiction, in such anthology series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/NBC, 1955–1962), One Step Beyond (ABC, 1959–1961), The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964), Thriller (NBC, 1960–1962), and The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–1965). All of these series presented science fiction, supernatural, and horror stories, but Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff, was more focused on Gothic horror stories, including several by Robert Bloch. The anthology series has remained a significant form in providing viewers with original and adapted horror narratives, as shown in the popularity of such series as Tales from the Crypt (HBO, 1989–1996), with a title and format adapted from the classic 1950s pulp horror comic book of the same name, and Tales from the Dark Side (1983–1988). Networks continued to develop new sources and formats for horror material. ABC adapted Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons for its comic Gothic Addams Family (1964–1966), a satire on American life featuring a macabre family living in a decaying Victorian mansion. More comic and less satiric was CBS’s The Munsters (1964–1966), which adapted characters based on Dracula and Frankenstein, as well as their Universal Studios incarnations. Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster have become cultural icons thanks to television as well as film and fiction, appearing everywhere from Public Television to breakfast cereal boxes (Count Chocula and Frankenberry).

Because of the need for broadcast content, television producers, in addition to acquiring the rights to earlier-released films, introduced made-for-television movies, which were usually less costly and time consuming to bring to the small screen than traditional films. As over-the-air stations and cable networks proliferated, the demand for new content increased, and made-for-television horror movies, adapted both from classics of Gothic horror and from popular horror fiction, became popular to both broadcasters and audiences.

The popularity of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula made them both attractive to television producers. In 1972 NBC released Frankenstein: The True Story, starring Leonard Whiting, Jane Seymour, and James Mason. The film was originally aired in two ninety-minute segments, and it presented the monster as handsome upon creation, only to grow uglier as the film progressed. In 2004 the Hallmark Channel released a miniseries adaption of Frankenstein starring Alec Newman, Luke Goss, and Donald Sutherland, which follows Shelley’s novel more closely than most adaptations.

In 1974, CBS broadcast released a made-for-television adaptation of Dracula, directed by Dan Curtis and starring Jack Palance. Outside the United States it was given a theatrical release. The film is noted for Palance’s performance and for suggesting a connection between the fictitious Dracula and the historical Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century Wallachian warlord. The television adaptations of the works of Stephen King—thirty-four made-for-television movies, television series, and episodes in other series—can provide an overview of adapted-for-television works by a popular contemporary writer. Television is a medium that can be adapted for narratives of varying lengths, and many of Stephen King’s longer works have been adapted for television miniseries rather than for the cinema, although some of his works have appeared on both the large and small screens. Four of King’s most popular works have been adapted twice. ’Salem’s Lot, King’s vampire novel published in 1975, first appeared as a successful miniseries produced by Warner Brothers in 1979, starring David Soul and James Mason. It was recreated by TNT starring Rob Lowe in 2004. Similarly, The Shining, published in 1977, was readapted (after Kubrick’s 1980 version) for television by ABC as a miniseries starring Rebecca de Mornay and Steven Weber in 1997. It, King’s epic novel of a cosmic horror terrorizing a small town in Maine across multiple generations, was adapted as a successful miniseries in 1992, with Tim Curry starring as the terrifying Pennywise the Clown, who preys on children. In 2017 a new theatrical adaptation was released with Pennywise played by Bill Skarsgård. In addition, King’s The Dead Zone, published in 1979, was adapted twice, first for the large screen by David Cronenberg in 1983 and later as a series for television that ran on USA Network from 2002 until 2006.

Stephen King is not the only successful horror author whose work has been adapted as successful television miniseries. The Vampire Diaries is a successful young adult series of novels published between 1991 and 2012 by L. J. Smith about a beautiful young high school student who falls in love with two attractive vampires. Three additional novels based on the series were written by ghostwriter Aubrey Clark and published in 2012 and 2013. In 2006 the CW network began airing a television adaptation, and it ran for many seasons. The Walking Dead is another popular adapted horror television series. Based on the comic book series of the same name written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Tony Moore, the series revolves around the adventures of Rick Grimes, a sheriff’s deputy who awakens from a coma in the middle of a quarantined Georgia faced with a zombie apocalypse. The series began airing on AMC in 2010, and in 2015 a spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead, was produced by the same network.

The attraction of many of the classic Gothic horror monsters is that they are able to overcome natural law and defy death. Mummies, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and zombies all come back from the dead. The economics of film and television, with ever increasing audiences and formats, demands a constant supply of characters and stories. It would seem inevitable that undying creatures that appeared first in print would be kept alive through adaptations, sequels, spin-offs, and parodies that have come back to life on the large and small screens.

Jim Holte

See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Comics; The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Bloch, Robert; Dracula; The Exorcist; I Am Legend; Interview with the Vampire; King, Stephen; Mummies; Poe, Edgar Allan; Rosemary’s Baby; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Werewolves; Zombies.

Further Reading

Backer, Ron. 2015. Classic Horror Films and the Literature That Inspired Them. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Broderick, James F. 2012. Now a Terrifying Motion Picture!: Twenty-Five Classic Works of Horror Adapted from Book to Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Guiley, Rosemary. 2005. The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters. New York: Facts on File.

Hanke, Ken. 2013. A Critical Guide to the Horror Film Series. London: Routledge.

Holte, James. 1997. Dracula in the Dark: A Study of the Dracula Film Adaptations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Jowett, Laura, and Stacey Abbott. 2013. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.

Melton, J. Gordon. 2011. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press.

RELIGION, HORROR, AND THE SUPERNATURAL

The critical commonplace, largely uncontested, is that horror is marked by a prevalent concern with the material and psychological. However, horror is also concerned with invoking a sense of spiritual and religious anxiety. In fact, authors from Arthur Machen to Clive Barker agree that the roots of horror literature are embedded in religious traditions or theological conflicts. While scholarship on the area of religious horror is relatively new, there are several exemplary books and essays on its literary origins in supernatural Gothic literature. British Gothic literature is marked by certain prevalent religious prejudices both anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. These strains of theological conflict can be read as the attempt to assert a hegemonic Protestantism against the threat of foreign and, in the case of Catholicism, former religious traditions. Although the religious and supernatural codes and conventions set out by the Gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are crucial to any consideration of religion’s connection with horror and supernatural literature, it is important to understand that horror goes beyond the traditions and inheritances of Christian Britain and is created within the contexts of different faiths and nationalities. Consequently, the representation of religion and the supernatural in horror fiction does not flow in one direction or from one nation or religion, but is created out of a cultural exchange of religious symbols, narratives, and themes.

It was the religious imagination of such early Christian theologians as Augustine of Hippo that first introduced the Western world to the horror of the human condition, and it was visionaries such as the Italian Dante Alighieri who first journeyed in the imagination to the depths and limits of hell. Their Protestant and Catholic illustrations of divine punishment and human perversity and sin greatly inform European horror to this day. This is not to suggest that horror fiction, as a whole, is orthodox or faithful. The ideology and form of horror fiction tends to focus on the corrupt and perverse; therefore, it is inclined toward showing the reader what is dreadful about church and God. Since the establishment of Anglicanism during the Protestant Reformation in 1534, supernatural and religious horror has become associated with an increasingly secularized form of literature preoccupied with questioning rather than preaching religious lessons and dogmas. As early as the Renaissance period, authors such as Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616) used modes of horror, supernaturalism, and the religious to undermine church and state. In the seventeenth century, the English poet John Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost (1667), caused religious controversy by suggesting a remarkably seductive and sympathetic devil. It was, however, the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment from the mid-eighteenth century onward that influenced two generations of darkly supernatural writing. This writing was tethered to certain religious and sociohistorical events that would breed religious horror. Events such as the tensions surrounding the Catholic Emancipation campaign through the 1770s, the French Revolution in 1789, and the eventual passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 all had an effect on the supernatural and religious themes of Gothic novels like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). These early Gothic writers made common the tropes of medieval and foreign European settings, entrapments in a monastery or convent, evil clergy and the Inquisition, wandering Jews, satanic or occult ritual, and supernatural occurrences. The holy terrors of the Catholic Church continued to be a favorite theme well into the twentieth century. J. M. Barrie’s Scottish Gothic story, Farewell Miss Logan (1932), for example, tells the story of a Protestant minister working in a lonely highland glen beset by ambiguous vampires, ghosts, and Roman Catholic Jacobites.

However, “foreign” Catholicism was not the only aspect of the religious to make Gothic and horror writers uncomfortable. A second wave of Gothic novels in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century established new religious and supernatural conventions. Taking inspiration from both science and religion, Mary Shelley gave scientific and theological form to the supernatural in Frankenstein (1818). Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) features a scholar who sells his soul for longer life only to become doomed to wander the world seeking death and redemption. Subsequent scholarship identifies the accursed wanderer—a literary inheritor of the anti-Semitic religious identity of Jews—as another horrifying figure popular among Gothic and Romantic writers. The first American Gothic novel is also a religious horror story. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) introduced the subject of America’s oppressive Puritan mindset by featuring a minister driven over the edge of sanity by his supernatural suspicions and sense of spiritual failure. Fanatical Protestant sects and Puritan paranoia are also the principal targets in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). Gothic Scotland is the setting for James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). These stories work through Calvinism’s oppressive guilt, self-scrutiny, and God by describing men pursued by their own demonic doubles.

An interesting thing to note in early Gothic novels is the differences between the authors’ perspectives on the representation of the religious and supernatural. Lewis’s parade of ghosts, demons, and, ultimately the devil himself is at once outrageous and irreverent. Radcliffe, on the other hand, showed timidity when it came to religious and otherworldly matters, offering natural but complicated explanations of the supernatural. Furthermore, the fact that all early Gothic writers show timidity about representing God has been read as underlying Christian values by some scholars and evidence of God’s increasing obsoleteness by others.

This nervousness around the representation of the supernatural was to change with mainstreaming of Gothic in Victorian literary culture and its branching off into subgenres such as the ghost story and weird or cosmic fiction. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, the clergy had been replaced with other fears also tethered to certain religious and social transformations, namely, the increased intrusion of science and materialism into people’s lives. This was sharpened by the discoveries of Charles Darwin on the evolution of the human in The Origin of the Species (1859) and the antimodernist scholarly work Degeneration (1895) by Max Nordau, both of which ignited diverse fears about what it means to be human. In response to the perceived threat of scientific materialism, a variety of spiritual and religious movements—such as, to name one notable example, Spiritualism—sprang up throughout the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, each in its own way attempting to bridge the divide between the rational and the spiritual.

The Victorian occult horror story and supernatural tale features séances, mesmerism, paganism, alchemy, medieval occult religions, and a more exuberant and varied supernaturalism. This indicates that the supernatural was becoming less tethered to fundamental religions or conventional concepts of God. It also suggests that the evocation of strange worlds, peculiar rituals, and exotic supernatural entities enabled readers to entertain spiritual notions that were otherwise fading in their everyday lives. Arthur Machen’s stories are filled to the brim with pagan gods and occult demons and an ambivalent attraction to medieval rituals and religions. Another writer who commonly exploited the occult was Oscar Wilde. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde used the standard aesthetics of Catholicism and an occult narrative to tell the story of the separation of one man’s soul from his body, but turned this into an exploration of his own Catholic tendencies. The fascination with paganism and occult religions remained well into the twentieth century where it was used to develop the idea of a person being caught between the oppressive horrors of the past and the soulless materialism of the present.

Horror, which is loosely deemed a subgenre of Gothic literature, shares many of that genre’s fears and anxieties as well as its religious ambiguities. But along with being traceable in this way to a late eighteenth-century English literature, there is, in fact, a wealth of horror from a diverse range of spiritual traditions from Judaism to Islam and Asia, each of which use the supernatural to explore the horrors of religious experience.

The zombie, for example, has its roots in the African-derived religious systems of Haitian Vodou—more commonly known in horror literature and film as Voodoo—Jamaican Obeah, and Cuban Santéria. As perhaps the most ubiquitous icon of the horror genre in the early twenty-first century, the zombie lends itself to both shifts and transformations in the religious and cultural experiences of Caribbean and Latin American people. This includes their racist displacement and oppression by white colonialism. The zombie, along with other Vodou spirits such as the Jumbie, was first brought to the attention of colonial readers in horrific tales of slave religion, barbaric ritual, and black magic. Vodou and its ceremonies also played an integral role in the uprising of Haitian and Jamaican slaves during two separate rebellions. However, despite repeated attempts to suppress and delegitimize its practice, Vodou survived by becoming intermixed with the European colonists’ native Catholicism. The interest in Vodou traditions was rekindled in the early twentieth century by both white and African authors playing to colonial mythology and romanticism, and by Caribbean authors looking to understand their religious traditions and the horrors of their past.

The reinvigoration of the zombie in the twentieth century also fit with the turn to the body in the mid-twentieth-century horror aesthetic. As well as making literature more recognizably categorized as horror, the body was the focus of multiple religious and theological fears. In a great many of these books, possession and dispossession symbolize a persistent supernatural dimension. By portraying the evil invasion of the female body, for example, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) suggest a threat from forces not only above and beyond but also within. Unnatural violations also occur in Noel Scanlon’s Black Ashes (1986), a book on the insidious horrors of reincarnation and a Hindu god-demon named Ravana who incarnates as a creepy and charismatic leader of an Indian cult. Other authors return to more typical psycho-religious Gothic ground, albeit in more gruesome manifestations. While echoes of America’s dark English heritage and sinister pagan rites appear in Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973), Haitian Vodou is to blame for a series of child sacrifices in Nicholas Condé’s The Religion (1987).

Other authors reflexively explored these literary themes alongside historical events and interpretations of scripture. For example, racism and anti-Semitism are the essence of evil in Dan Simmons’s novel Carrion Comfort (1989). Similarly, in his earlier book, Song of Kali (1985), the setting of Calcutta, the grotesque Hindu goddess Kali, and the hideous ceremony of human sacrifice are used to address such diverse fears as the fear of women, the fear of losing children, and humanity’s unholy passion for violence. In all of these twentieth-century examples, the body—its sexuality, transgression, and ruin—continues to pose as our most absorbing theological conundrum. This culminates most perversely in the “splatterpunk” movement that marked the closing of the century. The supernatural vocabulary and Christian values that underpin the prolific writings of Stephen King, James Herbert, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Peter Straub are made strange and ambivalent by their alternation between apocalyptic and emancipatory transgressions of the body.

Religious Horror around the World

Although Asian horror occasionally borrows the aesthetics of Western Christianity and the Gothic, its supernatural concepts are derived not from Christian notions of sin, evil, or anti-Catholicism, but from various forms of Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist philosophy. In Japanese religious folk tradition, for instance, the Onryō are female ghosts that have died in tragic or unlawful circumstances and are revered as minor deities. Unless pacified by homage and ritual (onyrōgami), these spirits can become restless and nasty, inflicting terrible justice and vengeance upon the guilty.

Islamic horror stories are populated by Jinns, unseen spirits that are derived from the Qur’an and that can manifest as human or animal. Jinns can be good or bad, playful or vengeful. However, as is often the case in these largely conservative stories, an evil Jinn can also be neutralized by prayer and leading a good Muslim life.

American Jewish Gothic stories convey complex fears about the mutability and instability of memory, time, place, and “authentic” Jewish identity. The Dybbuk is a Jewish poltergeist whose name is derived from Hebrew meaning “attachment” or “cling to.” Other undead spirits seeking homes in human bodies appear in early Kabbalistic texts.

Religion and the supernatural continue to be a characteristic of contemporary horror. Religious horror is shaped by many issues, including nationality, race, sexuality, history, politics, and, of course, theology. It is also the case that the genre’s use of supernaturalism challenges and complicates such issues as the boundary between flesh and spirit, the material and immaterial world, and transcendence and transgression. There is not just one religious horror, but religious horrors with many different forms and levels of dread and fear. These change as writers transform and renew the form in order to explore shifting cultural and religious concerns.

Eleanor Beal

See also: Apocalyptic Horror; Occult Fiction; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Devils and Demons; The Exorcist; Harvest Home; Herbert, James; King, Stephen; Koontz, Dean; Machen, Arthur; The Monk; The Numinous; Rosemary’s Baby; Song of Kali; Spiritualism; Straub, Peter.

Further Reading

Beal, Timothy. 2002. Religion and Its Monsters. New York: Routledge.

Geary, Robert F. 1993. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief and Literary Change. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.

Ingebretson, Edward J. 1996. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe.

Nelson, Victoria. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

O’Malley, Robert. 2006. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Porte, Joel. 1974. “In the Hands of an Angry God.” In The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, 42–64. Pullman: Washington State University Press.

SHAKESPEAREAN HORRORS

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has been an important influence on almost all genres and modes of literature; he casts a significant shadow over literary endeavors to this day. Known principally as a playwright, he also wrote poetical works, acted, and was a partner in the business of the Globe Theatre. He has rarely been considered specifically in regard to horror writing, however, despite the wealth of horror tropes and horrific images contained within his work. This is perhaps mainly due to the perceived gulf between Shakespeare as exemplar of high literary culture and the traditionally low esteem paid to horror as trashy sensationalism. Such a tradition ignores the ways in which the bodily effect of horror fits perfectly with the ideas of humors and passions that prevailed in Shakespeare’s time. Theater was believed to have a physical effect on its audiences, with their emotional response being a result of actual changes to their humoral makeup (changes that still have a metaphorical afterlife even after the decline of humoral theories).

Shakespearean horrors are largely in keeping with the early modern contexts of their authorship. Consequently, supernatural and spectral horror predominates. The ghosts and witches of contemporary cultural belief find their place on Shakespeare’s stage, alongside the flair for horrific spectacle that characterized the new professional theater. Competing with—often sharing the same performance spaces as—popular public entertainments such as bearbaiting meant that playwrights were keen to appeal to the more bloodthirsty interests of their paying customers. The hugely popular genre of revenge tragedy in particular fits well with horror, as it used increasingly lurid and sensational ways to torture its participants and thrill its audience.

The one play that has attracted most attention for its horror elements is Titus Andronicus (ca. 1594), although this attention has traditionally been far from positive. Generally dismissed as immature juvenilia and, indeed, often argued against being by Shakespeare at all, this dark tragedy bursts onto the stage with mutilations, decapitations, sacrifices, and forced cannibalism. In exploring the results of a corrupt emperor’s rule, the play revels in a view of the human body that is surprisingly close to the modern “torture-porn” of the likes of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). It is perhaps no surprise that productions of Titus invariably result in audience members fainting—a fact that publicity material delights in mentioning. In the figure of Titus’s daughter, Lavinia—savagely raped and then mutilated (her hands cut off and tongue removed)—we can see an early example of the displayed victim that haunts horror throughout the ages. Because she is unable to express the identity of her attackers, her family is forced to attempt to interpret what has happened through their engagement with her horrific wounds, a clear metaphorical comparison with the role of horror literature in culture more generally. Although clearly an early work, Titus is far more sophisticated than traditional critics’ dismissals might indicate. The play highlights the traumatic and horrific results of war, and its layering of staged atrocities leads to a bloody climax that wipes the stage clean of the majority of the combatants. The audience is left simultaneously appalled and thrilled by the excesses that they have witnessed—a conflation of feelings that is quintessentially related to the literature of horror.

Shakespearean Horrors in the Modern World

Such is Shakespeare’s influence and importance, there have been many attempts to adapt his plays into every imaginable media form. Notable examples within horror literature and film include:

•Theatre of Blood (1973): Possibly the greatest work of Shakespearean-influenced horror, this delightful movie stars Vincent Price as Edward Lionheart, an actor who takes vengeance on his scornful critics through elaborate devices taken straight from Shakespeare’s plays.

•Titus (1999): Julie Taymor’s film version of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play combines arthouse and horror techniques to provide a stunning and spectacular adaptation. Extra horror associations are achieved by the casting of Anthony Hopkins as Titus following his performance as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and its sequels, particularly given the cannibalistic ending.

•Romeo and Juliet vs. the Living Dead (2009): Low-budget and enthusiastic movie mash-up of Shakespeare’s classic tale of doomed love and the ubiquitous zombie.

•Shakespeare Undead (2010): Along the lines of many horror mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this novel recasts William Shakespeare as an immortal vampire with powers of necromancy, handily explaining the breadth of his knowledge and experience. While the first novel is equal parts Twilight and Shakespeare in Love, the sequel, Zombie Island, retells the story of The Tempest through a period version of the Romero-esque zombie movie.

While Titus Andronicus may be the clearest and most visceral of Shakespearean horrors, it is certainly not his only dalliance with darkness. The social and religious upheaval of the early modern era in which he was writing meant that there was a wealth of Gothic horror tropes on which he could draw. Not surprisingly, these moments of horror found expression predominantly, although not exclusively, in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Ghosts populate his history plays, and the fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream are not necessarily the innocent Victorian sprites of contemporary understanding. The transformation of Bottom in the same play also has potential for a much more horrific portrayal of the closeness between human and animal than its usual slapstick performance. However, it is the tragedies that represent the most developed and engaged examples of Shakespearean horrors.

Julius Caesar (1600) can be seen as a precursor of the more surreal moments of Giallo movies, with its horrific portents, highly choreographed stabbing, and musically driven ghost scene. Although far less overtly horror-based than Shakespeare’s earlier Roman play, the supernatural and gory elements drive the play’s narrative and drama, with the focus on Caesar’s bloodied robe in particular bringing the audience face-to-face with the violent result of ambition. Such a use of horror elements is continued in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1600–1601). Shakespeare’s most celebrated play is dramatically dominated by the Freudian/supernatural presence of the former king’s ghost. The repeated calls for Hamlet to “Remember” his father set the tone for centuries of hauntings, and productions on stage and screen have continually been heavily influenced by contemporary horror techniques in their representations of this spectral figure.

The claustrophobic tragedy of Othello (1604) contains a vein of problematic racist representations of the titular Moor. The play itself is more nuanced but does depict an early modern idea of the black soldier as monstrous and inhuman. This representation is a development from that of the villainous Aaron in Titus—a character who takes great relish in his role as villain. Instead, the horror of Othello is in the readiness of civilized society to dehumanize an individual labeled as “other.” This effect is achieved in part through reference to contemporary ideas of truly monstrous races that were popular in travel literature of the time: “And of the Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (Shakespeare 1997, Act 1, Scene 3, Lines 142–144). The introduction of such creatures leads to a spectrum of humanity that Iago exploits in horrific terms of proto–white supremacy. The eventual death of Desdemona is a prototypical foreshadowing of the enraged and murderous madman that would become a staple of sensationalist horror literature.

If Othello is claustrophobic and enclosed geographically, then King Lear (1606) takes the horror inside and relocates it into the mental degeneration of the eponymous ruler. While most famously providing a chilling examination of the effects of alienation and senility, the play also makes use of early modern traditions of demons and fairies throughout Lear’s isolation on the heath. The liberal use of Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) relocates the satirical listing of demons into a pagan, primitive version of folk horror in which individuals feel threatened by forces lurking just outside of their understanding. Of course, Lear also infamously features perhaps Shakespeare’s most vivid use of “splatter” as the Duke of Gloucester’s eyes are savagely removed onstage and then stamped on.

Macbeth (1607) can be seen as the culmination of Shakespeare’s various uses of horror imagery and motifs, containing as it does a veritable “best of” with gore, ghosts, witches, and supernatural omens. Often considered to be capitalizing on contemporary concerns with witchcraft (James VI and I having written a book on the subject), its repeated use of motifs such as the omens and hauntings from Julius Caesar suggest that Shakespeare was providing his paying audience with what they were demanding. This popular aspect of Shakespeare as a writer further undermines the traditional split between him as high culture and horror; in many ways he was working within a tradition similar to that of the sensationalist writers of later periods.

In Macbeth the horror elements are crucial in developing and furthering the plot, resulting in the play being more clearly identifiable as a horror text than any other of Shakespeare’s works, apart perhaps from the body horror of Titus Andronicus. The dark setting, full of supernatural and folkloric aspects, creates an oppressive world that serves as a combination of the claustrophobia of Othello and the pagan outdoors of Lear. Aside from this atmosphere of dread, Macbeth contains a number of key iconic moments of stage horror. The uncanny appearance of the bearded witches, Banquo’s bloody ghost, and gory visions emanating from the witches’ cauldron are all powerful moments of horror that have been memorably depicted on both stage and screen. The associations with horror are perhaps most clearly shown by the borrowings form horror cinema in movie versions of Macbeth, ranging from Roman Polanski’s 1971 version to the most recent one directed by Justin Kurzel (2015). The latter’s use of ideas of post-traumatic stress disorder is a particularly effective marriage of old and new to update the horrific elements of Shakespeare’s text.

Macbeth and horror are connected outside of the realms of the text, however, as can be seen in long-standing theatrical superstition. Actors traditionally refuse to utter the name of the “Scottish play” outside of performance for fear that it will lead to a horrific accident. It is surely no coincidence that this superstitious belief applies to the most developed horror text of Shakespeare’s canon. The dark and malevolent atmosphere of Macbeth leaks from the world of the play and into its wider cultural reception. While Macbeth is the culmination of Shakespeare’s use of tragic horror, it is not his last exploration of horror in drama.

Shakespeare’s late plays have often proved difficult to categorize, representing a departure from the traditional genres of comedy and tragedy, and variously labeled as romances, tragicomedies, or simply “late plays.” Some of this generic confusion can be attributed to their use of horror—moments that often seem particularly out of place with the general mood of these plays. Cymbeline features a decapitated corpse during one particularly horrific scene when the play’s heroine, Imogen (or Innogen depending on the edition), marks her face with its blood under the false belief that it is her fiancé, Posthumous. This visceral set piece shows the tragicomic turn in these plays, as it simultaneously provides a moment of stage horror and the potential for a comic ending as the audience knows the body is in fact that of the villainous Cloten. The Winter’s Tale takes place in an atmosphere of pagan belief and suspected witchcraft, seemingly concluding with the magical transformation of a statue into a living person. The play also includes the most famous stage direction in theater—Exit, pursued by a bear—a nod to the shared performance space and a precursor of the creature feature genre that would rise to prominence in twentieth-century horror.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is often considered one of his most modern plays, being understood as an exploration of colonialism and Western exploitation. The incursion onto the island by the shipwrecked Italians plays out like a prototype for King Kong with the monstrous ape represented by the problematic figure of Caliban, variously described as a fish and a monster. The drunkard Trinculo’s first reaction is to consider the potential rewards for exhibiting the islander at shows in England. Of course, more modern approaches to the play reposition Caliban as the colonized victim and Prospero as the oppressive monster.

Shakespearean horrors, therefore, cover a wide range of the areas that subsequent horror writers would go on to use, cementing his role as an important influence on—and participant in—the literature of fear. The centrality of his works in culture and education mean that Shakespeare’s use of horror creates and works within a shared cultural space in which his poetry and horror sit side by side.

Stephen Curtis

See also: Ghost Stories; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Three, Reference Entries: Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Aebischer, Pascale. 2004. Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Desmet, Christy, and Anne Williams, eds. 2009. Shakespearean Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Drakakis, John, and Dale Townsend, eds. 2008. Gothic Shakespeares. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Pridham, Matthew. 2012. “Razors to the Heart: William Shakespeare and Horror Fiction.” Weird Fiction Review, April 10. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/04/razors-to-the-heart-william-shakespeare-and-horror-fiction.

Shakespeare, William. [1604] 1997. Othello. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 2091–2174. New York and London: Norton.

Theatre of Blood. [1973] 2002. DVD. Directed by Douglas Hickox. Twentieth-Century Fox.

Yeo, Colin. “‘Supp’d full with horrors’: 400 years of Shakespearean Supernaturalism.” The Conversation, April 20, 2016. http://theconversation.com/suppd-full-with-horrors-400-years-of-shakespearean-supernaturalism-57129.

SMALL PRESS, SPECIALTY, AND ONLINE HORROR

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, horror fiction has found a comfortable home within small presses, specialty presses, and “alternative” outlets. These venues have functioned as markets for less commercial works and as proving grounds for authors developing their skills. The small press market has been traditionally dependent on both the technologies that support cheap production and the trends popularized by mainstream publishers. Yet small presses have often flourished in those periods of history when mainstream horror publishing has been declining, as popular and midlist writers have sought out new or niche venues for their works.

The early history of these venues centered upon the works of H. P. Lovecraft, an amateur press enthusiast whose work was first published in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. He and his circle—Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and a few others—frequently shared materials. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, a prominent member of this circle, August Derleth, joined with Donald Wandrei to establish Arkham House in Sauk City, Wisconsin, to release a memorial collection of Lovecraft’s short stories, The Outsider and Others (1939). After the end of World War II a number of other small presses such as Prime Press (established by Oswald Train in 1947) similarly made it their mission to rescue material that had once been published in the pulp magazines.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of paperback and trade publishing of horror books. Consequently, the small presses that had flourished in the postwar period began to decline, although Arkham House continued to publish a small but steady list under pressure from trade publishers and science fiction small presses. During this period, it was in comics, such as EC Comics’ The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and The Crypt of Terror, where horror remained most popular until the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953 caused many horror comics to fold. A few high-quality magazines such as Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook (1968) and Stuart Schiff’s Whispers (1970) began to pick up the slack in the tail end of the decade.

In the 1970s the public interest in horror surged, driven by the mainstream successes of works such as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and the early novels of Stephen King, including Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977), many of which were popularized by film adaptations. The small press market fed off these successes, spawning magazines such as The Horror Show, Grue, Pulphouse, and Cemetery Dance and presses such as Necronomicon Press, which continued alongside the stalwart Arkham House. Throughout the late seventies, a number of important writers got their start in the small presses, including Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja, and Poppy Z. Brite. Other commercially successful writers such as Joe R. Lansdale, Lucius Shepard, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Stephen King published in both large and small venues, depending on the nature of their work.

The importance of small presses was consolidated in the 1980s as Cemetery Dance Publications, Dark Harvest, Borderlands Press, and Dark Regions, among others, began their operations. These presses produced a range of titles from high-quality hardcover releases to limited editions for collectors to trade paperbacks. In 1988, John Gregory Betancourt, Darrell Schweitzer, and George H. Scithers revived Weird Tales, the magazine famous for publishing many of Lovecraft’s original works, which had ceased operations in 1954. It saw success initially with authors such as Ligotti, Tanith Lee, and Brian Lumley.

A Selective Timeline of Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror

1923

H. P. Lovecraft publishes “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” in the second issue of Weird Tales.

1939

Arkham House is founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to produce a memorial volume of Lovecraft’s fiction.

1954

Estes Kefauver leads the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, causing many horror comic publishers to censor or cancel their series.

1974

The hardcover edition of Stephen King’s Carrie is released by Doubleday, marking the beginning of the horror boom.

1986

Tor begins the first dedicated horror line from a major press.

1988

Weird Tales is revived by George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer.

1996

Zebra Press, the flagship imprint of Kensington Publishing and one of the last remaining major publishers of horror, is discontinued.

1997

Sponsored by Leisure Books, ChiZine.com is founded as an online magazine.

1998

Darren McKeeman conceives of connecting a worldwide community of horror lovers through www.Gothic.net.

2009

The global recession initiates a substantial decline in the traditional publishing industry.

2010

Leisure Books announces that Dan D’Auria will no longer edit its horror line, and all print publications are slated to continue as eBooks.

2012

John Joseph Adams successfully crowdfunds the launch of Nightmare Magazine.

But by the second half of the decade the genre had begun to stagnate as the market became saturated. In 1990, Tor, the first company to begin a dedicated horror line, shifted from genre to mainstream, and by 1996 Zebra was discontinued, sounding the death knell for the last of the major American horror lines. Leisure Books, an imprint of the mid-sized company Dorchester Publishing, continued to publish horror alongside Westerns and thrillers, but it was one of the few remaining publishers with industry heft. While the main market was faltering, small presses picked up some of the slack. By 1993, they were responsible for publishing almost 25 percent of all new horror novels, anthologies, and collections. Three influential editors of anthologies came to prominence within this period: Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, and Paula Guran.

A number of important new presses entered the field as the end of the 1990s approached. Of these, two of the most important were, arguably, the San Francisco–based Night Shade Books and Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing in Hornsea, established in 1997 and 1999, respectively. PS Publishing continues to be one of the most successful small presses in Britain. Other presses of this period included Sarob Press, which produced collectors’ editions of new and old fiction; Subterranean Press, which produced a quarterly magazine alongside novels collections and chapbooks; Ash-Tree Press in Canada, which rescued forgotten works in the ghost story tradition by writers such as M. R. James; Necronomicon Press, devoted to the Lovecraft tradition and responsible for a range of scholarly magazines; and Tartarus Press, which specialized in literary fiction with a supernatural bent and supported authors such as Robert Aickman. Magazine publishing continued with The 3rd Alternative, primarily focused on science fiction, fantasy, and slipstream stories.

By end of the century, the Internet was beginning to offer new possibilities. In March, 2000, Stephen King published his novella Riding the Bullet as an eBook freely downloadable for the first week. The publicity stunt was so successful that the hosting servers crashed. Digital publishing offered small presses and magazines a way to reduce their printing and distribution costs while still making fiction available to the reading public. A popular electronic market during this phase was Darren McKeeman’s www.Gothic.net, but others arose with varying levels of success, including Imaginary Worlds, Sinister Element, and Terror Tales. Chiaroscuro: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words (known as ChiZine.com), founded by Brett Alexander Savory in 1997, was one of the few eZines that worked its way up to paying professional rates. In 2009 it was expanded to include a successful print arm, ChiZine Publications.

As the global recession devastated the published industry in 2009, the small press market offered alternatives to the midlist writers who were increasingly under pressure within larger houses. New technologies such as print-on-demand continued to make publishing an attractive, if perilous, pursuit for those with an entrepreneurial spirit. A number of imprints took advantage of these circumstances, including Hippocampus Press, Grey Friar Press, Mythos Books, and Shroud Publishing. Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press, and Tartarus Press continued to produce high-quality works of fiction, and editor Sean Wallace acquired Prime from Wildside Press, which by this point was publishing the long-running Weird Tales magazine. But the economic climate and the changes to the publishing environment caused a number of small presses to fold, including Andrew Hook’s Elastic Press and Chris Teague’s Pendragon Press.

In 2009, online giant Amazon also released its second generation of the Kindle, a specialized e-reader. This would shape the industry for many years as publishers decided how best to integrate eBooks alongside printed books. While this technology benefited small presses to some extent, several experiments in eBook-only publishing were unsuccessful. In 2010, mass market publisher Leisure Books announced that Dan D’Auria, who had been responsible for its horror line, would be let go and that they would no longer produce print publications. In 2011, a group of writers called for the company to be boycotted for publishing eBooks for which they had not acquired digital rights.

During this period, electronic magazines came into their own. Strange Horizons was launched in 2000 by Mary Anne Mohanraj and continues to operate today. Apex Magazine also continues to publish a range of fiction and reviews, and former editor Lynne M. Thomas recently launched Uncanny Magazine. Print-on-demand also made print anthologies more attractive than magazine publication for many editors. One of the few surviving print-only publications is Black Static, which was previously published as The Third Alternative and was acquired in 2005 by Andy Cox and TTA Press. These venues tended to divide themselves along internal genre lines, with some favoring a more literary strand while others such as Sinister Grin and Raw Dog Screaming Press have explored bizarro fiction, a visceral brand inspired by the late 1980s turn to schlock and gore. Authors who have found their foothold in the small presses of the late 1990s and early 2000s include Brian Evenson, Laird Barron, Kelly Link, and Reggie Oliver, among others.

As the publishing industry has begun to stabilize, the last decade has seen some presses falter while others have reached maturity. In 2010 Night Shade Books, a prominent publisher, was placed on probation by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for irregularities in payment. Two years later the company, facing bankruptcy, was sold to Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing. And yet PS Publications and Tartarus Press continue to produce high-quality specialty editions in the United Kingdom, while Small Beer, Dark Regions, Hippocampus Press, Samhain Publishing, and Permuted Press publish a range of new fiction in America. Canada has distinguished itself largely through the efforts of ChiZine Publications and Undertow Press launched by Michael Kelly, while Australian publishers such as Ticonderoga, Severed Press, and Twelfth Planet Press have also taken advantage of the new paradigm of digital production. Nightmare Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, released its first issue in 2012 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Likewise, a greater number of writers who first published with small presses have moved into mainstream success, including Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, Jeff VanderMeer, and, most recently, Michael Andrew Hurley, whose novel The Loney was first published by Tartarus Press in 2014, only to win Costa’s prestigious First Novel Award after a successful reissue by John Murray in 2015.

Small press and specialty publishing from the beginning of the twentieth century onward has been driven in part by a desire to innovate and in part a desire to conserve the materials of the past. The small presses have traditionally been home to materials that were not expected to find a widespread audience, either because the writing was too experimental or extreme or because the traditional market for those works was declining. But as technology has made small-scale production cheaper, there has been a concomitant rise in publishing of exactly this kind. The chapbooks and hand-stapled ephemera of the past decades have largely migrated to digital formats or else been collected into cheap print-on-demand anthologies. Likewise, the specialty presses that traditionally made their money from expensive limited editions have also begun to branch out into the mass eBook and print-on-demand trade market. Whereas in the horror boom of the 1980s small press publishing was influenced by the large publishers such as Tor, in fact, the trend seems to be reversing, with independent publishing providing the impetus for innovation. The result is that readers and writers are likely to encounter more choice in the materials they read and the formats available to them in the future.

Helen Marshall

See also: Horror Anthologies; Horror Comics; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Aickman, Robert; Arkham House; Barron, Laird; Campbell, Ramsey; Datlow, Ellen; Derleth, August; Etchison, Dennis; King, Stephen; Lee, Tanith; Ligotti, Thomas; Link, Kelly; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Oliver, Reggie; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Barron, Neil. 1999. Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Hantke, Steffen. 2008. “The Decline of the Literary Horror Market in the 1990s and Dell’s Abyss Series.” Journal of Popular Culture 41.1: 56–70.

Herald, Diana Tixier, and Wayne A. Wiegand, editor. 2006. Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Jones, Stephen. 2014. Best New Horror: # 1. Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing.

Morrison, Michael A. 1996. “After the Danse: Horror at the End of the Century.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Sutton, David, and Stan Nicholls. 2000. On the Fringe for Thirty Years: A History of Horror in the British Small Press. Birmingham: Shadow Publishing.

VAMPIRE FICTION FROM DRACULA TO LESTAT
AND BEYOND

Vampire fiction finds its origins in the vampire hysteria that swept across Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century, a period that saw officially sanctioned exhumations of villagers suspected of being vampires. German poets like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gottfried August Bürger, as in his ballad Lenore (1774)—which included a verse that gave rise to the line “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” (For the dead travel fast) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—soon began integrating into their works the figure of the vampire. But by the early part of the nineteenth century, romantics such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats began to try their own hands at vampire poetry in works such as The Giaour (1813), Christabel (1816), and Lamia (1820), respectively, which gave rise to the vampire as a distinct fictional trope.

It was not until Dr. John William Polidori’s anonymously published “The Vampyre; A Tale” (1819) in The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, however, that the enduring features of the vampire still seen today came into being. The first story of the undead “successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre,” according to Sir Christopher Frayling, “The Vampyre” was falsely attributed upon publication to Lord Byron, for whom Polidori had previously worked as a personal physician (Frayling 1991, 108). Polidori based his work on the fragment of a novel Byron wrote during the now celebrated ghost story competition (at which Polidori was present) between him, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley at Byron’s home, the Villa Diodati, by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, the same competition that would produce Frankenstein (1818). Polidori’s chief vampire, Ruthven, which he stylized after Byron, is an enigmatic lord who enters London society where he encounters a young Englishman named Aubrey. They become fast friends and travel together, but various events during their adventures reveal to Aubrey that Ruthven is in fact a vampire. The novel ends with Aubrey dying insane and Ruthven marrying Aubrey’s sister, who turns up dead with her blood drained. Polidori’s story found immediate popular success, no doubt partially as a result of being initially attributed to Byron, but mainly due to its appropriation of the Gothic conventions for which the public longed. Despite its success, “The Vampyre,” and Byron’s public refutation of and disdain for the story, destroyed Polidori’s career. However, it transformed the vampire from the hideous walking corpse of folklore into the form recognized today of an aristocrat who feeds upon high society.

Polidori’s formula surfaces again in the short story “The Mysterious Stranger,” first published in German as “Der Fremde” by Karl Adolf von Wachsmann in Erzählungen und Novellen (1844), then in installments in the popular literary magazine Würzburger Conversationsblatt (May–June 1847), and then it was translated into English and published anonymously as “The Mysterious Stranger” in Chambers’s Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts (October–December 1853) and later reprinted in Odds and Ends (1860). The story begins with a party of Austrian travelers led by the Knight of Fahnenberg, who has just inherited a large estate in the Carpathian Mountains. Among the party are Franziska, the knight’s daughter, her cousin and suitor, the Baron Franz von Kronstein, and Bertha, Franziska’s female companion who is admired by the courageous Knight of Woislaw, presently off in Turkey fighting in a war. Soon it becomes apparent that a torrential snowstorm is upon them, so they hasten their journey onward only to find that howling “reed-wolves” have encircled the party. The travelers soon approach the abandoned ruins of Castle Klatka, and fearing an attack, they seek refuge there. Before the travelers can reach the ruins, however, the wolves begin their assault. They fear the worst until suddenly a tall man appears out of nowhere between the wolves and the party. Knightly and old-fangled in dress, the stranger raises his hand in a waving gesture, which halts the advance of the wolves and sends them in retreat into the woods. The travelers watch as their rescuer says nothing and simply returns to the path leading up to the castle, where he seems to vanish into the ruins.

The travelers eventually return to explore the castle, finding among its ruins the coffin of “Ezzelin de Klatka, Eques.” At sunset, appearing out of nowhere again is the tall stranger, who calls himself Azzo von Klatka. Like Dracula, he is about forty, tall, thin, and pale, with piercing grey eyes, black hair, and black beard. The thankful travelers invite their rescuer to pay them a visit at their neighboring estate, and soon the stranger makes frequent dinner visits after nightfall. In the meantime, Franziska, who has taken a fancy to the stranger, slowly becomes anemic, complains of bad dreams and nightly visitors who enter her bedroom in mist, and starts to bear a small wound on her throat. Then, arriving just in time is the Knight of Woislaw, a proto–Van Helsing character who, given his dealings abroad, suspects almost immediately that a vampire is afoot. Woislaw then takes Franziska back to Castle Klatka, where he instructs her to drive three long spikes through the coffin lid of “Ezzelin de Klatka.” Afterward, Franziska quickly recovers from her strange illness, and Azzo, the mysterious stranger, is not seen or heard from again.

“The Mysterious Stranger,” like Polidori’s The Vampyre, obviously had a great effect on Stoker’s writing of Dracula, but it was not the last to do so. Serialized works like James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s “penny dreadful” Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, first published in The Dark Blue (1871–1872), then reprinted in Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), did much to firmly establish the vampire in the popular imagination of the Victorian era, and, in doing so, influenced Stoker. Sir Francis Varney was the first vampire to establish, at least in English, what would become several standard tropes in vampire fiction: vampires bearing fangs and entering through windows at night to attack sleeping maidens, leaving behind two puncture wounds in the neck, and displaying hypnotic powers coupled with incredible strength and agility. Though it is not unreasonable to speculate whether Rymer or Prest had indeed read “Der Fremde” in its original German and mirrored Varney somewhat after Wachsmann’s “Azzo,” what is certainly their creation is a vampire who drinks and eats as a human, if only to disguise himself, and who acts upon his vampirism only when his energy is running low, an unfortunate condition Varney simultaneously loathes and is powerless to ignore. In this way, Varney is a prototype of the “sympathetic vampire” that would come into its own more than a hundred years later. The erotic elements seen in Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire novella Carmilla show through in Stoker’s Dracula as well, particularly in Stoker’s characterization of his vampire women. Carmilla is also set in Styria, where Stoker originally set Dracula before moving the count’s home to Transylvania.

Stoker’s greatest achievement in Dracula, a novel he spent seven years writing (longer than any of his other novels), lies in his combining a number of tropes from previous vampire literature and displaying them to perfection in Dracula’s pages. Although Stoker did not invent many of the tropes he used, he did build upon them, and Dracula’s incredible popularity and immensely positive reception by critics only helped to fan the public’s association of these tropes with his novel. One example is Count Dracula’s transformation into a bat. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, no doubt influenced by the vampire hysteria and poetic verse of the previous century, identified and named the vampire bat (Phyllostoma rotundum) in Paraguay in 1810, and it was during the nineteenth century that the vampire bat and the supernatural vampire slowly fused together. American newspapers had appropriated the figure of the vampire as early as the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, as a pejorative to describe everything from corporations and banks to bankers and politicians. But when science invoked the vampire to name and describe certain species of bat (and later, squid), and with the publication of Polidori’s instantly popular The Vampyre in 1819, newspapers and literature worked eagerly at fusing the supernatural vampire and the vampire bat into one mythology. For a while, a new vampire hysteria spread across the globe when folks started seeing (i.e., misidentifying) vampire bats everywhere (despite their being a species native to Central and South America only). Eventually, a conflation of the supernatural vampire with the relatively harmless vampire bat occurred in the figures of the “winged vampire” or vampire “bat-winged” person, who alternately began to play a prominent role in figurative political rhetoric and even as an American literary trope. This conflation is also almost assuredly what fanned the late-Victorian image of the vampire as having fangs (a trait the European vampire of folklore lacked entirely). (Take, for example, the fanged vampire in the form of the beautiful “Vespertilia” in Anne Crawford’s “A Mystery of the Campagna” [1887], vespertilio, or “evening bat,” being a common variety of bat found the world over.) Thus, although the eighteenth-century vampire of folklore and poetic verse was responsible for the vampire bat’s subsequent nomenclature and frightening mystique, it was probably the vampire bat that, in turn, fitted the literary vampire with its iconic fangs. After Dracula, fangs, crucifixes, traveling boxes (or coffins), mirrors, and garlic were to become standard fare in vampire literature through the next century and into the twenty-first.

Draculas the World Over in Film, Television, and
Video Games

1921

Drakula halála (Hungary/Austria)

1922

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Germany)

1931

Dracula (USA); Drácula (USA)

1936

Dracula’s Daughter (USA)

1943

Son of Dracula (USA)

1944

House of Frankenstein (USA)

1945

House of Dracula (USA)

1948

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (USA)

1953

Drakula Istanbul’da (Turkey)

1956

Matinee Theatre, “Dracula” (USA)—Television

1958

Dracula (UK); The Return of Dracula (USA)

1959

Onna Kyuketsuki (Japan)

1961

El Mundo de los vampiros (Mexico)

1963

Mga Manugang ni Drakula (Philippines)

1964

Tetsuwan Atom, “Vampire Vale” (Japan)—Television, Animation; Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (Philippines/USA)

1966

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (UK); Emotion: densetsu no gogo=itsukamita Dracula (Japan)

1967

Zinda Laash (Pakistan)

1968

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (UK); Kaibutsu-Kun (Japan)—Animation

1969

Dracula and the Boys; aka Does Dracula Really Suck? (USA)—Adult; Drakulita (Philippines); Santo en El Tesoro de Dracula (Mexico)

1970

El Conde Drácula (Spain/West Germany/Italy/Liechtenstein); Scars of Dracula (UK); Taste the Blood of Dracula (UK)

1971

The Electric Company (USA)—Television

1972

Blacula (USA)

Dracula A.D. 1972 (UK)

1973

Dracula (UK)—Television; Santo y Blue Demon contra Drácula y el Hombre Lobo (Mexico); The Satanic Rites of Dracula (UK); Scream, Blacula, Scream (USA)

1974

Blood for Dracula (Italy); The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Hong Kong/UK)

1975

Deafula (USA)

1977

Count Dracula (UK)—Television

1979

Dracula (USA/UK); Love at First Bite (USA); Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (West Germany)

1981

The Count (USA)—Video Game

1983

Gayracula (USA)—Adult; Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, “Transylvanian Connection” (USA)—Animation/Television

1985

Kyûketsuki hantâ D (Japan)—Animation

1990

Akumajo Dracula (Japan)—Video Game

1992

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (USA); Khooni Dracula (India)

2000

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy vs. Dracula” (USA)—Television; Dracula 2000 (USA)

2012

Hotel Transylvania (USA)—Animation

2013

Dracula (UK/USA)—Television

2014

Dracula Untold (USA); Penny Dreadful (USA/Ireland/UK)—Television

Short fiction featuring vampire characters continued to see print in the early part of the twentieth century, but with Dracula’s lucrative adaptation on the British and American stage from the mid- through late 1920s, and the subsequent film version by Universal in 1931, Count Dracula would continue to dominate the public’s image of the vampire. However, one notable exception came in 1954 with Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), a postapocalyptic zombie-vampire novel that is now considered a contemporary classic among horror fiction in general and vampire literature in particular. The story’s protagonist is Robert Neville, a resident of Los Angeles who has become the only survivor of a pandemic whose victims have returned from the dead, hide out by day, and venture about by night in search of human blood. Neville is immune to the disease as a result, he thinks, of being bitten by a vampire bat years earlier. While I Am Legend is revered for its vampiric storyline, of equal note is the way in which Matheson’s vampires break radically from the traditional literary archetype of the Romantic and Victorian periods by reverting back to the older, preliterary vampire that had ruled the “vampire hysteria” of the eighteenth century (though, in Matheson’s novel, vampire hunters may now add to their arsenal the use of garlic, stakes, and mirrors, tools deriving from folklore but popularized in Stoker’s Dracula).

Although the late twentieth century continued to see traditional works of vampire fiction, such as Stephen King’s immensely popular ’Salem’s Lot (1975), which reimagined Stoker’s Dracula story around modern-day small-town America (in Maine, to be precise), something thematically important happened in the late 1960s that was to have a lasting effect on vampire fiction, remaining visible even today. Barnabas Collins, the Dracula-type vampire in Dan Curtis’s television series Dark Shadows (1966–1971), firmly planted into the American consciousness the prospect of an incredibly sad, flawed, yet redeemable vampire with whom audiences could at last sympathize. This new character trait became immediately fashionable, surfacing again in Blacula (1972), Dan Curtis’s televised movie Dracula (1973), and in Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974). However, it was to have an equally profound effect on vampire literature, the mode that would prove to have the most lasting effect on subsequent vampire narratives—on screen and in print. Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976)—and, albeit to a lesser extent, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint-Germain series (1978–), beginning with Hôtel Transylvania (1978)—took the vampire mythos by storm.

Today, the current state of vampire literature and film is most immediately the result of the “vampire renaissance” that occurred roughly from the late 2000s through the early 2010s. This period heralded not only an explosion of vampire fictions, from Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series (2001–2013) and the subsequent televised adaptation True Blood (2008–2014) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008) and the subsequent film adaptations (2008–2012), but the decisive and definitive proliferation of the sympathetic vampire, a theme that began in its earliest form in Varney the Vampire, before being reimagined and redeveloped over a century later in Dark Shadows and then perfected in Interview with the Vampire.

John Edgar Browning

See also: Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part Three, Reference Entries: Carmilla; Dracula; I Am Legend; Interview with the Vampire; Penny Dreadful; Rice, Anne; Stoker, Bram; Vampires; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.

Further Reading

Anderson, Douglas A. 2010. “A Note on M. R. James and Dracula.” Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 1(2): 189–194.

Barber, Paul. 2010. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Browning, John Edgar. 2010. “The Mysterious Stranger.” In The Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, edited by S. T. Joshi. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Browning, John Edgar, ed. 2012. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Critical Feast, An Annotated Reference of Early Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1913. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.

Carter, Margaret L., ed. 1988. Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Carter, Margaret L. 1989. The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography (Studies in Speculative Fiction). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Crawford, Heide. 2016. The Origins of the Literary Vampire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Eighteen-Bisang, Robert, and Elizabeth Miller, eds. 2008. Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Frayling, Christopher. 1991. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber and Faber.

Matheson, Richard. 1954. I Am Legend. New York: Gold Medal Books/Fawcett Publications.

Miller, Elizabeth, ed. 2005. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 304). Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale.

Polidori, John William. 1819. The Vampyre: A Tale. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones.

Wachsmann, Karl Adolf von. 1844. Erzählungen und Novellen 21. Leipzig: Verlag von Carl Focke.

WEIRD AND COSMIC HORROR FICTION

While they have applications beyond his conceptions, the terms “weird fiction” and “cosmic horror” are both widely associated with the critical and fictional writings of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), whose influential study Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) helped to popularize and to some degree define them. However, Lovecraft’s essay does not consistently distinguish between them, nor does it serve as the final authority on their meaning. Later writers have understood both “weird” and “cosmic” horror in different but closely related ways. Cosmic and weird horror are closely intertwined, but at the same time they are potentially distinct literary modes that intersect in multiple ways with horror. Though there are many important writers of the weird and cosmic whose work is not generally understood as horror, it is also true that many of the writers who have had the greatest influence on the history of horror literature have done so largely because of their work in cosmic and weird fiction.

In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft defined a weird tale as one involving supernatural elements, but which nonetheless did not conform to the conventions of the Gothic novel as established initially by eighteenth-century British writers including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis and carried on in the nineteenth century by writers from Mary Shelley to Bram Stoker, or to those of the ghost story, which had been formalized particularly by Victorian writers including M. R. James and Rudyard Kipling. Lovecraft claims that the sine qua non (the irreducible element) of the weird tale is the creation of a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” and the suspension, if not violation, of “fixed laws of Nature” (Lovecraft 2012, 28).

Lovecraft presents Edgar Allan Poe as the most important figure in the development of weird fiction, claiming: “Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions” (Lovecraft 2012, 55). Lovecraft provides an alternative definition of weird fiction in a 1926 letter that also emphasizes Poe’s centrality: “As to what is meant by ‘weird’—and of course weirdness is by no means confined to horror—I should say that the real criterion is a strong impression of the suspension of natural laws or the presence of unseen worlds or forces close at hand,” going on to claim that “perhaps the supreme weird tale of all the ages—is to me The Fall of the House of Usher” (Lovecraft 1997, 2.69–70).

Here, too, the central idea behind Lovecraft’s definition of the weird is “the suspension of natural laws,” and this characteristic is one way of formulating a distinction between cosmic horror and weird fiction. In its narrowest and most identifiable sense, cosmic horror is an approach that fuses the affect and tone of horror with science fictional premises while following naturalistic principles, remaining to some degree compatible with contemporaneous scientific thought. In this sense, it is a literary mode closely related to the cosmic irony beloved of American naturalist writers (ca. 1890–1925) including Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane (both of whom were admired by Lovecraft), and to Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmic indifferentism, which emphasizes the insignificance of humanity in the unknown vastness of the universe. This breed of cosmic horror uses verisimilar writing techniques (i.e., techniques that make fictional stories appear true) to undermine the human presumption of knowledge, displaying the abyssal contrast between delusions of human exceptionalism and the reality that we are but one species of animal among thousands, struggling for survival on one planet among millions, in a universe whose virtually infinite reaches are beyond our meager ability to grasp or understand. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and At the Mountains of Madness (1936) are his greatest achievements in this mode, and important later examples include John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938), Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” (1940), Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Michael Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Dry Salvages (2004), Peter Watt’s Blindsight (2006), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), as well as films including Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982, itself based loosely on Campbell’s 1938 story).

However, as Lovecraft’s privileging of Poe’s “Usher” (a story whose occult themes and baroque style make it far removed from these examples) suggests, what he calls “weird” and in other instances “cosmic” is often markedly different from this narrow conception. In its broader sense, cosmic horror need not be tied to either realism or science fiction. It can draw on a wide variety of techniques, approaches, and literary modes to suspend or erode presumptions about the nature of reality, and this broader sense of the term becomes more nebulous, difficult to classify, and impossible to disentangle from weird fiction generally.

The word “weird,” originally associated with fate, predestination, prophecies, and related phenomena, has a venerable lineage in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first adjectival uses in Middle English near the turn of the fifteenth century, where it was often used attributively to describe the Fates and the three witches of British and European folklore that are descended from them. This usage appeared in Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1587, which would become the primary inspiration for the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

The term’s use in delineating a particular kind of fiction, however, dates to the early twentieth century. While clear links exist between the weird and literary modes of earlier epochs, most commentators agree that it is very much a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon. Central to the shift in meaning that led to “weird fiction” becoming a distinct literary concept and marketing category in the early twentieth century was the magazine Weird Tales, founded in 1923 by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger as a companion publication to Henneberger’s pulp crime magazine Detective Tales that would be devoted exclusively to horror fiction. Over the first two decades of its existence, Weird Tales became associated with fiction that moved away from the folkloric supernaturalism associated with earlier Gothic horror. Writers including H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, and Francis Stevens contributed stories in which science fictional concepts produced the combination of awe and terror that had once been the provenance of the supernatural beings of traditional folklore.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft was critical of Weird Tales’ tendency to publish more readily classifiable works of Gothic horror and action-oriented pulp science fiction, often to the exclusion of the more interstitial and challenging work that he considered “true” weird and cosmic fiction. His development of a germinal theory of weird fiction, which began in earnest two to three years after the magazine’s appearance, is partially informed by this critical reaction.

As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s compendious anthology The Weird (2012) demonstrates, the twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition of weird fiction, with its close ties to American naturalism on the one hand and pulp fiction on the other, drew upon and existed parallel to numerous other threads of weird fiction. These threads run through the work of writers from different cultural and linguistic traditions, with the canon that Lovecraft’s influential essay helped to establish being but one cluster in a much larger constellation.

Nevertheless, The Weird’s conception of weirdness shares the central epistemological emphasis of Lovecraft’s: it “strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges that failure as sign and symbol of our limitations” (VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2012, xv). In S. T. Joshi’s words, “the weird tale is an inherently philosophical mode in that it frequently compels us to address directly such fundamental issues as the nature of the universe and our place in it” (Joshi 1990, 11).

Rather than a fixed literary form or genre, weird fiction is best understood as a series of mutations and hybridizations of other literary forms. According to the VanderMeers, “As a twentieth and twenty-first century art form the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic” (VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2012, xv–xvi). Similarly, influential writer and scholar of weird fiction Michael Cisco (1970–), who describes his own work as “de-genred,” maintains that its transgeneric state is the most identifiable quality of weird fiction.

This makes weird fiction closely related to other modern and contemporary interstitial fictional modes, including New Wave science fiction, slipstream fiction, and bizarro fiction. Indeed, British writer Anna Kavan’s (1901–1968) 1967 novel Ice, which Christopher Priest identifies as a quintessential work of slipstream, could, with its menacing strangeness, ghastly beauty, and gradual creation of an atmosphere of anxious dread, be as productively read as an important mid-century example of weird horror.

This interstitial relationship between weird fiction and different precedent or contemporaneous literary movements can best be illustrated with a brief list of selected examples. The weird fictions of British writer Arthur Machen (1863–1947), one of the greatest influences on Lovecraft and his circle, bear many similarities to the Victorian Gothic novels of Bram Stoker or Richard Marsh. Like Stoker’s Dracula and Marsh’s The Beetle (both 1897), Machen’s novella The Great God Pan (1894) and novel The Three Impostors (1895, as much short story cycle as novel) are ultimately invasion narratives. Rooted in cultural anxieties linked to a particular moment in British colonial history and industrial globalization, they also share in common modernized approaches to the epistolary novel form.

Contrarily, the weird fictions of early twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) and the Poe-inspired Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965) are closely tied to the Edo-era popular movement Ero-Guro-Nansensu (Erotic-Grotesque Nonsense), which emphasized eroticism, decadence, and aestheticism. Those of Polish fine artist, playwright, and novelist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), who produced an important body of weird work including the story collection The Street of Crocodiles (1934) and the delirious autobiographical novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), like those of Austrian writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924), share more in common with literary modernism, while anticipating in many ways the existentialist and absurdist movements of the mid-twentieth century. Notably, both these writers continue to exert a powerful influence over many contemporary weird fiction writers, including Thomas Ligotti (1953–) and Michael Cisco.

Some of the most important mid- to late twentieth-century English-language works of weird horror, including fictions by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), Harlan Ellison (1934–), James Tiptree Jr. (1915–1987), Joanna Russ (1937–2011), Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), and Angela Carter (1940–1992), are closely linked to the New Wave movement(s) in speculative fiction. Coalescing first in the United Kingdom and then in North America in the second half of the twentieth century, New Wave writers fused genre tropes with avant-garde literary techniques and an adversarial stance toward received social and literary conventions. Similarly, a number of the most important weird writers of the 1990s, including Clive Barker (1952–), Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), Kathe Koja (1960–), and Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964–), became known for sexually transgressive work that both drew upon and subverted the literary techniques of mainstream horror boom icons including Stephen King and Peter Straub.

Since the 1990s, writers including China Miéville (1972–), M. John Harrison (1945–), and Jeff VanderMeer (1968–) have identified with what they call the “New Weird,” in part as a way to forcefully differentiate their genre-resistant approach to weird fiction both from the horror genre and from the pulp-era roots of the Anglo-American tradition centering on Lovecraft and Weird Tales. Others, including Laird Barron (1970–), Gemma Files (1968–), and Mark Samuels (1967–), tend to work recognizably with and through both the horror genre and the Lovecraft tradition.

Sean Moreland

See also: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part Three, Reference Entries: Ballard, J. G.; Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Blackwood, Algernon; Brite, Poppy Z.; Cisco, Michael; Dick, Philip K.; Dreams and Nightmares; Ellison, Harlan; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Joshi, S. T.; Kafka, Franz; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Machen, Arthur; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Samuels, Mark; Schulz, Bruno; VanderMeer, Jeff.

Further Reading

Everett, J., and Jeffrey H. Shanks, eds. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Studies in Supernatural Literature. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2012. “Poe, Lovecraft, and the Revolution in Weird Fiction.” Paper presented at Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the Poe Society, October 7. https://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/pl20121.htm.

Lovecraft, H. P. 1997. Selected Letters. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Ralickas, Vivian. 2008. “‘Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18, no. 3: 364.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2012. “The Weird: An Introduction.” In The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, xv–xx. New York: Tor.

YOUNG ADULT HORROR FICTION

Controversies over the consumption of horror fiction by young adults began as early as 1796 with the publication of then twenty-year-old Matthew Lewis’s shocking novel, The Monk. A story of Satanism, incest, and rape, The Monk is characterized by critics today as the product of “adolescent fantasy” and at the time of its publication was subject to venomous attacks by reviewers (Spacks 1990, 149). Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that “The Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter he might reasonably turn pale” (Coleridge 1936, 356–357). Seen as the product of a juvenile imagination and assumed to have a deleterious effect on young minds, The Monk typifies the way horror fiction written for, or read by, young adults prompts polarized responses. Though many critics of the day echoed Coleridge’s consternation, some Romantic writers vociferously argued the benefit of terrifying tales on young minds, or expressed nostalgia for their own juvenile appreciation of horror. In “Witches and Other Night Fears” Charles Lamb laments how “tame and prosaic” his adult dreams have grown in contrast to a younger self “dreadfully alive to nervous terrors” (Lamb 1835, 75). In his discussion of these Romantic responses to frightening fiction, Dale Townshend notes that William Wordsworth praised the gruesome chapbooks of his youth for giving the energy of the young imagination free rein. For Wordsworth, horror in literature (in the form of chapbook romances and gruesome fairy tales) “enabled him to withstand the potentially annihilating effects of horror” encountered in real life (Townshend 2008, 29). As a brief look at the history of the subject will show, debate about the merits (or lack thereof) of horror literature for young adult readers continues through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and well into the twenty-first.

Since its inception in the form of the chapbooks so beloved by William Wordsworth, through the Gothic romances derided by critics in the eighteenth century, into the scandalous penny dreadfuls of the late nineteenth century, and on into the pulp horror of the twentieth century, horror literature has consistently been weighed against pedagogical criteria, with critics concerned as to how it will help (or hinder) the education and psychological development of young adults. Accordingly, critical approaches to young adult horror in the twentieth century borrow variously from developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, or some variety of ego-relational therapeutic psychology in an attempt to understand the effects horror might have on young adult readers. J. A. Appleyard argues that adolescent readers exhibit a predilection for horror and the supernatural; they “demand that stories not just embody their wishes and fantasies, but also reflect realistically the darker parts of life” (Appleyard 1991, 109). Appleyard characterizes adolescence as a psychologically “dark” period that horror stories help readers navigate. This view echoes Bruno Bettelheim’s famous thesis on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), in which he deployed Freudian theories to argue that fairy tales help children negotiate the various phases of psychological development. In her assessment of the appeal of frightening fiction to young adult readers, Kimberley Reynolds is at first wary of such “well-rehearsed psychoanalytic arguments,” though she agrees that the monsters of horror offer the “perfect metaphor for this stage in a young person’s development . . . ‘the beast’ many teenagers suspect they harbor within themselves can be externalized, encountered and finally overcome” (Reynolds 2001, 6). Reynolds also suggests that the “abject” aspects of YA horror writing, that is, its use of disgusting imagery, helps young adult readers replay and so finally overcome the oedipal conflict of their early childhood (Reynolds 2001, 7). This narrative about the therapeutic benefits of horror for young adult readers endures today. In a an essay at the Tor.com blog titled “Why Horror Is Good for You (And Even Better for Your Kids),” writer and artist Greg Ruth states that childhood and adolescence are a “terrifying ordeal” that the horror writer can “help children survive” (Ruth 2014). The direction of commentary such as this, even though it acts in praise of horror fiction, is as paternalistic as Coleridge’s consternation over The Monk. The critics allot a therapeutic role to horror administered by adults to aid young adults on their road to developing maturity.

Since the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in 1796, critics have argued about the suitability of horror fiction for young adult readers. From eighteenth-century Gothic romances to fin de siècle penny dreadfuls, from the furor over horror comics in the 1950s to the 1980s’ “video nasty” panic, young adult horror fiction has prompted moral panic among its detractors as well as impassioned defenses by others who see the value of frightening fiction for developing young minds. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century, horror is lauded as an important and valuable mode of writing, though many works defy accepted ideas about the ways horror fiction aids in the maturation and psychological development of young adult readers.

This association of frightening fiction with the developing maturity of the young adult reader plays out in a continual back and forth about suitability, and the history of horror literature and young adult readers through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also a history of moral panic. In the 1870s, cheap installment fiction aimed at a juvenile, working-class readership, known as “penny dreadfuls,” were big business for various entrepreneurial publishers. Popular titles such as The Wild Boys of London; Or, The Children of the Night (1846–1866) contained violent imagery and often “borrowed” plots (without acknowledgment) from older Gothic romances. Many contained stories about violent criminals, and John Springhall argues that they became the scapegoat for a host of social problems in the late Victorian period in Britain. In 1877, the Society for the Suppression of Vice instituted summonses against the publishers of The Wild Boys of London under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act (Springhall 1994, 326). As Springhall points out, the moral panic over penny dreadfuls was also a class conflict. The 1852 Government Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles promoted standard middle-class morality in its attempt to suppress penny dreadfuls, part of working-class culture (Springhall 1994, 328). A similar moral panic occurred a century later in the United States when a public outcry against horror comics on the newsstands coincided with a congressional investigation on juvenile delinquency. The investigation linked delinquency to comic books thanks in part to Fredric Wertham’s indictment of the industry in Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Comic book titles such as The Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, and The Haunt of Fear by pulp comic publisher EC Comics were placed under scrutiny and, as a result, publishers agreed to self-censor to prevent further damage to reputation and sales. Among its restrictions, The Comics Code Authority forbade the depiction of excessive violence, gruesome illustrations, and vampires, werewolves, or zombies. These restrictions loosened over time, with publishers abandoning the code one after another in the late twentieth century (Marvel in 2001 and DC in 2011), rendering the code, finally, defunct.

Penny dreadfuls and horror comics are two examples that reveal how the development of horror for young adult readers seems to follow a “masculine” direction. Typically, horror fictions are conceived of as being written for and consumed by male readers. Reynolds argues that the twentieth century saw the development of “a peculiarly male form of horror/frightening fantasy [that] has emerged in tandem with youth culture’s male rebels and the rejection of the cozy domestic world fetishized in the books, radio and television programs of the postwar period” (Reynolds 2001, 5). Despite this association of horror fiction with male youth culture, evidence abounds that female readers have also found horror fiction compelling. British writer Celia Rees counts classic “pulp” horror works of the twentieth century like The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959–1989) and Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934) among the works that have influenced her own writing the most. As a teenager, she would “borrow” such illicit titles from under her older brother’s bed and consume them “voraciously” (Rees 2012). Rees’s juvenile appetite for horror is present in her own writing for young adults, such as the 1996 vampire novel Blood Sinister.

In the late twentieth century, the two most popular print horror series, Point Horror and Goosebumps (category fiction imprints from Scholastic), borrowed overtly from slasher movies and B-movie horror tropes (two genres also associated with male audiences) to address female teens. Point Horror, in particular, was aimed at girls and rewrote the early twentieth century domestic genre of the “school story” as a paranoid mode in titles such as Prom Dress by A. Bates (1989) and Teacher’s Pet by Richie Tankersley Cusick (1990). Kevin McCarron notes that the Point Horror series employed distinctly masculine and feminine modes, with masculine “thrillers” that offered the appearance of realism (typified by R. L. Stine’s work) and feminine “supernatural” works that resisted such realism (typified in the vampire fictions of Caroline B. Cooney) (McCarron 2001, 42). McCarron characterizes Point Horror as conservative fiction, which tends to establish and maintain boundaries such as insider vs. outsider, often reinforces social norms (including heterosexuality and marriage), and reestablishes social cohesiveness in the resolution of its plots (Reynolds 2001, 28). Likewise, for Reynolds much of the popular fiction of the late twentieth century marketed as horror for young adults lacks the “all pervasive sense of fear and ghastly transgression which characterizes true horror” (Reynolds 2001, 3). In these evaluations of young adult horror, McCarron and Reynolds implicitly reinforce a masculine/feminine binary that runs throughout discussions of horror literature. Demanding that “true” horror be radical and subversive, they align horror with “masculine” subcultures and reject popular, or mainstream, culture, which is implicitly regarded as “feminine.”

Radical or not, these horror fictions of the late twentieth century prompted their own moral panic among adult commentators and educationalists. Reynolds notes that British newspapers branded the Point Horror series “vile and truly pernicious,” echoing the language used about penny dreadfuls, and lists various campaigns that sought to have the books excluded from school libraries (Reynolds 2001, 2). Reynolds likens the concerns raised over the Point Horror books to the moral panic over horror comics, though they are most likely the consequence of the British “video nasty” panic of the 1980s and 1990s, which involved a media outcry about the effects of horror film violence on teenagers able to watch “adult” horror through the unregulated medium of VHS. This panic was intensified by the killing of the toddler James Bulger in 1993 by two teenagers from Merseyside who were supposedly influenced by the film Child’s Play 3. However, such damning commentary about the effects of horror abated by 2001, a shift that is in part due to the Harry Potter phenomenon. Nick Hunter notes that by the time all seven of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter titles had been published in 2008, the series had sold more than 375 million copies in 63 languages. In response, the New York Times introduced a children’s best-sellers list in 2001 after Harry Potter titles had filled the first three spots on their regular best-seller list for more than a year (Hunter 2013, 46). Though Harry Potter is not horror fiction, Rowling’s use of “dark” fantasy appealed to adult readers and critics, and its popularity with these gatekeepers led to the fantastic mode in general becoming more culturally valuable. At the same time, innovations on the small screen were also changing critical perceptions of horror for young adults. Joss Whedon’s genre-defining television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) was playful and self-aware in its use of horror tropes. The show explicitly interrogated the typical gender roles of horror narratives and played with critical assumptions about gendered responses to horror. After Harry Potter and Buffy, there occurs a distinct shift in discourse on horror fiction for young adults away from the centuries-old back and forth about its merits and pitfalls, and toward a more positive association.

In the twenty-first century, young adult horror fiction not only proliferates in the publishing market, but it is also generally well received by critics both in the academy and in wider culture. No longer ghettoized as category fiction, as Scholastic’s Point Horror series was, young adult horror can be found across publishers and genres. Notable examples include Chris Priestley’s portmanteau horror series Tales of Terror (2007–2009) and the now canonical (and critically acclaimed) Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002), which has since been adapted into a successful film by Henry Sellick and Laika (2009). Pulp horror also remains popular, exemplified by the gory zombie serials by Darren Shan (Zom-B, published between 2012 and 2016) and Charlie Higson (The Enemy, published between 2009 and 2015). These two series in particular attempt to exceed previous limits of acceptability in terms of gross-out aesthetics and violent content, though critics now seem more sanguine about such transgressions. The Telegraph, a British newspaper at the forefront of the condemnation of Point Horror, favorably reviewed Zom-B as “a clever mix of horror, fantasy and realism” (Chilton 2012). Finally, there is also an emergent trend for young adult weird fiction, inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. Titles include Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five series (2005–2012) and Celia Rees’s novel The Stone Testament (2007).

Though much commentary on this recent fiction continues to evoke long-standing ideas about horror as essentially therapeutic or helpful in developing the maturity of young adult readers, the works themselves often resist this pedagogical function. Darren Shan’s first Zom-B novel, for example, offers an unlikely hero protagonist whose moral, social, and physical maturation is cut short when she is turned into a zombie at the close of the book. In subsequent books, it proves difficult to map a developmental schema or moral lesson onto Shan’s foul-mouthed and violent zombie hero protagonist. Likewise, the nihilistic conclusion to Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five series, Oblivion (2012) refuses the bildungsroman (i.e., coming-of-age) structure of much young adult fiction. As the title suggests, the hero protagonist of this series does not achieve maturation and mastery in the resolution of the plot, but rather complete oblivion. Finally, young adult readers are beginning to make themselves heard in the continuing dialogue about the suitability and function of horror fiction. In 2014, pupils of the Richmond Park Academy, London, self-published an anthology titled Dare You? that challenges the assumption that adult gatekeepers might know what is best for young adult readers. The collection defies many of the accepted notions of what critics and writers think is appropriate. The stories frequently refuse resolution, and the reader is left feeling disoriented; there are no safe spaces, and barriers are frequently ruptured; shocking body horror erupts at unexpected moments. Like Shan’s Zom-B, there are thoroughly unlikeable personalities who disrupt notions of empathy and conventional morality. In many ways, Dare You? recalls the work of Matthew Lewis in 1796, who, at the age of twenty, produced a shocking, discordant, and fascinating work that proved as popular with young adult readers as it was shocking to adult critics.

Chloé Germaine Buckley

See also: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; Horror Comics; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Body Horror; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Cthulhu Mythos; The Monk; Penny Dreadful; Pulp Horror; Zombies.

Further Reading

Appleyard, J. A. 1991. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bettelheim, Bruno. 1976. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson.

Chilton, Martin. 2012. “Zom-B by Darren Shan, Review.” The Telegraph, September 28, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/children_sbookreviews/9568888/Zom-B-by-Darren-Shan-review.html.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1936. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by Thomas M. Raysor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hunter, Nick. 2013. Popular Culture: 2000 and Beyond. London: Raintree.

Lamb, Charles. [1823] 1835. Essays of Elia [Both Series]. Paris: Baudry’s European Library.

McCarron, Kevin. 2001. “Point Horror and the Point of Horror.” In Frightening Fiction, edited by Kimberley Reynolds, Geraldine Brennan, and Kevin McCarron, 19–52. London and New York: Continuum.

Pulliam, June. 2014. Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Rees, Celia. 2012. “Interview about a Vampire and Other Gothic Topics.” The History Girls Blog, October 18. http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/interview-about-vampire-and-other.html.

Reynolds, Kimberley. 2001. “Introduction.” In Frightening Fiction, edited by Kimberley Reynolds, Geraldine Brennan, and Kevin McCarron, 1–18. London and New York: Continuum.

Ruth, Greg. 2014. “Why Horror Is Good for You (and Even Better for Your Kids).” Tor.com, May 29. http://www.tor.com/2014/05/29/why-horror-is-good-for-you-and-even-better-for-your-kids.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1990. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Springhall, John. 1994. “‘Pernicious Reading’? ‘The Penny Dreadful’ as Scapegoat for Late-Victorian Juvenile Crime.” Victorian Periodicals Review 27, no. 4: 326–349.

Townshend, Dale. 2008. “The Haunted Nursery: 1764–1830.” In The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, edited by Roderick McGillis, Karen Coats, and Anna Jackson, 15–38. London: Routledge.

Part Three:
Reference Entries
(Authors, Works, and
Specialized Topics)

A

AICKMAN, ROBERT (1914–1981)

Robert Fordyce Aickman was a British writer of fiction and nonfiction, best known for his supernatural “strange” tales. His interests were many and various: he was a noted conservationist, a champion of the restoration of the British canal system; he loved to travel; he was a passionate patron of the arts; and he was a lifelong believer in ghosts and the paranormal, an advocate and theorist of supernatural literature, as well as a writer of it.

“The Cicerones”: Numinous Horror

“The Cicerones” is one of Aickman’s most memorable tales, and also one of his shortest. It was first collected in Sub Rosa. It also appeared in The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1971), which Aickman edited, and in the posthumous compilation The Unsettled Dust. It is apparently based on something that actually happened to Aickman. The title is an old term for a city guide.

John Trant, a bachelor approaching middle age, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in Belgium, entering at almost exactly 11:30 a.m., anticipating the midday closure of the building. He finds the cathedral surprisingly empty. Wandering through the building, he has a series of uncanny encounters with young men and strange children, the cicerones of the title, who show him the cathedral’s morbid paintings of monsters and martyrs. At the story’s end, Trant is penned in by the cicerones, down in the cathedral’s crypt. The clock then strikes twelve, and the cicerones close in on him and begin to sing. The story derives its disconcerting power from linking the gruesome ends of the martyrs in the paintings with Trant’s own fate, though all is implicit, and the story ends in ambiguity.

“The Cicerones” brings together a number of key Aickman themes, including travelers who, through ignorance or misfortune, stray across a boundary into some strange place, and ordinary time coming to a standstill in the face of the strange. It is also imbued with a strong sense of the numinous, that strong religious or spiritual quality that indicates or suggests the presence of a divinity. Here, though, as in other Aickman tales, this sense is turned to horror. A 2002 short film directed by Jeremy Dyson and starring Mark Gatiss was based on the story.

Timothy J. Jarvis

Aickman was born just before World War I (1914–1918). He would never quite feel that he “fitted in” in the modern world, feeling instead that he rightly belonged to a lost era of gentility that the war had ended forever. He had a fraught upbringing. His parents were unsuited to each other, and they fought continuously. He survived his early years by taking refuge in books, his imagination, and the supernatural, which provided him with a sense of profound communion. Aickman also had a Gothic family inheritance: Richard Marsh, a popular author who was most famous for the horror novel The Beetle, was his grandfather.

After World War II, Aickman met the author Elizabeth Jane Howard through his conservation work, and the two had an affair. Howard encouraged Aickman to write his first ghost stories, and they published a volume together in 1951, We Are for the Dark. From that point on, Aickman concentrated more and more on his writing. In 1964, he published a novel, The Late Breakfasters, and a collection of ghost stories, Dark Entries. He also began editing the Fontana series Great Ghost Stories.

Over the next sixteen years, Aickman published a volume of autobiography, The Attempted Rescue (1966), and six more volumes of supernatural tales. He also received recognition for his writing, winning a World Fantasy Award for the story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” in 1975 and a British Fantasy Award for his short story “The Stains” in 1980.

Very few of Aickman’s supernatural tales contain anything like a conventional haunting. In fact, though We Are for the Dark was subtitled “Six Ghost Stories,” he later adopted, for the subtitle of his 1968 collection Sub Rosa, “Strange Stories.” And he would use the term “strange” to describe his work throughout the remainder of his life. The term has become synonymous with the Aickmanesque story.

In various critical writings, Aickman outlines a unique philosophy of the supernatural tale and a singular mode of composition. Aickman had a strong interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which may well have stemmed from therapy undergone to make sense of the damage his childhood did him. He believed in Freud’s notion that only one-tenth of the mind is conscious, and that the remaining nine-tenths is unconscious. Because he felt the conscious one-tenth, the intellect, to be responsible for the ills of modernity, he thought it important to get in contact with the other nine-tenths. Of all literature, he considered the ghost story best equipped to do this. But though he believed in the supernatural, he didn’t think that the “ghost” in a ghost story had to be an actual revenant, though it did have to be, in Freudian terms, a return of the repressed, something rising up from the unconscious mind.

Aickman had particular ideas about the compositional strategies that might be used to draw out the submerged nine-tenths of the mind. He felt that the best ghost stories are close to poetry in that they are only partly constructions of the conscious mind. He wrote that his most successful tales came to him in a half-trance. Aickman’s strange stories, then, arising from the unconscious, are akin to dreams. And they work because they are dream-like; though they have no surface logic, they hang together because they are the emanations of Aickman’s psyche and have a clear symbolic skeleton. The reader cannot shake the idea that there might be solutions to their puzzles. Of course, as is often remarked, there is nothing duller than someone relaying a dream, and sometimes Aickman’s stories miss their mark. But when they do work they are as strange and off-kilter as the oddest dreams, as chilling as the worst nightmares. And, like dreams, they are often startling in their frankness and grotesquery, comical in their bizarreness, melancholy in their affect, and chilling in their insinuation. Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters and his posthumously published novella The Model (1987) take the same themes and techniques, and develop them in different modes—satire in the case of The Late Breakfasters and magical realism in the case of The Model.

In the autumn of 1980, Aickman became ill with cancer. He refused conventional treatment, choosing instead to consult a homeopathic physician. Following a brief illness, he died in London’s Royal Homeopathic Hospital on February 26, 1981.

Since Aickman’s death, his reputation as one of the most significant British writers of supernatural short fiction of the late twentieth century has grown. His influence can be seen in the work of writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Joel Lane, Reggie Oliver, and M. John Harrison. His stories have been adapted for television. He has also influenced comedy: the bizarre and unsettling British troupe called the League of Gentlemen took much from Aickman’s tales. His work has been reprinted. And a new generation of writers has been influenced by him: 2015 saw the publication of an anthology, Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas, which contains a number of British, U.S., and Canadian authors, including Lisa Tuttle, writing stories of Aickmanesque strangeness.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; “Ringing the Changes”; Surrealism; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Crawford, Gary William. 2011. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash Tree Press. Kindle edition.

Crawford, Gary William. 2012. Insufficient Answers: Essays on Robert Aickman. Baton Rouge: Gothic Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Russell, R. B., and Rosalie Parker. 2015. Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales. Leyburn, North Yorkshire, UK: DVD. Tartarus Press.

Strantzas, Simon, ed. 2015. Aickman’s Heirs. Pickering, ON, Canada: Undertow Publications.

AINSWORTH, WILLIAM HARRISON (1805–1882)

William Harrison Ainsworth was a popular English novelist who, though trained in law, chose to write creatively, specializing in historical romances. An immensely prolific writer, he published forty novels over a span of five decades, many of which contained elements of horror. In the words of H. P. Lovecraft, Ainsworth’s “romantic novels teem with the eerie and gruesome” (Lovecraft 2012, 46).

His early stories often involved crime and criminals, and made use of such Gothic motifs as thwarted heirs, secret passages, ruined edifices, burial vaults, corpses, and ghosts, the latter genuine as well as rationalized. His first success, Rookwood (1834), is ramshackle in plotting and construction but utilizes all of these devices, as well as a legend involving the fall of a tree branch leading to a death; it describes a dispute over an inheritance and the legitimacy of an heir. (There are, additionally, false identities, gypsies, and excessive praise of highwaymen, particularly the infamous Dick Turpin, as the story gradually resolves itself in favor of the legitimate claimant.) Though not supernatural, Jack Sheppard (1839) is more genuinely horrific, describing the monstrously villainous thieftaker (someone hired to capture criminals) and thief Jonathan Wild (1682?–1725) and his role in the creation, persecution, and ultimate destruction of the titular criminal (1702–1724). Although it proved popular with readers, Jack Sheppard reveals problems that were increasingly to affect Ainsworth’s prose, specifically weak characterizations and narrative padding. Even allowing for the market, the latter is egregious.

Ainsworth’s next significant successes were a trio of overtly historical novels—The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), and Old St. Paul’s (1841)—whose turgid plots combined with historical events proved initially popular with contemporaries. These, too, often contained horrific material, as in the latter’s depiction of the spread of the black plague and the Great Fire of 1666; their success permitted Ainsworth to establish his own magazine (Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842–1854). He thus serialized Windsor Castle (July 1842–June 1843), a historical romance describing the events around Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne Boleyn; a strong Gothic element involves the presence of the supernatural Herne the Hunter, who haunts Windsor Forest, who leads ghostly hunts through the forest, and whose origins are variously given. Windsor Castle proved very popular, not because of the uninspired retelling of the historical narrative, but because of Herne, who is more vital and convincing than the humans surrounding him.

Following this relatively promising beginning, Ainsworth’s fortunes began a long, slow, and sad decline. His once large readership dwindled, as did his income, and where he was once considered almost Charles Dickens’s equal, he gradually became no more than another impoverished second-rater, though it would be inaccurate and unfair to refer to him as a hack, as he undoubtedly cared about his writing. Late in his life, the City of Manchester honored him for his writings featuring the history of that city, but the accolades did not include financial security, and he died shortly thereafter. His obituaries tended to be dismissive and sometimes included erroneous material.

Though specialists and scholars still occasionally read Ainsworth and note that his fiction often possesses narrative drive, he is unlikely to be rediscovered by later audiences. The general academic consensus is that he was neither an innovator nor particularly talented as a writer or a creator of character, and that he provided a popular readership with historical novels featuring familiar and generally uninspired horrific devices. Still, there are some who appreciate his fleeting and faded charms. Rosemary Mitchell, a British scholar of Victorian literature and history, writes that Ainsworth may well have been forgotten because his “attraction was to the gothic historical, to the black and the bloody, to haunted history,” which made his writings serve in effect as “the dark side of those progressive Victorians we all know about, with their trains and telegraphs, their technological advances and their scientific discoveries, their liberal politics and their enlightened skepticism.” She characterizes Ainsworth as a “precursor of [legendary Hollywood director and producer] Cecil B. DeMille and [best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code] Dan Brown, a master of the spectacle and the sinister, king of the colourful and the clichéd” (Mitchell 2011).

Richard Bleiler

See also: Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition.

Further Reading

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Mitchell, Rosemary. 2011. “‘What a Brain Must Mine Be!’: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth.” Open Letters Monthly, August 1. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/what-a-brain-must-mine-be-the-strange-historical-romances-of-william-harrison-ainsworth.

Schroeder, Natalie. 1985. “William Harrison Ainsworth.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 1, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 187–194. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

AJVIDE LINDQVIST, JOHN (1968–)

Of Algerian descent, horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist is popularly referred to as Sweden’s answer to Stephen King, an appropriate soubriquet given the author’s interest in childhood and the decidedly supernatural bent of his fiction. Ajvide Lindqvist is notable for having produced one of the most original vampire novels of the twenty-first century, but also because he is one of a very few number of horror auteurs to have broken into the international market without writing in English. His novels are transnational enough to appeal to a wider public, yet remain decidedly Swedish in references and subject matter.

Ajvide Lindqvist was born in Blackeberg, Sweden. He rose to fame with his first and, to date, most famous novel, Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In, published in his home country in 2004 and translated into English in 2007. The novel was made into a successful Swedish film in 2008 and was remade for the American market in 2010. Thematically, his writings have thus far covered, and updated, traditional horror figures such as the vampire (lonely and sympathetic in Let the Right One In), the zombie (an empty, post-traumatic shell of her/his former self in Hanteringen av odöda / Handling the Undead [2005; 2009]), and the ghost (capable of physically possessing the living in Människohamn / Harbour [2008; 2010]). But Ajvide Lindqvist has also conjured up less familiar scenarios, such as those of Lilla stjärna / Little Star (2010; 2011), in which a psychic child is capable of sucking the life out of humans, and of the surreal mood pieces collected in Let the Old Dreams Die (2010), a translation of Pappersväggar (2006) that included the story “Låt de gamla drömmarna dö” / “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2011). In the latter, Oskar and Eli from Let the Right One In make a brief reappearance.

One of the things that separates Ajvide Lindqvist from other contemporary authors is the allegorical quality of his writings, which work narratively as well as more metaphorically. This personal trait is particularly obvious in his last novel to be translated to English, I Am behind You (2017; published in Swedish as Himmelstrand in 2014), where an apocalyptic scenario serves as an excuse to probe the dark recesses of human despair. Similarly, in Harbour, what starts off as a fairly standard haunting turns into a reflection on Sweden’s historical connection to the sea.

Xavier Aldana Reyes

See also: Vampires; Zombies.

Further Reading

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 189–214. London: British Library Publishing.

Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Henriette Thune. 2011. “Parallel Worlds of Possible Meetings in Let the Right One In.” Word and Image, 27, no. 1: 2–14.

Costorphine, Kevin. 2010. “Panic on the Streets of Stockholm: Sub/urban Alienation in the Novels of John Ajvide Lindqvist.” In The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, edited by Eoghain Hamilton, 137–144. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832–1888)

Louisa May Alcott was the renowned writer of The Little Women Trilogy (1868–1886), and her Gothic and sensation fictions were often pseudonymous, anonymous, or lost. Her children’s fiction (Jo March’s tabloid fiction in Little Women), correspondence, journals, and scholars occasionally referenced her shadow oeuvre of thrillers before their recovery by Madeline Stern in six volumes (1975–1993). As the daughter of Bronson Alcott, she was connected to the Transcendentalist movement and progressive educational initiatives from birth, with her circle of family friends including the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy recovered Alcott’s unpublished first novel The Inheritance (1849, 1997), with Gothic landscapes and a secret family history influenced by Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë. Alcott published sentimental yet sensational tales in 1850s Boston weeklies, but her 1860s thriller career involved two cheap publishing empires, Frank Leslie’s and Elliot, Thomes, & Talbot. Three different Leslie publications ran at least twenty-seven original Alcott tales (1863–1870), beginning with prizewinner “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” (1863, 1975) about a U.S. femme fatale marrying a Cuban planter to aid her revenge against her U.S. ex-fiancé. Another confidence woman tale, “V. V.” (1865, 1976), is an early detective fiction and initiated Alcott’s run with Elliott, Thomes, & Talbot (1865–1867). That firm published several poems and six novelettes (four as A. M. Barnard and two relatively upbeat Gothics with her own name), including her final two con artist narratives. These con narratives exhibit Alcott’s career-long interests in gender struggles, often defined in terms of mastery and slavery, as well as theatricality and masquerade, which threaten family structure in “Pauline’s” and “V. V.” but prove liberating for characters marginalized by gender and/or class hierarchy in “Behind a Mask” (1866, 1975) and “The Mysterious Key” (1867, 1975).

Alcott’s thrillers invoke the supernatural, the Orientalist, and drugged states. “The Abbot’s Ghost” (1867, 1975), a late Barnard tale, is a Christmas ghost story with her usual theme of secret family history. “Lost in a Pyramid” (1869, 1998), a late Leslie work rediscovered by Dominic Montserrat, expands upon Théophile Gautier with a sorceress-mummy’s cursed flower seeds, and holds the distinction of being one of the earliest stories about defilers of an Egyptian tomb being hounded by a curse. Her anonymous novel A Modern Mephistopheles (1877) reprises Faustian bargains, foreign drugs, and moral or physical confinement from Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark” (1863, 1976) and A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866, 1995), a novel rejected by Elliott and recovered by Kent Bicknell. Before her death, Alcott agreed to reprint (1889) under her own name Mephistopheles and “Whisper.” Alcott’s parallel oeuvre illustrates supernatural and sensational themes and imagery informing nineteenth-century sentimental literature as well as dilemmas of female authorship in a patriarchal literary market.

Alcott suffered from ill health for many years, and she died of a stroke in Boston at the age of fifty-five. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, near Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and many other notable U.S. writers in the section of the cemetery now known as Authors’ Ridge.

Bob Hodges

See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Mummies.

Further Reading

Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne Phillips, eds. 2001. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Porter, Nancy, and Harriet Reisen, eds. 2008–2016. Alcott Project. www.alcottfilm.com.

Smith, Gail. 1995. “Who Was That Masked Woman? Gender and Form in Alcott’s Confidence Stories.” In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown, 45–59. New York: Garland.

Stern, Madeline. 1995. Introduction to Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

ALONE WITH THE HORRORS

Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961–1991 was published in 1993 by Arkham House. It is a revision and expansion of Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987) and was fittingly published by the firm that issued Campbell’s first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), when he was a teenager. The selection of stories is Campbell’s own, and the stories are dated by year. These dates do not indicate date of publication but date of composition. Campbell has kept a scrupulous record of the writing, publication, and translation of his work. Campbell does not include a story for every year of his literary career since 1961; both early in his career and later on, when he turned his attention to writing novels, he wrote few or no short stories; in this volume, there are no stories for the years 1962–1965, 1969–1972, 1981–1982, and 1988–1990.

The volume is a scintillating assemblage of some of the best weird fiction written during the years it covers. “Cold Print” (1966) constitutes Campbell’s ultimate refinement of his adaptation of motifs borrowed from the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which was the focus of the juvenile pastiches of his first volume. Campbell reprints several stories from his second—and, arguably, best—story collection, Demons by Daylight (1973), which embody his distinctive melding of dream imagery, sexuality, and luminous prose.

A full eight stories are taken from Dark Companions (1982), in which Campbell’s exposition of urban horror reaches its pinnacle. “Mackintosh Willy” (1977), for example, finds terror in a homeless person who appears to live in a bus shelter and is mercilessly tormented by two adolescent boys—but they pay for their cruelty when Mackintosh Willy revives from the dead to exact vengeance. “The Depths” (1978) features a prototypical mingling of dream and reality, where a writer discovers that if he doesn’t write down the horrible nightmares he suffers, the events they depict occur in the real world.

Later stories feature grim and sardonic humor (“Seeing the World” [1983], in which a couple who have returned from an overseas trip are revealed to be zombies); a focus on aberrant psychological states (“Boiled Alive” [1986], where a man cannot distinguish between the real world and the pseudo-reality of film); and a clever use of modern technology to incite terror (“End of the Line” [1991], in which a telemarketer may be receiving calls from his deceased ex-wife and child).

Overall, Alone with the Horrors includes the full range of Campbell’s short fiction and exhibits the wide-ranging imagination, the relentless focus on aberrant psychological states, and the manipulation of evocative, smooth prose that distinguish Campbell’s work in both the novel and the short story. In 1994 the book was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

S. T. Joshi

See also: Campbell, Ramsey; “Mackintosh Willy”; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Campbell, Ramsey, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. 1995. The Core of Ramsey Campbell: A Bibliography & Reader’s Guide. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

ALRAUNE

Alraune is the second novel in a loose trilogy that focuses on the character of Frank Braun, a thinly veiled idealization of its author, Hanns Heinz Ewers. Alraune was originally published in Ewers’s native Germany in 1911, and it went on to become the most successful book of his career. S. Guy Endore’s original English translation first appeared in 1929, published by the John Day Company of New York in an illustrated edition with drawings by the acclaimed artist of the grotesque, Mahlon Blaine.

Named after the novel’s main character, Alraune is a play on the legend of the mandrake root (Alraune is German for mandrake) that was said to grow from the spilt semen of a hanged man at the foot of the gallows tree. In the novel, Braun, buried under gambling debts, retreats to the secluded home of his uncle Ten Brinken, a wealthy biologist and collector of arcana and oddities. Among this collection is a mandragora root. Braun appeals to his uncle’s prideful and curious temperament by suggesting that he could be the first scientist in history to create a living Alraune-creature, the first to, as Braun phrases it, “make truth out of the old lie” (Ewers 1929, 58). The requirements for the task were the seed of a condemned criminal and a prostitute who would serve the Mother Earth role in the myth. Braun posits that “earth is also the eternal prostitute. Does she not give herself to all, freely?” (59).

Thus was spawned Alraune. Her diabolical conception resulted in her body being poisonous, her soul evil. Frank Braun returns, after further travel and adventures, to find that the “project” has matured into a woman. In keeping with Ewers’s fascination with the Lilith archetype of the demonic or otherworldly female, Alraune is practically irresistible to men, whose blood is enflamed by her presence. This, naturally, is a disastrous attraction, as Alraune leaves a string of corpses in her wake before love itself leads to her ultimate destruction.

The double current of Alraune herself, that of Eros and Thanatos, not only makes for a stimulating novel, but it also resonates with the structure of the classical mandragora myth, which was said to bring boons to one person and disaster to another. Alraune’s poisonous flesh and callous soul give the novel something of a Sadean flavor (that is, reminiscent of the notorious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writer and libertine the Marquis de Sade), while its embrace of blasphemy, individualism, and the Gothic arguably qualifies the book an example of Germany’s famous Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) literary movement from the latter half of the eighteenth century.

While the creation of life by artificial means links Alraune directly to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it lacks some of the philosophical integrity of its predecessor. Where Victor Frankenstein strove for a Promethean leap in human abilities and comprehensions of life, Ewers’s protagonists seem to approach the endeavor with a certain mouth-watering zeal for sin for sin’s sake. The theme of parental responsibility, which served as Frankenstein’s moral anchor, tends more to float in Alraune like textual driftwood. The novel’s substance also bears the clear marks of the author’s interest in the question of genetics and environment, or alternately, blood and soil.

Alraune was filmed no fewer than five times, beginning with three silent versions. It was also loosely adapted as a German comic book between 1998 and 2004. The novel itself was brought back into print in the twenty-first century in a new translation by Joe E. Bandel, and the original English translation by Endore was also given a new edition.

Richard Gavin

See also: Ewers, Hanns Heinz.

Further Reading

Ashkenazi, Ofer. 2012. “Assimilating the Shrew: Alraune and the Discussion of Biological Difference in Weimar Horror Film.” In Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, 77–110. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ball, Jerry L. 1996. “Alraune.” Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature 1–2.

Ewers, Hanns Heinz. [1929] 2013. Alraune. Translated by S. Guy Endore. London: Birchgrove Press.

Koger, Grove. 2007. “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” Guide to Literary Masters and Their Works 1. Salem, MA: Salem Press.

ANCESTRAL CURSE

Curses are forms of magical thinking that give intercessionary power to gods and spirits. An ancestral or family curse is one that accompanies a family and causes misfortune across multiple generations.

Many ancient cultures have ritual forms of curses on rivals and enemies, or which are used to protect family and property, or preserve memory. Assyrian memorial stones laud the powerful, but condemn those who dishonor their name. Egyptian scribes formalized “execration texts” in which the names of the enemies of the pharaoh were written on clay pots and smashed. These “threat formulas” could also be addressed to personal enemies. In the Greco-Roman tradition, defixiones, or curse tablets, appealed to the infernal gods or spirits with messages written on thin lead sheets that were then rolled and buried (sometimes in graves). In Greece, many shadowed legal disputes. Roman curses could be more personal and were composed in an obscure, occult language designed to address the gods in their own language. The Semitic god of the Old Testament issued regular curses that traveled down family lines, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5) for disobeying the jealous god. There is rich evidence of curses in northern tribes, particularly in Gaelic and Icelandic traditions.

Highly formalized, curses promise oblivion to the enemy, usually by ending the family line. “May his name and his seed disappear in the land,” reads one Assyrian curse on a memorial stele (Holloway 2014). The content of curses has remained remarkably consistent across millennia and cultures. Curses are often paired with “lucks,” talismans that bring good fortune, countermagics that work to block the hexes of enemies. This is the purpose of the evil eye: it neutralizes the threat by cursing those who curse first. Curses are also recursive, in that it has long been feared that to come into contact with one is to become bound to its logic and suffer its consequences.

Curses are associated with premodern thought, the kind of superstitious belief that Enlightenment thinkers believed a rational and scientific worldview would eradicate. To Victorian anthropologists, belief in curses was a sign of “primitive” thought. Yet just as Gothic literature emerged in the eighteenth century, so did a revamped idea of the family or ancestral curse. The Gothic and family curses are linked from the first avowed Gothic romance, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole’s fiction concerns the perversion of the proper patriarchal line, and the usurper Manfred meets his end in accord with an ancestral curse. This plot was repeated across many key early Gothic novels, from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

In response to the social and economic transformations of eighteenth-century England, a new interest in genealogy was common. Families sought legitimacy and security by digging for aristocratic or even royal roots (the Walpoles being a prime example). Hence, alongside the Gothic, stories of ancestral lucks and curses became a new kind of folklore, the stories commonly told and widely known.

Family curse stories might be typified by the Cowdray Curse, in which the nobleman Sir Anthony Browne was rewarded for his loyalty to Henry VIII by the gift of lands during the dissolution of the monasteries. Browne’s family was cursed by a monk cast out at the dissolution. Over the centuries, several disasters among the descendants culminated in the extinguishing of the line in 1793. The most notorious family curse concerned the Tichbornes. The luck of the ancient family was said to depend on the annual payment of a dole to the local poor. When the family discontinued the Tichborne Dole in 1796, the curse was activated. The heir to the baronetcy was lost at sea in 1854; ten years later a man in Australia declared himself the lost baronet. The “Tichborne Claimant” dragged the family through the courts at vast expense and much public scandal in two trials in the 1870s. The Tichbornes restored the dole, but the family was ruined.

Many fictional family sagas followed patterns of ancestral curses. Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1818) typified the ubiquity of clan curses in the Scottish imagination and his use of these plots, tinged with the supernatural, were hugely influential. The Gothic or horror version was common to tales published by Blackwood’s Magazine. The anonymity of Blackwood stories such as “The Curse” (1832) left a shivery boundary of uncertainty as to the truth status of these narratives. Soon, family curses bled into mainstream fiction, such as the doom that haunts the Dedlock family in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). The sensation fiction boom of the 1860s was dominated by melodramas driven by family secrets and ancestral shame, a device often used by writers like Ellen Wood and Wilkie Collins. By the late nineteenth century, biological determinism colored the imagination of family inheritance. The curse in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) turns out not to be a spectral dog but the evolutionary taint of criminality in the family blood.

Another key element of curse stories is that they are often a kind of exercise of primitive retributive justice of the weak against the strong. They are populated by monks, shepherds, the itinerant, and the dispossessed who curse feudal power, challenging its absolute rights with the promise of supernatural retribution. This class resentment figured strongly in the case of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, the wealthy aristocrat who funded years of excavation in Egypt only to die six weeks after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923. The recursive logic of “Tut’s Curse” allegedly killed many associated with the opening, although such a curse had no basis in ancient Egyptian belief. The story fitted into the Western tradition of ancestral curses perfectly, however. The pattern of revenge against transgression in Tut’s Curse is the model for horror films from The Mummy (1932) all the way to Drag Me to Hell (2009).

Curses are effective in horror fiction and film because they evoke this premodern underpinning of nasty and vengeful supernatural agencies, but also because they exist in the shadowy space of rumor, hovering between fact and fiction, the perfect fodder for sensational tabloid reportage. A curse can crawl out of a museum relic, or rest with a mummy, or rise up out of the floors of a house imbued with a hidden, traumatic history. The cursed house is central to the American Gothic from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) or Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977). Magical thinking still assigns misfortune, poverty, illness, and death to purposive malignant forces: horror fiction simply meets us halfway to disavowed belief.

Roger Luckhurst

See also: The Castle of Otranto; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The House of the Seven Gables; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Monk; Mummies; The Shining.

Further Reading

Holloway, April. 2014. “Assyrian Stele Containing Ancient Curse Will Not Be Reunited with Its Other Half.” Ancient Origins, March 29. http://www.ancient-origins.net/comment/14174.

Lockhart, J. G. 1938. Curses, Lucks and Talismans. London: Geoffrey Bles.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mighall, Robert. 1999. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, 78–129. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nordh, Katarina. 1996. Aspects of Ancient Egyptian Curses and Blessings: Conceptual Background and Transmission. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press.

ARKHAM HOUSE

As soon as he received news in March 1937 of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, writer August Derleth immediately began to make plans for the preservation of Lovecraft’s stories. He had never met Lovecraft, but through correspondence he had developed a close relationship with him. Derleth was by this point a successful writer, both in the pulps and in the literary mainstream. He first submitted a volume of Lovecraft’s stories to his regular publisher, Scribner’s, but when this failed, he collaborated with fellow writer Donald Wandrei to bring the book out under his own imprint. Derleth had to surreptitiously borrow the money from a bank loan on his house, and Wandrei pitched in what he could. The result was The Outsider and Others (1939) under the imprint of Arkham House (the name taken from the imaginary Massachusetts town featured in Lovecraft’s fiction). Nothing would ever be the same again. Not only was the Lovecraft volume of paramount importance, but the publishing precedent Derleth had set would have wide repercussions.

Arkham House, founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei after the death of H. P. Lovecraft to preserve his work, went on to publish some of the most significant works of fantasy, horror, and science fiction in history, including several important horror “firsts.”

1939

The Outsider and Others. Arkham House’s first book, and the first published collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, consisting of thirty-five stories, plus Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” plus a short essay about Lovecraft by Derleth and Wandrei.

1942

Out of Space and Time. First collection of supernatural stories by Clark Ashton Smith.

1945

The Opener of the Way. First book by Robert Bloch.

1947

Dark Carnival. First book by Ray Bradbury.

1958

Nine Horrors and a Dream. First book by Joseph Payne Brennan.

1964

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. First book by Ramsey Campbell.

Matt Cardin

Derleth’s sole intention had been to preserve Lovecraft. Further volumes were planned, including at least one volume of Lovecraft’s brilliant letters. But at the same time Derleth had submitted a collection of his own weird stories to Scribner’s, and the editor there suggested that a specialized firm, like Arkham House, could publish the book more effectively. This proved to be the case. Despite good reviews, The Outsider and Others sold slowly, and Derleth’s Someone in the Dark actually made a profit first. Derleth and Wandrei then began to consider preserving the work of other Weird Tales writers, beginning with Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time in 1942. Another Lovecraft volume, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, appeared in 1943, followed by Henry S. Whitehead’s Jumbee (1944) and another Smith collection. Whether he had planned to or not, Derleth had become a publisher. Wandrei joined the army in 1942, after which Arkham House was mostly Derleth’s business.

Derleth was in new territory, but he was well prepared. Prior to him, there had only been sporadic efforts to publish Lovecraft’s work in book form, such as William Crawford’s very amateurish edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). But Derleth came on the scene as a professional whose books were taken seriously by critics and the book trade. Within a few years, in the period following World War II, there were many such firms publishing fantasy, horror, and science fiction, such as Fantasy Press and Gnome Press, but it was Derleth who had shown the way. Mainstream publishing was not ready, and small presses run by enthusiasts had to demonstrate that there was a market for such material.

Derleth knew there was a market for Lovecraft. He released Marginalia in 1944 as a stopgap, intending to bring out at least one volume of Lovecraft’s letters shortly thereafter. But, as frequently happened with Arkham House, economic realities put the project on hold. The Selected Letters eventually ran to five volumes, but the first one did not appear until 1965.

After World War II, Derleth had to decide in what direction Arkham House should go. He brought out the first collection of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy Skullface and Others in 1946. He experimented tentatively with science fiction, and his edition of A. E. van Vogt’s popular Slan (1946) was the first science fiction book published in hardcover after the war. He sought the newest talent and published the first story collections of Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber Jr. He also reprinted the work of older writers, including J. Sheridan Le Fanu and William Hope Hodgson. He signed up as many of the still-living classic ghost story writers as he could: Algernon Blackwood, H. R. Wakefield, Lord Dunsany, L. P. Hartley, and Cynthia Asquith. He also brought out an extremely important anthology of supernatural poetry, Dark of the Moon (1947).

Not all of this worked out well. By the early 1950s, Derleth had to be bailed out by a $2,500 loan from author-physician David H. Keller. Arkham House survived the 1950s on a reduced scale, publishing several volumes of poetry (by Robert E. Howard, Leah Bodine Drake, and Clark Ashton Smith), a collection of Keller’s stories, and more Lovecraft. The 1960s saw a general reprinting of all of Lovecraft’s work, plus his Collected Poems (1963), and the last volumes of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction (ultimately six in all), plus his monumental Selected Poems (1971). There were major discoveries: the first books by Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. By the time of his death in 1971, it was clear that Derleth had been a major force in twentieth-century fantasy publishing, and he had done his job superbly, producing attractive volumes much prized by collectors.

Derleth probably did not expect Arkham House to outlive him, but his heirs continued. New volumes by Campbell and Lumley appeared, along with other backlog. In 1975 the dynamic James Turner took over as managing editor. He oversaw the reissue of Lovecraft in carefully revised texts (edited by S. T. Joshi), published a Cthulhu Mythos anthology, and brought out horror collections by Charles L. Grant and Tanith Lee, but outraged Arkham House traditionalists by turning heavily to modern science fiction, so that when a rival firm, Fedogan and Bremer, began to appeal to the old Arkham House market (starting with a collection by Donald Wandrei), fans called it “the new Arkham House.” There is no doubt that Turner’s books—by Michael Bishop, James Tiptree, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Lucius Shepard, J. G. Ballard, and others—sold extremely well. His departure in 1996 left Arkham House in a difficult position. Fedogan and Bremer had captured their old readership and Turner had walked off with the new, founding the Golden Gryphon Press, which published the same sort of books that he would have done for Arkham House. The post-Turner Arkham House has seemed to drift. It has brought out some interesting nonfiction, notably E. Hoffmann Price’s book of pulp-era memoirs, Book of the Dead, plus a biography of Hugh B. Cave and two volumes of stories by pulp writer Nelson Bond. These may not have sold very well. The firm still exists but has not published a new title in several years.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Campbell, Ramsey; Derleth, August; Hartley, L. P.; Howard, Robert E.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lumley, Brian; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wakefield, H. R.; Wandrei, Donald.

Further Reading

“Arkham House: Home to Horror, Sci-Fi Writers.” 2004. Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR, October 31. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4133870.

Barrett, Mike. 2013. “Arkham House: Sundry Observations.” In Doors to Elsewhere, 17–43. Cheadle, Staffordshire, UK: Alchemy Press.

Joshi, S. T. 1999. Sixty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

At the Mountains of Madness is the longest story that H. P. Lovecraft published during his lifetime, although legend has it that he had set it aside in 1931 when it was rejected by his usual market, Weird Tales, and was subsequently submitted by Donald Wandrei without Lovecraft’s knowledge to Astounding Stories of Super-Science, where it was serialized in a heavily edited version in 1936. A version much closer to the original was included in the Arkham House omnibus The Outsider and Others in 1939 and reprinted as the title story of an Arkham House collection in 1964; a corrected version of the latter collection was issued in 1985.

The novella follows the standard format of an archepological mystery story, in which investigators of long-buried ruins disturb entities that might have been better left to lie. The narrative takes the similarly standardized form of an account by geologist William Dyer of a scientific expedition to the Antarctic in 1930–1931, supposedly relating facts previously unrevealed, with the motive of warning future prospective explorers of the dangers they might face.

John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”: Antarctic
Horror with Echoes of Lovecraft

John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella “Who Goes There?” is one of the most original—and influential—treatments of a shape-shifting monster, widely acknowledged as a classic of the science fiction genre. The story was originally published, under the pseudonym “Don A. Stuart,” in the August 1938 issue of the pulp Astounding Stories.

Set at an Antarctic research station, “Who Goes There?” echoes H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931) in its depiction of an isolated group of scientists besieged by alien forces. In Campbell’s tale, this extraterrestrial invader is capable of assimilating and perfectly mimicking any life form, including human beings, and the story’s horrific charge lies in the growing paranoia of the increasingly harried men, who cannot be sure who is friend and who is foe. Above all, the monster must be prevented from reaching civilization, where its ability to simulate humans would be given free rein, spreading like a contagion.

“Who Goes There?” has influenced much subsequent SF-horror hybrids, such as Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers and the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based upon it. Campbell’s story also has been adapted for the screen, first in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, which removed the shape-shifting premise, and then in 1982, by director John Carpenter, as The Thing, which reinstated the original plot line.

Rob Latham

Source: Leane, Elizabeth. 2005. “Locating the Thing: The Antarctic as Alien Space in John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’” Science Fiction Studies 32 (2): 225–239.

Dyer explains how the expedition discovered traces of a civilization established there fifty million years ago by extraterrestrial colonists, called Elder Things by the expedition’s ill-fated biologist Professor Lake, but probably identical to entities previously introduced in other Lovecraft stories and allegedly known in arcane writings as the “Old Ones.” The colonists’ cities were built with the aid of monstrous biologically engineered slaves called shoggoths, whose eventual revolution brought the civilization to an end. In the course of the story the members of the expedition realize that the city’s final inhabitants were only in suspended animation; having been disturbed, they are now returning to life, apparently continuing their ancient conflict. After a climactic encounter with a shoggoth, the narrator reports that his companion, the graduate student Danforth, was driven insane by the sight of even worse horrors that he was fortunate enough not to glimpse.

Along with the other Lovecraft story published in Astounding, “The Shadow out of Time,” At the Mountains of Madness became a pivotal item of the retrospectively constructed “Cthulhu Mythos,” ingeniously redefining entities that had been deemed supernatural in previous stories within a science fictional context, as products of alien biology, and thus decisively altering the assumed metaphysical context of that schema. In consequence, its substance offered more scope than its predecessors for future development and elaboration by the many other hands who added later works to the Mythos, and more temptation to exercise the imagination in extrapolation and variation. It is, therefore, one of the most extensively plundered and supplemented narratives in the sequence, and one of the most influential texts in modern weird fiction.

At the Mountains of Madness has been the subject of various extraliterary adaptations, including a graphic novel and audio dramatizations and readings by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society and the BBC. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro spearheaded an effort to make a big-budget movie adaptation, with James Cameron being named as producer and Tom Cruise attached as a lead actor at one point. However, the project ran into roadblocks at Warner Brothers, and del Toro was reportedly dismayed and discouraged by similarities between his vision of the film and director Ridley Scott’s 2012 science fiction–horror film Prometheus. At the start of 2017, the project was still in limbo.

Brian Stableford

See also: Arkham House; “The Colour out of Space”; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.

Further Reading

Collis, Clark. 2012. “‘Prometheus’ Kills Guillermo del Toro’s Dream Project.” Entertainment Weekly, June 10. http://www.ew.com/article/2012/06/10/prometheus-ridley-scott-guillermo-del-toro-lovecraft.

Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, 148–172. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

Long, Christian. 2015. “The Story of Guillermo del Toro’s Fight to Bring Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ to the Screen.” Uproxx, August 20. http://uproxx.com/movies/guillermo-del-toro-mountains-madness.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1936] 2005. At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. New York: Modern Library.

Mosig, Dirk W., and Donald R. Burleson. 1979. “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol. 1, edited by Frank N. Magill, 97–101. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

“On At the Mountains of Madness: A Panel Discussion.” 1996. Lovecraft Studies 34 (Spring): 2–10.

B

BALLARD, J. G. (1930–2009)

James Graham Ballard was known primarily as an author of science fiction, although the tones and textures of his best work converged with horror literature. Ballard was interned in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, enduring trials that left him with an abiding alienation from the values of Western modernity, convinced that advanced civilization is merely a screen for violent and irrational impulses. Influenced by Freudian psychological theory and European surrealism, Ballard’s early work—gathered in such collections as The Voices of Time (1962) and The Terminal Beach (1964)—pointed the way toward a sophisticated and cynical new breed of science fiction, skeptical about the scientific mastery of nature and the essential heroism of the human species. His trilogy of disaster novels—The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966)—challenged every convention of the genre: rather than battling to preserve the remnants of civilization in the face of adversity, his protagonists pursued a psychic accommodation—virtually a mystical fusion—with the forces destroying their worlds. In these works, the pessimistic impulses of horror literature seemed to overcome the essential optimism of science fiction.

This movement toward horror was even more pronounced in Ballard’s mid-career trilogy chronicling the crushing boredom and despair of modern urban experience: Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1973), and High-Rise (1975). Crash evokes the automobile as a kind of demon lover, with fatal collisions becoming emblems of perverse eroticism, of denatured humanity bleakly coupling with machines, while High-Rise centers on an apartment building swiftly descending into chaos, driven by the low-grade tensions and rivalries that mark urban existence itself. Disturbingly surreal examinations of the tenuousness of civilization, these works—both memorably filmed (Crash by David Cronenberg in 1996, High-Rise by Ben Wheatley in 2015)—depict eruptions of the wanton irrationalism lurking beneath life’s surface pleasantries.

These novels’ grim tone and inclination to explore the basest of human impulses made Ballard a controversial figure within science fiction, with many fans arguing that he was not a science fiction author at all. Certainly, his later work moved resolutely away from the field, with his culminating tetralogy—Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006)—extrapolating the vein of social horror plumbed in Crash and High-Rise. All of these works are set in artificial environments, planned communities where their denizens’ darkest fantasies can be given free rein, and their tone is consistently somber, though enlivened by flashes of ferocious satire. When Ballard died in London in 2009, he was widely celebrated as one of the most important British authors of the postwar period.

Rob Latham

See also: Psychological Horror; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Baxter, Jeanette, and Rowland Wymer, eds. 2012. J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Luckhurst, Roger. 1997. The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Oramus, Dominika. 2015. Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Toronto: Terminal Press.

Sellars, Simon, and Dan O’Hara, eds. 2012. Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard. London: Fourth Estate.

BARKER, CLIVE (1952–)

Clive Barker is a celebrated horror author, a member of the Masters of Horror elite, a film and theater director, and an artist. He is best known in horror literature and film for his thematic blending of body horror and transcendence, frequently incorporating transgressive sexual symbolism and transformations of the body. His influential original creations are often bound up in twisted transfigurations of the flesh, the most infamous of which is the Hell Priest “Pinhead” from Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart (1986), adapted and directed by Barker for the screen as Hellraiser (1987). He attained acclaim in the mid-1980s in Britain for his unique short stories and novels that celebrate graphic body horror, as well as his unique S&M-style monsters, all of which combine erotic suggestion with the desire and torment of human transcendence. His novels and short stories are known for their lyrical descriptive prose, recalling H. P. Lovecraft’s style of describing the unimaginable. Barker is particularly interested in themes and motifs of gaining access to other worlds and hidden realms, doorways which are often concealed from view and discovered only by those worthy to glimpse their wonders.

Born in Liverpool, England, in 1952, Barker displayed a keen interest in art, drawing, painting, models, and puppets from an early age, and he soon began creating dark creatures and fantastical worlds. He was keen on detailing his own unique creatures and tales, which soon translated to an interest in theater. Alongside both former school friends and upcoming actors and writers, he formed an avant-garde theater group, the Dog Company, which served as his first foray into professional writing and stage work. The group earned some critical praise in London and Edinburgh for their avant-garde original plays and performance style. By the late 1980s, Dog Company members directly featured in or contributed to Barker’s films, both onscreen and off, the most notable of whom is Doug Bradley, who was cast as Pinhead of the Hellraiser franchise. Peter Atkins, another Dog Company writer, wrote the screenplays for the first three Hellraiser sequels—Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988); Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), and Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1996)—which established his own screenwriting career in horror cinema.

A Selective Clive Barker Chronology:
Books and Films

Books

1984–1985

Books of Blood

1985

The Damnation Game

1986

The Hellbound Heart

1987

Weaveworld

1988

Cabal

1989

The Great and Secret Show

1991

Imajica

1992

The Thief of Always

1994

Everville

1996

Sacrament

1998

Galilee

2001

Coldheart Canyon

2002

Abarat

2004

Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

2007

Mister B. Gone

2011

Abarat: Absolute Midnight

2015

The Scarlet Gospels

Films (as writer and/or director)

1973

Salomé (short film)—Director

1978

The Forbidden (short film)—Director

1985

Underworld, a.k.a. Transmutations—Writer

1986

Rawhead Rex (based on Barker’s short story “Rawhead Rex”)—Writer

1987

Hellraiser (based on Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart)—Writer and director

1990

Nightbreed (based on Barker’s novella Cabal)—Writer and director

1992

Candyman (based on Barker’s short story “The Forbidden”)—Writer and producer

1995

Lord of Illusions (based on Barker’s short story “The Last Illusion”)—Writer, producer, and director

Barker’s first success as an author came with the publication of an ambitious collection of horror short stories entitled Books of Blood (1984–1985). Published in six volumes over two collections, these imaginative and often visceral horror short stories enjoyed a strong critical reception, garnering Barker enthusiastic endorsements from such horror luminaries as Ramsey Campbell and, most notably, Stephen King, who described Barker in a widely circulated blurb as “the future of horror.” This rapid ascent in horror circles was followed by Barker’s debut novel, The Damnation Game (1985), set in 1980s Britain and celebrating Barker’s interest in traditional Gothic and horror tropes. This first novel rapidly established him as a major literary force in British horror literature; by 1986, two years after his publishing debut, he appeared alongside Ramsey Campbell and Lisa Tuttle in the horror anthology Night Visions 3, edited by George R. R. Martin. The story featured in the anthology, “The Hellbound Heart,” would become a signature piece in Barker’s literary and visual storytelling; republished as a separate novella in 1988 due to its successful screen adaptation, The Hellbound Heart foregrounded Barker’s style as one of fleshy horror and gore combined with body modification, exploring the intermingling of pleasure and pain as a wellspring of fascination and desire. According to Doug Bradley, Barker half-jokingly describes this macabre tale as “Ibsen with monsters” (Under the Skin, 2004), in that it is primarily concerned with the disintegration of a marriage by means of infidelity and murder, with monsters hidden in the attic.

Barker’s polymathic artistry also flourished with the rare opportunity to adapt and direct his novella into a feature-length film, retitled Hellraiser. Barker had previously directed two short films, Salomé (1973) and The Forbidden (1978), and had previous unsuccessful screen adaptations of his stories with Underworld (1985; released as Transmutations in the United States) and Rawhead Rex (1986), but this new feature-length project was grander in scope and budget, and, crucially, it allowed Barker to completely control its style and tone as director. Its most spectacular element was certainly the S&M-style Cenobites, “demons to some, angels to others” (Hellraiser 1987), infernal explorers of pain and pleasure that are striking in their visual design, with each member of the group bearing its own unique body modifications, which include bejeweled pins decorating intersections of precisely carved flesh, exposed abdominal gashes, surgical wounds, and chattering teeth, all made complete by the creatures’ bodies being sewn into sculpted leather clothing. The Cenobites, designed directly from Barker’s own sketches, also engender a ghostly and gothic contamination of domestic space, an invasion of the psyche made monstrous with forbidden appetites. Barker’s monsters peel back open flesh and sinew with bloodied chains and hooks, marking Hellraiser as a confrontational visual experience at the time. A striking combination of gory special effects makeup with a plot that evokes the theme of the Faustian bargain, Hellraiser is Barker’s most successful and widely known film as director to date.

There exists a certain branding tension between Barker’s authorial and directorial creations. His name had become synonymous with horror branding as early as 1986, but privately he was undergoing a transition away from his roots in graphic horror fiction. Hellraiser was released during this period of generic change in Barker’s writing style, which was characterized by a distinctive moving away from his established exploration of body horror in favor of dark fantasy storytelling. Rejecting rigid genre traditions and expectations, Barker describes his creations as “dark fantastique” (Winter 2001). This notable confluence of fantasy and horror is evidenced in Barker’s second novel, Weaveworld (1987), a tale of magic and power in a secret realm hidden in the filigree of a magic carpet. Weaveworld is better understood as an epic tale of dark adventure rather than one of grisly horror or mutilation. The novel’s mantra, “that which can be imagined need never be lost” (Barker 1997, xvii), neatly sums up Barker’s thematic transition from his earlier visceral horrors and bleak tone. Released in the same year as Hellraiser, Barker’s Weaveworld began his generic transition in literature over the next decade, while his public (and film) personas were more explicitly wedded to his visceral horror creations. His next three novels, The Great and Secret Show (1989), Imajica (1991), and Everville (1994), crystallized his preoccupation with dark forces and human transcendence, as each tale grapples with themes of Manichean battles (that is, battles between absolute light and darkness) that ripple across time and dominions. For Barker, the fantastic enabled him to create parallel worlds of wonder and horror, glimpsed through a doorway in the everyday world and free from the constraints of any one genre.

Barker has had a mixed relationship with the film industry. His directorial debut with Hellraiser was positively received, soon spawning a successful sequel, which he produced. However, in 1990 he directed Nightbreed, based on his novella Cabal (1988), and the film received a mixed critical response and poor box-office returns. This disappointment left an indelible mark on Barker. Nightbreed is a tonally uneven film, but it also suffered from mishandling by Fox Studios that directly affected its box-office returns. Executives were reportedly baffled by the film’s insistence that the monsters were its heroes, and the studio rejected the director’s cut in favor of a shorter yet narratively confusing theatrical version. Further, Fox’s marketing department inaccurately sold the film as a slasher, despite its clear fantasy themes, all of which contributed to unfavorable critical responses and to Barker’s personal and professional disillusionment with the film industry. Nightbreed has remained a cult favorite with film festival audiences, and it underwent restoration and re-release as a director’s cut in 2014.

Barker’s final film as director, Lord of Illusions (1995), was loosely adapted from his short story “The Last Illusion” in Books of Blood, Vol. 6. Starring Scott Bakula as Detective Harry D’Amour, the film combines dark fantasy, stage magic, and horror, generically blending Barker’s fascination with trickery, evil, and immortality with strong film noir aesthetics. Garnering positive reviews from critics including Roger Ebert and the Hollywood Reporter, the film was more palatable to general audiences outside of Barker’s core fan base. However, today Barker avoids further directorial projects while remaining an influential producer through his production company, Seraphim Films, and he continues his contributions to filmmaking through extensive collaboration.

During the mid-to-late 1990s, Barker’s novels revealed much about his personal life, including his political and cultural interests beyond the horror genre and filmmaking. Following his relocation to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he published three “dark fantastique” novels—Sacrament (1996), Galilee (1998), and Coldheart Canyon (2001)—each of which leaves illuminating clues about his personal and emotional life. As an openly gay author, in Sacrament Barker articulates his concerns about the horrors of animal extinction and the 1990s AIDS crisis. Galilee draws inspiration from Barker’s then relationship with photographer David Armstrong in a tale of a mysterious and exotic explorer, the titular Galilee, caught between two warring families. Coldheart Canyon is a Gothic haunted house novel critiquing Hollywood’s vapid culture and scandalous past. Partially set in Barker’s Beverly Hills home, the novel heralded his explicit return to the horror fold, through which he vented his personal frustrations with Hollywood culture, including his place within it.

The inclusion of Barker’s original artworks in his novels emerged in the early 1990s and had steadily grown more prominent in his literary career. The Thief of Always (1992), his fable-like first published novel for children, included Barker’s own sketches, documenting the story’s many monsters and ghoulish sights as witnessed by young protagonist Harvey Swick. Abandoning the constraints of filmmaking for the expressive liberation of painting and sketches, Barker was keen to create tales lyrically and visually for young adult (YA) readers at a time when it was unorthodox for horror authors to target different audiences and demographics. The success of The Thief of Always prompted him to plan a series specifically addressing a younger readership. The Books of Abarat, an intended quintet of novels accompanied by Barker’s paintings, chart the tale of heroine Candy Quackenbush, who accidentally discovers a hidden magical realm of monsters and strange creatures scattered across an enchanted archipelago of twenty-five islands. To date, three of the five intended books have been published: Abarat (2002), Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War (2004), and Abarat: Absolute Midnight (2011).

A return to more traditional horror fiction was inevitable for Barker. His short novel Mister B. Gone (2007) plays with narrative form, as readers encounter the title character and demon Mister B., who wishes to break free from the very pages of the book. The novel is Barker’s personal testament to the power of horror literature. In 2015, in the midst of completing his Books of Abarat quintet and its accompanying artworks, Barker also published the long-awaited and much anticipated novel The Scarlet Gospels, a crossover tale reviving beloved characters from his earlier work. The Scarlet Gospels chronicles a battle of wits between Pinhead and Barker’s film noir–styled paranormal detective Harry D’Amour, as the Hell Priest journeys into the bowels of hell to claim its throne for himself. Ten years in development, the novel was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2016. More recently, he has hinted on social media that he is preparing a new tale in which Pinhead revisits the character of Kirsty from The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser for a final encounter. These developments suggest a desire on Barker’s part to return to the type of horror fiction, visceral and gory in theme and style, that originally established his reputation in the 1980s.

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

See also: “The Beast with Five Fingers”; Body Horror; Books of Blood; The Damnation Game; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Splatterpunk.

Further Reading

Badley, Linda. 1996. “Clive Barker Writing (from) the Body.” In Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice, 73–104. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Barker, Clive. [1987] 1997. Weaveworld. 10th Anniversary Edition. London: HarperCollins.

Brown, Michael, ed. 1991. Pandemonium: Further Explorations into the Worlds of Clive Barker. Forestville, CA: Eclipse.

Hellraiser. 1987. Written and directed by Clive Barker. New World Pictures.

Hellraiser. 2004. Special Edition Boxset. Anchor Bay Films.

Hoppenstand, Gary. 1994. Clive Barker’s Short Stories: Imagination as Metaphor in the Books of Blood and Other Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Jones, Stephen. 1991. Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden. Lancaster: Underwood-Miller.

McRoy, Jay. 2002. “There Are No Limits: Splatterpunk, Clive Barker, and the Body in-Extremis.” Paradoxa 17: 130–150.

Ní Fhlainn, Sorcha, ed. 2017. Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Under the Skin: Doug Bradley on Hellraiser. 2004. Directed by Jake West. Nucleus Films.

Winter, Douglas. E. 2001. Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic. London: HarperCollins.

BARLOW, R. H. (1918–1951)

Best known for his work as an anthropologist, Robert Hayward Barlow spent his early years as a central figure in the Lovecraft circle, a group of weird fiction writers. Barlow befriended H. P. Lovecraft via correspondence at the young age of thirteen, and Lovecraft collaborated with Barlow on no less than six stories. They became so close that the latter named Barlow his literary executor upon his death. Unfortunately, this appointment drove a wedge between Barlow and the rest of the Lovecraft circle, effectively alienating him from the group and ending his career as a practitioner of the weird tale.

Barlow’s fiction more clearly resembles the fantasy tales of Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith than Lovecraft’s speculative realism. The bulk of Barlow’s writing is of an amateurish quality, consisting largely of short vignettes and sketches rather than completed stories. However, this work shows the promise of a young writer learning his craft and reveals that Barlow possessed a wry wit and a keen sense of satire. These short pieces recount events occurring in fantasy worlds and are tied loosely together by theme and motif. They often depict the interactions between the gods and the societies that worship them, foregrounding the disastrous consequences of human hubris in confronting larger forces. Barlow also connects his tales through reoccurring characters such as the God Lord Krang, thus demonstrating the early stages of development of a mythos modeled on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

While the majority of Barlow’s work feels unpolished, he produced at least two stories, “The Night Ocean” (1936) and “A Dim-Remembered Story” (1936), that demonstrate professional quality. “The Night Ocean” most resembles Lovecraft’s work and is the least fantastic of Barlow’s writing. While Lovecraft collaborated with Barlow on this story, his input has been proven minimal. The story, an excellent study in atmospheric horror, centers on an artist on vacation at a small seaside town, building tension through the artist’s ruminations on human insignificance next to the terrible vastness of the ocean. “A Dim-Remembered Story,” more in line with the rest of Barlow’s fantasy work, tells the story of a man who awakens in a seemingly medieval world, only to realize that he is actually eons in the future among the remnants of a fallen civilization. The narrator is then transported further into the future where, as a mere consciousness floating in space, he sees that the universe is completely altered, leaving no trace of humanity’s existence. The horror of the story develops from the recognition of human triviality in the gigantic flow of time.

After falling out with the Lovecraft circle, Barlow met Lawrence Hart and began publishing activist poetry. He eventually moved on to a successful career in anthropology at Mexico City College as an expert in Mesoamerican culture and the Náhuatl language. Barlow committed suicide in January 1951.

Travis Rozier

See also: Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Smith, Clark Ashton.

Further Reading

Barlow, R. H. 2002. Eyes of the God: The Weird Fiction and Poetry of R. H. Barlow, edited by S. T. Joshi, Douglas A. Anderson, and David E. Schulz. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Berutti, Massimo. 2011. Dim-Remembered Stories: A Critical Study of R. H. Barlow. New York: Hippocampus Press.

BARRON, LAIRD (1970–)

Laird Samuel Barron is a writer of weird fiction from the United States. He is one of the most significant early twenty-first-century writers of cosmic horror and has received many plaudits, award nominations, and awards for his work.

Barron was born in Palmer, Alaska, and raised on a wilderness parcel in an isolated area, in general poverty. In Alaska he later worked as a fisherman on the Bering Sea and raced the Iditarod, a punishing long-distance sled-dog race, three times. The wilderness and the harsh conditions of his upbringing have fed his work.

Barron’s work falls in the tradition of Lovecraft’s cosmicism by portraying humans as living at the mercy of inhuman metaphysical forces and entities whose nature and concerns dwarf the human perspective and emerge as intrinsically horrifying to it. But in contrast to Lovecraft, Barron’s outer entities are not utterly Other and indifferent to humankind. They are not expressions of a pessimistic shudder at the insignificance of the planet Earth and its civilizations. Instead, Barron’s cosmos is actively malevolent. In his stories, the things from the far corners of the universe are petty and cruel. In this, Barron’s fiction bears similarities to Thomas Ligotti’s. A black miasma underlies everything, and men and women are little more than puppets of this malicious vital force. But in Barron’s work, unlike in Ligotti’s, human life is not part of the toxicity. In fact, relationships, drinking, drugs, and sexual encounters offer a kind of reprieve from the torment.

Barron’s fiction combines weird horror with other pulp modes, such as the Western (as in “Bulldozer,” 2004) and noir (as in “Hand of Glory,” 2012). His prose also contains revelatory moments of unnerving lyricism, especially when the weird is encountered. Barron has talked of the influence of Cormac McCarthy and Angela Carter on his work, and the approach of these two writers to language can be seen in his stories.

Much of Barron’s work deals with the presence of hostile alien entities in Washington State, which was Barron’s home for some years. These works form a cycle known as the Pacific Northwest Mythos that shares characters and incidents. In fact, in all of Barron’s stories, players and events recur again and again. This has the uncanny effect of making them feel like recountings rather than fictions. Barron has also, in his most recent work, turned to metatextual, parodic stories, such as “More Dark” (2012), in which he and other prominent horror writers are characters; “More Dark” addresses some of the myth-making surrounding Thomas Ligotti in the community of horror writers and readers.

In the early 2010s Barron moved to the Hudson Valley region of New York State, and in his fiction he has turned away from Pacific Northwest settings to focus on Alaskan themes. His 2016 book Swift to Chase (2016) collected some of his Alaskan stories.

Barron’s work had a strong influence on early twenty-first-century weird fiction. In 2014, Word Horde published The Children of Old Leech, a tribute to Barron’s fiction. Barron is a multiple Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker award nominee and was a 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award winner for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007) and Occultation and Other Stories (2010). “Mysterium Tremendum” won a 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Carter, Angela; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Shirley Jackson Awards.

Further Reading

Barron, Laird. 2010. “Why I Write.” Publishers Weekly, July 12. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/43795-why-i-write-laird-barron.html.

Jarvis, Timothy. 2013. “Stages of Horrific Vision in ‘The Forest.’” Weird Fiction Review, April 9. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/04/101-weird-writers-laird-barron.

Lockhart, Ross E., and Justin Steele. 2014. The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron. Petaluma, CA: Word Horde.

Tourigny, Yves. They Who Dwell in the Cracks: A Look at the Works of Author Laird Barron. Accessed July 11, 2106. http://www.theywhodwellinthecracks.com.

Vanderhooft, JoSelle. 2012. “Laird Barron: I’m a Magnet to Steel—Interview.” Weird Tales 66, no. 3: 21–25.

An Interview with Laird Barron

October 2016

In this interview, Barron, whose writing is noted for its strong use of voice and setting, discusses the place of these elements in horror fiction. He also talks about the revitalization of weird fiction in the twenty-first century, the significance of H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti (and also Cormac McCarthy and T. E. D. Klein) for horror fiction, and the impressive breadth of the new millennium’s horror revival.

Matt Cardin: One of the first things an astute reader notices when reading your work is the centrality of voice. Many have noted the use of a noir-type voice, tone, approach, in a significant amount of your work, but it goes beyond that. A distinct voice in general, whether noir-ish or otherwise, is crucial to everything you’ve written. Can you speak to why this is the case? Because not all horror fiction hinges so heavily on this quality. In fact, a great deal of modern horror fiction has been written in the same “style-less” style and voiceless prose that has characterized much mass-published fiction in the past few decades. Why is it different for you? And what do you see as the role of voice in horror fiction as a whole?

Laird Barron: I’m heavily influenced by noir and pulp from the 1930s through the early 1980s. Most of the authors I admire skew toward narrative traditions that privilege sharp characterization and robust detail in setting and atmosphere.

Music also played a significant role in my development. Country and Western songs from the 1960s and 1970s often defaulted to a ballad format. Singers such as Bobby Bare, Tom T. Hall, and Marty Robbins (and many others) possessed rich and distinctive voices and styles. As a consequence, I’m less interested in modes of contemporary prose that eschew all adornment or tend to neuter voice. Horror works best when synthesized with a strong point of view. Voice: the reason Stephen King reigns as the heavyweight champion of horror forty years into his career.

MC: Setting is also crucial to your stories, as it is to a great deal of horror fiction in general. You’ve done some striking things with turning Washington State into a kind of haunted land of its own, reminiscent, perhaps, of what Stephen King has done with Maine, or what Lovecraft did with Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New England in general. You have also given some of the same treatment to Alaska. How do you understand the role of setting in horror literature? What would you say about it to readers of horror fiction—yours or anyone else’s—who are looking to increase their understanding, enjoyment, and experience of this particular type of literature?

LB: Setting is integral to the kinds of literature that shaped my youth. For example, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, and Louis L’Amour dwelled on the physicality of their universes. These writers created pulp heroes who reflected (or stood in marked contrast [to]) the high deserts, frozen wastelands, lush jungles, and alien vistas so ubiquitous in their tales. Setting can provide critical elements to a horror story—perhaps it isolates the protagonist or acts as an obstacle. My own choice has been to occasionally elevate setting, to imbue it with its own agency, and, occasionally, treat it as another character.

Real terror can be derived from a reactive universe. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian demonstrate opposite ends of the spectrum of how a reactionary setting illuminates and amplifies horror. In the context of cosmic horror, the vastness of the natural world, and beyond, reinforce the notion that man is minute, a flea upon the back of a behemoth.

MC: The early twenty-first century has seen a reinvigoration of horror fiction and film, especially, but not exclusively, in the area of weird fiction. You are part of this wave. What do you think has happened? Why now? And what is different, if anything, from the original “horror boom” of circa 1975 to 1995?

LB: These things tend to exist as cycles—perhaps we were simply due for a revival. The current boom separates itself from previous cycles in regard to volume and variety. I’m not sure there’s ever been so broad or deep an array of theme, style, or technique. Independent presses and the advent of digital technology are driving the movement.

This latter point can’t be stressed enough: the independent press and digital technology have compensated for an ever-shrinking midlist. The Internet and forbearance of small publishers have encouraged authors to experiment and to push the envelope.

MC: Two writers have frequently been mentioned in association with you and your work, and both of them are, like you, quite prominent in the twenty-first century’s new wave of horror. Their names may be taken here as questions for you to answer, problems for you to address, and/or enigmas for you to explain, whether in relation to yourself or in relation to the field at large. First: Lovecraft.

LB: My interest in H.P. Lovecraft focuses mainly on the implications of his cosmic obsessions, rather than tilling the same patch of literary earth.

Lovecraft has, with diligent labor by August Derleth and S. T. Joshi, arisen from the dust of obscurity to become a literary monument. He personifies what contemporary authors term cosmic horror. That said, it’s important to recognize Lovecraft for what he truly is—an artifact. Much of his personal philosophy is untenable and his visionary approach to fiction is simply a beginning, a jumping-off point for those of us who’ve followed the trail.

Two major camps have arisen of late, the anti-Lovecraftians and the Lovecraft deifiers. The man made a serious contribution to weird fiction; this can’t be lightly dismissed on the basis of his purple prose or his abhorrent personal beliefs. Likewise, he isn’t the alpha or omega of the genre. Weird fiction and cosmic horror predate the Bible. Weird fiction and cosmic horror have succeeded Lovecraft and will succeed us as well.

MC: Second: Ligotti.

LB: I’ve written a substantial number of stories in response to Lovecraft and Lovecraft’s successors, especially early in my career. As I said, he’s a monument looming over a certain precinct of weird fiction. Conversely, Thomas Ligotti is, at this juncture, a massive subterranean structure, or the submerged bulk of an iceberg that dwarfs its surface presence. The worldview of both men drive their fiction. Lovecraft’s gaze turned almost impossibly outward, while Ligotti dwells upon the microcosmic. Somehow they wind up bumping into one another at the end of a long, dark journey.

Ligotti’s core strength and main appeal is the sui generis quality of his work. Where Lovecraft (despite xenophobic tendencies) spoke to the interests of a broad spectrum of humanity, Ligotti speaks directly to the disaffected, the despondent, and the depressed in a naturalistic manner that knows no equal among horror writers. The adage goes that one mustn’t conflate an artist with his or her creations. Ligotti is an exception to the rule. His philosophy seems largely inseparable from the hellscape of his imagination.

MC: Are there any additional authors and works that you would recommend to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important both for this genre and for literature as a whole?

LB: While Cormac McCarthy isn’t widely considered a horror or weird fiction author, I beg to differ. His landmark novel, Blood Meridian, numbers among the seminal works of both cosmic horror and North American literature in the main. Few stories so brutally illustrate the minuteness of man in all his depravity, ambition, and hubris when contrasted with the implacability of nature and the larger universe.

T. E. D. Klein’s horror collection, Dark Gods, is essential reading. To quote something I once wrote about this book: Dark Gods is a seminal collection of four dark fantasy novellas epitomizing all that was excellent with 1980s horror. Klein, former editor of Twilight Zone Magazine, is a master of creeping dread, of quiet, cerebral horror, requiring nary a drop of blood to nail home his point. One of the smoothest wordsmiths in the business, his knack with observed detail is astounding. His talent is certainly on par with the likes of [Peter] Straub and [John] Updike. Of especial merit: “Petey” and “Black Man with a Horn,” this latter an homage to H. P. Lovecraft.

MC: What do you think is most important for contemporary readers to know, remember, bear in mind, about horror literature?

LB: Circling back to comments about Cormac McCarthy (and earlier when I mentioned the role of the small press), I note that horror is where you find it. A welcome aspect to the current horror/weird fiction resurgence is a broad-spectrum approach to the subject. Cosmic horror and its kin aren’t confined to explicit genre niches—a new wave of writers continue to unearth and perfect techniques and delivery mechanisms far removed from the pulp trappings of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and other forefathers of the tradition. May this trend continue.

BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821–1867)

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, critic, and translator whose visionary works signal the shift from romanticism to symbolism in the mid-nineteenth century and represent a definitive example of and inspiration for the Decadent movement of the later nineteenth century (which emphasized degeneration, perversity, and self-conscious artifice), thus paving the way for the crystallization of surrealism in the twentieth century as a philosophical and artistic movement dedicated to giving voice to the unfiltered contents of the unconscious mind. Baudelaire’s myriad stylistic and conceptual innovations were designed to create a flux of verse that could extract, from the abyss of urban experience, a vision of reality appropriate to the volatility and uncertainty of modern life. Twentieth-century horror literature, particularly in the weird and cosmic modes, owes a great deal to Baudelaire, whose hallucinatory and erotic meditations on possession, corpses, vampires, nightmares, ghosts, poison, pain, and death conjure overwhelming sensations of fear and wonder while turning inside-out traditional notions of space and time. Indeed, years before H. P. Lovecraft would define the weird in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), Baudelaire remarked, “The Beautiful is always strange” (Hyslop 1992, 36). Another of the early twentieth century’s important authors of cosmic horror, Clark Ashton Smith, explicitly acknowledged Baudelaire as an influence. Commercially successful in his day only for his popular translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, Baudelaire lived a turbulent life oscillating between idleness and debauchery, culminating in his contraction of syphilis and his death from a paralytic stroke at the young age of forty-six.

Inspired by the Gothic writings of Poe, Baudelaire published, in 1857, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), an immeasurably influential volume comprised of 132 breathless poems dedicated to poet Théophile Gautier and later praised by such writers as Émile Deschamps, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. These metaphysically pessimistic works deconstruct the Romantic view of a harmonious relationship between inner and outer worlds in favor of an embrace of dizzying multiplicity, of an ironic fall from grace and a satanic rapture in the “spleen” of fear and flight. The ecstatic and funerary poems, included under the headings of “Révolte” and “La Mort,” best exemplify the volume’s anticipation of and role in shaping the genre of cosmic horror. Six poems from Les Fleurs du mal—“Les bijoux” (The Jewels), “Le Léthé” (Lethe—the river of forgetfulness in Hades), “A celle qui est trop gaie” (To She Who Is Too Gay), “Lesbos,” “Femmes damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte” (Women Doomed: Delphine and Hippolyta), and “Les métamorphoses du vampire” (The Vampire’s Metamorphoses)—were condemned and suppressed on grounds of moral indecency. In 1860, Baudelaire published Les Paradis artificiels, opium et haschisch (Artificial Paradise, Opium and Hashish), an investigation into the sensorial distortions and changes in perspective that come with the effects of opium and hashish. Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), published posthumously in 1869 and dedicated to writer Arsène Houssaye, collects fifty-one prose poems that study the melancholic drone of Parisian life in the nineteenth century through a macabre prism, best evidenced in the languid horror of “Chacun sa chimère” (To Each His Chimera) and the creeping dread of “Mademoiselle Bistouri.”

Sean Matharoo

See also: Gautier, Théophile; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Smith, Clark Ashton; The Sublime; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Balakian, Anna. 1947. Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New Mysticism in French Poetry. New York: New York University Press.

Holland, Eugene W. 1993. Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hyslop, Lois Boe. 1992. Charles Baudelaire Revisited. New York: Twayne.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1949. Baudelaire. Translated by Martin Turnell. London: Horizon.

“THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS”

W. F. Harvey’s now-famous story of a creeping, crawling disembodied hand, “The Beast with Five Fingers,” was originally published in the first volume of The New Decameron (1919), an anthology series that also saw contributions from Dorothy L. Sayers, Compton Mackenzie, and D. H. Lawrence. In the tradition of the fourteenth-century Italian Renaissance writer Boccaccio, volume one is presented as stories told by holiday-makers of disparate disciplines traveling together. “The Beast with Five Fingers,” the first story in the book, is billed as “The Psychic Researcher’s Tale.”

A Suspicious Scuttling Sound . . .

In “The Beast with Five Fingers,” Eustace has had a box delivered to him, containing what he thinks is some kind of small animal. It escapes in the library of the “gloomy Georgian mansion” (Harvey 1919, 32) where he lives. He pursues the scuttling sound to the top of the library’s iron corkscrew stairs and receives a shock:

Quickly he stole on tiptoe in the dim moonshine in the direction of the noise, feeling as he went for one of the switches. His fingers touched the metal knob at last. He turned on the electric light.

About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor, was a man’s hand. Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment. It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole. While he was looking, too surprised to stir, the hand disappeared round the corner. (42–43)

Matt Cardin

Source: Harvey, W. F. 1919. “The Beast with Five Fingers.” In The New Decameron, 29–71. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co.

Although anthologized in the interim, “The Beast with Five Fingers” was not collected until 1928, when it became the title story of Harvey’s second collection, The Beast with Five Fingers and Other Stories. For this collection, according to Richard Dalby in his introduction to The Double Eye, Harvey foundationally changed and rewrote the story’s first two pages, while deleting some text from the story’s latter half. It is this revised version that tends to be reprinted and that has appeared many times in anthologies of terror and horror. It appears, for example, with one of Harvey’s other notable stories, “August Heat,” in Alexander Laing’s classic anthology The Haunted Omnibus (1937), and it was even included by Sayers in her Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, Second Series (1931).

The story’s prologue concerns the eccentric and wealthy Adrian Borlsover, whose ancestors were “generous patrons of odd sciences, founders of querulous sects, [and] trustworthy guides to the bypath meadows of erudition” (Harvey 2004, 310). Toward the end of his life, Borlsover lost his sight. However, he developed “powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny” (311). For reasons only hinted at, but never made clear, Borlsover’s hand develops autonomous sentience, and on its master’s death has itself delivered to Borlsover’s nephew, Eustace, whom it proceeds to torment. Harvey’s storytelling is engaging and the narrative is tightly paced, and both qualities have doubtless contributed to the story’s ongoing popularity.

“The Beast with Five Fingers” is perhaps the best-known story in the severed-yet-animated hand subgenre, not to be confused with disembodied hands of a more ghostly and less corporeal taxonomy, such as Arthur Quiller-Couch’s “A Pair of Hands” (1898). One of the earlier literary examples of this subgenre is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” (1861). Another key example is Maurice Renard’s influential 1920 horror novel The Hands of Orlac. More recently Clive Barker, notable for his grisly explorations of the subgenre known as “body horror,” explored similar territory in his story “The Body Politic” (1984). The hands in these stories invariably represent the fragmented self, composed of separate, autonomous, intelligent personalities, often in rebellion, with an ability to scuttle and scheme against the identity of the body as a whole.

There is also no shortage of severed-yet-animated hands in film and television, as seen in Orlacs Hände (1924), The Addams Family (1964–1966), The Hand (1981), and Evil Dead 2 (1987). The most notable case of Harvey’s influence in this subgenre is the loose cinematic adaptation of The Beast with Five Fingers released in 1946, directed by Robert Florey and starring Robert Alda and Peter Lorre, with a script by Curt Siodmak, who is best known for his work on Universal Studios’ The Wolf Man (1941). While Siodmak’s adaptation of Harvey’s story is highly enjoyable, it substantially departs from Harvey’s original narrative, changing the setting to an Italian village, adding a number of characters, and making the character of Adrian Borlsover, renamed Francis Ingram in the film, a master pianist (a nod, perhaps, to Orlac, whose eponymous protagonist was likewise a pianist).

Brian J. Showers

See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; The Hands of Orlac; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan.

Further Reading

Dalby, Richard. 2009. Introduction to The Double Eye, by W. F. Harvey, v–xvi. Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus Press.

Forrest, Richard W. 2014. “Body Parts.” In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 55–58. London and New York: Routledge.

Harvey, W. F. [1919] 2004. “The Beast with Five Fingers.” In The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories, 310–329. Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions.

Rowe, Katherine. 1999. “The Beast with Five Fingers: Gothic Labor Relations in Victorian Ghost Stories.” In Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

BEAUMONT, CHARLES (1929–1967)

Charles Beaumont, born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago on January 2, 1929, was an American author of horror and science fiction who is probably best known for his classic Twilight Zone teleplays from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

His parents, Charles and Letty, were working-class; his father was employed in the railroad industry. Charles was a sickly youngster, and the relationship between mother and son was not always an easy one; he would later write about this period with great detachment and insight, especially his uneasy bond with his mother, in stories such as the acclaimed “Miss Gentilbelle.” As a youth, Charles L. Nutt was restricted to a year’s bed rest to convalesce from spinal meningitis. He missed a great deal of school, but it was during the recovery from this difficult period that he discovered the world within books. He also took up drawing in earnest, for which he had already displayed a natural aptitude.

As a young man, Nutt, now called Charles Beaumont by his own choosing due to dissatisfaction with his surname (a change that he made legal as an adult), married Helen Broun after leaving the military, and they eventually had four children after striking out on their own for Los Angeles, California.

Once in Southern California, Beaumont was at last able to meet others of similar disposition and was to form deep, lasting friendships with Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson (Ocean’s 11, 1959), John Tomerlin (Challenge the Wind, 1967), Chad Oliver (The Winds of Time, 1957), and several others in a loose alliance that came to be known as the “Southern California Writing School.” As their careers progressed, they would each find success as writers of short stories, scripts for television (including The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents), film, and novels. Beaumont was the nucleus of this group with his frenetic, sparking energy.

Beaumont’s fiction and his television scripts are often marked by exceptional strokes of imaginative whimsy, tinged with a subtextual bent toward social justice, as evinced in works as varied as the 1960 story “The Howling Man” (later adapted by Beaumont into a memorable 1960 Twilight Zone episode) and his unfinished novel excerpt, “My Grandmother’s Japonicas.” His single greatest tale is likely the remarkable “Black Country” from 1954, which explores the societal role of African Americans by describing the posthumous influence of a (fictional) black jazz musician. It was the first work of fiction ever published in Playboy.

As a stylist, Beaumont is second only to early Bradbury, his mentor. With regard to themes, he worked a large canvas; from genre works in horror and science fiction to straight literary fiction and even comedy, his talent was immense, seemingly unlimited. He usually painted vivid portraits of conflicted, realistic characters in unusual dilemmas of a moral nature and always did so with sensitivity, insight, and intelligence. As was the norm within his peer group of writers, his stories typically featured only one minor element of supernaturalism, or some aspect of progress gone awry (a frequent supernatural stand-in).

While on the set of his greatest artistic triumph, director Roger Corman’s 1962 cinematic adaptation of The Intruder from Beaumont’s eponymous literary novel, about integrating the Jim Crow South, Beaumont began to exhibit symptoms of neural damage. It was initially believed to be the effects of stress, and he was sent to a variety of experts before finally being diagnosed with an incurable, terminal neurological condition. He succumbed after a four-year struggle, at age 38, on February 21, 1967.

Beaumont was singular in his sphere of influence, in that he could inspire others to do things they would never do on their own. This inspirational aspect of his persona was key to his creative influence and to the way he was able to position himself in the modern mass media. Given that his output was restricted to roughly thirteen short years, he was remarkably prolific and consistent, and he remains one of the key, albeit overlooked, figures in genre literature of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Jason V Brock

See also: Bradbury, Ray; Matheson, Richard; Nolan, William F.

Further Reading

French, Lawrence. 2010. “Richard Matheson Remembers His Good Friend Charles Beaumont.” Cinefantastique Online, March 24. http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2010/03/richard-matheson-remembers-his-good-friend-charles-beaumont.

Grams, Martin, Jr. 2008. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing.

Prosser, Lee. 2010. Running from the Hunter: The Life and Works of Charles Beaumont. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Zicree, Marc Scott. 1992. The Twilight Zone Companion. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press.

BELOVED

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was published by Knopf in 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1987. In 2006 the New York Times named Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years.

While editing The Black Book (1974), Morrison read about a slave, Margaret Garner, who, in 1856, escaped from a northern Kentucky plantation with her family into Cincinnati, Ohio. During their recapture, Garner killed one of her children with the intent of killing all four and herself in order to prevent them from returning to the violence of slavery. This horror became the inspiration for Beloved, though Morrison has noted that she wished to explore imaginatively the themes that Garner’s predicament provokes rather than writing strictly historical fiction. She decided to write a ghost story: “The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery of ghosts” (Morrison 2004, xvii).

In Beloved, Sethe runs from Sweet Home in Kentucky to her mother-in-law’s home near Cincinnati. When slave catchers find the family, Sethe attempts to kill her children and herself, but she only is able to kill her two-year-old girl. Beloved has a circular structure as characters try to avoid their pasts. Sethe deliberately works to forget repetitive traumatic memories of her past, or “rememories” as she calls them. Rememories are so vividly horrific that she believes they can hurt her daughter Denver, who is ignorant of her mother’s past. Sethe’s loss of her mother when she was a child, her sexual and physical torture at Sweet Home, and her infanticide cannot be repressed, and they return in the form of a spectral presence named Beloved.

Beloved is set in a haunted house where the lost child’s ghost initially manifests as a poltergeist and then arrives as a lost young woman named Beloved. Most critics agree that Beloved is the ghost of the lost child, the eruption of the past in the present. Through her supernatural knowledge and abilities, Beloved forces Sethe to relive her past and share her pain with others. To represent this violent history, Morrison uses the conventions of supernatural literature to illustrate how the trauma of slavery haunts the present and leaves its mark on later generations. A movie adaptation of Beloved directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Oprah Winfrey was released in 1998.

Melanie R. Anderson

See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Morrison, Toni; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Anderson, Melanie R. 2013. Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Brogan, Kathleen. 1998. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Denard, Carolyn C., ed. 2008. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Morrison, Toni. [1987] 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage.

BENSON, E. F. (1867–1940)

Edward Frederic Benson was an English writer of novels, short stories, dramas, biographies, and reminiscences. He was the fifth child of Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson (1829–1896), the man who, on January 12, 1895, gave Henry James the idea for The Turn of the Screw. His brothers Arthur Christopher and Robert Hugh were also writers.

In 1891, E. F. Benson received a first-class honors degree from King’s College, Cambridge, then worked on the staff of the British School of Archaeology in Athens and as a member of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. But in 1893, inspired and perhaps assisted by Henry James, Benson published Dodo, whose success inspired him to continue writing. From 1895 until his death Benson was a full-time professional writer, and horrific fiction is but a small portion of his output: nine novels and eleven collections of short stories were published during his lifetime.

Among Benson’s novels, The Luck of the Vails (1901) is supernatural, the ironically named Luck bringing misfortune to generations of the Vail family, but the plot is that of a traditional mystery, complete with unexpected denouement. The Image in the Sand (1905) makes use of Benson’s Egyptian background to describe an amulet that restrains the evil Set-nekht; when it is broken, Set-nekht possesses young Ida Jervis, who is in turn used by the evil Henderson. The Angel of Pain (1905) has as its central theme the idea of communing with nature and discovering the nature god Pan; after some successes, Tom Merivale meets his unhappy fate beneath Pan’s crushing hooves. The novel reuses the central ideas from Benson’s earlier short story “The Man Who Went Too Far” (1904), but both pieces appear indebted to the works of Algernon Blackwood, whose fiction often used variations of this theme. (The two seem never to have met, but Blackwood was a student in Wellington College, established by Edward White Benson prior to his becoming archbishop.) Benson’s The Inheritor (1930) reuses Pan on both a literal and a metaphoric level. Steven Gervase inherits the curse that leaves him a spiritual Pan: soulless, unable to love or bond with others; when his child is born a literal Pan, he rather unconvincingly commits suicide. The enormously overlong Colin (1923) and Colin II (1925) describe the results of an ancestral bargain with the devil; the present Colin Stanier is self-consciously wicked but his son’s refusal to embrace evil leads at last to Colin’s repentance. Benson’s last fantastic novel is Raven’s Brood (1934), an atypical work in that it uses lower- and middle-class characters along with folkloric and paganistic elements reminiscent of those used by Arthur Machen. (Again, the two do not seem to have met.)

E. F. Benson’s “Caterpillars”: A Cryptic Nightmare

E. F. Benson’s widely anthologized short story “Caterpillars” was first published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories. It is told in flashback, with the nameless narrator describing his stay at the Villa Cascana on the Italian Riviera, where he was once the guest of the Stanleys. He recounts how the villa was beautiful but somehow a place where something was fundamentally wrong. Unable to sleep, he witnessed an unoccupied bedroom swarming with enormous yellowish-grey caterpillars with mouths that opened sideways and pincers rather than legs. It might have been a dream, but the next day fellow guest Arthur Inglis has found such a caterpillar; it survives being thrown into a fountain, and when Inglis and the narrator encounter it again, the caterpillar crawls onto Inglis before it is killed. That night, the narrator glimpses the monstrous caterpillars crawling into Inglis’s room. An epilogue occurring six months later, in England, has Mrs. Stanley explaining that Inglis has terminal cancer, that he seems to have developed it at the Villa Cascana, and that there had been a fatal case earlier in the unoccupied bedroom.

The subtext of “Caterpillars” is remarkably muddled. It is unclear if, for example, Benson is implying that certain horrible diseases have malign existences and physical manifestations. Or he may mean to convey that the caterpillars are a metaphor for something else. Though one doubts this was Benson’s intention, the story might be seen as an attack on Italy, fair on the outside and corrupt within, and its corruption and destruction of the innocent English. It could likewise be argued that the horrible caterpillars might represent a repressed and emergent sexuality, or the inescapability of destructive fate, or really any number of themes. The story remains a puzzle, presenting situations and images without a resolution.

Richard Bleiler

Benson’s short horror stories are fairly conventional and were collected and published in four books during his lifetime: The Room in the Tower (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and More Spook Stories (1934). At the same time, while Benson often used animals as horrific elements—apes and monkeys figure in “The Ape” and “Monkeys,” respectively; cats and cat-gods in “The Cat” and “Bagnell Terrace”; giant caterpillars in “Caterpillars”; leeches and slugs in “Negotium Perambulans . . .” and “‘And No Bird Sings’”—his most horrible and memorable characters are, interestingly, always women. Lady Sybil Rorke in “Inscrutable Degrees” and Nellie Mostyn in “Christopher Came Back” are murderers and sadists; Mrs. Stone in “The Room in the Tower” and Mrs. Amworth in “Mrs. Amworth” are vampires and monsters; Mrs. Ray in “The Sanctuary,” Mrs. Andrews in “Mrs. Andrews’ Control,” and Mrs. Cumberbatch in “Mr. Tilly’s Séance” are active Satanists and idiotic spiritualists; and the otherwise amiable Mrs. Acres of “The Outcast” is the reincarnation of Judas. In “The Face” horrors are visited on harmless Hester Ward: she is haunted by dreams of ruins and an abandoned grave, then taken by a maligned and misshapen being, never to be seen again.

Benson would certainly have objected to being called misogynistic—and a perhaps unconvincing argument may be made that his tales used and misused women because he recognized that they had been neglected and underutilized as figures of power and terror—but there is no doubt that he would have been delighted that his stories disturbed. Indeed, Benson’s brief preface to The Room in the Tower and Other Stories states that the stories were written to give “some pleasant qualms to their reader” and concludes by stating that “the author therefore fervently wishes his reader a few uncomfortable moments” (Benson 1912, v). The best of E. F. Benson succeeds admirably in providing these.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; “The Great God Pan”; Possession and Exorcism.

Further Reading

Ashley, Mike. 1992. “Blood Brothers: The Supernatural Fiction of A. C., R. H., and E. F. Benson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, 100–113. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

Benson, E. F. 1912. The Room in the Tower and Other Stories. 1912. London: Mills & Boon.

Joshi, S. T. 2004. “E. F. Benson: Spooks and More Spooks.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 59–65. New York: Hippocampus Press.

BIERCE, AMBROSE (1842–1914?)

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American journalist, satirist, and author of short fiction, including horror fiction. In some ways his life reads like one of his stories. The unresolved circumstances of his death, generally listed as having occurred in 1914 with an added question mark, eerily parallel many of his short stories of horror and suspense.

Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio. The Bierces moved to Kosciusko County, Ohio, where the young Ambrose graduated from high school. At fifteen he embarked on his first journalistic experience as an apprentice at a small Ohio newspaper. By all accounts his family circumstances were not happy, but his parents’ interest in reading offered an advantage that his peers did not enjoy.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Bierce joined the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment in 1861. He saw action, notably at Shiloh in 1862 and the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, where he sustained a head wound. He returned to active duty later that year and was discharged in 1865. His war experiences accounted for a significant outpouring of his fiction, and some critics suggest that the grisly battle scenes he witnessed inspired many of the horrific aspects of his stories. Although he received some acclaim for his war exploits, they ultimately embittered him, paving the way for his most noted nickname, “Bitter Bierce.”

“The Damned Thing”: Hunting the Invisible Horror

“The Damned Thing” (1893) features a common theme in horror fiction: the invisible evil force that bedevils an unsuspecting soul. It opens with eight men gathered in a cabin at night for an inquest into the death of Hugh Morgan, whose mutilated corpse is in the room with them. A man named Harker, a newspaper columnist who witnessed the death, arrives and reads from some of his notes to recount what happened. He says he and Morgan went hunting and encountered a number of eerie events that Morgan attributed to “the damned thing.” Finally, Morgan fired his gun, let out blood-curdling screams, and fell to the ground in convulsive jerks. The assembled jurors claim Harker is insane, and they conclude that Morgan was killed by a mountain lion. The story then becomes a series of extracts from Morgan’s diary, revealing that Morgan had been haunted by an invisible being and was determined to hunt it.

Bierce was accused of plagiarizing the “invisible monster” idea from Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (1859), and he mounted a vigorous defense of his story’s originality, arguing that, instead of an invisible monster, his story posited a wild animal whose color was invisible. The idea of an invisible color proved significant because of its apparent influence on H. P. Lovecraft in the conception of one of his major stories, “The Colour out of Space.” Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” probably also influenced Lovecraft in the writing of “The Dunwich Horror,” where a fusion of elements from Bierce’s story, O’Brien’s story, and de Maupassant’s “The Horla” may be discerned.

“The Damned Thing” remains a staple of horror fiction and has been anthologized many times. A few adaptations have also appeared on television, including a 2006 episode of the Masters of Horror series directed by Tobe Hooper.

E. Kate Stewart

His marriage to Mary Ellen “Mollie” Day on December 25, 1871 did not exactly bring marital bliss. Although the two apparently loved each other, they spent most of their marriage separated and subsequently divorced in 1904. The union produced three children: sons Day and Leigh and daughter Helen. Day and Leigh died in 1889 and 1901, respectively. Day committed suicide and Leigh, an alcoholic, died from pneumonia.

Before Bierce penned his most well-known stories, he enjoyed a successful journalistic career. He spent 1872 to 1875 in London, where he wrote for the magazine Fun. There he also published his first book, The Fiend’s Delight, in 1873; it bore the penname Dod Grile and contained a collection of his newspaper pieces. On his return to San Francisco, he worked for a variety of newspapers, most notably, perhaps, The Wasp, which he edited from 1881 until 1885. He also wrote frequently for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner; his association with Hearst continued until 1909.

Between 1888 and 1891, Bierce published the stories that secured his fame as a fictionist. In 1896, Hearst sent him to Washington, D.C., so that he could stop legislation that would allow the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad to be excused from repaying loans. Bierce also gained a degree of notoriety because of a poem he had published in the aftermath of the assassination of Kentucky governor William Goebel in 1900. When President William McKinley was assassinated the next year, Bierce and Hearst were accused of inciting the president’s death. In 1909, Bierce published a collected volume of his stories and The Devil’s Dictionary.

In 1913 Bierce traveled to Mexico to join Pancho Villa’s army and observe the Mexican Revolution. His last communication with a friend came by letter in December of that year. He disappeared soon after, and the actual date and circumstances of his death remain unknown. The 1985 novel Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes presents a fictionalized imagining of Bierce’s experiences in Mexico, including his death. It was adapted as a movie of the same title in 1989, with the part of Bierce being played by Gregory Peck.

Ernest Jerome Hopkins in The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (1970) divides Bierce’s fiction into the following groups: The World of Horror, The World of War, and The World of Tall Tales. Among anthologies of American literature that include Bierce, his war stories are most commonly featured, especially “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) and “Chickamauga” (1891). On rare occasions the horror tale “The Boarded Window” (1891) will appear. Because of the notoriety of his war stories, many readers may not realize that both his horror stories and his tall tales have much to recommend them. Common threads run through each of the types of stories that Bierce produced. He was, for example, a master of visual and other sensory detail. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” for instance, he achieves a striking effect by focusing on the haunting sound of protagonist Peyton Farquhar’s pocket watch as he descends into a dream world.

Although Bierce harbored an antipathy toward literary realism, arguing instead for the value of romanticism, he distinguished himself as a skilled practitioner of realism’s most prominent outgrowth, naturalism, through his talent for creating highly effective descriptions of physical landscapes—a result, perhaps, of his work as a journalist—in which the individual is confronted by mysterious and threatening forces. He also had an interesting habit of creating fictional “authorities” of various kinds for many of his horror tales. For instance, both “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886) and “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (1891) quote Hali, an apparently Bierce-created philosopher who stresses that “there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some others it vanisheth quite away with the spirit” (Bierce 1910, 308). Similarly, in “A Psychological Shipwreck” (1879) Bierce presents an “extract” from the fictional “Denneker’s Meditations” containing the haunting passage: “to sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart from the body for a season” (Bierce 1910, 230). It also might not be much of a stretch to view Peyton Farquhar’s experiences in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” as similarly representing an “out-of-body” episode. A common thread connects each of these musings: the idea of the disembodied soul walking the earth. This walking-dead/zombie theme went on to influence contemporary popular culture, and Bierce can validly be identified as one of the forefathers of the modern zombie fiction subgenre, especially via “The Death of Halpin Frayser.”

Bierce’s fiction has worn well with the public, and many of his “out-of-body” horror tales enjoy currency through their subtle influence on such prominent B-horror films as White Zombie (1932) and such prominent television series as The Walking Dead. His most remembered story is unquestionably “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been studied extensively for its narrative technique, and which has been assigned to generations of high school students. The story has been adapted several times for film and television, including a 1929 silent film and episodes of both Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1959 and The Twilight Zone in 1964.

E. Kate Stewart

See also: “The Death of Halpin Frayser”; Zombies.

Further Reading

The Ambrose Bierce Project. Accessed June 29, 2016. http://www.ambrosebierce.org/main.html.

Bierce, Ambrose. 1910. The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume III: Can Such Things Be? New York and Washington: Neale. http://www.ambrosebierce.org/cansuchthingsbe.htm#frayser.

Cornes, Judy. 2008. “The Nightmare World of Ambrose Bierce.” In Madness and the Loss of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21–54. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Davidson, Cathy, ed. 1982. Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Morris, Roy, Jr. 1995. Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. New York: Crown.

O’Connor, Richard. 1967. Ambrose Bierce: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown.

BLACKWOOD, ALGERNON (1869–1951)

Algernon Blackwood was a British writer who first achieved popular success in the early twentieth century with his tales featuring psychic investigator John Silence. As well as producing atmospheric ghost stories, children’s fiction, plays, and novels that are usually distinguished by a heavy strain of mysticism, many of Blackwood’s stories have had an enduring influence on subsequent horror fiction. Notable examples include “The Wendigo” and, particularly, “The Willows.”

“The Wendigo”: A Frolic in the Fiery Heights

Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (1910), whose title refers to the wendigo of Algonquin folklore, is an example of what Margaret Atwood identifies as a Canadian genre, “Death by Bushing,” in which characters are overwhelmed by isolation in the wilderness to the point of insanity.

The narrative is presented as an anecdotal account by a Scottish doctor of a terrifying incident experienced by a hunting party in the Canadian backwoods. One of the party’s guides, Défago, succumbs to a maniacal wanderlust, personified in the form of the demonic wendigo. He disappears, before returning (in body only) from what is hinted to be a grotesque frolic in the sky, at heights so vast they burn. Distilling European anxieties in the colonial frontier, the focus of the story’s horror is almost entirely on Défago’s absorption by the illimitable wilderness, embodied by the wendigo. When Défago eventually returns to camp, his personality seems to be entirely absent; and this, more than his hideously deformed, charred feet, inspires the horror of his companions.

The folkloric myth of the wendigo (or “windigo”) has been used in works as diverse as Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983). Thanks in no small part to Blackwood’s story, it is now a definite, if minor, horror trope. Two notable iterations in horror cinema are director Larry Fessenden’s The Wendigo (2001) and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999). In the latter, the notion of “wendigo psychosis” provides an ambiguously supernatural overtone to an incident of cannibalism in the old West. The 2015 survival horror computer game Until Dawn is set in “Blackwood Pines Lodge” at the base of “Blackwood Mountain” in Canada and features the wendigo as the principal antagonist.

James Machin

Born in the southeastern county of Kent, England, Blackwood experienced a childhood marked by stifling religiosity at odds with his own inclinations. He was raised in a household dominated by his father’s sternly evangelical Christianity and then educated by similarly severe schoolmasters at the Moravian School in the Black Forest, Germany. He rebelled through clandestine investigations into Buddhism and Theosophy (he would later briefly become a member of a late nineteenth-century occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) and also through his enthusiasm for the natural world. He would later fictionalize his German education in the story “Secret Worship” (1908), where the protagonist remembers of his school days that he found solace and reprieve from the grimly repressive atmosphere by gazing through “the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond” (Blackwood 1998, 145).

Blackwood led an itinerant early life that included spells living in the United States and Canada, detailed in his lively memoir Episodes Before Thirty (1923). By the time of the publication of his first book, The Empty House, at the age of thirty-seven, Blackwood had been a farmer, gold prospector, hotel manager, artist’s model, and journalist for the New York Times. His passion for travel and, especially, for the wilderness led to adventures in the wild expanses of the American north, Egypt, and the Swiss Alps. The tensions between domesticity and the wild, humanity and nature, and between traditional Christianity and pantheism resonate throughout his work, where they are regularly amplified into overt horror.

The most celebrated example of this is “The Willows” (1907), possibly the most widely anthologized of Blackwood’s stories, and praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a text in which “art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development” (Lovecraft 2012, 88). If not representative of Blackwood’s variegated output, it is perhaps the story in which Blackwood’s powers are most expertly and powerfully deployed, particularly his consummate skill in the inexorable ramping up of weird atmosphere through incremental, barely noticeable turns of the screw. Beginning as a genteel travelogue chronicling the months-long canoe trip of two men along the Danube, Blackwood’s story subtly strips away the ordinary and commonplace from the engulfing landscape until, by its climax, the protagonists seem entirely at the mercy of ambiguous supernatural forces threatening their survival.

This ambivalence toward the natural world as a place equally immanent with beauty and dread is also connected with another anxiety regularly evident in Blackwood’s horror fiction: the loss of personality or the absorption of the individual into the illimitable wilderness. The colonial frontier was for Blackwood, as it was for the early European settlers, a threatening, predatory entity as much as a liberating, emancipating blank canvas upon which to paint a new life. In “The Wendigo” (1910), the eponymous forest spirit of Algonquian folklore is not simply a physical threat to a small hunting party in the Canadian backwoods. The French-Canadian guide, Défago, is abducted by the monstrous and nebulous entity, and when he reappears it is in body only; his personality has been expunged. Although wildly different in tone, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912) is a further iteration of this same neurosis. In it, David Bittacy is first obsessed, then ultimately absorbed by the collective consciousness of the forest encircling his home. Bittacy’s pantheism is framed in opposition to his wife’s Christianity, but, despite Blackwood’s Buddhist sympathies, the process of Bittacy’s loss of self and ego is cast as terrifying rather than liberating. Despite the gentle, almost ethereal unfolding of the tale, the denouement is shattering.

This ambivalence provides a regular balance to the more visionary flights of mystical yearning of the protagonist O’Malley in the novel The Centaur (1911). It is as much an exposition as a narrative, regularly quoting great swathes of Gustav Fechner and William James, and promulgating something approaching a Gaia hypothesis of sentient planethood through the experiences of O’Malley (clearly a proxy for Blackwood himself). O’Malley travels to the Caucasus in the company of an Urmensch; a “Cosmic Being,” both premodern and more highly developed than the teeming human masses. Again, the risk O’Malley exposes himself to is the loss of personality. The price of enlightenment and connection with the Earth’s superconsciousness is engulfment: “Complete surrender would involve somehow a disintegration, a dissociation of his personality that carried with it the loss of personal identity” (Blackwood 1912, 6). Throughout the novel, O’Malley oscillates between feeling an unbearable longing to achieve “genuine cosmic consciousness” and an equally acute dread of the implications of its attainment; for “this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical internal dislocation of his personality” (Blackwood 2012, 149–150). As so often in Blackwood’s writing, the threat to O’Malley is one of absorption and amalgamation within a greater, overwhelming whole, rather than physical threat.

Other noteworthy stories include “Ancient Sorceries” (1908), the original inspiration behind Jacques Tourneur’s celebrated 1942 horror film Cat People. The tale concerns Arthur Vezin’s weird encounters in a mysterious little town in northern France. The sleepy populace first baffle, then seduce the lone tourist, before the narrative culminates in a diabolical ritual in service of the “Great Ones,” vividly rendered as a dreamlike vision. The increasingly hallucinatory quality of Vezin’s experience is intensified when he becomes aware that his will is being sapped from him, rendering him unable to make decisions or initiate the process of departure. He becomes inexorably absorbed into the spell lying over the community as his volition is sapped, and he is transfixed by the seductive and mercurial daughter of the hotelier, who seems to toy with him like a cat batting about a concussed mouse between her paws. Blackwood effectively employs the same trope of the seduction of an older man by a mysterious younger woman in “The Glamour of the Snow” (1911), in which the protagonist (a middle-aged writer in thrall to the mountains—Blackwood himself, in other words) has a strange encounter with a lone skater on a mountain resort ice rink at midnight, a beautiful young woman who is in fact an embodiment of both the pleasures and dangers of snow. The protagonist is gradually isolated from the rest of the tourist party and pursues his obsession with the girl—who, it transpires, is actually some type of elemental spirit—with near fatal consequences.

In 1912’s “The Man Who Found Out,” ancient Chaldean tablets detailing the ultimate secret of the universe extinguish the spirit of anyone who reads them (typically of Blackwood, marked by the “crumbling away” of personality). The story can be read as a cautionary account of the dangers of scientific overreaching, or—and anticipating Lovecraft’s work—a more profoundly pessimistic rumination on complacent belief in the primacy of humanity’s place in the universe. Blackwood’s occasional cosmic scope is contrasted by low-key pieces like “The Little Beggar” (1919), in which a devastatingly personal blow is dealt to an aging gentleman walking to his club one evening when he experiences a counterfactual encounter with his son-who-never-was, the progeny of a marriage that never happened due to the death of his fiancé twelve years earlier.

As well as his unique and sophisticated contributions to the horror genre, Blackwood also produced more formulaic, though nevertheless engaging writing. For example, 1906’s The Empty House is an uncomplicated ghost story. “The Nemesis of Fire” (1908), a John Silence story, is a particularly well-executed example of the Edwardian “occult detective” genre, featuring an ancient Egyptian curse causing havoc in an English manor house. Similarly, another Silence adventure, “The Camp of the Dog” (1908), uses the traditional horror trope of the werewolf.

In his later years Blackwood became something of a celebrity due to frequent appearances on British television, mesmerizing the nation with his peerless skill at delivering a chilling tale to the camera. He died at the age of eighty-two, leaving little in the way of personal effects or papers, most of which had been destroyed during the bombing of London during the Second World War. Blackwood’s influence on horror fiction was considerable even in his lifetime. Many of the writers associated with Weird Tales, including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, cited “The Willows” as among their favorite short stories. Blackwood’s impact on Lovecraft can be most keenly felt in Lovecraft’s foregrounding of marshlands and backwoods as places replete with immanent evil and supernatural threat in stories such as “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

Blackwood’s character John Silence is a key link in the development of the “occult detective” genre, representing an early twentieth-century rendering of nineteenth-century forerunners such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius and Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing. The legacy of Blackwood’s John Silence stories—as well as William Hope Hodgson’s similar Carnacki tales, which they influenced—can be felt through ensuing genre and popular culture from the pulp magazines to television’s The X Files and Supernatural.

James Machin

See also: John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Numinous; Occult Detectives; “The Willows.”

Further Reading

Ashley, Mike. 2001. Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood. London: Constable.

Blackwood, Algernon. 1912. The Centaur. London: Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/centaur00blacgoog.

Blackwood, Algernon. 1923. Episodes Before Thirty. London: Cassell.

Blackwood, Algernon. 1998. The Complete John Silence Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Dover.

Blackwood, Algernon. 2002. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin.

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

BLEILER, E. F. (1920–2010)

Everett Franklin Bleiler was an American editor and scholar. In 1948, a youthful interest in fantastic fiction, combined with his scholarly abilities, led the owners of Shasta Publishers to pay him $500 to compile the book that became The Checklist of Fantastic Literature.

From 1949 to 1954, with T. E. Dikty of Shasta, he co-edited the first “best of the year” science fiction anthologies before joining Dover Publications in 1955. While at Dover, he edited a number of collections, including the supernatural works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs. Riddell, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and M. R. James, as well as anthologies reprinting Gothic novels and Victorian ghost stories, as well as an edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature. All the books contained serious introductions that provided biographical data and contextualized the works as literary history. Bleiler left Dover in 1977 and joined Charles Scribner’s Sons, editing and introducing collections of Victorian genre fiction and two massive bio-critical reference works, Science Fiction Writers (1982) and Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror (1985). In 1983 Kent State University Press published his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, which attempted to conceptualize a field of literature by providing a summation of, and thematic indexes to, every work of supernatural fiction published prior to 1960. He later published two analogous works dealing with the history of science fiction. In 1978 Bleiler received a Special Award (Professional) from the World Fantasy Awards; in 1988 he was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1984, he received the Pilgrim Award for his contributions to science fiction scholarship.

Bleiler’s editorial work and introductions were solid and scholarly, but he was under no illusions about their durability, for inevitably new scholarship emerged, sometimes obviating his earlier efforts, and over his lifetime the concept of editorship changed. It was no longer sufficient to reprint what were deemed an author’s “best” or most representative works; researchers wanted and needed the author’s oeuvre, however mediocre or discreditable some of it might be. Bleiler came to see himself as a living fossil and was often dismissive of his earlier work, but he took genuine pleasure in assisting in the bibliographic discoveries and scholarly insights of others. Without his contributions, many premodern writers of the fantastic would not have been readily discovered.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Blackwood, Algernon; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Dirda, Michael. 2012. “Let Us Now Praise Dover Books: The Literary Legacy of E. F. Bleiler.” The American Scholar, December 28. https://theamericanscholar.org/let-us-now-praise-dover-books.

Showers, Brian J. 2006. “All Hallows Talks with . . . E. F. Bleiler.” All Hallows 42. http://www.brianjshowers.com/articles_bleiler.html.

BLOCH, ROBERT (1917–1994)

Robert Bloch was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who, early in his career, was recognized as a representative of the Weird Tales school of pulp horror fiction and one of the most talented contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of stories that colleagues of H. P. Lovecraft wrote in homage to his cosmic horror fiction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bloch sublimated his talent for writing horror fiction in a succession of crime novels that culminated in the publication of Psycho (1959), a landmark novel that established him as a leading exponent of psychological horror fiction.

Psycho: A Landmark of Psychological Horror

Bloch’s novel Psycho (1959) has been hailed as a landmark of psychological horror, and it was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic 1960 film adaptation. Bloch explained in his autobiography that the case of real-life serial murderer Ed Gein inspired him to write a novel featuring an apparently ordinary rural character who is actually a psychotic murderer. In Psycho this character is Norman Bates, proprietor of the Bates Motel on the outskirts of the Midwestern town of Fairvale. Norman is dominated by his emasculating, verbally abusive mother, who, when Norman shows interest in the newly checked-in Marion Crane, murders her—or so it would appear. When people begin investigating Marion’s disappearance, they find discrepancies in Norman’s claim that he lives alone with his mother, not the least of which is that local authorities remember attending Mrs. Bates’s funeral years earlier. Eventually, it is revealed that the psychologically unhinged Norman, who was morbidly close to his mother, exhumed her corpse, preserved it, and now dresses up like her to sustain the illusion of her continued presence. Any encounter that threatens their relationship causes Norman’s “mother” to lash out protectively, as she has done several times before (after which Norman dutifully disposes of the corpses in a swamp behind the motel).

In Bloch’s novel, as in the movie, the story is sustained by narrative misdirection. The reader is not aware until the denouement that the conversations between Norman and his mother are taking place entirely inside his head. Bloch wrote two sequels, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), both concerned with how the sickness of the serial killer is mirrored in the society that nurtured him. Hitchcock’s film also inspired several sequels and, in 2013, the A&E cable network’s series Bates Motel. It is sometimes cited as an influence on the slasher film subgenre.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

Bloch became a fan of Lovecraft’s fiction in 1927, shortly after he started reading Weird Tales, and in 1933 he began corresponding with him. At Lovecraft’s suggestion Bloch submitted his early ghost story “Lilies” (1934) and his fantasy “Black Lotus” (1935) to William Crawford, publisher of the semiprofessional magazines Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories. Bloch first appeared in print professionally in the January 1935 issue of Weird Tales with “The Feast in the Abbey,” a Gothic shocker about a traveler through the forests of medieval France who stumbles upon a monastery of cannibal monks. Written in overwrought purple prose, but perfectly orchestrated for its chilling climax, the story is a prime example of the neo-Gothic horror fare that Weird Tales, in its early years, peddled to its audience. It would become one of Bloch’s (and the magazine’s) most reprinted stories.

Between 1935 and the end of 1939, Bloch placed twenty-six stories in Weird Tales, which was virtually his exclusive market for fiction. In “The Secret in the Tomb” (1935), he first made mention of Ludvig Prinn’s The Mysteries of the Worm, a book of occult lore that was to become one of the canonical grimoires of the Cthulhu Mythos. Most of Bloch’s mythos tales are routine horror stories clearly written to please Lovecraft, although several rise above simple pastiche. “The Mannikin” (1937), about a hunchback whose deformity is an undeveloped twin alive to the influence of supernatural evil, ends with a perfectly timed O. Henry–type twist that was to become one of Bloch’s trademarks. Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935) might have been considered a minor mythos tale but for the decimation of its main character, who was clearly modeled on Lovecraft—an example of how much early Cthulhu Mythos fiction was written as an elaborate in-joke among participating writers. Lovecraft responded in 1936 with one of his masterpieces, “The Haunter of the Dark,” in which he killed off one “Robert Blake,” and Bloch made the story cycle a triptych when, in the September 1950 issue of Weird Tales, he responded with “The Shadow from the Steeple,” a story that updated the mythos for the then-nascent nuclear age.

A handful of Bloch’s mythos tales—including “The Faceless God” (1936), “The Brood of Bubastis” (1937), “The Secret of Sebek” (1937), and “Fane of the Black Pharoah” (1937)—fuse ancient Egyptian lore with Lovecraftian horrors but are part of a larger cycle of Egyptian tales that include “The Opener of the Way” (1936), “The Eyes of the Mummy” (1938), and “Beetles” (1938), which are Lovecraftian in tone but without mythos content. The majority of these stories feature unsympathetic protagonists—greedy tomb-robbers, self-interested businessmen, and the like—who are served poetically just desserts for their transgressions. These stories show Bloch attempting to distinguish his writing as more than just a slavish imitation of Lovecraft’s.

Lovecraft’s death in 1937 devastated Bloch, but it also propelled him out of the creative rut he had dug himself working in Lovecraft’s shadow. He began attempting stories with diverse horror themes: voodoo in “Mother of Serpents” (1936); Native American curses in “The Totem-Pole” (1939); and deals with the devil in “Fiddler’s Fee” (1940). Bloch also began writing for markets other than Weird Tales, among them the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and the fantasy pulp Fantastic Adventures, both edited by Raymond A. Palmer, whom Bloch had met through his involvement with the Milwaukee Fictioneers, a writing group that he had joined in 1935.

Also in 1939, Bloch began writing for Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), a magazine of “logical” fantasy fiction launched by editor John W. Campbell as a companion to Astounding Science-Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. Bloch’s “The Cloak” (1939), a comic story about a man turned into a vampire when he dons the cloak of a former vampire owner, lampooned many of the Gothic clichés of horror fiction and broke ground for him as a writer of humorous fantasy. For two more comic fantasies published in Unknown, “A Good Knight’s Work (1941) and “The Eager Dragon” (1943), Bloch adopted a slangy contemporary storytelling voice inspired by the work of Damon Runyon. He would use the same voice in Fantastic Adventures to relate the adventures of Lefty Feep, a born loser with the gift of gab and a penchant for getting caught up in preposterously fantastic escapades. Filled with topical jokes and bad puns, they were not Bloch’s best work, although some rose above the others in cleverness, notably “The Weird Doom of Floyd Scrilch” (1942), whose protagonist is such an average person that the products he orders from ads in the back pages of pulp magazines—which are notorious for fulfilling the promises of their manufacturers only for the average person—prove fatally effective for him. Bloch also took a cue from fantasist Thorne Smith and, in stories such as “Nursemaid to Nightmares” (1942) and its sequel “Black Barter” (1943), and later “The Devil with You” (1950) and “The Big Binge” (1955), wrote the equivalent of supernatural screwball comedies in which characters become caught up in a series of bizarre events with amusing outcomes. More than any other writer of weird fiction in the twentieth century, Bloch showed that horror and humor were opposite sides of the same coin in stories such as “House of the Hatchet” (1941) and “The Beasts of Barsac” (1944), which mix irony with serious dramatic incidents, and “Catnip” (1948) and “Hungarian Rhapsody” (1958), which end with darkly amusing puns.

In his autobiography Once Around the Bloch (1993), Bloch recalled a primal moment from his childhood when he was frightened by Lon Chaney’s unmasking scene in the 1925 film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Horror films and the relationship between their illusory horrors and the macabre possibilities in real life became a recurrent theme in a significant number of his stories, including “Return to the Sabbath” (1938), “The Dream Makers” (1953), “Terror over Hollywood” (1957), “Sock Finish” (1957), “Is Betsy Blake Still Alive?” (1958), and “The Movie People” (1969). In the late 1930s and 1940s, Bloch also began to explore the intersection of crime and weird fiction in stories such as “Slave of the Flames” (1938), which provides the pyromaniac responsible for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 with a supernatural motivation, and “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade” (1945) and “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” (1946), in which contemporary characters acting under the supernatural influence of legendary murderers are compelled to recapitulate their crimes. Bloch’s classic in this vein is “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943), in which it is revealed that the titular character is alive in contemporary America and committing another spate of serial murders to appease dark gods in exchange for their gift of personal immortality. The year after its publication, this story, among Bloch’s best-known works, was adapted for the radio program The Kate Smith Hour. It was part of the program of radio adaptations of thirty-three of Bloch’s weird tales aired in his native Milwaukee as Stay Tuned for Terror.

In 1945, to fill out his first hardcover collection of short fiction, The Opener of the Way (1945), Bloch wrote “One Way to Mars,” the story of a hopped-up musician whose slipping grasp on reality—and eventual spiral into psychosis—manifests in the form of a strange-looking man in a brown coat who appears to him repeatedly and offers to sell him a one-way ticket to Mars. It was a foretaste of things to come in his writing, not just tales of psychological horror such as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1949), in which a mentally challenged young man who believes a stage magician’s illusions are real attempts to reproduce them with disastrous results, and “Lucy Comes to Stay” (1952), in which a woman projects her psychotic proclivities onto an imaginary friend, but in his work as novelist. In 1947 Bloch published his first novel, The Scarf, about a man with a dual personality, one of which is a serial strangler of women. Over the next three decades, Bloch wrote a succession of crime novels, including Spiderweb (1954), The Kidnapper (1954), The Will to Kill (1954), The Dead Beat (1960), Firebug (1961), The Couch (1962), and Terror (1962), that are memorable for their explorations of the aberrant psychology of their antagonists. These characters descend directly from the unsympathetic protagonists of Bloch’s weird fiction, and the world he presents, as seen through their eyes and shaped by the motivations by which they rationalize their behavior, is as skewed and abnormal as the horror of his supernatural fiction.

In 1959, Bloch wrote Psycho, the novel to which his reputation as a writer of horror and suspense fiction is inextricably bound. Inspired in part by the real-life crimes of Wisconsin serial murderer Ed Gein, it tells of Norman Bates, a motel operator whose jealous mother kills any female patron who catches Norman’s fancy. At the novel’s end, it is revealed that Norman killed his mother and her lover years before, and that, unhinged by guilt, Norman has absorbed her personality and acts out the dark side of their uncomfortably close relationship, sometimes even dressing up in her clothes to commit “her” murders. The novel is a narrative tour de force that doesn’t tip its hand, until the denouement, that the conversations Norman is having with his mother throughout are taking place entirely within his tortured psyche. Bloch’s novel, and the term “psycho,” became important fixtures in popular culture when Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel as his famous film of the same name in 1960.

The notoriety of Hitchcock’s adaptation of Psycho helped to further Bloch’s career in Hollywood, where he had begun working as a screenwriter in the late 1950s. Bloch contributed scripts to the television programs Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, and Star Trek. England’s Amicus Studios released three anthology films—Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), and Asylum (1972)—that adapted mostly stories of his that were first published in Weird Tales, and also the movies The Skull (1965; based on Bloch’s story “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”) and The Deadly Bees (1966), filmed from Bloch’s scripts. Director William Castle also filmed the psychological suspense movies Strait-Jacket (1964) and The Night Walker (1964) from Bloch’s scripts.

Bloch was an active contributor during the horror fiction boom of the 1980s and 1990s. His first novel of the supernatural, Strange Eons (1979), was an homage to H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. His novels American Gothic (1974) and The Jekyll Legacy (co-written with Andre Norton in 1990) were historical crime fiction that verged on horror fiction. He also wrote two sequels to Psycho, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), partly to try to reclaim control of Psycho, after having sold the rights to the cinematic story line. These stories are memorable for their depictions of a morally sick contemporary society that allows monsters like Norman Bates to flourish unrecognized in its midst. Not surprisingly, Bloch edited two anthologies of psychological horror fiction inspired by Psycho under the titles Psycho-Paths (1991) and Monsters in Our Midst (1993). Among his final books were the novel Lori (1989), a tale of ambiguous supernaturalism, and his nostalgic personal memoir Once Around the Bloch (1993), subtitled in his trademark pun-laden style An Unauthorized Autobiography.

Bloch’s six-decade career as a horror writer was one of the longest in the twentieth century. He was one of the last of the generation of horror writers who made their reputations writing short stories rather than novels, and his often darkly funny tales, distinguished by their careful craftsmanship and imaginative flair, continue to be reprinted in collections and anthologies after his death. Bloch’s transition from writing supernatural horror stories to works of psychological suspense, and his ability to parlay his skills as a writer of fiction into work as a writer for television and film, are an object lesson in how a writer can maintain his relevance in a culture that changes over time. For his accomplishments he received the World Fantasy Convention’s Life Achievement Award in 1975 and the Horror Writer Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1989). Bloch died of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 77.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Arkham House; Bram Stoker Award; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Bloch, Robert. 1993. Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography. New York: Tor.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2003. “Robert Bloch.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 99–114. New York: Thomson/Gale.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. “A Literary Tutelage: Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft.” In Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, 548–565. New York: Hippocampus.

Larson, Randall. 1986. Robert Bloch: Starmont Reader’s Guide No. 37. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

Moskowitz, Sam. 1966. “Robert Bloch.” In Seekers of Tomorrow, 335–349. New York: World.

Punter, David. 1990. “Robert Bloch’s Psycho: Some Pathological Contexts.” In American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, edited by Brian Docherty, 92–106. New York: St. Martin’s.

Shovlin, Paul. 2015. “Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch.” In The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, edited by Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks, 201–210. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2009. The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Winter, Douglas E. 1985. “Robert Bloch.” In Faces of Fear, 10–22. New York: Berkley.

BODY HORROR

The term “body horror” refers to a type of horror focusing on flesh and its transcendence, challenging the concept of the body as a bounded entity and transgressing the limits of the flesh by pushing toward new, transformed corporeal states. The posthuman configurations of body horror are often depicted as positive alternatives to the banality of the “old” human flesh, as in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1986): here, the body is a canvas, capable of twisting—with the right chemical and genetic alterations—into something at once frightening and ambiguously beautiful. Flesh is always unfinished, always in motion. Body horror celebrates this capacity for corporeal—and often ontological or metaphysical—transformation, reveling in the materiality of the body and its mutative possibilities.

Though body horror is most often associated with cinema, it is prevalent in literature, video games, and other horror media, and is as old as the genre itself. Mary Shelley’s hybrid creature in Frankenstein (1818), who occupies a body that is both living and dead, human and nonhuman, provides an early example of the subgenre’s preoccupations with transitional or intermediate bodily states and the possibilities inherent in matter. Invasion, contagion, and mutation have been central concerns throughout the body horror canon, where the body’s permeability reveals the instability of both flesh and humanness itself. In John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938), an extraterrestrial being invades, mutates, and then reassumes the guise of its human hosts, grounding its plot—and its corporeal play—in the flexibility of flesh and the inability to determine humanness by sight. Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), in which the protagonist is confronted with the inevitability of his transformation into a half-human, half-fish creature, draws on the horror—and the disturbing ecstasy—that arises from surrendering to a body whose humanness is rapidly disappearing. At the story’s close, the young man embraces the newness of his flesh and the strange possibilities for being it affords him.

The development of prosthetics-based special effects technologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s contributed much to body horror’s prominent place in 1980s horror cinema and is perhaps the reason why the subgenre is most associated with film. David Cronenberg’s films—widely considered to be the apotheosis of the subgenre—display special effects technologies to grand effect, celebrating transgressive corporeality and bodily possibility in classic body horror works such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986). In Videodrome, the protagonist Max Renn’s bodily transformation into a human-media corporeal hybrid opens onto new ontological possibilities best encapsulated in the film’s memorable line, “Long live the new flesh!”

This idea of “new flesh” is central to body horror: where much of horror has turned on the fear of embodiment and the limits of the flesh, body horror celebrates the transformative capacities and potentialities inherent in embodiment. These bodily transformations are always ambiguous: they are at once violent and liberating, repulsively beautiful.

Brittany Roberts

See also: Books of Blood; The Grotesque; The Hands of Orlac; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Kafka, Franz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Palahniuk, Chuck; Splatterpunk; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

Further Reading

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kane, Paul, and Marie O’Regan, eds. 2012. The Mammoth Book of Body Horror. Philadelphia: Running Press.

BODY SNATCHING

Body snatching is the act of digging up newly buried bodies for the purpose of selling them to hospitals and anatomists to dissect for research, teaching, or other types of experimentation. Though the term “body snatching” was not adopted until the early nineteenth century, it was active throughout the eighteenth century, when body snatchers were referred to as “resurrection men.” Most studies of this still-mysterious subject have focused on Great Britain, particularly on areas of medical innovation in Edinburgh and London, but the practice also occurred in America. In tension with a concurrent fear of live burial, it inspired a series of protective devices and procedures, such as mortsafes, which are iron cages and locks placed around coffins to prevent entry. Body snatching, therefore, found a natural entry into the Gothic imagination, alongside this literary tradition’s creative uses of corpses and the abject.

“The Body Snatcher”: Guilt and Grave-Robbing

First published in the Pall Mall Christmas Extra in December 1884, this story features characters based on criminals employed by Robert Knox, the noted nineteenth-century Edinburgh surgeon who was implicated in the infamous Burke and Hare murders of 1828.

Using a frame story, it narrates the tale of two men named Fettes and Macfarlane, who attended medical school together in Edinburgh under the tutelage of the famous doctor “K” (a disguised reference to Knox). They are responsible for acquiring dissection subjects and paying the suspicious men who arrive with the corpses. When Macfarlane brings in the body of a man named Gray, who recently heckled and insulted him, Fettes is convinced that Macfarlane murdered the man. But he keeps silent, and students dissect the body. Some time later, when the medical school is short on anatomical subjects, Fettes and Macfarlane exhume the body of a recently deceased farmer’s wife, but on the nighttime ride back to Edinburgh from the graveyard they accidentally break their lantern and, upon lighting the remaining one, discover to their horror that the body is actually that of the long-dead Gray. They leap, terrified, from the carriage, which continues rolling toward Edinburgh.

Dismissed by some critics as a mere potboiler, “The Body Snatcher” shows Stevenson drawing upon his own family history—one of his uncles had trained under Robert Knox—as well as real-life events in Scottish history. It also shows the author’s long-running interest in guilt and moral culpability, which would reach its apex just two years later in his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“The Body Snatcher” was adapted as a well-received 1945 Hollywood film directed by Robert Wise, produced by Val Lewton, and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their final screen appearance together. It has also been adapted for television, radio, and the classic horror comic book Creepy.

Jon Greenaway

Source: Richardson, Ruth. 2015. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher.” The Lancet 385, no. 9966 (January): 412–413. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60144-1.

Body snatching arose because it was lucrative. Anatomists paid handsomely for bodies, with no questions asked: the fresher, the better. Dissection of the dead was considered to be a vital element of medical education, a concept that was still relatively new. However, there were few legal opportunities in Great Britain to obtain corpses. William Hunter’s successful anatomy school became popular in the mid-eighteenth century for its anatomy lectures, and William’s brother, John, facing the task of making sure there were enough bodies to meet the demand, turned to body snatching. He was certainly not alone in this. In the most famous case, William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen people in Edinburgh in 1828, using a suffocation technique called “burking” and selling the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox. After Burke’s execution, his body was, fittingly, dissected before an enthusiastic audience. Two pieces of legislation, separated by nearly a century, addressed concerns over body snatching, although they were not entirely effective. The Murder Act of 1752 gave anatomists the bodies of executed murderers as an additional punishment, while the Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed anatomists to take bodies not claimed from hospitals within forty-eight hours and without specific instructions.

Body snatching in literature appeared as early as the 1797 novel The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey, attributed to a “Mrs. Carver,” though the best-known body snatcher is of course Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, who dug up anatomical parts for his creature wherever he could find them. Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” (1884) tells of two students of Knox who are caught up in an increasingly complicated situation involving body snatching for medical education purposes. H. P. Lovecraft also employed the theme of body snatching in his short fiction, although in his The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and Herbert West—Reanimator the practice is used less for dissection and more for resurrection.

Tales of body snatching still resurface sometimes in the news today, and though such incidents tend to inspire less fear than they did in a former age, they still cause scandal and incur significant legal punishment. Within contemporary Gothic literature and film, body snatching has become a staple associated with mad scientists—who now typically procure the bodies themselves without the use of resurrection men—and with medical horror texts, such as Robin Cook’s Coma (1977). The ethics of the practice have now expanded beyond dissection and experimentation to include acts that involve both clear benefits, such as organ harvesting, as well as clear injustices.

Laura R. Kremmel

See also: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist.

Further Reading

MacDonald, Helen. 2005. Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Marshall, Tim. 1994. “Frankenstein and the 1832 Anatomy Act.” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, 57–64. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

Moore, Wendy. 2005. The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery. New York: Broadway Books.

BOOKS OF BLOOD

The Books of Blood are a collection of thirty short horror stories of varying lengths written by Clive Barker. The first three volumes, containing four to five stories each, were published individually by Sphere in Britain in 1984, with three further discrete volumes published in 1985 after the venture proved successful. The different volumes were eventually collected in two omnibus editions.

Thematically, the Books of Blood are quite varied and mix modern horror with the Gothic tradition: well-known monsters such as ghosts, werewolves, and doubles appear in some stories, and one in particular—“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”—revisits Poe, but they also include new ones. The stories are marked by effect and are often driven by strong and memorable imagery—the founding fathers of “The Midnight Meat Train,” the giants in “In the Hills, the Cities,” the sow in “Pig Blood Blues,” the severed hands in “The Body Politic”—and by a reclaiming of the monstrous as psychologically complex, a notion Barker has also explored in later novels such as Cabal (1988).

The uniting thread of the stories in the Books of Blood is the body of the medium Simon McNeal, whose flesh becomes the “book of blood” in the eponymous frame story, which is the first one in the collection and acts as a prologue. The dead, whom he has been mocking, decide to carve their stories (the ones included in the various volumes) on his body and to thus turn him into a living record of their tribulations.

Despite the risk involved in publishing three volumes of short stories by an unknown author, Sphere’s investment in Barker paid off. After he was touted by Stephen King as “the future of horror” and the stories were commended by Ramsey Campbell, the Books of Blood became an overnight sensation. There are many things that distinguish these stories from previous horror fiction, such as Barker’s queer sensibility, but their legacy would be strongly connected to their graphic quality. Although “gore” had already been prominent in James Herbert’s The Rats (1977), the Books of Blood would be credited with generating mainstream interest in horror fiction and with leading to the birth of “splatterpunk,” championed by writers such as John Skipp and Craig Spector. The stories’ legacy has continued in cinema through a number of adaptations in the twenty-first century.

Xavier Aldana Reyes

See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Dark Fantasy; The Rats.

Further Reading

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 42–51. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Meyer, Gus, and James van Hise. 1990. “The Books of Blood.” In The Illustrated Guide to the Masters of the Macabre, edited by James van Hise, 103–120. Las Vegas, NV: Pioneer Books.

Morrison, Michael A. 1991. “The Delights of Dread: Clive Barker’s First Three Books of Blood.” In Clive Barker’s Shadows of Eden: The Books, Films and Art of Clive Barker, edited by Stephen Jones, 157–169. Lancaster, PA: Underword Miller.

BORGES, JORGE LUIS (1899–1986)

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinean author of short fiction that has had a massive impact on the fields of fantasy and supernatural horror literature. He began writing during the 1930s but only reached a significant international audience in the 1960s, when many of his most important stories were gathered into two major collections of English translations (with some overlapping content), Ficciones (1962) and Labyrinths (1962). Elliptical and haunting, Borges’s tales explore themes of memory, identity, power, and myth with an imaginative brilliance that, despite their idiosyncrasy, gives them the sweep and cogency of universal statements.

Borges’s fictions occupy a space somewhere between the short story and the philosophical essay: searching, meditative, wryly ironic, they delve into the profoundest mysteries of human experience with elegance and panache. Borges’s first work to appear in English, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), is characteristic: on the surface a tale of wartime espionage, it imagines history as a proliferating series of potential outcomes, branching off from decisive moments of action, in which protagonists elect their destinies and thus define a collective fate; here, Borges’s favored trope of the labyrinth becomes a model for history itself. An even more affecting treatment of this theme is “The Library of Babel” (1941), which evokes an archival universe made up of an infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms filled with all the books that have been or conceivably could be written, tended by a shadowy cabal of librarians; the possibility that some volumes may contain secret hermetic knowledge provides support for a messianic cult that ceaselessly roams the stacks. The story conveys a powerful otherworldly feel, a sense of dislocation into an alternate universe of occult intensity; Borges, who himself worked for many years as a librarian, manages to capture the bibliomaniacal fantasy of a world made wholly out of books.

Many of Borges’s stories inhabit such otherworlds, alternative time-spaces darkly estranged from our own. “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941) depicts a mythical world in which the eponymous game of chance dictates all dimensions of life, offering a kind of parable about the power of random chance to shape human destiny. A similar effect can be found in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), which illustrates the implications of epistemological solipsism (the belief that only the contents of one’s own mind are really knowable) in its evocation of a world whose inhabitants deny its own objective existence. In such tales, complex ideas take on palpable form; indeed, Borges’s stories are invariably conceptually driven, their characters and incidents subordinate to a larger speculative agenda that involves consistently blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality. These two realms interpenetrate at every level, including the very manner—nonlinear, reflective, recursive—in which the tales are told. Borges’s fictions often have dark and paranoiac textures, like a nightmare, and his world is one haunted by numinous presences, thick with ghosts, yet he largely eschews conventional depictions of the supernatural in favor of a hazy sense of lurking immensities, a creative treatment for which the term “Borgesian” has been coined.

Many commentators have observed the deep debts Borges’s work owes to Edgar Allan Poe in its oneiric (dreamlike) obsessiveness, its fondness for mercurial or unreliable narrators, and its complex mixture of precise cognition and irrationality. Borges also, in his 1975 story “There Are More Things,” highlighted a link with H. P. Lovecraft; though affirming that Lovecraft was, in his view, a lesser artist than Poe, Borges nonetheless produced a characteristically eccentric homage in this tale of a monstrous entity inhabiting a shunned house. While his own style is far from Lovecraftian, much of Borges’s work does suggest, as in Lovecraft, the highly precarious nature of human existence in the face of cosmic magnitudes beyond mortal ken, and he also has a fondness for furtive mystical or cabalistic cults hankering after forbidden forms of knowledge.

The influence of Borges can be discerned in authors as diverse as Robert Aickman, whose strange stories show a similar impulse to philosophical reflection, and Iain Banks, whose dark fantasy novels Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986) occupy textual dreamscapes of Borgesian complexity. The most powerful homage to Borges in recent years was Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000), a metafictional horror story set in the eponymous labyrinth, at whose heart lurks a deeply occulted mystery. The term “slipstream,” coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling in 1989 to describe a form of postmodern fiction that makes the reader feel “very strange,” can be seen as a contemporary variant of Borges’s playful speculations, wherein fantasy elements coexist with a drive toward rigorous logical thought. In acknowledgment of his importance to the field, Borges was honored with a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1979.

Rob Latham

See also: Aickman, Robert; Dreams and Nightmares; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; House of Leaves; The Numinous; Surrealism; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Bell-Villada, Gene H. 2000. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Buchanan, C. J. 1996. “J. L. Borges’s Lovecraftian Tale: ‘There Are More Things’ in the Dream Than We Know.” Extrapolation 37 (4): 357–363.

Burgin, Richard, ed. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Fraser, Howard M. 1977. “Points South: Ambrose Bierce, Jose Luis Borges, and the Fantastic.” Studies in 20th Century Literature 1 (2): 173–181.

Williamson, Edwin, ed. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BOWEN, MARJORIE (1885–1952)

Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell Long was born in Hampshire, England, to an alcoholic father who deserted the family soon thereafter and a cold and ineffectual mother. She wrote her first novel, The Viper of Milan, while still in her teens, though it did not see print until 1906, where it has remained under various publishers to the present day. History interpenetrates nearly all of Bowen’s work, whether she is writing a travel guide, an essay, a biography, crime fiction, or supernatural fiction; or attempting to recreate a specific historical event entirely from available evidence, or using that evidence as a springboard for her own imagination. As with Vernon Lee, her attention to period detail lends her settings and dialogue a sense of having been “lived in,” so that her characters act convincingly as integral players in events with recognizable human motives rather than as cogs in a machine.

All of her books appeared under pseudonyms—nearly one hundred under the name Marjorie Bowen, more than thirty as George Preedy, seventeen as Joseph Shearing, and the remainder by Robert Paye, John Winch, the ghost story anthologist Arthur Neale, and the thinly disguised author of the autobiography. Regardless of the pseudonym used, all twenty of the short story collections Bowen gathered include what she termed “twilight tales.” Although these are primarily supernatural, her interest in irony, venality, social injustice, and the annals of criminality also lends a macabre edge to her suspense fiction and much of her historical fiction. Thus, although there are only a handful of supernatural novels—Black Magic: A Tale of the Rise and Fall of Antichrist (1909), concerning the legend of Pope Joan; The Haunted Vintage (1921), chronicling the nineteenth-century appearance of the goddess Freya in the Rhine Valley; I Dwelt in High Places (1923), about the sorcerous adventures of John Dee; Five Winds (1927), about the inexorable working out of a family curse; The Shadow on Mockways (1932), a grotesque and not entirely successful Gothic melodrama; The Devil Snar’d (“by George Preedy,” 1932), a novel of diablerie; Julia Roseingrave (“by Robert Paye,” 1933), dealing with the subtle encroachment of witchcraft in a romantic relationship; and the doppelgänger tale The Man with the Scales (1954)—many of Bowen’s historical novels and novels based on classic crimes “by Joseph Shearing” focus on the darker side of history. Examples include The Master of Stair (1907), dealing with the massacre at Glen Coe, and The Poisoners (“by George Preedy,” 1936), set in the murderous cabal within the court of Louis XIV. Such novels turn very dark indeed, and even some of her novels on heroic subjects, like the Black Prince in The English Paragon (1930), contain episodes of a horrific nature.

This is not meant to imply that her work is unrelievedly grim. There is a tender or lyrical side on display in stories like “The House by the Poppy Field” (1916), “The Sign Painter and the Crystal Fishes” (1917), “Dark Anne” (1923), “The Avenging of Anne Leete” (1923), “Anne Mellor’s Lover” (1923), “The Breakdown” (1976), and the vision of the godlings toiling in the vineyard at sunrise in The Haunted Vintage, as well as grim humor to leaven the supernatural events in “Decay” (1923), “The Crown Derby Plate” (1931), and “Incubus” (1935). This compensates for the savagery of stories like “Giuditta’s Wedding Night” (1916), “The Fair Hair of Ambrosine” (1916), “The Last Bouquet” (1916), “Scoured Silk” (1919), “Kecksies” (1923), “Florence Flannery” (1929), and “The Bishop of Hell” (1929).

At her best, Bowen’s work teems with color, drama, pathos, and an often underappreciated metaphorical richness that belies the haste that leaves perceptible, if forgivable, flaws in many of her novels. These are among the qualities that have appealed to so many writers, including Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter de la Mare, Horace Walpole, William Roughead, Michael Sadleir, Edward Wagenknecht, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Graham Greene claimed that after reading Bowen’s first novel, “From that moment I began to write. All the other possible futures slid away. . . . It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject” (Greene 1951, 15–16).

Jim Rockhill

See also: Ancestral Curse; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Campbell, Margaret. 1939. The Debate Continues, Being the Autobiography of Marjorie Bowen. London: William Heinemann.

Greene, Graham. 1951. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. London: Eyre and Spottiswood.

Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. 1998. “The Supernatural Romances of Marjorie Bowen.” In Marjorie Bowen, Twilight and Other Supernatural Romances, xix–xl. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash-Tree Press.

Wagenknecht, Edward. 1991. “Marjorie Bowen.” In Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction, 152–181. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

BRADBURY, RAY (1920–2012)

Raymond Douglas Bradbury was an American short story writer, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter who produced more than six hundred works of horror, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction. He published in more than fifty books, and provided the creative inspiration for the U.S. Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair and the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World. His work continued to be published until a week before his death on June 5, 2012. Although he was most widely known as a science fiction writer, in his early writing life he focused more on horror, and this was a subject to which he returned repeatedly throughout his career.

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, a town he frequently fictionalized as Green Town in works such as Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He included among his ancestors a woman who was tried as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. He saw magician Harry Blackstone several times when he was young, and when he was twelve a carnival magician who appeared under the name Mr. Electrico tapped him on the nose with an electrified sword and commanded him to “live forever.” Bradbury took the advice to heart and started writing every day for the rest of his life. He later said he imitated Edgar Allan Poe from the time he was twelve until he was eighteen.

Ray Bradbury: Horror Writer

Although he is more widely thought of as a science fiction writer—thanks largely to the branding he received as “the world’s greatest living science fiction writer,” an epithet printed on the covers of paperback editions of his books in the 1970s and 1980s—Ray Bradbury is actually better described as a writer of fantasy, and it is often quite dark fantasy, with much of it shading over into genuine horror. His first book, the short fiction collection Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, which at that point dealt only in supernatural horror. Dark Carnival was later transformed into The October Country (1955), which went on to become a cherished classic among horror readers. In these and many other works, Bradbury made significant and deliberate contributions to horror. He also spoke and wrote passionately, in stories, essays, and public talks, about the necessity of acknowledging and even celebrating, in art, the fearsome, dark, terrifying, and horrifying aspects of life. In a real sense, it would not have been inaccurate during his lifetime to have branded him as one of the greatest living horror writers.

Matt Cardin

When Bradbury was fourteen, the family moved to Los Angeles, by which time he already considered himself a writer. Unable to afford university, he educated himself after high school by going to the local library several days a week for the following decade. He supported himself by selling newspapers. He self-published some of his early work in magazines and fanzines, using pseudonyms to disguise his numerous contributions, and made his first professional sale in 1941, earning $15 for a story called “Pendulum” published in the November issue of Super Science Stories. Two years later, he became a full-time writer, supported by his wife, Marguerite “Maggie” McClure, whom he met in the bookstore where she worked.

He adopted a regimental approach to his chosen profession, drafting a new short story every week—first draft on Monday, revisions over the next several days, submission to a potential publisher on Saturday. His plots were often about the perceptions of children or memories of childhood, and he claimed to have total recall of his earliest years, including the moment of his birth.

Most of his work in the horror genre came during his twenties. He found a willing home for his stories in Weird Tales, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith, placing a story in every issue but one between March 1943 and September 1945. In the biographical sketch accompanying his appearances in the magazine, Bradbury said he didn’t care much for ghosts, vampires, or werewolves, since they had been killed with repetition. Instead, he said, there were good stories to be found in everyday things, as well as good stuff “buried in the green leaves of childhood and the heaped dead leaves of old age” (quoted in Schweitzer 1988, 31).

He made a significant sale to Mademoiselle in 1946 with “The Homecoming,” about a normal young boy who feels like an outcast in a family of witches and vampires. It was an unlikely story for the market, but Truman Capote, who was helping out around the editorial offices at the time, pulled it from the slush pile and recommended it to the editors. Charles Addams—of Addams Family fame—was hired to illustrate the story, which became the centerpiece of the magazine’s Halloween issue. Over the years Bradbury would return several times to the Elliot family of ghosts, ghouls, and other assorted monsters. The seven Elliot tales, including “Uncle Einar,” which was also written during this period, are collected in From the Dust Returned (2001).

Many of the stories from Weird Tales were collected in Bradbury’s first book, Dark Carnival, published by specialty press Arkham House in 1947. This edition consisted of slightly over 3,000 copies, and within a couple of years the book was out of print and would remain so until a limited edition reissue by Gauntlet Press in 2001.

Several stories in Dark Carnival have two-word titles, in the form “The Noun.” These include classics such as “The Jar,” about a farmer who buys a jar that has something strange floating in it from a carnival sideshow; “The Lake,” where the protagonist returns to his hometown after the body of his childhood friend who drowned a decade earlier is finally discovered; “The Crowd,” in which a character discovers the same people appearing in the crowds that gather around accident scenes; “The Scythe,” wherein a man learns the burdens and responsibilities of reaping; and “The Emissary,” a gruesome tale in which the family dog drags the body of a beloved teacher to a bedridden boy. These stories arose from Bradbury’s early habit of writing lists of nouns to generate ideas. After creating these lists, he would do a free association exercise in which he investigated why he chose those particular words and what they meant to him. Dark Carnival also contains such notable stories as “Skeleton,” where a hypochondriac becomes convinced his skeleton is to blame for his health problems; and “The Small Assassin,” in which a woman thinks her newborn baby is conspiring to kill her. Given the opportunity to bring the book back into print in 1955, Bradbury decided instead to extensively revise several of the stories, lightly edit others, add four new tales to the mix, and remove twelve of the original twenty-seven that he deemed weak, primitive, or overly violent.

In the years between Dark Carnival and the publication of this revamped edition, titled The October Country, Bradbury produced some of his most notable works, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 (expanded from “The Fireman,” which was written in the basement of the UCLA library on a typewriter that he rented for ten cents per half hour), and The Golden Apples of the Sun, in addition to beginning work, in collaboration with film director John Huston in Ireland, on the script for the Hollywood film adaptation of Moby Dick. In addition to his two early collections, his only other foray into overt horror was Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), expanded from the 1948 short story “Black Ferris,” first as a screenplay for Gene Kelly (to whom the book is dedicated) to direct, and then into a novel when Kelly couldn’t get funding for the project. He then declared that he had said everything he had to say in the horror field.

Before moving into the realm of science fiction and fantasy, Bradbury tried his hand at writing crime fiction for pulp magazines such as Dime Mystery Magazine and Detective Tales, although these were more often tales of terror rather than whodunits or mysteries. He then started making regular sales to the higher-class and higher-paying “slick” magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harper’s.

Though much of his work was futuristic, he classified his stories and novels—other than Fahrenheit 451—as fantasy rather than science fiction, because they were about things that could not happen instead of things that might possibly happen. He likened science fiction to using a mirror to slay Medusa: though the stories seemed to be looking into the future, they were actually a way to explore contemporary issues. Despite his reputation as a visionary, Bradbury was a notorious technophobe, refusing to fly for most of his life and never learning to drive a car.

Even when Bradbury worked in other genres and forms, horror and horrific images continued to play an important part in his stories and novels throughout his career. For example, in the futuristic story “The Veldt,” parents fall prey to their children’s imagination, and “The Banshee,” inspired by his difficult experiences working on Moby Dick, pits a John Huston-like character against the traditional Irish title creature. During the early 1950s, more than two dozen of his short stories were adapted for EC Comics magazines, including Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear. During the same period, his stories also became installments of radio dramas and television anthology series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, where his story “I Sing the Body Electric” was adapted as the show’s 100th episode. Dozens of additional short films, television episodes, and movies have been adapted from his stories. In the 1980s he developed The Ray Bradbury Theater, a television series for HBO and, later, the USA Network, for which he adapted sixty-five of his stories. The series ran from 1986 until 1992.

Recognition for his achievements came early in his career. He won the O. Henry Prize for “The Homecoming” in 1947 and was a finalist for “Powerhouse” in 1948. In 1954, on the strength of Fahrenheit 451, the National Institute of Arts and Letters honored him for “his contributions to American literature.” He received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, was awarded a National Medal of Art by President George W. Bush in 2004, was made Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and was honored with Lifetime Achievement awards by the Horror Writers Association, the World Fantasy Convention, and the PEN Center USA West. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright and won an Emmy Award for his teleplay adaptation of his short novel The Halloween Tree, about the death-like Mr. Moundshroud leading a group of American Midwestern children on a journey through history to discover the meaning of Halloween. In 2007 Bradbury received a special citation by the Pulitzer Prize jury for his “distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” The same year, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies was established in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.

After a stroke in 1999 left him unable to type, Bradbury continued to write by dictating his work over the phone to his daughter in Arizona, who recorded and transcribed it before faxing edits back to him. Collections of his earlier works, including some that had not been previously published, continued to appear late in his life, culminating in The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, a projected eight-volume series that aims to bring together every short story he ever published in chronological order. The week before he died in June 2012, he published an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker double issue devoted to science fiction.

Bev Vincent

See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy; The October Country; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Aggelis, Steven L., ed. 2004. Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Bloom, Harold, ed. 2010. Ray Bradbury. New Edition. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. New York: Infobase.

Reid, Robin Anne. 2000. Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1988. “Tales of Childhood and the Grave: Ray Bradbury’s Horror Fiction.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, 29–42. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

Weller, Sam. 2010. “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203.” Paris Review 192. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury.

Weller, Sam. 2014. Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. New York: Melville House.

BRAM STOKER AWARD

The Bram Stoker Award came into being with the inception of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) in 1987. It has since become a major literary award for the genres of horror and dark fantasy.

Under the leadership of Dean Koontz, the newly formed Horror Writers Association (then named the Horror Writers of America) agreed to give out an award of accomplishment for “superior achievement” in the horror field. It was decided that the award would be named after an icon of horror, and the short list of recommendations included Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker.

The award process involves both recommendations from the HWA’s membership at large and a juried selection of published works from a given year, with two rounds of voting (on the preliminary ballot and then the resulting final ballot) determining the winners. At the time of this writing, the award is divided into eleven categories: novel, first novel, graphic novel, young adult novel, long fiction, short fiction, fiction collection, screenplay, poetry collection, anthology, and nonfiction. There is also a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in the horror field. Past winners of this latter award include Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ellen Datlow, Clive Barker, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Anne Rice.

Notable past winners of a Bram Stoker Award have included Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Richard Matheson, and Clive Barker. The trophy itself is a whimsical eight-inch replica of a haunted house designed by Steven Kirk.

The Stoker Awards were originally given out in small weekend gatherings, and later at the World Horror Convention. More recently, in 2016, the awards ceremony was moved to the literary horror conference StokerCon in order to accommodate a growing audience.

Chun H. Lee

See also: Shirley Jackson Awards; Stoker, Bram; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

“The Bram Stoker Awards.” 2009. Horror Writers Association. http://www.horror.org/awards/stokers.htm#about.

Wiater, Stanley. 1996. “A Shockingly Brief and Informal History of the Horror Writers Association.” Horror Writers Association. http://www.horror.org/aboutus.htm.

BRENNAN, JOSEPH PAYNE (1918–1990)

Joseph Payne Brennan was an American writer, poet, and editor, and publisher of Macabre magazine, which appeared in twenty-three issues between 1959 and 1976. Brennan spent the majority of his life working as a librarian in Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but although his stories often made use of New England history, culture, and traditions, and a number were set in New Haven, he apparently eschewed using his place of employment as a setting.

Brennan’s literary career began as a writer for Connecticut newspapers, but he rapidly became a contributor to pulp magazines, writing numerous crime, mystery, and Western stories in addition to the weird and horrific fiction for which he is remembered. A capable poet whose verse utilized traditional forms, Brennan’s fantastic fiction was equally traditional in its subject matter and plainly written, but traditional and plain do not mean inferior, and he was generally capable of providing the requisite thrills required by editors and readers alike. Among his better known stories are “The Calamander Chest” (1954) and “Slime” (1953), which display the range of Brennan’s talents: the former is small-scale and personal, with a haunted chest beckoning Ernest Maax, its new owner, to death, while the latter is large-scale, describing a being of slime, monstrously emergent from the ocean, which causes death and destruction until repelled. (Stephen King has praised the latter for the efficient delivery of its horrors.)

At times Brennan’s darker fiction had a moral side, too: “Levitation” (1958) depicts a carnival performer with a genuine skill, with which he briefly silences hecklers, but when the performer collapses, the levitated heckler continues to rise. New England history is repurposed in “Canavan’s Backyard”: the titular bookseller becomes fascinated by his backyard, which seems unnervingly larger when one is in it than it does from the outside. As the narrator recounts, Canavan’s researches have disclosed a disquieting historical injustice and an accompanying curse, but knowledge of these is not sufficient to save Canavan. New England itself is presented in “The House on Hazel Street” (1961) and “Episode on Cain Street” (1967): these take place in New Haven and mourn the destruction of historic New England and its accompanying traditions.

While the above stories are thematically connected, Brennan also had a series of stories featuring a psychic investigator, Lucius Leffing, a resident of suburban Connecticut. Nevertheless, as one would anticipate from stories first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Leffing’s investigations lead not to the supernatural but to the human beings behind the seeming manifestations.

Brennan was a fairly consistently second-tier writer of fiction, rarely disappointing while rarely achieving greatness, and his fiction thus appeared in books published by the genre’s small and private presses, collections that remained available despite the slow sales that would have led to their pulping by more commercial publishers. He seems to have been content with this, regarding himself as a poet who wrote occasional fiction. The World Fantasy Convention honored him in 1982 by giving him its award for life achievement, but presently he is completely out of print.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Arkham House; Occult Detectives; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1991. “Darkness Come to Life: The Weird Fiction of Joseph Payne Brennan.” Studies in Weird Fiction 9 (Spring): 18–26.

Murray, Will. 2009. “Joseph Payne Brennan Interviewed.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 330–333. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press.

Warren, Allen. 1999. “American Gothic: Joseph Payne Brennan.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 108–114. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

BRITE, POPPY Z. (1967–)

Billy Martin, whose works have appeared under the name Poppy Z. Brite, is a New Orleans–born writer of horror, Southern Gothic, and dark comedy. Featuring queer characters and explicit descriptions of gay sex narrated in a lush and sensual style, Brite’s fiction is among the first American horror to place queer sexuality at its center. Brite’s frank acknowledgment of his and his characters’ non-normative genders and sexualities, in addition to his evident fondness for subculture, have made him a controversial figure in the genre. Though his earliest novels and short stories—published when Brite was in his mid-twenties—were sometimes dismissed as “naïve,” Brite quickly achieved cult status and then mainstream success, earning a devoted readership and much praise for his poetic, languorous style and unapologetic eroticism.

Brite began his career when he was eighteen, publishing his first story, “Missing,” in The Horror Show in 1986, followed by the publication of a number of short stories that would later be gathered in the collection Swamp Foetus (1993; later renamed Wormwood, 1996). However, Brite’s real breakthrough success came with the publication of his first novel, Lost Souls (1992), which firmly established his reputation as a writer of innovative genre fiction. Featuring an imaginative recasting of the vampire as an ambiguously gendered, separate species from humans, Lost Souls introduced many elements that would become mainstays in Brite’s work: bisexual and gay characters, the alienation and sometimes nihilism of subcultural American youth, and the non-normative family and friend group—often made up of both literal and figurative orphans—as an alternative to the broken nuclear family.

Though much of Lost Souls takes place in New Orleans, the novel also introduces readers to Brite’s fictional city of Missing Mile, North Carolina, a small, swampy Southern town that exerts a strong atmospheric presence in Brite’s second novel, Drawing Blood (1993), which doubles as a love story and haunted house tale. Exploring the complexities of love, violence, sexuality, and addiction, Drawing Blood anticipated many of the themes that would ground Brite’s third horror novel, Exquisite Corpse (1996). Though Brite’s writing in Exquisite Corpse was highly praised, its plot—a brutal romance between two serial killers, modeled after real-life murderers Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer, and set against an HIV-saturated New Orleans—proved to be too extreme for many horror readers and critics, solidifying Brite’s reputation as a controversial writer. Exquisite Corpse is Brite’s last horror novel to be set in his own fictional universe. It was followed, in 1998, by The Lazarus Heart, a dark revenge fantasy set in the fictional universe of James O’Barr’s The Crow series.

Brite’s horror work also includes the short story collections Are You Loathsome Tonight? (1998), Wrong Things (with Caitlín R. Kiernan, 2001), The Devil You Know (2003), and Triads (with Christa Faust, 2004), as well as the edited vampiric erotica collections Love in Vein (1994) and Love in Vein II (1997). Brite moved into dark comedy in 2002 with his acclaimed Liquor series, and in 2010, announced his retirement from writing.

Brittany Roberts

See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Splatterpunk; Vampires.

Further Reading

Brite, Poppy Z. 2001. Guilty but Insane. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Poppy Z. Brite.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 147–152. New York: Thomson/Gale.

THE BRONTË SISTERS

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were English novelists and poets of the early nineteenth century. Charlotte, the eldest, was born in 1816 and outlived the rest of her siblings, dying in 1855. Emily was born in 1818 and died of tuberculosis in 1848. Anne, the youngest, was born in 1820 and died in 1849, also of tuberculosis. Although their lives were brief, each made an important difference in the development of English literature, and their novels continue to be regarded as classics today. In the history of horror literature, their novels are important for the way they combined aspects of the Gothic with the psychological and social concerns of nineteenth-century English fiction.

Their father, Patrick Brontë, was born in Ireland and moved to England when he became an Anglican clergyman. He was assigned to the parish at Haworth, a village in West Yorkshire, where he continued to work all his life. He and his wife Maria Branwell Brontë had six children, the first two dying young. Maria herself died in 1821, and so her children had to grow up, for the most part, without her. Patrick Brontë did not remarry, but raised the children with the assistance of relatives. In addition to the three surviving daughters, who would come to be known to posterity as the Brontë sisters, he had one son, Branwell, who died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one. As children, the Brontës amused themselves by creating interlocking stories in shared imaginary worlds; Charlotte and Branwell invented a kingdom they called “Angria,” while Emily and Anne created a Pacific island domain they named “Gondal.” In a way, these juvenile first efforts anticipated the development of fantasy fiction as a genre of imaginary worlds.

As adults, the three sisters all arranged to have their first novels published in the same year, 1847. The Brontë family was never especially affluent, and publishing fiction was one of the few available ways that women could make money in Victorian England. The Brontë sisters had not failed to try as many of these ways as they could, having worked as teachers and governesses, both in England and abroad. Charlotte Brontë, using the name “Currer Bell,” published Jane Eyre, while Emily Brontë, writing as “Ellis Bell,” published Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontë, writing as “Acton Bell,” published Agnes Grey. They chose to present themselves to the public disguised as the “Bell Brothers” to avoid controversy, since women writers were not as respected as men and were not generally free to write about darker or more intimate topics. Taking a male name was a strategy that women writers in that era often utilized in order to get their work published; novelist “George Eliot,” for example, was in reality a woman named Mary Ann Evans.

The nexus of literary creativity and family tragedy that was the Brontës stands as one of the most striking stories in the history of literature—Gothic, horror, or otherwise.

1812

Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell wed.

1814

Maria Brontë is born.

1815

Elizabeth Brontë is born.

1816

Charlotte Brontë is born.

1817

Patrick Branwell Brontë is born.

1818

Emily Brontë is born.

1820

Anne Brontë is born.

1821

Maria Branwell Brontë dies of uterine cancer at age thirty-eight.

1825

Maria dies of tuberculosis at age eleven. Six weeks later, Elizabeth dies of tuberculosis at age ten.

1847

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all have their first novels published: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (published under the pen name “Currer Bell”), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (as “Ellis Bell”), and Anne’s Agnes Grey (as “Acton Bell”).

1848

Anne publishes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in June. Three months later, Branwell dies, possibly of tuberculosis or chronic bronchitis, aggravated by drink and/or drugs. Three months later, Emily dies of tuberculosis and complications from a cold she caught at Patrick’s funeral.

1849

Anne dies of tuberculosis in May. Five months later, Charlotte publishes Shirley.

1853

Charlotte publishes Villette.

1855

Charlotte dies of tuberculosis and/or extreme morning sickness.

1861

Patrick Brontë dies at the age of 84, having never remarried, and having outlived all of his children.

Matt Cardin

Of the three “Bell Brothers” novels, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were immediately successful, selling very well and receiving so much attention that the Brontës found it impossible to avoid revealing their true identities. These two novels, though quite different from each other, both represent very significant developments for Gothic literature. Agnes Grey was less well received, and it was Anne Brontë’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), that proved to be the more successful of her works.

Jane Eyre tells the story of an orphan girl, the title character, who becomes relatively independent and takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. There is a strong attraction between Jane and her employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, but she refuses to become involved with him on an unequal footing. Rochester is a darkly charismatic Gothic character who conceals a terrible secret: his own interracial marriage and the fact that his wife, now insane, is confined to the attic of his estate. What Jane initially takes for signs of a possible haunting are in fact the sounds and actions of this mad wife. Much of the supernatural is invoked, only to be explained away, in the course of Jane Eyre, but at one point Jane does appear to receive a psychic message, a cry for help, from the far-off Rochester. Jane Eyre’s independence and strength of character, her refusal to abandon herself either for pleasure, by running away with Rochester and becoming his mistress, or for the sake of duty, by marrying her austere missionary cousin, St. John, establishes her as a significant feminist character in English literature.

Charlotte Brontë’s next novel, Shirley (1849), is centered on two female characters, Shirley, who is strong willed and financially independent, and Caroline, who is self-effacing and meekly submissive. Later in her life, Charlotte Brontë published an autobiographical novel, Villette (1853). During the early 1840s, she had worked at a school in Belgium, and there she fell in love with the director of the school, who was already married. Villette tells a modified version of this story. This novel is less strongly Gothic in flavor, although it does include a scene in which the protagonist, Lucy Snowe, sees what she believes to be the ghost of a nun.

Of the three sisters, Charlotte was the one who came closest to fulfilling the public role of the contemporary novelist, attending literary events in London and meeting other prominent authors, notably William Makepeace Thackeray. Emily, on the other hand, shunned publicity, avoided people, and remained for the most part close to home. Anne was not much in demand until her second novel was published, by which time her health had already begun to fail.

Wuthering Heights (1847), published a few months after Jane Eyre, recounts the story of two Yorkshire families over several generations, centered on the doomed love of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan discovered and adopted by Catherine’s father. Heathcliff develops into a brooding and occasionally sinister character, largely as a result of Catherine’s decision to marry the elegant Edgar Linton instead of him. In a sense, aspects of character that Charlotte imbued into Rochester are divided into two characters by Emily. Edgar acquires the aristocratic finish and status, while Heathcliff is given the passion and the pride. Supernatural elements are slightly stronger in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff seems to be haunted by visions of Catherine after her death, and the ghostly couple may appear on the moors. The narrator of the overall narrative encounters the ghost of Catherine before any of the story has been revealed to him, which is arguably the most unequivocal example of a supernatural event in the novel. Wuthering Heights also makes use of nonsupernatural Gothic elements, such as the struggle for the inheritance of property, the association of weather and landscape with human emotions, and the extensive use of stories within stories. Where Jane Eyre is retold by Jane herself, Wuthering Heights is a story told by a stranger, relayed by him from a trusted old family retainer.

Anne’s Agnes Grey is the most directly autobiographical of the first “Bell” novels, telling the tale of a young woman who goes to work as a governess for a wealthy family in order to prove herself capable of supporting her own family. In both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gothic attributes are much less obvious than in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights; in both of Anne Brontë’s novels, the most recognizably Gothic feature is the morally bankrupt wealthy or aristocratic family, and the image of the country estate as fertile ground for the cultivation of selfishness and secret vice.

Taken together, the Brontës are unusual in that they focus their attention on country life with barely a glance toward London, which looms so large in other works of nineteenth-century English fiction. As outsiders from the English countryside, who did not feel or respect the need to adopt a common or conventional perspective uncritically, they were Romantic in that they insisted on their own point of view. While William Wordsworth and the poets of the English Lake District were also emphatic about the validity of their rural point of view as a commentary on an increasingly alienated and urbanized English society, the Brontës still seemed to regard themselves as outsiders, and the horror theme of “outsideness” is strong with them. Their female characters are as morally centered as any Gothic heroines, but Agnes Grey, Catherine Earnshaw, and Jane Eyre are neither naïve nor weak. The intrepid hero of the Gothic novel is entirely absent from these novels, and, while the villains are still present, they are developed with a new degree of understanding and psychological care. The Gothic villain may be sympathetic, within limits, but with the Brontës there is a stronger sense that the darker attributes of the male characters may not be entirely unknown to the female characters as well. In particular a fierce pride and defiance of convention emerge in the Brontës’ novels, a clear sign of the influence of romanticism.

The poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) was one of the most important Romantic figures for the Brontës, as indeed he was for the literary world at large, and many critics regard him as the model for both Rochester and Heathcliff. Byron was notorious for flouting social and moral conventions; a handsome and athletic man, he was in many ways like a modern pop star in his own time. His poetic works, which included Don Juan, Manfred, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and which made ample use of Gothic imagery, were extremely popular. Nor was his use as a model for literary characters confined to the Brontës alone; he was a close friend of the gifted poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary, the author of Frankenstein (published in 1818), and the character of Victor Frankenstein seems to have blended attributes of both Percy Shelley and Byron. Another friend of Byron’s, Dr. John Polidori, wrote one of the earlier examples of vampire literature, simply titled “The Vampyre,” and the character of the vampire, Lord Ruthven, was clearly modeled on Byron.

Byron may be taken to exemplify what romanticism meant, in good measure, for the Brontës: an exhilarating, but dangerous, liberation from conventional ideas of morality, coupled with a more psychologically sophisticated understanding of character. The mysterious, largely unexplained “evil” of the older Gothic tale disappears, and instead the Brontës present us with characters who may do good for less than virtuous motives, and who may do evil through being overzealous in the pursuit of virtue. Their skepticism about moral absolutes, at least among human beings, does not cause them to dismiss the Gothic as Jane Austen did, but to look to the Gothic for ways to express a stormy and often obscure idea of human passions and motivations, the mysterious problem of the will, which cannot be perfectly controlled by reason. While their female protagonists are clearly valorized, these novels have no purely exemplary characters or morally pure role models; instead, characters are morally complex, formed in a mixture of moral and psychological thinking. It may be that the Byronic model was the key for all three of the Brontës, enabling them to address grim themes and more violent passions.

While the novels of the Brontës all build toward conventional endings involving marriage, all of their works are marked by pessimism about the possibility of lasting happiness and doubts about the value of mere contentment. Jane Eyre is able to marry Rochester only after he is maimed and nearly killed in a fire, while the marriages of the main characters in Anne’s novels only come after they have resigned all hope of achieving happiness. The marriages in Wuthering Heights come with dire repercussions, and only the final marriage of Hareton and the young Cathy seems to promise anything like a peaceful reconciliation.

The influence of the Brontë sisters is remarkable. Not all popular works of the late 1840s went on to enduring fame, but theirs did. Wuthering Heights has been adapted for film and television numerous times and has appeared on the stage both in play and in operatic form. Jane Eyre has been adapted for film even more often and has also been presented on television and the stage. Anne Brontë’s works have also been dramatized, albeit less frequently. The fictional stories of the Brontës have been retold from the perspectives of other characters, sequels to their novels have been written, and both the Brontës themselves and their characters have entered popular culture. Their most important contribution to English literature might have been their forthright boldness in setting down and publicizing their stories, their franker treatment of the inequities and hypocrisies of English society, their use of sexual themes, their criticism of the institution of marriage, their unconventional piety, and their opinion of the domination of English society by men. Their contribution to horror literature was nothing less than an elevation of the psychological sophistication of the Gothic character, the introduction of a new kind of heroine, one who is virtuous, but conflicted, more active and passionate than her eighteenth-century predecessors. In the strong women of later horror fiction, characters like Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, and Catherine Earnshaw continue to be reflected.

Michael Cisco

See also: Byron, Lord; Byronic Hero; Gothic Hero/Villain.

Further Reading

Gaskell, Elizabeth. [1857] 1997. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. New York: Penguin.

Losano, Antonia. 2002. “The Brontë Sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.” In British Writers: Retrospective Supplement 1, edited by Jay Parini, 49–62. Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Reef, Catherine. 2012. The Brontë Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. New York: Clarion Books.

Shulevitz, Judith. 2016. “The Brontës’ Secret.” The Atlantic (June): http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/the-brontes-secret/480726.

BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN (1771–1810)

Charles Brockden Brown was an American novelist and historian whose accomplishments made him one of America’s most important literary figures. As a novelist he wrote mainly in the Gothic tradition, and his work influenced other major writers in the same genre, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

Late in Brown’s Gothic novel Wieland, the narrator, Clara, reflects on the uncanny occurrences that have unfolded, especially the hearing of disembodied voices, which have led her brother, Wieland, to murder his family in the belief that it is God’s will. Clara, who is intensely intellectual, finds her thoughts leading her in dark directions:

Ideas thronged into my mind which I was unable to disjoin or to regulate. I reflected that this madness, if madness it were, had affected Pleyel and myself as well as Wieland. Pleyel had heard a mysterious voice. I had seen and heard. A form had showed itself to me as well as to Wieland. . . . What was my security against influences equally terrific and equally irresistable?

It would be vain to attempt to describe the state of mind which this idea produced. I wondered at the change which a moment had affected in my brother’s condition. Now was I stupified with ten-fold wonder in contemplating myself. Was I not likewise transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearful attributes? Was I not transported to the brink of the same abyss? Ere a new day should come, my hands might be embrued in blood, and my remaining life be consigned to a dungeon and chains.

. . . Some times I conceived the apparition to be more than human. I had no grounds on which to build a disbelief. I could not deny faith to the evidence of my religion; the testimony of men was loud and unanimous: both these concurred to persuade me that evil spirits existed, and that their energy was frequently exerted in the system of the world. (218–220)

Matt Cardin

Source: Brown, Charles Brockden. 1798. Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale. New York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, for H. Caritat.

Brown was born into a Quaker family on January 17, 1771. His family intended their son to become a lawyer, and to accomplish this they sent him to a Quaker school from 1781 to 1787. After six years of reading law, though, he turned to other interests and published his first collection of essays, entitled The Rhapsodist, in a local magazine in 1789. Subsequently, he moved to New York to pursue other interests. There he became associated with the Friendly Club, a “study club,” which included such luminaries as Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap and a number of literary ladies. These intellectuals steered him into the world of imaginative literature. Brief sketches and introductory notes on Brown mention that he was the first professional writer in the colonies and the first American writer to garner an international reputation. At various times, some have designated him as either the “Father of American Romance” or the “Father of the American Gothic.” Between 1798 and 1801, Brown published his best-known novels: Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), Clara Howard (1801), and Jane Talbot (1801). Shortly thereafter, he entered into a partnership with his brothers in an export business, which failed in 1806. The demands of business notwithstanding, Brown continued his literary endeavors by editing The Monthly Magazine and American Review and The Literary Magazine and American Register. He died in 1810, apparently of tuberculosis.

The general consensus is that Brown’s best novels are those allied with the Gothic. Although most scholars hold that the author was a slovenly stylist, they also assert that he was a “flawed genius,” and that Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly are worthy contributions to the Gothic genre. Undeniably, Wieland, or The Transformation stands as his best novel, horror or otherwise. Employing a female narrator, Brown relates the history of the Wieland family as it is plagued by religious freneticism and mental aberration. The family patriarch dies as a result of spontaneous combustion; his unbridled zeal may well have led to his fiery end. The younger Wieland manifests both of these tendencies, and they lead him to murder his wife and children. Arthur Mervyn explores the terrors of physical illness in the form of yellow fever, which scourged the environs of Philadelphia in 1793. Brown’s treatment of this epidemic looks ahead to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” In Edgar Huntly, Brown explores the mysterious world of somnambulism and the dangers of living on the fringes of the wilderness.

In all of his horror fiction, Brown excels in his work with landscapes. On the one hand, he is fairly conventional in his Gothic settings. Brown, though, Americanizes it. In both Wieland and Edgar Huntly, he describes carefully and thoroughly the Pennsylvania region. The former novel employs the urban “wilderness” in Philadelphia, while the latter uses the Lehigh Valley.

The Godwin Circle (the group of radical thinkers gathered around the English political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley) and other international luminaries praised Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic fiction. In addition to Poe and Hawthorne, Brown also influenced Washington Irving and Margaret Fuller. In the later nineteenth century, interest in Brown’s work waned. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, scholars revived the almost forgotten novelist, and Brown has carved his niche in the world of the literature anthology and the academic conference.

E. Kate Stewart

See also: Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Irving, Washington; Poe, Edgar Allan.

Further Reading

Axelrod, Alan. 1983. Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Brown, Charles Brockden. 1926. Wieland, or the Transformation, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Grabo, Norman S. 1981. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Kafer, Peter. 2004. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2011. Charles Brockden Brown. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

BULWER-LYTTON, EDWARD (1803–1873)

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, author of several influential works of occult fiction, was born May 25, 1803, in London. He added a hyphenated Lytton to his name after inheriting his mother’s estates in 1838 and became Lord Lytton in 1866. Although he is chiefly remembered today for his horror story “The Haunted and the Haunters,” his popularity as a novelist in his own day rivaled that of Charles Dickens, influencing everything from clothing styles to the development of Theosophy. He is remembered outside the genre for his historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834); for the phrases “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “the great unwashed,” and for the perhaps unjustifiably maligned opening line “It was a dark and stormy night,” which inspired a whimsical annual contest of bad opening lines. He died in 1873.

Heavily influenced by Lord Byron and Romantic literature as well as Rosicrucianism and the Kabbalah, he took the Gothic novel in a metaphysical direction and explored the use of psychology and archetypal characters. His work represents a transition from Gothic to modern supernatural fiction. His actual beliefs are unclear, but he is known to have done extensive research into such areas as spiritualism, animal magnetism, and ritual magic.

Bulwer’s early occult short stories include “The Tale of Kosem Kesamim” (1832), “Monos and Daimonos” (1830), and “Manuscript Found in a Madhouse”(1835). His main contributions to the genre, however, are his two occult novels Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862), and the novella The Haunted and the Haunters (1859). The titular character of Zanoni is an immortal magician belonging to an ancient secret society, who sacrifices himself for love. The novel also introduces the demonic entity called the Dweller of the Threshold, a guardian that haunts failed initiates to the society. “The Haunted and the Haunters” concerns a house haunted by the willpower of an immortal magician.

“The Haunted and the Haunters”: A Prototypical
Haunted House Story

First published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters; or The House and the Brain” represents a transition from the Gothic novel to the modern ghost story. It is one of the earliest haunted house stories, and despite the Gothic elements of secret rooms and mysterious phenomena, it is set in a contemporary urban environment, and the haunting has physical effects. It is the prototypical story of people spending a night in a haunted house, and it exemplifies Bulwer’s philosophy that there are no truly supernatural forces, but only natural ones yet to be explained by science. Unlike those in later stories, the phenomena here have a pseudoscientific explanation. Many of the phenomena described were inspired by séances conducted in the author’s home by the noted spirit medium Daniel Dunglas Home.

The protagonist hears of a purportedly haunted house for rent in London and decides to spend several nights there. He brings a servant and a dog, and experiences a variety of frightening manifestations. The normally fearless servant flees, and the dog dies of a broken neck, but the protagonist makes it through by sheer willpower. The story exists in a shorter form, in which the protagonist discovers and destroys an apparatus used to create the phenomena. In a second, unabridged version, he later meets the immortal magician responsible for the haunting.

This story’s direct influence can be seen in such later works of supernatural horror as “No. 242 Rue Le Prince” (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram, The Haunting of Hill House (1962) by Shirley Jackson, and Hell House (1971) by Richard Matheson. “The Haunted and the Haunters” is directly or indirectly responsible for the establishment of an entire horror subgenre.

Lee Weinstein

A Strange Story has many elements in common with the previous stories and involves a magician, the elixir of life, alchemy, and possible reincarnation. It has been cited as an influence on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories. Bulwer regarded the magical forces depicted in his work as natural forces that were as yet unexplained by science, as opposed to actual supernatural forces. This is also true of his later science fictional utopia, The Coming Race (1871). “The Haunted and the Haunters” remains his most popular and influential work.

His occult fiction in general was influential on the work of Sheridan Le Fanu, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marie Corelli, and Edgar Allan Poe, all of whom influenced succeeding generations of horror writers. He died in Torquay, UK, on January 18, 1873.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Spiritualism.

Further Reading

Christensen, Allan Conrad. 1976. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The Fiction of New Regions. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Christensen, Allan C. 1983. “Edward Bulwer-Lytton (25 May 1803–18 January 1873).” In Victorian Novelists Before 1885, edited by Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman, 73–87. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 21. Detroit: Gale.

Mitchell, Leslie. 2003. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. New York and London: Hambledon and London.

Woolf, Robert Lee. 1971. “Strange Stories: The Occult Fiction of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton.” In Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction, 143–366. Boston: Gambit.

BURNT OFFERINGS

Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel Burnt Offerings began as an idea for a screenplay sometime around 1970, when Marasco was working as a high school teacher in Manhattan and had just attained some success with a Broadway production of his play Child’s Play. Burnt Offerings, which was originally conceived as a black comedy, charts the disintegration of the Rolfe family during a summer vacation in a crumbling country mansion that effectively acts as the book’s murderous villain.

The narrative focuses primarily on Marian Rolfe, her son Davey, husband Ben, and his Aunt Elizabeth. Marian’s love of cleanliness, order, and beautiful furniture prompts her to pester Ben into renting a sprawling and suspiciously affordable house to get away from a suffocating city apartment. Marian throws herself into cleaning and caring for the house and cooking for the reclusive old Mrs Allardyce, who is never actually seen. Meanwhile, her family falls prey to a series of terrible accidents, as the house mysteriously repairs itself around them. What is most horrifying about the novel is how little Marian struggles against the house’s manipulation of her desire for domestic perfection, as she abandons her dying loved ones and is ultimately absorbed into the house, taking Mrs Allardyce’s place in a locked room at its heart, as a kind of supernatural housekeeper. A series of eerie photographs suggest that the house periodically restores itself to splendor in precisely this way, demanding blood sacrifices every few years.

Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings, although it has receded from public memory in the decades since its publication, remains an influential haunted house novel, and it still provides a powerful jolt of supernatural horror for those readers who choose to seek it out. It has often been compared to Stephen King’s The Shining, which it preceded by four years, because both novels tell the story of middle-class families living as caretakers in an isolated mansion that proves to harbor an evil force, which infiltrates their psyches as it tries to destroy them.

Matt Cardin

Burnt Offerings cannot be separated from the American haunted house tradition, epitomized by writers from Charles Brockden Brown to Mark Z. Danielewski. Specifically, it emerged during a wave of late twentieth-century novels and films about supernatural domestic disturbances, such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1980), and is often compared to Stephen King’s The Shining (1977); indeed, King has written about the book on several occasions. When it was first published, reviewers found it effective and chilling, and for today’s readers, it offers a neat, convincing, often unnerving account of a woman driven by societal pressures to subordinate her personal affections to housework and a love of material objects.

In this regard, it bears comparison to Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972), and King’s Carrie (1974), horror novels by American male writers focusing on issues affecting middle-class women and girls. While both the book and Dan Curtis’s star-studded 1976 film adaptation are relatively obscure today, Burnt Offerings remains an important contribution to horror’s explorations of the troubled and troubling relationship between women and the houses that dominate their lives.

Dara Downey

See also: Brown, Charles Brockden; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; House of Leaves; Rosemary’s Baby; The Shining.

Further Reading

Bailey, Dale. 1999. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. 1999. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

King, Stephen. 1998. “Robert Marasco, Burnt Offerings.” 1998. In Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 217–218. New York: Carroll and Graf.

BUTLER, OCTAVIA E. (1947–2006)

Octavia Estelle Butler was primarily a science fiction writer whose well-crafted, intelligent, and emotionally resonating—and at times devastating—novels brought her much critical success during her lifetime. It can be argued nonetheless that her themes, which she revisited in all of her writing, are also central to horror fiction. Her sustained focus on alienation and marginalization, her examination of the crushing effects of power as it is wielded by alien forces, her investigation of bodies that have been colonized and refashioned into something Other yet which remain recognizably and in some instances tragically human, are common threads found in the best horror fiction.

The five novels that together make up Butler’s Patternist Series—Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984)—tell a complex story, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing into the distant future, of an ancient creature and his son who breed with a female shape-changer to create a new breed of human. Her Xenogenesis trilogy—Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—tells the story of a visiting alien race that, through programmatic miscegenation (the interbreeding of different races), offers a dying humanity a chance to continue the species, albeit with changes. The Parable series was left unfinished at the time of her death. Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) take place in an early twenty-first century America that has collapsed into political, economic and ecological crisis. The latter of these was awarded the Nebula Award for best novel by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

These novels incorporate horror imagery and themes to varying and perhaps progressively lesser degrees, but her final work, Fledgling (2005), more fully embraces the horror treasury in its presentation of the vampire as a different species. The Ina are a shadow species that survive by feeding on human blood, and their saliva, in turn, extends the lifetimes of the humans they bring into their inner circle. Butler’s dominant theme—of unequal but beneficial symbiotic relationships that require sacrifice from both parties—plays out against a backdrop of familial infighting and power struggle. Shori, the novel’s main character, is an adult Ina who, because of a genetic experiment, resembles a ten-year-old black girl. A powerful family of Inas, all of which are white, see her as an aberration and set out to destroy her. The novel is especially bloody even for Butler, whose stories are often vicious in their telling, but Fledgling is nonetheless a powerful and insightful exploration of the intersection of identity and violence.

Butler’s shorter fiction numbers barely more than half a dozen short stories, but of these, “Bloodchild” (1984) stands out as an extraordinary exercise in body horror and corporeal violation willingly given between alien and human. It was awarded the Locus, Nebula, and Hugo awards. Also significant is “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987), which details the horrific aftereffects of a cure for cancer. The children of those who took the cure are crippled by extreme psychosis and violent behavior. While the subsequent generation learns how to delay the onset of the aftereffects, the social alienation they experience as a result is no better than the afflictions they will eventually face.

As a female African American science fiction writer, Butler’s was for years a lone but necessary voice. Indeed, no one but she could have written a novel like Kindred (1979), which illuminates the all-too-real horrors of slave culture. The novel follows an educated black woman in 1976 whose white slave-owning ancestor is able to call her back through time whenever his life is imperiled. She and her white husband are forced to confront, experience, and be complicit in the exploitation of black bodies and the violence wrought upon them. Butler’s influence on a current generation of writers, white and of color, is profound and cannot be overstated. Her sudden death from a head injury sustained in an accidental fall in her backyard robbed the field of one of its most distinctive and important voices.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Body Horror; Vampires.

Further Reading

Francis, Consuela, ed. 2010. Conversations with Octavia Butler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Octavia E. Butler. Accessed July 28, 2016. http://octaviabutler.org.

Pfeiffer, John R. 1999. “Butler, Octavia Estelle (b. 1947).” In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Bleiler, 147–158. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Samatar, Sofia. 2013. “Strange Symbiosis in ‘Bloodchild.’” Weird Fiction Review, June 24. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/06/101-weird-writers-26-octavia-butler.

BUZZATI, DINO (1906–1972)

Dino Buzzati was, along with Italo Calvino, one of the most important modern Italian writers of fantastic and surrealistic fiction. A prolific author of novels, stories, plays, and journalism, Buzzati has had, via a handful of English translations, a modest impact on the more literary strains of horror and dark fantasy writing. His most celebrated and widely circulated novel, The Tartar Steppe (1945), potently echoes Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926) in its depiction of a labyrinthine military fort of inscrutable purpose, infested with self-important bureaucrats, to which the main character, Giovanni Drogo, is assigned in a kind of nightmarish exile; the atmosphere, brilliantly sustained, is one of ironic claustrophobia, with Fort Bastiani offering a potent allegory of psychological entrapment. In this novel, Buzzati, like Kafka, makes the absurd seem genuinely foreboding.

Buzzati’s key theme is the way in which fantasy and desire—often incarnated in alluring dreams or visionary quests with vaguely supernatural overtones—manage to survive in a barren secular world. His short stories, many taking the form of crystalline parables that draw on fairy tales and myth, have been distilled into two excellent collections of English translations by Lawrence Venuti: Restless Nights (1983) and The Siren (1984). Buzzati deploys his considerable skills as a journalist to describe, in matter-of-fact prose, marvelous violations of everyday reality: hallucinations take on palpable form, leading to the death of “The Bewitched Bourgeois” (1948); an uncharted city persistently foils an avid traveler in “The Walls of Anagoor” (1955); time accelerates or freezes into stasis in “The Time Machine” (1954), a work that verges on science fiction (as does Buzzati’s 1960 novel Larger Than Life [trans. 1962], in which a scientist’s dead wife is seemingly reincarnated in a computer).

Buzzati died in 1972, leaving behind a complex corpus of work, much of it still inaccessible to those unversed in Italian. His influence on modern horror literature has been less obvious than that of Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges, but it has nonetheless exerted a strange fascination for readers unafraid to grapple with its playful mysteries, and it has been cited by the contemporary American horror writer Thomas Ligotti as a significant influence.

Rob Latham

See also: Borges, Jorge Luis; Dreams and Nightmares; Kafka, Franz; Surrealism; The Uncanny.

Further Reading

Atchity, Kenneth. 1978. “Time in Two Novels of Dino Buzzati.” Italica 55 (1): 3–19.

Cancalon, E. D. 1977. “Spatial Structures in the Narrative of Dino Buzzati.” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 11 (1): 36–46.

Venuti, Lawrence. 1982. “Dino Buzzati’s Fantastic Journalism.” Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1): 79–91.

BYRON, LORD (1788–1824)

George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron, became the most famous poet of his era and the central figure of the English Romantic movement. His work was dominated by his image and seen primarily as an aspect of that image; his attire and attitude became enormously influential on the poses struck by young men ambitious to be seen as rebels against conformity, the former defining the dress code of English and French “dandies” for a generation—assisted by the influence of his disciple George “Beau” Brummell—and the latter shaping their lifestyle fantasies. Prompted to flee England in 1816 after the breakdown of his marriage to Anne Millbanke, amid scandal generated by multiple affairs (most famously with Caroline Lamb) and rumors of incest (with his half-sister Augusta Leigh) and sodomy, he apparently poured his feelings of guilt into the classic Faustian fantasy Manfred and justified his promiscuity by representing “Don Juan” as a victim unable to resist female seduction rather than a predator.

Byron was the orchestrator of the occasion that gave rise to the most famous legend in the history of horror fiction when his guests at the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva in 1816 embarked on a competition in which each would write a horror story. He and Percy Shelley never finished theirs, but Mary Shelley developed hers into Frankenstein, and Byron’s physician, John William Polidori, eventually produced “The Vampyre,” whose anonymous publication led to it being widely misattributed to Byron. The inspiration provided by that occasion thus produced two of the most important archetypes of English horror fiction, and the latter story, which recasts a character clearly based on Byron—given the same name as the villain of Caroline Lamb’s vengeful novel Glenarvon (1816)—brought out the “satanic” aspects of the Byronic pose in a lurid fashion, with the result that countless future vampires would be modeled, directly or indirectly, with various degrees of stigmatization, on the unwitting baron.

Byron’s Manfred: A Gothic Metaphysical Drama

Byron’s Manfred is a dramatic poem in the form of a closet drama (a play intended to be read, not performed). First published in 1817, it was written after Byron fled Britain following the breakdown of his marriage, amid scandalous rumor, mostly while he was traveling through the Alps after the famous evening spent at the Villa Diodati when he and his various companions discussed writing horror stories.

Like Byron himself, the poem’s eponymous protagonist leaves home to wander the Alps, after summoning seven spirits in a Faustian fashion. They cannot provide him any immediate solution to his predicament, which stems from the death of his beloved Astarte, in regard to which he feels a mysterious but intense guilt. In the course of his quest, Manfred also confronts the Witch of the Alps; Arimanes; an abbot; and various allegorical figures, but the various kinds of bargain that they can offer him—including the abbot’s offer of forgiveness and redemption from his sin—are not acceptable to him as exits from his predicament, and he insists on dying on his own defiant terms.

Manfred proved the most fascinating of the various alter egos Byron adopted in his long philosophical poems. Although haunted by guilt, Manfred refuses any of the conventional solutions to his plight that are offered to him, manifesting an assertive individualism that seemed to many of Byron’s admirers to be a perfect encapsulation of the Romantic spirit and the very essence of the imitative Byronism that became a popular lifestyle fantasy.

Manfred was musically adapted for the stage by Robert Schumann as Manfred: Dramatic Poem with Music in Three Parts, first performed in 1852. It was also adapted as a symphony, simply titled Manfred, by Tchaikovsky in 1885.

Brian Stableford

Apart from the phantasmagorical Manfred, there is little of the horrific in Byron’s own work, save for a few elements in the Oriental fantasy “The Giaour” (1813) and the enigmatic poem “Darkness” (1816). The latter is sometimes interpreted as a vision of the end of the world, but probably adapts a description of the aftereffects of the eruption of the volcano Mount Tambora the previous year—whose ash blotted out the sun temporarily in many parts of the world—to the same feelings of guilt occasioned by the failure of his marriage that produced Manfred.

Byron’s death in April 1824 added further to the romanticism of his legend. Having taken an active role in the Greek War of Independence, perhaps in a spirit of expiation, he died of an infection probably caused by his physician, employing an unsterilized lancet in his worse-than-futile bloodletting.

Brian Stableford

See also: Byronic Hero; Gothic Hero/Villain; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary; “The Vampyre.”

Further Reading

Bloom, Harold. 2004. Lord Byron. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.

Cochran, Peter, ed. 2009. The Gothic Byron. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

MacCarthy, Fiona. 2002. Byron: Life and Legend. London: John Murray.

BYRONIC HERO

The term “Byronic hero” describes a recurring character type often found in horror literature that is identified by his role as a social rebel. Not virtuous in the traditional sense, the Byronic hero is a larger than life figure that is characterized by arrogance, charisma, confidence, moodiness, and mysteriousness. Flawed and at war with society, the Byronic hero is often a handsome character who has dark overtones that are overwhelming to those around him. Named after the early nineteenth-century British poet Lord Byron, whose lover Lady Caroline Lamb once supposedly described as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” the Byronic hero has featured in many notable works from the horror genre and continues to appear in modern fiction and film.

The Byronic hero has its literary origins in pre-nineteenth-century literature, such as the plays of William Shakespeare and the early works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The advent of Gothic fiction in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, itself a work inspired by Shakespearean drama, established the Gothic hero-villain, in the form of the usurper Manfred, as the central character of this new literary genre. Manfred dominates Walpole’s narrative with his villainy and commands the reader’s unwavering attention in every scene in which he is present. This character type would be combined with the emotional excesses of the “man of feeling,” another literary archetype popular in sentimental fiction, by Byron in his own works with strong traces of his own imposing personality to create the Byronic hero, first appearing in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). Byron would revisit the Byronic hero in numerous later works, most notably Manfred (1817), a supernatural play about a sorcerer whose name is an homage to Walpole’s Manfred but remade in Byron’s image.

Partly because of the engrossing nature of the character type, and partly because of the then celebrity-like infamy surrounding Byron personally, the Byronic hero became an instant success with nineteenth-century horror writers. Byron’s personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, used the Byronic hero to criticize his employer in an unflattering short story entitled “The Vampyre” (1819), which is considered the progenitor of vampiric fiction. Byron’s lover, the aforementioned Lady Caroline Lamb, wrote Glenarvon (1816), a novel that also features this character trope. Years later, after Byron’s death, Charlotte and Emily Brontë wrote their Gothic novels, respectively Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847), with male figures that are clear expressions of the Byronic hero. Continuing to the present day, the Byronic hero is very much alive in horror fiction and film, with examples such as Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt from the Vampire Chronicles and Sir Thomas Sharpe in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) demonstrating the continued relevance of this fascinating archetype.

Joel T. Terranova

See also: The Brontë Sisters; Byron, Lord; The Castle of Otranto; Gothic Hero/Villain; Rice, Anne; “The Vampyre.”

Further Reading

Stein, Atara. 2009. The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Thorslev, Peter. 1962. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wootton, Sarah. 2016. Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

C

“THE CALL OF CTHULHU”

“The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. It marks the advent of his most effective and characteristic work, and is a bellwether of cosmic horror. In this tale, worn-out supernatural themes (e. g., the vampire) are boldly replaced by philosophical concerns (e.g., humanity’s place in the cosmos and the mind’s tenuous grip on reality) as the sources of horror.

Francis Thurston pieces together information from disparate sources around the world, and realizes an alien called Cthulhu came to Earth eons ago in the company of beings called the Great Old Ones. The latter used magic to suspend Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh, from which he will reemerge when the “stars are ready” to rule the planet.

Lovecraft was inspired in part by Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895), which also employs the collation of unrelated documents and subnarratives. Another key source is Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887), about an invisible being that sways men’s minds. Other influences include A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool (1918–1919) and W. Scott-Elliot’s theosophist treatise Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1925).

The opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” has justly become one of the most famous passages in all of Lovecraft’s fiction, and in weird and cosmic horror fiction as a whole, for it brilliantly encapsulates not only the guiding philosophical ethos of this particular story, but that of the entire cosmic-horrific substream of weird fiction that Lovecraft pioneered. The basic thrust is that an accurate “big picture” understanding of humankind’s cosmic circumstance would reveal horrors so vast and profound that they would annihilate the race:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day, the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Lovecraft 2016, 139)

Matt Cardin

Source: Lovecraft, H. P. 2016. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. New York: Penguin.

The story is characterized by Lovecraft’s unique blend of scientific realism and weird atmosphere. Humans and the world, in contrast to traditional religion, have no special place in the cosmos but are merely “recent and transient.” Cthulhu is master of time, space, and even mind (he communicates with human beings in dreams); the geometry of his city is non-Euclidean; and even the phonetics of his name are absolutely nonhuman. The narrator realizes that an alien intrusion undermines human science, belief, art, morals, law, and custom—“the liberated Old Ones would teach [men] new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom” (Lovecraft 2002, 155)—and portends complete oblivion for the race.

The work shows a high degree of artistic finish. Its structure, with narrative time folding back on itself, reflects its themes. The prose is carefully modulated, and deft touches of surrealism and dada (the early twentieth-century artistic and literary movement driven by disillusionment with conventional values) appear in the apparently random juxtaposition of events, the use of dreams, and the encounter with Cthulhu. The latter, with its octopus-like head, scaly body, clawed feet, and wings, is the most vivid creation in modern weird fiction. “The Call of Cthulhu” consolidates elements of what would later be called the “Cthulhu Mythos.” It has inspired a vast number of imitations and sequels in various media, as well as a 2005 independent film adaptation that was created as a silent black-and-white production, thus mimicking the look and feel of a movie that would have been produced in 1926 when the story was first published.

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Frame Story; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Machen, Arthur; Maupassant, Guy de.

Further Reading

Cannon, Peter. 2016. H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press. Kindle edition.

Joshi, S. T. 1996. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. 1996. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2004. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, 27–30. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. 2002. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. S. T. Joshi, ed. London: Penguin.

CAMPBELL, RAMSEY (1946–)

Born in Liverpool, England, Ramsey Campbell has been described as “Britain’s most respected living writer” of horror fiction by the Oxford Companion to English Literature (Birch 2009, 499). A highly prolific and versatile author, editor, anthologist, and critic, Campbell’s literary output to date includes more than three dozen novels and around three hundred short stories. His early work was lauded by Stephen King and T. E. D. Klein as making a significant and original contribution to the genre. During his long career, Campbell has won recognition from the British Fantasy Society, the Horror Writers’ Association, and the International Horror Guild, among many others. In 2015 he was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Campbell’s fiction has dealt with both supernatural and nonsupernatural themes, especially psychological horror, in a contemporary setting. However, his knowledge of the history of horror literature and the Anglo-American tradition are comprehensive, and his work is, as a consequence, highly allusive. Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Fritz Leiber, and Arthur Machen have all been cited as influences by Campbell. The primal role of H. P. Lovecraft, in particular, in the writer’s development has been acknowledged, then disavowed in the late 1960s and 1970s, before being reembraced in the following decade in the short story collection Cold Print (1985).

Campbell is still perhaps best known for his short stories, and he has continued to use this form. He began writing horror at eleven years of age. What was to become his first published story, “The Church in High Street,” was accepted by August Derleth at Arkham House in 1962, appearing in the anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart. Arkham House also published Campbell’s first collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), when the author was eighteen. An anthology of rewritten Lovecraftian tales, it is notable for Campbell’s creation, under the advice of Derleth, of a distinctively British setting for his narratives. The fictional “Brichester” of many of Campbell’s stories is a thinly disguised stand-in for his native Liverpool. Campbell was to return consistently to a Merseyside and Severn Valley locale throughout his career, for example in Creatures of the Pool (2009), thematically in part a novel-length expansion of Lovecraft’s fable of miscegenation, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

However, it was the appearance of his second collection of short stories, Demons by Daylight (1973), which really heralded the arrival of Campbell as an original voice within the genre. Stories like “Concussion” and “The Guy” mark a departure from the influence of Lovecraft, marrying modern urban settings and social critique with a subtle and precise prose style. Technique was, and has remained, a central concern for Campbell. Although defining horror as “the branch of literature most often concerned with going too far,” Campbell has consistently rejected what he sees as the “disgustingness” of much modern writing in the genre (Campbell 2002, 49; Joshi 2001, 4). As with M. R. James, the horror in Campbell’s work evokes shudders but is glimpsed briefly rather than explicitly dwelt upon. For example, the story “Chucky Comes to Liverpool” in the late collection Holes for Faces (2013) combines wry social comment with oblique horror. With the media’s attribution of horror videos as a cause behind the real-life 1993 murder of a British toddler by two older boys serving as a backdrop, “Chucky” portrays the ironic transformation of an antiviolence campaigner’s teenage son into a murderous arsonist. A cinema projectionist becomes a vividly dehumanized “figure covered with flames and partly composed of them” (Campbell 2010, 167). Like the unfortunate projectionist, Campbell’s prose is crisp and pared down. These characteristics have led to Campbell being described as “the poet of urban squalor and decay” (Joshi 2001, 97).

A third collection of short stories, The Height of the Scream, followed Demons by Daylight in 1976. Campbell’s important anthology of pieces written during the first thirty years of his career, Alone with the Horrors, appeared in 1993. But although his short stories have attracted great acclaim, his output of longer fictions has been prodigious. These novels, and the occasional novella, have become Campbell’s most frequently used form of publication and are gaining increasing attention.

Campbell’s first novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976), and in particular its successor, The Face That Must Die (1979, revised 1983), established him as a specialist in depicting social alienation and madness. The author was drawing from personal experience. His vivid autobiographical preface to The Face That Must Die recounts a Catholic childhood and adolescence marked by parental estrangement, in which Campbell’s father continued to share the family house as an unseen but frequently heard presence, and his mother descended into paranoid schizophrenia. Perhaps informed by this Gothic-sounding upbringing, Campbell’s fiction prominently features abnormal psychology. Diseased minds and mental illness are rendered horrific through probing with “uncomfortable intensity” (Joshi 2001, 12), often from the antagonist’s point of view. Characters fantasize about killing their elderly relatives (Obsession, 1985), or, as with the malignant great-aunt Queenie in The Influence (1988), are possessed or displaced by them. The plot of Incarnate (1983), a long novel written during the last year of Campbell’s mother’s illness, draws on a schizophrenia-like collapse between dream and reality.

Beginning with Horridge in The Face That Must Die, the deranged serial murderer as main character is a recurrent theme of Campbell’s. Significantly, Campbell began this focus prior to the popularization of the serial killer by thriller writers like Thomas Harris. Campbell’s writing has a consistent strain of black humor, though. He even produces a further innovative riff, the comic serial killer, in The Count of Eleven (1991) with its sympathetic antihero, Jack Orchard, and his pathetic refrain: “Got to laugh, haven’t you?” (Campbell 1991, 29). Like The Count of Eleven, many of Campbell’s novels, particularly his crime fictions of the 1990s and 2000s, have no supernatural content. However the violent subject matter of murder, child abuse, and the vulnerability of children and women are still, in Campbell’s broad imaginative definition, viable sources of horror. Even the suspense thriller, The One Safe Place (1995), “becomes” a horror story through its grim conclusions regarding the contagion of violence (Campbell 2002, 43). Throughout Campbell’s fiction, those who struggle against the experience of evil tend to do so unaided. Professional support services such as the church, senior educational figures, police, and social workers are depicted negatively, as variously insensitive, buffoonish, or sinister.

Concern with the vulnerability of the nuclear family unites Campbell’s nonsupernatural and his supernatural work, particularly the novels. Villains like Peter Grace (The Parasite, also known as To Wake the Dead, 1980) or Kasper Ganz (The Nameless, 1981), who seek to exploit children, exemplify a threat to the family unit, with the satanic cult acting as a metaphor for invasive evil. Yet often with Campbell the threat is much closer to home: “in coming face to face with the monsters we may find ourselves looking not at a mask but a mirror” (Campbell 2002, 53). Even in the Lovecraftian novel The Darkest Part of the Woods (2002), inspired by Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the evil represented by the villainous Nathaniel Selcouth thrives by exploiting family dysfunction. Repeatedly with Campbell’s fictions, the central figure is a father. For example, Midnight Sun (1990), a novel in the cosmic horror tradition of Lovecraft, Blackwood, and Machen, features a protagonist who, in becoming possessed by an alien intelligence, gradually becomes an emotionally detached and unfeeling monster. In a dramatic climax, Ben Sterling undergoes a last-minute recovery and finally sacrifices himself out of love for, and to save, his own family. The House on Nazareth Hill (1996), Campbell’s novel-length contribution to the haunted house subgenre, narrows its cast of characters to become a claustrophobic two-hander between an increasingly psychotic, possessed father and his abused teenage daughter.

Campbell became a parent himself for the first time in 1978, and some critics, notably S. T. Joshi, have regretted the increasing focus on middle-class family life in the plots of his novels, preferring instead what they see as the undiluted purity of his short stories. Nevertheless, domesticity continues to be a significant theme for the author, as attested by the late novella The Pretence (2013), about a central character trying to protect his family in the last few hours before some unspecified apocalyptic event.

Campbell’s horror writing also reflects an ongoing interest in and engagement with other media. He was a film and later DVD critic for BBC Merseyside radio for many years (1969–2007), and early in his career he produced novelizations for several classic Universal Horror movies such as The Bride of Frankenstein under the pseudonym Carl Dreadstone (1977). Film itself has a central role in two of Campbell’s original novels. Ancient Images (1988) features a lost, but entirely fictional, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi horror movie of the 1930s in a story about cursed land. The Grin of the Dark (2007) draws upon silent film comedy and transpires to be a narrative about a satanic medieval historian seeking to allow an evil intelligence a portal into the world. Although the subject is, again, a traditional one for the genre, the latter novel also employs electronic mail as a new source of horror. Websites, photography, and the sculptures of Antony Gormley feature in The Seven Days of Cain (2010), while Think Yourself Lucky (2014), with its murder blog, uses the latest trending in social media to uncanny effect.

Such blurring of the boundaries between the real world and a virtual or artificially created one is central to Campbell’s horror fiction. For example, the plot of The Seven Days of Cain concerns Internet characters, including a sadistic, shape-shifting villain, who keep “writing themselves” after their creation, and culminates in a fictional character’s consciousness of her own fictionality and desire for independent existence through being “ashamed of not being real” (Campbell 2010, 143, 306). That this is the photographer hero’s girlfriend lends poignancy: “losing Claire felt like abandoning the best part of himself” (Campbell 2010, 314). However, it also reflects Campbell’s own consistent authorial self-consciousness. Repeatedly, his work centers on writers or booksellers, their relationship with readers, and the processes and consequences of literary creativity. The novella Needing Ghosts (1990), told in the first person and urgent present tense, is perhaps his most confessional if not autobiographical work. The protagonist John Mottershead, a horror writer who, it is revealed, has murdered his own family, is caught in a narrative of entrapment in which he has become the central character of his own story. Writing, the narrator complains, “won’t leave you alone, ever,” and the mind is likened to a predator, “a spider which is trying to catch reality and spin it into patterns” (Campbell 1990, 34). Unable to distinguish between dream and memory, Mottershead appears doomed to repeat the events of a single day, including sinister encounters with public transport officials, bookstores and a writers’ group, and a suicide attempt: “Hadn’t he tried this before,” he wonders, “more than once, many times?” (Campbell 1990, 80). The theme of recurrent nightmare without closure follows a long tradition, exemplified by Melmoth in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), while the self-haunted, unreliable narrator reflects the influence of Aickman.

Despite the appearance of vampires in his recent novel Thirteen Days at Sunset Beach (2015), Campbell’s vision of horror has largely avoided such familiar generic figures in favor of monstrosity of a more human kind. Although shifting between supernatural and nonsupernatural story lines and often returning to old themes, there has been a development from early use of Anglo-American horror motifs to familial concerns and an increasingly sophisticated preoccupation with psychological processes and existential questions. Campbell’s subtle, intensely referential and literary style, his self-description as a horror writer, and his reluctance to allow the parameters of his horror to be easily defined or pigeonholed possibly account for a relative lack of commercial success to date compared to other authors, with Harris, or the even more prolific King, being obvious examples of this. As an editor, Campbell has also championed the work of others. The anthology Uncanny Banquet (1992) revives less familiar texts, including the first reprint of Adrian Ross’s 1914 novel, The Hole of the Pit. Still, Campbell was presented by Liverpool John Moores University with an Honorary Fellowship for outstanding contribution to literature in 2015. His own website, ramseycampbell.com, continues as a forum for discussion of views on horror fiction.

Keith M. C. O’Sullivan

See also: Aickman, Robert; Alone with the Horrors; Blackwood, Algernon; James, M. R.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Birch, Dinah, ed. 2009. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Ramsey. 1990. Needing Ghosts. Bergvlei, South Africa: Century.

Campbell, Ramsey. 1991. The Count of Eleven. London: Macdonald.

Campbell, Ramsey. 2002. Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Hornsea: P. S. Publishing.

Campbell, Ramsey. 2010. The Seven Days of Cain. Cincinnati, OH: Samhain Publishing.

Campbell, Ramsey. 2013. Holes for Faces. Ashland, OR: Dark Regions Press.

Crawford, Gary William, ed. 2014. Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Joshi, S. T., ed. 1993. The Count of Thirty: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

An Interview with Ramsey Campbell

October 2016

Campbell shares his thoughts and observations about the long-term arc of horror literature from the 1950s to the early 2000s. In addition, he discusses horror as an intensely personal type of writing, the role of nightmares and nightmarish intrusions and irruptions in horror fiction, and the importance of several notable authors in the field, including, especially, H. P. Lovecraft. He concludes by offering some insights about the central characteristics of horror literature that distinguish it from other types.

Matt Cardin: In 2015 you received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Your career as a published author spans six decades. From this seasoned vantage point, what are some of the most significant developments in horror fiction that you’ve seen? What do you regard as some really noteworthy aspects of the field’s literary evolution from the mid-twentieth century up to now?

Ramsey Campbell: The 1950s saw some crucial developments. On the one hand, there was the rise of [the] California school of contemporary horror, a group of writers—Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Charles Beaumont—who founded their sense of the fantastic in everyday reality and in the experience of characters who might live next door if not in the reader’s own house (although urban supernatural horror had come to crucial life some years earlier in Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” where the mundane environment is no longer invaded by the supernatural but is its source, producing an entity manifested in the kind of suggestive glimpse Leiber learned from M. R. James). Shirley Jackson raised the tale of terror to a new peak of delicate reticence, and not just in The Haunting of Hill House. Without these developments I doubt we would have the teeming tapestries of contemporary life that Stephen King creates, drawing also, I think on the traditions of [Edgar Allan] Poe and Mark Twain to convey his highly personal vision. Peter Straub has shaped his own elegant form, a marriage of mystery fiction and horror. T. E. D. Klein demonstrates how cumulatively powerful allusiveness can be in long narratives, while Dennis Etchison pares his accounts of contemporary darkness down to a starkness reminiscent of [Ernest] Hemingway—whose conciseness influenced Bradbury, of course. Thomas Ligotti’s vision is as dark as that of any writer in the field, and perhaps outside it, too, but its sense of the cosmic gives it largeness.

In Britain, the 1950s saw the rise of Robert Aickman, the greatest master of the enigmatic strange tale since Walter de la Mare. In the sixties Thomas Hinde (The Day the Call Came, The Investigator) developed comedy of paranoia, in which dark humor is inextricably bound up with menace. In the seventies James Herbert based The Rats on his own youthful experience and brought a working-class view to the field. In the eighties Clive Barker celebrated the monstrous with his gorgeously gruesome horrors, depicted with a painter’s eye. Later British writers—Joel Lane, Gary McMahon, Simon Bestwick, and others—have used horror fiction to scrutinize contemporary experience, often in political terms. And there’s a strong female sensibility in the field these days, represented by such varied talents as Nina Allan, Sarah Pinborough, Allison Littlewood, Thana Niveau, Lynda Rucker. . . .

MC: Some of your stories and novels have drawn quite directly on your own personal, painful experiences, “Chimney” being a notable example. All writers draw on personal experience, of course, but your practice of it has been particularly intense at times. Do you think there’s something about horror fiction as such that makes it a particularly potent literary vehicle for this?

RC: I wouldn’t separate horror from other fiction that digs deep. The first three novels of John Franklin Bardin may be nominally crime fiction, but they have a powerful sense of paranoia, based on the author’s years with his schizophrenic mother. For that matter, has any horror novel surpassed Samuel Beckett’s L’Innomable for unrelenting dread? In my case it isn’t so much that I choose horror fiction to convey my experience as that aspects of my life find their way into the fiction, often generating it. That’s to say, my love of the genre preceded the themes that have become central to many of my tales—psychological disturbance, the vulnerability of children, the willingness to espouse belief systems that deny the right to question, and so on. I’m sure I would write horror, but my preoccupations shape the kind I write.

MC: Much of your work is characterized by a blurring of boundaries between reality and unreality, wakefulness and dream (or nightmare), and sanity and insanity, with frequent irruptions of the strange, the supernatural, and the uncanny. These are all long-lived tropes in Gothic and horror fiction, as is the basic idea of boundaries being violated or broken. Why should this be? What makes this such a central concern in horror stories?

RC: In my case I must invoke autobiography once more. By the time I was three years old I had to distinguish objective reality from my mother’s way of seeing it, and so it’s hardly surprising if I often write about misperception and about first sights that prove to be something other. More generally, I’d say that disturbing intrusions—whether from without, in the form of the uncanny or the physical or a combination of both, or from the depths of the mind (repressed terrors, the child who we never really cease to be, both of which may lie dormant)—aren’t merely the underlying themes of our field but its core. Surely they’re so widespread because they’re among the basic human dreads, and in many cases the writers are conveying, however metaphorically, some experience of their own.

MC: From the beginning of your career, you had a literary relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. With his legacy growing ever more prominent even as it grows ever more problematic, how do you regard his place in literature and culture, and in relation to your own work? Can you offer any advice or guidance to those who are perhaps wondering what to make of him and how, or whether, to start reading him?

RC: I take Lovecraft to be the most important single writer of the weird, insofar as he unites the traditions that preceded him on both sides of the Atlantic and builds on their strengths. His Supernatural Horror in Literature is not only an appreciation of all that he found best in the genre and a critique of the flaws he saw, but also a statement of his own artistic ambitions. His fiction gives them life. To an extent his reputation is the victim of his most famous creation, the Lovecraft Mythos. It was conceived as an antidote to conventional Victorian occultism—as an attempt to reclaim the imaginative appeal of the unknown—and is only one of many ways his tales suggest worse, or greater, than they show. It is also just one of his means of reaching for a sense of wonder, the aim that produces the visionary horror of his finest work (by no means all of it belonging to the Mythos). His stories represent a search for the perfect form for the weird tale, a process in which he tried out all the forms and all the styles of prose he could. For modulation and orchestration of prose, for the accretion of suggestive detail that builds to awe and terror—in fact, for his exemplary sense of structure—his best work is worthy of the closest study. In my first book I tended to imitate the aspects of his work that seem easiest to replicate, but I’ve found his example inspiring enough to attempt to scale his heights once more in some recent work. Among the Lovecraft tales I’d recommend to new readers: “The Colour out of Space,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Rats in the Walls,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Shadow out of Time.” All of them convey a sense of powers and presences larger than the prose can quite contain.

MC: What other authors and works would you recommend in general to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important and profound both for this genre and for literature as a whole?

RC: Apart from all those I’ve already cited, Poe and J. Sheridan Le Fanu both compressed the Gothic mode and intensified its sense of the supernatural and psychological. Algernon Blackwood at his finest (“The Wendigo,” “The Willows”) conveys real uncanny ecstasy, as Arthur Machen does more insidiously in his masterpiece, “The White People.” M. R. James can convey intense spectral terror in a sentence or even a phrase that shows just enough to suggest far worse. William Hope Hodgson is the great master of oceanic terror, while his novels The House on the Borderland and The Night Land are milestones of cosmic horror.

MC: In the end, what really distinguishes horror from other types of literature? What is its singular, sui generis, darkly beating heart?

RC: Horror is the branch of literature most often concerned with going too far. It is the least escapist form of fantasy. It shows us sights we would ordinarily look away from or reminds us of insights we might prefer not to admit we have. It makes us intimate with people we would cross the street to avoid. It shows us the monstrous and perhaps reveals that we are looking in a mirror. It tells us we are right to be afraid, or that we aren’t afraid enough. It also frequently embraces, or at least is conterminous with, the ghost story. It flourishes here and there in the fields of science fiction and crime fiction, and not infrequently it bobs up in the mainstream, whatever that is. Despite its name, it is often most concerned to produce awe and terror in its audience, but it is not unusual for a horror story to encompass a wider emotional range. This said, I’d suggest that our field is related to real-life horror both directly, in sometimes (I think increasingly often) seeking to examine it, and metaphorically. But let’s not underrate the aesthetic experience of terror: some of the finest work in the field is lyrical. Horror and beauty can be a potent combination.

CARMILLA

Carmilla is a vampire novella written by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). It was originally published serially in the journal Dark Blue during 1871–1872 in a version that included illustrations by D. H. Friston (1820–1906). It was then published in its entirety with an additional prologue in Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872), which brought together five of Le Fanu’s short stories. Le Fanu created the character of Doctor Hesselius, an occult detective, to present In a Glass Darkly as a case book of supernatural occurrences. Doctor Hesselius has been identified as the first occult detective in literature. His influence can be seen in pulp horror with characters such as Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin.

The scene in Carmilla when the narrator suffers a kind of waking nightmare of being attacked by a large cat demonstrates Le Fanu’s skill in delivering an authentic chill to the reader. The narrator, Laura, has a sense of awakening in the dead of night. She sees something moving at the foot of her bed:

. . . it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. . . . I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.

I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside. I was afraid to open it—I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head up in the bed-clothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning. (Le Fanu 1872, 147–149)

Matt Cardin

Source: Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. 1872. In a Glass Darkly, Volume III. London: R. Bentley & Son.

Carmilla follows Laura and her English father, who live in Styria. Following a carriage accident, they take in a young woman, Carmilla. Laura is entranced by her new friend, recognizing her from a dream she had as a child. After Carmilla’s arrival, young women in the village start dying. Laura herself becomes ill and dreams of being attacked by a large cat. Her father takes her to meet an old family friend, General Spielsdorf, whose young daughter has recently died. The general recognizes Carmilla as Millarca the vampire, a descendant of the ancient Karnstein family, who preyed on his daughter. Together with Baron Vordenburg, a vampire expert, the general and Laura’s father stake Carmilla/Millarca in her tomb before cutting off her head. Laura recovers.

The relationship between Laura and Carmilla has been categorized by many readers and scholars as a lesbian relationship. During the Victorian period, especially approaching the fin-de-siècle—the late nineteenth-century period in Europe and Britain characterized by a growing sense of cultural exhaustion, pessimism, and fears of societal degeneration and civilizational collapse—there was a growing concern over what was perceived to be sexual abnormality, including homosexuality. Carmilla’s choice of prey, young women, suggests that she is a predatory deviant, and the trope of vampirism is used to explore these fears. Carmilla’s vampirism is horrifying because it represents an attack on societal codes. Le Fanu’s novella may have been influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lyrical poem “Christabel” (1797), which also features a close friendship between a young woman and a female supernatural creature.

Carmilla falls into the genre of Gothic horror. Like earlier Gothic stories it features an absent mother (Laura’s mother is dead), which makes Laura vulnerable to attack. The Styrian landscape is replete with forests, abandoned villages, and a gloomy graveyard in which stands a tomb to the ancient Karnstein family. A foreign setting in mainland Europe is regularly used in early Gothic narratives. The horror elements are seen in Carmilla’s attack on innocent young women and her vampiric identity. Laura notices a similarity between Carmilla and a portrait of one of her ancestors, a typical Gothic conceit and a cause for uncanny unease. At the end of the novel Carmilla is discovered lying in a coffin full of blood, adding to the sense of horror.

Although less popular than Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Carmilla influenced Stoker, whose notes show that his novel was originally to have opened in Styria where Jonathan Harker, the protagonist, would meet with a beautiful female vampire. Though Stoker ended up changing the opening setting of his novel to Transylvania, there is a parallel between the character of Baron Vordenburg in Le Fanu’s novella and the character of Doctor Van Helsing—another vampire expert—in Stoker’s novel. Likewise, Carmilla’s ability to transform into a cat to attack Laura is echoed in Dracula’s ability to shape-shift. Both Le Fanu and Stoker were Irish, and their vampire stories have been analyzed as engaging with Irish politics and as part of the Irish Gothic tradition.

Carmilla has been adapted for film a number of times. Notable adaptations include Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), though the lesbian sexuality was excised, and Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1960). Le Fanu’s vampire heavily influenced the British Hammer Horror film productions of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Vampire Lovers (1970), which starred Ingrid Pitt and was the first installment of the Karnstein Trilogy. Most recently the novella has been adapted as a Web series on YouTube also titled Carmilla (2014–2015).

Kaja Franck

See also: Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Vampires.

Further Reading

Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Nethercott, Arthur H. 1949. “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla.” Modern Philology 47: 32–38.

Signorotti, Elizabeth. 1996. “Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula.” Criticism 38: 607–632.

Ulin, Julieann. 2013. “Sheridan Le Fanu’s Vampires and Ireland’s Invited Invasion.” In Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 39–55. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CARRION COMFORT

Carrion Comfort is Dan Simmons’s second novel, published by Dark Harvest in 1989. In it, Simmons reinvents the concept of vampires by applying the word to characters who gain strength and forestall aging by forcing others, through mind control, to perpetrate acts of violence. The book’s title is taken from a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet that chronicles the protagonist’s struggle with the temptation to yield to despair. In a blurb on the book’s cover, Stephen King called Simmons’s novel “one of the three greatest horror novels of the 20th century.”

The plot centers on three “mind vampires,” Nina Drayton, Melanie Fuller, and Willi Borden, who have been playing a game for half a century. They gather annually to award each other points based on the difficulty of individual feats of mind control and on the amount of notoriety each violent incident gains. Rivalries and decades-old animosities spark a power struggle within their group. America becomes the playing field for their conflict, and they turn innocent bystanders into the weapons in their attacks against each other. Only Willi wants to join with and control other mind vampires—powerful gifted individuals who have infiltrated almost every level of American society.

The book’s Van Helsing is holocaust survivor Saul Laski, who has been hunting Willi for decades. He enlists the help of Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry and photographer Natalie Preston, both of whom have been exposed to the violence arising from the vampires’ battles. Gentry is killed halfway through the book, and the remaining human combatants stage an attack on a private island where the elite group meets to play chess with human pieces. They kill all of the vampires except for Melanie, whose thoughts turn to the possibility of controlling a nuclear submarine in the closing pages.

The supernatural creatures in Carrion Comfort are considered vampires because the author says they are. They rarely come into direct contact with their victims, and they do not extract anything material from them. Their main driving force is a lust for power rather than hunger, although they do benefit physically from feeding. Simmons uses his unconventional concept of vampires to explore the corrupting influence of nearly limitless power and the effect such power has on those who refuse to be victims of it.

At roughly half a million words, Carrion Comfort is an ambitious epic, part horror novel, part thriller, with an enormous cast, multiple viewpoint characters (including Melanie’s first-person narrative), and numerous settings.

The opening section of Carrion Comfort was published as a novella of the same name in OMNI (1983) and collected in Prayers to Broken Stones. Mainstream American publishers deemed the book too long, though, so its hardcover release came from a small press. It won August Derleth, Bram Stoker, and British Fantasy awards for Best Novel and found a wider audience in paperback the following year.

Bev Vincent

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Simmons, Dan; Vampires.

Further Reading

Gelder, Ken. 1994. Reading the Vampire, 130–133. New York: Routledge.

Simmons, Dan. 2009. “Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Carrion Comfort.” In Carrion Comfort, ix–xxxi. New York: Thomas Dunn Books.

CARROLL, JONATHAN (1949–)

Jonathan Carroll is an American writer (long resident in Vienna, Austria) whose work can be characterized as surrealism or American “magic realism.” He tends to write about sophisticated, artistic people, reflecting his background as the son of noted screenwriter Sidney Carroll and Broadway actress and lyricist June Carroll (Sillman). Carroll’s stories often establish a realistic, contemporary setting and a convincing narrative voice. Somewhere along the way, the story will get very strange, merely because life is strange, without any rational explanation. Carroll has said in an interview that he is not consciously writing in a fantasy or horror tradition (Schweitzer 2013, 38).

His approach is typified by his masterful first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), which is about two people who are great fans of a famous children’s book author, Marshall France. The narrator, Thomas Abbey, hopes to write France’s biography. He is invited by the author’s daughter to come to France’s hometown, live in his house, and do research. But gradually he is bringing France’s works and then France himself to life. For about 60 percent of the way through, this is a realistic novel that lovingly conveys a sense of literary worship. But then, startlingly, the fantastic begins to intrude. The book ends as the townspeople go to the train station to greet Marshall France, who is coming back from the dead. The fate of Thomas Abbey and his companion is uncertain, now that he has fulfilled his usefulness to the townspeople, who may well be France’s creations as well.

Carroll can achieve similarly sinister effects in his short fiction. In the World Fantasy Award–winning “Friend’s Best Man” (1987), a man loses a leg saving his dog from a train. While in the hospital, he befriends a terminally ill young girl. The girl seems to be able to talk to the dog. This seems a charming fancy until, just before her death, the girl warns the man that soon animals will revolt and wipe out humans. There are increasing signs that other things the girl learned from the dog are true, so this may be true as well.

Carroll has written (as of 2016) fifteen novels and two novellas published as separate books. Bones of the Moon (1987) takes place within the serial dreams of a woman who is led through them by the spirit of the aborted child she never had. (Dreams are a very important motif in Carroll’s work and often a major plot element.) Sleeping in Flame (1988) is loosely based on the Rumpelstiltskin story. It is about a writer/actor who begins to develop magical talents. Most of Carroll’s novels are about people from the normal, everyday world slipping into strangeness. The Ghost in Love (2008) reverses this by starting in the afterlife. There is a certain sameness to some of Carroll’s later novels, but this is not a major defect because of their uniformly high quality.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Dark Fantasy; Dreams and Nightmares; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Rottensteiner, Franz. 1986. “Jonathan Carroll: The Wonder and the Threat of Existence.” Fantasy Review 9, no. 11 (December): 10–13.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 2013. “Jonathan Carroll” (an interview). In Speaking of the Fantastic, 38–58. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press.

Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Carroll, Jonathan 1949–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 1, edited by Richard Bleiler, 201–207. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

CARTER, ANGELA (1940–1992)

Angela Carter was an English novelist whose revival of Gothic horror in the early days of second wave feminism exposed complacencies of romance and domestic relationships, emphasizing the essential performativity, and imposed and internalized imprisonment, of gender roles. Her work won several awards, including the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for The Magic Toyshop (1967), the Somerset Maugham award for Several Perceptions (1968), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Nights at the Circus (1987). Influenced by William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, and Charles Dickens, always irreverent, and mixing disturbingly dark, glittering, and bawdy carnivalesque themes with horror, her work grows from and rewrites myths, fairy tales, popular fictions, the Marquis de Sade, and Hollywood movies. It undercuts and exposes their sexually constraining, damaging narratives.

Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and H. P. Lovecraft, Carter was more down to earth than any of these three, using fantasy and humor, finding the terrible and vicious in the everyday, such as in domestic tyranny and incarceration in The Magic Toyshop, where a severed hand in a kitchen drawer suggests bondage, and orphaned Melanie is turned into a living puppet playing Leda to puppeteer Uncle Philip’s gross, homemade swan, Zeus (as in the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan). This latter event indicts classical art and mythology as patriarchal sadism, while satirizing the vanity and violence of attempts to control women’s sexuality and agency, here through the figure of the lumpy, comedic, homemade swan. Carter uncovers the horror latent in the familiar, in domestic servitude (as with Aunt Margaret in The Magic Toyshop, silenced by her necklace choker), and in pornographic reification and fetishization of women (as in Nights at the Circus with its protagonist Fevvers, a Cockney winged circus aerialist, and her friends in alcoves at Madame Schreck’s all-female freak show).

Carter’s living dolls fight back, even destroying their puppet masters, so in “The Loves of Lady Purple” (1974), a marionette, “petrification of a universal whore” (Carter 1995, 44), refuses her nightly titillating and punished performance, coming to vengeful life, draining the puppeteer’s blood, and stalking off to the village brothel. Carter rewrites romantic fictions of eternal undying love and horror scenarios (which they often resemble). In the reversed vampire myth of “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979), Dracula’s descendant mourns her vampire nature, falls in love, and is ultimately betrayed/released by a kiss from a traveling bicyclist on his way to die in the First World War.

Carter’s version of the romantic lies and tortuous entrapment of the popular “Bluebeard” tale in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) links de Sade with feminism, revealing a penniless young wife’s sexual desires, a duke’s commodification of her as so much meat on a slab, and a warrior mother’s rescue of her daughter. In Carter’s werewolf tale, “The Company of Wolves” (1979), she empowers Rosaleen, a feisty Little Red Riding Hood, to recognize, come to terms with, and celebrate the beast in herself and the lover in the beast, embracing the werewolf. Technically and linguistically, her work operates at the level of paradox, irony, and the oxymoron, refusing binary gender and power divisions, and the Otherizing of difference. Both in its theme and in its form, Carter’s writing blends the everyday with the monstrous. She confronts the gender imbalances in traditional fairy tales, showing conventional horror as patriarchal fabrication based on conservative values to control woman as hag, victim, and whore, her virginity a talisman, her innocence a jewel to own and preserve. Lorna Sage, recognizing Angela Carter for her gendered, politicized Gothic horror as “a witch or wise woman” (1994, 1), says her “fictions prowl around the fringes of the proper English novel like dream monsters—nasty, exotic, brilliant creatures that feed off cultural crisis” (Sage 1977, 51).

A number of Carter’s works have been adapted for radio, television, and film. Probably the most prominent among these are The Magic Toyshop, adapted to film in 1987 with a screenplay by Carter, and The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan and with a screenplay by Jordan and Carter.

Gina Wisker

See also: Dracula; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Vampires; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Carter, Angela. 1995. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. New York: Penguin.

Cavallaro, Dani. 2011. The World of Angela Carter: A Critical Investigation. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

Munford, Rebecca. 2013. Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sage, Lorna, ed. 1994. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago.

Sage, Lorna. 1977. “The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter.” New Review 39/40: 51–57.

Wisker, Gina. 1993. “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror.” In Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 161–175. London: Pluto Press.

THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD

At 51,000 words, this is H. P. Lovecraft’s one true novel, if a short one. It is the most Gothic of his major works, a final exercise in that mode before he turned to more science fictional tales such as At the Mountains of Madness. Joseph Curwen, of Salem, moves to Providence, Rhode Island in the late seventeenth century. He establishes himself as a merchant, but attracts undue attention by his failure to age. Even when he marries into a respectable family, he cannot dispel sinister rumors of secret experiments and mysterious cemetery delvings. In 1771, a posse raids Curwen’s farm in nearby Pawtuxet, when Curwen, still young and vigorous, should be nearly a century old. What they find is only hinted at. Curwen is killed. As much as possible, all trace of him is erased from the historical record.

In 1918, a teenager, Charles Dexter Ward, discovers that he is Curwen’s descendant. Already obsessed with the past, he devotes all his energy (indulged by wealthy parents) to learning about his ancestor. He finds Curwen’s grave, and by replicating certain of Curwen’s own techniques, resurrects him from his “essential saltes.”

Charles Dexter Ward by Any Other Name

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has been the subject of two well-regarded cinematic adaptations, but neither of them used its title. In the first, director Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963), the Lovecraft connection is buried beneath a veneer of Poe; “The Haunted Palace” is the title of an 1839 poem by Poe, and the movie was marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace” in order to promote it as another entry in Corman’s popular series of Poe adaptations for American International Pictures. But the plot was directly drawn from Lovecraft’s short novel (with the screenplay penned by Charles Beaumont), right down to the fact that the film’s protagonist is named Charles Dexter Ward. The Haunted Palace is widely considered a high point in Lovecraftian cinema.

The second Charles Dexter Ward adaptation arrived twenty-eight years later under the title The Resurrected (1991), although The Ancestor and Shatterbrain were alternative titles before its release. Directed by Dan O’Bannon, who was already a known quantity in the horror world for writing Alien (1979) and directing Return of the Living Dead (1985), the film is dark, frightening, and smart, and is regarded as another high point in Lovecraftian cinema. Despite this, it received only a tiny theatrical release (although a wider one had been planned) and was shunted to video in 1992.

Matt Cardin

Soon Ward confides to the family physician, Marinus Willett, that his “triumph” has turned into unimaginable horror. Disturbing events ensue, both in Charles’s laboratory at home and then at the old Pawtuxet farm. His parents fear for his sanity, but Dr. Willett discovers far worse: that Curwen, who so resembles Ward that one can pass for the other, has murdered Charles and is impersonating him. Willett visits the farm and discovers pits inhabited by malformed horrors, left over from Curwen’s original resurrection experiments in the 1700s. He manages to have “Ward” committed to a madhouse, and there confronts him, as Curwen, with what he knows. Curwen attempts magic. Willett counters it and Curwen crumbles into dust. Curwen’s original scheme went well beyond cheating death. He and two colleagues, who are still alive in the present, were resurrecting learned men and compelling them to surrender their secrets, working toward some goal that threatened all of humanity, even the universe, if a panicked Charles Ward is to be believed.

This is the one Lovecraft story that rises to the dignity of genuine tragedy, as the noble Dr. Willett strives unsuccessfully to save the innocent Charles from the consequences of his actions. Despite this, Lovecraft apparently thought the work a failure and never made any attempt to have it published even when, in the 1930s, publishers began to ask him for a novel-length work. It was only published posthumously, first abridged in Weird Tales in 1941 and then complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep in 1943. It is in a slightly unpolished state, with some loose ends and inconsistencies, but it still contains some of his best writing and is, for Lovecraft, a rare triumph of characterization. It can be read as a story of the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Yog-Sothoth is mentioned and invoked for the first time in this tale, but the precise nature of the entities Curwen is trafficking with is never made clear.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Ancestral Curse; At the Mountains of Madness; Lovecraft, H. P; The Return.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence, The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, 664–670. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” In Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, 393–409. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press.

Ward, Richard. 1997. “In Search of the Dread Ancestor: M. R. James’ ‘Count Magnus’ and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Lovecraft Studies 36: 14–17.

“CASTING THE RUNES”

This short story is one of the best-known works of Montague Rhodes (M. R.) James. It appeared in More Ghost Stories, published in 1911, as a follow-up to his first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. With its subtle onset of “quiet horror” that creeps into the everyday and slowly builds in the imagination of the reader, it is a classic Jamesian tale.

“Casting the Runes” tells of a malevolent scholar, Victor Karswell, who takes horrible revenge upon his critics by employing his occult expertise to conjure up an “awful demon creature” that pursues, terrifies, torments, and finally kills its target (James 1992, 142). Another scholar, named Edward Dunning, gives one of Karswell’s articles a poor review, setting in motion Karswell’s vengeance. Dunning receives a slip of paper from him with runes hidden within its contents. Upon learning that he has been cursed, Dunning, with the help of Henry Harrington, the brother of one of Karswell’s previous victims, eventually manages to turn the tables on Karswell by tricking him into taking back the paper, thereby consigning him to the same fate that he has meted out to others—a frightful and mysterious death.

Like other Jamesian monsters, such as Count Magnus’s tentacled and hooded accomplice in “Count Magnus” (1904), or the billowing sheet-thing of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), the demon that haunts first Harrington and then Dunning, the protagonist of “Runes,” is most effective for appearing only partially glimpsed in monstrous fragments, such as the “unnaturally rough and hot” (135) hand that thrusts a pamphlet with the name of Karswell’s victim Harrington at Dunning, who cannot afterwards recall the exact appearance of the pamphleteer. In one of the story’s most memorable scenes, Dunning puts his hand under his pillow, only to encounter “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair around it” (137). The demon is also alluded to in the excerpt from the Coleridge poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner that appears in the text. Finally, it appears as something stalking the doomed Karswell that is mistaken for a dog by a startled porter. At the story’s conclusion, its final appearance is in the unspeakable nightmares that Harrington apparently suffered before dying, which Dunning cannot bear to hear recounted.

Night of the Demon: The Too-Explained Supernatural

RKO, the Hollywood studio known for its elegant, sophisticated, and restrained suspense and horror films in the 1940s (which stood in marked contrast to the more garish horror films put out by Universal Studios), would have seemed the perfect studio for adapting James’s elegant, sophisticated, and restrained occult horror tale “Casting the Runes.” And indeed, more than 95 percent of director Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett’s 1957 adaptation Night of the Demon (released in the United States as Curse of the Demon) lived up to that expectation (although the film ended up being made and released not by RKO, as that studio had originally hoped, but by Columbia). But the producer balked at Tourneur’s and Bennett’s plan to retain the ambiguity of James’s story by leaving the question of a natural or a supernatural explanation unanswered, and opted instead to show a giant demon clearly and unmistakably existing at the beginning and killing the villainous Karswell at the end, in scenes shot without Tourneur’s participation. Notwithstanding the fact that the creature’s design drew on demonic imagery from medieval woodcuts and delivered a fairly impressive moment of cinematic-demonological iconography, the final result betrayed the director’s, the screenwriter’s, and James’s visions. Night/Curse of the Demon remains one of the most notorious instances of a studio’s tampering with a filmmaker’s artistic intention.

Matt Cardin

“Casting the Runes” has frequently been adapted for television and radio, and was retold most famously in director Jacques Tourneur’s classic, atmospheric horror film Night of the Demon (1957). An amusing pastiche of this story, which yet retains somewhat of the horrific bite of the original, can be found in James Hynes’s Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror (1997), where a young assistant professor, Victoria Dunning, takes on the culture wars in the person of the senior professor Karswell, who plagiarizes her work and curses her for refusing to allow him to do so. Currently director Joe Dante is planning to re-adapt James’s story for a new film.

Aalya Ahmad

See also: Devils and Demons; James, M. R.

Further Reading

Cox, Michael. 1987. “Introduction.” In Casting the Runes, and Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James, xi–xxx. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hynes, James. 1997. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror.

James, M. R. 1992. Collected Ghost Stories. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Michalski, Robert. 1996. “The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Exchange in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories.” Extrapolation 37, no. 1: 46–62.

THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO

Written and published by Horace Walpole in 1764, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story was an immediate success with the British reading public and established the genre of Gothic fiction as numerous writers in subsequent years were directly influenced to follow its haunted footsteps. Originally presented to the reading public as an actual sixteenth-century Italian manuscript in translation regarding events that occurred during the Crusades, The Castle of Otranto later received a second edition where Walpole added the subtitle “A Gothic Story” and claimed ownership of the text, explaining that he had been influenced by Shakespeare to create a new genre of romance by blending both the new and the old.

Focusing on Manfred, the prince of Otranto, The Castle of Otranto opens on the wedding day of Conrad, Manfred’s son, and Isabella. Conrad, however, is killed by a massive helmet that falls on him from the sky, stunning everyone. In shock over his son’s death and fearing the collapse of his bloodline, Manfred decides to divorce his wife Hippolita so that he can marry Isabella instead. Manfred jails a young man named Theodore and pursues Isabella against her will until a priest named Father Jerome appears who tells Manfred that the young maiden is under his protection. Jerome discovers that Theodore is his long-lost son and petitions Manfred not to execute him. Manfred demands that he will release Theodore only if Isabella is turned over to him. Meanwhile, Isabella’s father, Frederic, arrives to challenge Manfred’s rulership of Otranto. Eventually, after a series of supernatural occurrences that culminate with Manfred’s accidental murder of his daughter Matilda, it is revealed that Manfred’s line is illegitimate and Theodore is actually the true heir to Otranto. The young man marries Isabella, with Manfred retiring to a convent to atone for his sins.

Walpole’s novel is striking for the way it almost single-handedly invented an entire genre. Common characteristics of Gothic novels—not to mention the multitude of stories, poems, and movies that have descended from the same source—include:

•A setting in a gloomy castle or mansion

•A plethora of fantastic, strange, and often supernatural-seeming events

•Inflated melodrama accompanied by breathless emotions heightened to a fever pitch

•Lovely, virginal women threatened, menaced, manipulated, and pursued by a dark, powerful, tyrannical king, lord, or other authority figure

•A chase through murky catacombs or hidden passageways in or beneath the castle or mansion

•Disturbing dreams and/or other ominous portents of an ancient curse’s or prophecy’s imminent fulfillment

These all abound in The Castle of Otranto, which synthesized them into a singular form for the very first time, and which, although it is not the greatest of novels in terms of pure literary quality, must therefore be acknowledged as one of the single most influential works of literature ever written.

Matt Cardin

At the center of The Castle of Otranto’s narrative is its concern with legitimacy. The text explains that Manfred’s line has ruled for three generations, starting with his grandfather and continuing to the present day. The ruler previous to Manfred’s grandfather was Alfonso, a man who is spoken of as having been kind and just. As the novel opens and introduces the reader to Manfred’s family, the narrator notes a cryptic prophecy that will result in the end of Manfred’s line when the ruler becomes too large to inhabit his castle. As the narrative progresses, strange supernatural events take place that involve giant pieces of armor, the first being the helmet that crushes Conrad. When Theodore is shown as Alfonso’s heir, and thus the true lord of Otranto, it is also revealed that Manfred’s grandfather had committed murder and forgery to take control of Otranto. The supernatural powers at play in the text, while horrific at times, are divine in nature and act to restore the legitimate order, casting aside the usurping force of Manfred’s family in favor of Theodore’s authentic bloodline.

Almost the entirety of Walpole’s text can be looked at in terms of legitimacy. It was composed in a mock-castle that appeared ancient but was actually quite modern (Walpole’s famous Strawberry Hill House). When first published, its author declared it to be a medieval work from the Crusades in translation. Neither Walpole’s castle at Strawberry Hill nor the text’s origins as a medieval work are authentic. Likewise, the plot’s focus on one group of aristocrats who are illegitimate compared to another group who are legitimate raises questions as to Walpole’s intent. Prior to the elevation of Walpole’s father as prime minister in 1721, the family had been well-off country gentry. By the time of The Castle of Otranto’s publication in 1764, the family’s wealth had put it on the level of some of the most lucrative dukedoms in the nation. The circumstance of being aristocratic in terms of power and influence but not in blood is something Walpole would certainly have been aware of, and this concern seems to have psychologically manifested in his Gothic novel.

In the two and a half centuries since its first publication, The Castle of Otranto has continued to have an impact on the horror genre. Not only was it the first Gothic novel, but numerous tropes, such as the uncanny portrait, weeping statues, and haunted castle, originated with Walpole’s novel and are now considered commonplace. Indeed, the use of the haunted castle, which over time has been expanded on to include locations such as houses, forests, ships, schools, and even dreamscapes, is probably the most important contribution The Castle of Otranto has made to the modern horror genre that would be instantly recognizable by anyone who has ever seen a scary movie or read a work of Gothic fiction.

The Castle of Otranto directly inspired other writers, such as Clara Reeve, who wrote the second Gothic novel, The Old English Baron (1777/1778), to try their hand at this new species of romance, which continues to thrive in the present day. Other writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King have all acknowledged The Castle of Otranto’s significance in their own discussions of the horror genre. While it is true that several scenes in The Castle of Otranto could be considered laughable by today’s horror standards, such as the gargantuan-sized helmet that falls from the sky and crushes a man to death, this is nonetheless a work that has rightfully earned its place as historically important and should be read at least once by anyone who studies the horror genre.

Joel T. Terranova

See also: Ancestral Curse; Byronic Hero; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; Radcliffe, Ann; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Clemens, Valdine. 1999. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from Castle of Otranto to Alien. New York: State University of New York Press.

Clery, E. J. 1995. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, Markman. 2000. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Mack, Ruth. 2008. “Horace Walpole and the Objects of Literary History.” ELH 75 (2): 367–387.

Rumore, Michael Angelo. 2016. “The Terror of Translation: Ruins of the Translatio in The Castle of Otranto and Vathek.” Studies in the Fantastic 3: 3–22.

THE CEREMONIES

T. E. D. Klein has been described as “one of the twentieth-century masters of the horror genre” (Mariconda 1986, 28) despite the fact that he has written very little in this field. His fame stems primarily from his singular novel, The Ceremonies (1984), and his collection of short stories in Dark Gods (1985)—both of which have been widely regarded as modern classics.

The Ceremonies is based on a 1971 short story by Klein entitled “The Events at Poroth Farm.” Over several years, Klein developed this much more simplistic tale into a 600-page novel, which is now the classic that we have today. The Ceremonies is a thoroughly layered and richly textured work, but its essential narrative elements are as follows. The story centers on a young academic named Jeremy Friers, who visits an isolated community on the edge of the forests outside of New York, in order to pursue an extensive reading list in Gothic studies. Here, in the fictional and devoutly religious setting of Gilead, New Jersey, he stays with a married couple named Deborah and Sarr Poroth, who are part of a vaguely Amish-like religious sect called the Brethren of the Redeemer. He stays in a small cabin at the edge of their garden, immediately beside the woods, in a situation that is, interestingly, very similar to Henry David Thoreau’s when writing Walden (1854). Jeremy is later visited there by his girlfriend Carol, who is meanwhile employed back in New York City by a man named Rosie (or Rosebottom), who has her researching the darkest origins of people’s everyday games and rituals. It transpires that Rosie is in league with mysterious forces in the woods and requires both Jeremy and Carol for an elaborate series of ceremonies. His ultimate aim is to sacrifice this couple in the woods, as this will result in the awakening of a primordial monster that resides, hidden, inside Earth itself. The Poroths become possessed and ultimately killed by the evil forces at hand, but Jeremy and Carol survive their tribulations. The final sacrifice is interrupted just in time, and so the monster slumbers on, temporarily undisturbed. Its presence, however, undercuts this happy end; with the novel’s final imagery, there is a tangible sense of the chaos and horror that dwells just beneath human existence.

A Stealth Course in Literary Horror History

The Ceremonies not only stands as an effective (and momentous) horror novel in its own right, but it also offers the reader what amounts to a mini-course in the history of weird, Gothic, and supernatural horror literature. In making Jeremy, the protagonist, a graduate student and college instructor who is preparing to write his dissertation on Gothic and weird literature, Klein creates a narrative vehicle for conveying reflections on many classic texts, presented as entries in Jeremy’s journal. These encompass the likes of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Stoker’s Dracula, Le Fanu’s Carmilla and “Green Tea,” Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries,” Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, and Arthur Machen’s “The White People.” These same works—especially the last—also form a thematic background to the cosmic horror at the center of Klein’s novel.

Matt Cardin

The novel has been described as a “monumental tribute” (Joshi 1990, 235) to the works of Arthur Machen, and especially to his short story “The White People” (1904), which tells the tale of a young girl’s mysterious interactions with her surrounding countryside. Machen’s story is famed for its portentous vagueness—a style that is very much emulated throughout the majority of The Ceremonies. Klein directly lifts and uses elements of Machen’s tale: for example, the narrator of the Green Book (the diary featured in “The White People”) refers mysteriously to “the ceremonies” and to something called the “dȏl” (Machen 2006, 119)—inspirations, surely, not only for the novel’s title, but for its monstrous entity, “the Dhol.” In another of his infamous and highly mysterious works, “The Great God Pan” (1890), Machen talks ominously of what he terms “that awful secret of the wood” (106). Though he never reveals what exactly this “awful secret” is, in The Ceremonies it seems to have been taken as Klein’s central subject, as the vast mysteries of the woodland haunt the novel throughout and are only somewhat revealed at its very end. Klein explicitly draws on the horrors of Machen when he has Jeremy eventually wonder, in horror, “what if Machen told the truth?” (484).

Klein’s love and knowledge of Gothic literature extend well beyond the works of Machen and are vividly represented throughout The Ceremonies. The protagonist, Jeremy, is not only a scholar of literature, but of Gothic literature specifically. Throughout his time in Gilead, he is slowly working his way through an extensive collection of horror classics, and his reactions to each of these are recorded in detail. There are several instances in which Jeremy’s own experiences mirror the texts he reads—for example, when journeying into the wilderness of Gilead, he is reading about Jonathan Harker’s entering the woods of Transylvania (Dracula, 1897), and later, when one of the animals on the farm is possessed, he is reading about the demonic monkey in Le Fanu’s short story “Green Tea” (1872). There is thus a rich intertextuality throughout The Ceremonies, which firmly underlines Klein’s assertion that horror literature is—or should be—“a tradition-conscious genre” (Tibbetts 2011, 51).

There are many reasons why The Ceremonies is seen as a modern horror “classic.” In addition to its use of intertextuality, it harbors many traditional elements of the Gothic, including possession, murder, and ultimately a monster. However, what may be most central to making the novel so utterly memorable is its haunting use of ambience. Early on, Klein has Jeremy muse on the main features of the Gothic, and he concludes that the notion of “setting as character” is the most “promising” of all (16). Certainly, this idea is successfully explored throughout The Ceremonies. Nature itself is an ominous presence from the outset, and as the novel progresses, it seems almost to become a malicious entity. The novel plays, most effectively, on our contradictory notions about the natural world: Gilead is, on the one hand, an idyllic retreat from modern urbanity, but on the other hand, it embodies the unknown and is a monstrous wilderness. Though Jeremy initially views the farm as a blissful retreat, he soon has the overwhelming sense that “it isn’t right to build so close to the woods” (26). He begins to think in terms of “man vs. nature” and to fear this unknown environment around him. This setting conceals a wealth of mysteries, secrets, and untold dangers. This is, in the one sense, wholly exciting: in the words of Jeremy, it is “exhilarating” to see evidence of “modern superstition” (265). However, when he eventually learns of the horrors that lie hidden inside nature, he is extremely disturbed.

The Ceremonies is a truly terrifying tale that warns of humankind's naïveté in thinking they have evolved beyond outmoded superstitions. In it, Klein creates a rich and detailed world, which is both seductive and terrifying. It is little wonder, therefore, that this is a text to which fans return again and again—and one that has made such an indelible mark in the history of horror literature.

Elizabeth Parker

See also: Dark Gods; “The Great God Pan”; Klein, T. E. D.; Machen, Arthur; “The White People.”

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.

Klein, T. E. D. 1984. The Ceremonies. New York: Viking Press.

Machen, Arthur. 2006. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Leyburn: Tartarus Press.

Mariconda, Steven J. 1986. “The Hints and Portents of T. E. D. Klein.” Studies in Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 (Summer), 19–28.

Tibbetts, John C. 2011. “Certain Things Associated with the Night: T. E. D. Klein.” In The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media, 51–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAMBERS, ROBERT W. (1865–1933)

Robert William Chambers was a best-selling American novelist and short story writer who occasionally wrote horror fiction, including the classic work The King in Yellow (1895). Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1865, he studied art in Paris for seven years and initially became a magazine illustrator. He wrote a collection about Parisian life called In the Quarter (1894), but his second book, The King in Yellow, was the first to become highly successful. In addition to several more Parisian sketches, it contained five supernatural stories, and its success caused him to turn from illustration to writing. He wrote a few other early collections containing weird fiction, but he soon became more famous for his prolific output of commercial historical romances and society novels that earned him the nickname “the Shopgirl Scheherazade.” He died in 1933.

Chambers was skilled at creating an eerie atmosphere in his weird fiction, and he often employed occultist themes and sometimes out-of-context folkloric elements. The imaginative visual imagery in his work reflects his artistic background. His love of the outdoors, hunting and fishing, butterflies, and Asian antiquities often surface in his fiction as well.

In The Maker of Moons (1896), the titular story involves a Chinese sorcerer who is creating artificial gold near the Canadian border. The story involves a repellent creature called a Xin and headless Yeth hounds from Welsh folklore. However, the other fantasy stories in the collection are either light in tone or comical. The Mystery of Choice (1897), his second best collection, contains two groups of thematically related fantasies, involving revenants, death, white shadows, and strange dreamlike fugue states, and has fallen into undeserved obscurity. In Search of the Unknown (1904) is comprised of mostly humorous science fiction stories about a zoologist hunting for strange animals. But the first story in the book, “The Harbour Master,” features an amphibious humanoid creature that anticipates the gill-man from the classic 1941 Universal horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon and may have been an influence on H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” In The Tree of Heaven (1907), a mystic in the first story predicts the events of the following tales, many of which contain supernatural elements. Years later, Chambers returned to the horror genre with The Slayer of Souls (1920), which expands on the framework of “The Maker of Moons” and concerns a cult of sorcerers out to cause worldwide political discontent, and a psychic woman who is out to destroy them; and The Talkers (1923), about a hypnotist who tampers with a woman’s soul for his own ends.

In his own day Chambers was a celebrity who wrote to entertain. Today he is remembered chiefly for his contributions to horror fiction, particularly The King in Yellow. He died in December 1933 following surgery for an intestinal ailment.

Lee Weinstein

See also: The King in Yellow; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

Further Reading

Lovett-Graff, Bennett. 1999. “Robert W. Chambers.” In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, 69–75. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 202. Detroit: Gale.

Weinstein, Lee. 1985. “Robert W. Chambers.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 739–745. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

CHARNAS, SUZY MCKEE (1939–)

Suzy McKee Charnas is an acclaimed fantasy and science fiction author, best known in horror for her vampire fictions, which include the award-winning novel The Vampire Tapestry (1981). Apart from vampire stories, Charnas has also produced work inspired by other horror icons, several of which were collected in The Music of the Night (2001). Her darkly funny werewolf story, “Boobs,” won the 1989 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and has appeared in many anthologies. Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” inspired Charnas’s apocalyptic horror story “Lowland Sea” (2009), and The Phantom of the Opera inspired her “Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast” (1996), a finalist for both the Hugo (Best Novelette) and the James Tiptree Literary Awards in 1997.

Charnas is also renowned for her groundbreaking feminist science fiction series, the Holdfast Chronicles, which includes seven novels, beginning with Walk to the End of the World (1974) and concluding with The Conqueror’s Child (1999). In 2003, the Holdfast series, along with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame, which recognizes significant positive gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender content in North American work published prior to 1998. Charnas has also been a finalist and recipient of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, winning retrospectively in 1994 for Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World, and in 2000 for The Conqueror’s Child. In 1994, Charnas also won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature for The Kingdom of Kevin Malone.

Born on October 22, 1939, Charnas enjoyed a privileged education among the children of wealthy Manhattanites, but as a young woman, she spent two formative years in Nigeria working for the Peace Corps, which radically altered her perspective: “Teaching in Nigeria taught me much that American Education [sic] had falsified, misunderstood, or denied outright about human beings, culture, economics, history, and the world in general, and in the process did what the Peace Corps is, to my mind, supp[os]ed to do: it made me permanently marginal to my home culture” (Charnas 2011).

Charnas describes her speculative fiction as operating in the “sociological and anthropological,” rather than the “technological” mode, where “smart white guys doing imaginary techno speak at each other” (Gordon 1999, 451–454). The central protagonists of her fictions tend to be women of all ages, often in subjected states, and children. Her writing is imbued with a strong eco-feminist political consciousness. For example, her werewolf story “Boobs” traces the adolescent development of young Kelsey’s body and its sudden vulnerability to sexual violence and objectification. The onset of Kelsey’s menstruation coincides with the onset of her lycanthropy. A decade later, this was the plot of the cult horror film Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett). Learning to love her powerful werewolf body, Kelsey avenges herself upon the boy who assaults her by devouring him without remorse.

The Vampire Tapestry is a collection of five separately published novellas that, read together, weave the tale of the charismatic, alluring predator Dr. Weyland, mostly through the eyes of various humans who encounter him. For much of the novel, Charnas preserves ambiguity, causing the reader at first to doubt that Weyland is really a vampire and then to discover he is more of a science fiction creature than a traditional romantic vampire. Weyland appears first in “The Ancient Mind at Work” as a distinguished anthropology professor at a small college who uses his sleep research to batten upon students, but housekeeper Katje de Groot, a no-nonsense Boer from South Africa, realizes he is a vampire and, after he attacks her, shoots and critically wounds him. In “The Land of Lost Content,” the wounded Weyland turns up as a prisoner held by the unsavory Roger and his Satanist associate Alan Reese. Roger orders his young nephew Mark to tend to the captive, while he and Reese exploit Weyland, but Mark eventually rebels and frees the vampire. Attempting to get himself reinstated at his college, Weyland next appears in “The Unicorn Tapestry,” seeking psychotherapy with Dr. Floria Landauer. Fascinated by her patient’s vampire “delusion,” Floria wears down Weyland’s carefully constructed barriers against intimacy with the humans he regards as his prey. Weyland is then found in Charnas’s home state, New Mexico, attending Tosca (“A Musical Interlude”), during which, affected by his recent experiences and the splendor of the music, he loses control and kills a performer. “The Last of Dr. Weyland” wraps up the novel with Weyland, transformed by his encounters and menaced by discovery, entering a lengthy period of hibernation.

The Vampire Tapestry was shortlisted for both World Fantasy and Nebula awards in 1981. “The Unicorn Tapestry” won the 1980 Nebula Award for Best Novella and has since been adapted by Charnas into the play Vampire Dreams. Along with “The Ancient Mind at Work,” this chapter also won the Spanish Gigamesh Award upon its translated publication in 1990.

Aalya Ahmad

See also: “The Masque of the Red Death”; Monsters; Poe, Edgar Allan; Vampires; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Charnas, Suzy McKee. 1997. “Meditations in Red: On Writing The Vampire Tapestry.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 59–67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Cranny-Francis, Anne. 1990. “De-Fanging the Vampire: S. M. Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry as Subversive Horror Fiction.” In American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, edited by Brian Docherty, 155–175. New York: St. Martin’s.

Davis, Kathy S. 2002. “‘Beauty in the Beast: The ‘Feminization’ of Weyland in The Vampire Tapestry.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1: 62.

Gordon, Joan, and Suzy McKee Charnas. 1999. “Closed Systems Kill: An Interview with Suzy McKee Charnas.” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 3: 447–468.

“THE CHIMNEY”

“The Chimney” is a story by Ramsey Campbell, written in 1975, first published in the anthology Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Doubleday, 1977), and reprinted in Campbell’s story collections Dark Companions (1982), Dark Feasts (1987), and Alone with the Horrors (1993). One of the most gripping and personal of Campbell’s stories, it is the first-person account of a man (who never identifies himself, not even by his first name) who reflects on some traumatic events that occurred when he was twelve years old. As a boy he was plagued with fears—fears of the dark, and especially fears of his own upstairs bedroom—that caused his parents to be ashamed of him. The boy’s father is particularly harsh, chastising his wife for coddling the boy. As Christmas approaches, the boy’s terror focuses on the chimney in his room, and he remembers when, years before, he watched a television show about “two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping towards them” (Campbell 2004, 156). The boy is petrified, but his mother tries to reassure him that it is only Father Christmas: “He always comes out of the chimney” (157). The boy’s fears have only increased since that time, and he now insists on a fire being lit in the chimney in his room. Then, on Christmas Eve, he hears and then sees some red-costumed figure coming down the chimney—it looks as if it is charred. It turns out to be the boy’s father, dressed up as Father Christmas. Years later the boy’s father dies in a fire in his house: when the boy sees the burned body, he realizes that he saw a vision of it on that Christmas Eve years before.

The story is a twisted version of the strange upbringing Campbell himself endured. Shortly after his birth in 1946, his Catholic parents became estranged; but because divorce was difficult, they devised a living arrangement whereby Campbell’s father remained upstairs in their house in Liverpool and had no contact with Campbell or his mother, who occupied the downstairs rooms. As Campbell testifies in a searing document, “At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour,” “For most of my childhood . . . my father was heard but not seen. . . . I used to hear his footsteps on the stairs as I lay in bed, terrified that he would come into my room. . . . Worst of all was Christmas, when my mother would send me to knock on his bedroom door and invite him down, as a mark of seasonal goodwill, for Christmas dinner. I would go upstairs in a panic, but there was never any response” (Campbell 2011). Campbell has fused this painful episode in his early life with the British tradition of “Father Christmas” to produce an imperishable tale of domestic conflict and existential terror. “The Chimney” remains among Campbell’s most celebrated and widely anthologized stories.

S. T. Joshi

See also: Campbell, Ramsey; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Campbell, Ramsey. [1993] 2004. “The Chimney.” In Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961–1991, 153–167. New York: Tor.

Campbell, Ramsey. [1983] 2011. “At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour.” In The Face That Must Die. Kindle Edition. Necon E-Books.

CISCO, MICHAEL (1970–)

American writer Michael Cisco is among the most influential, erudite, and ambitiously experimental voices in twenty-first-century weird fiction and horror. Cisco’s large body of work encompasses novelistic and long-form fiction, short fiction, translations (including work by Julio Cortazar and Marcel Béalu), and theoretical and critical essays, and he often intermingles these forms to unsettling effect. Cisco’s first novel, The Divinity Student (1999), won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel for that year, and his 2011 novel The Great Lover was named Best Weird Novel of the year by the Weird Fiction Review and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year.

While, like most of Cisco’s fiction, The Divinity Student plays vertiginously with language, it is probably the closest of his novels to traditional supernatural horror and parallel-world fantasy. Drawing on Judaic, Christian, and neo-Platonic philosophy, it unfolds in a crumbling urban landscape teeming with sinister beings and governed by dreamlike physical laws. Combining bleak horror and deep amazement, merging Bildungsroman (a story of someone’s formative education) and fable, it presents the education, death, resurrection, and strange second life of an eponymous protagonist, who embodies aspects of both the scientist and the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This hybridization of the doctor with his creation serves as an apt metaphor for Cisco’s authorial identity and ever-mutating writing. He even describes his literary approach in mad scientist terms, as experimenting in order “to create living monsters that will go out into the world and wreak havoc on readers” (Mills 2013). His other novels and long-form fictions, including The Tyrant (2003), The Narrator (2010), Member (2013), and Animal Money (2015), continue to combine linguistic and narrative experimentation with atmospheric horror, absurdist humor, and an exploration of alienation in many fabulous forms.

This is also true of his short fiction, which can be found in numerous anthologies, including The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Leviathan III and IV, Album Zutique, Grimscribe’s Puppets, and Aickman’s Heirs. A selection from his novella The Genius of Assassins was included in the VanderMeers’ influential omnibus, The Weird, and many of his earlier short stories are included in the collection Secret Hours (2007).

While it often incorporates horrific imagery and transfigures conventions of the horror genre, Cisco’s work, like Caitlín R. Kiernan’s, evades easy classification. He has described it as “de-genred” fiction, stating, “I don’t negate or deny genres but to me they’re like a spice rack, to be thrown together entirely along the lines of taste” (Moreland 2013). Cisco’s work draws on and transfigures writing by a vast array of influences, some of the more important being Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Ligotti, and Robert Aickman. While Cisco sees pastiche as central to his literary approach, the results of his incisive engagements with other writers are often startlingly original, creating powerfully affecting, philosophically rich, and deeply troubling narratives. There is therefore ample reason to take Jeff VanderMeer’s characterization of Cisco as “The American Kafka” seriously, for, in VanderMeer’s words, Cisco “has forged a singular path in creating visionary, phantasmagorical settings, uniquely alienated anti-heroes, and genuinely creepy happenings—while also exhibiting a healthy absurdism and dark sense of humor” (VanderMeer 2015).

Sean Moreland

See also: Aickman, Robert; Kafka, Franz; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Smith, Clark Ashton; Surrealism; VanderMeer, Jeff.

Further Reading

Mills, Adam. 2013. “Interview with Michael Cisco.” Weird Fiction Review, October 15. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/10/interview-with-michael-cisco.

Moreland, Sean. 2013. “An Interview with Michael Cisco.” Postscripts to Darkness, November 22. https://pstdarkness.com/2013/11/22/an-interview-with-michael-cisco.

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2015. “American Kafka? The Weird, Uncanny Work of Michael Cisco.” Literary Hub, May 27. http://lithub.com/american-kafka.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2012. “The Weird: An Introduction.” In The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, xv–xx. New York: Tor.

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (1772–1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by means of his practice as a poet as well as his lectures and publications in philosophy and literary criticism, became one of the prime movers of the English Romantic movement (ca. 1798–1832), in collaboration with his more prolific but less gifted collaborator William Wordsworth. His introduction to England of the ideas of German idealism, which had helped to guide the German literature of sturm und drang (storm and stress) and provided an important element of Gothic fiction, provided a similar impetus to the more sophisticated practitioners of the English movement, where they blended well with the inspiration of Byronism. His earlier friendship with the poet Robert Southey—the two of them married the sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker in 1795—caused them to make plans to found a utopian community in America under the guidance of a philosophy they called Pantisocracy, but the practical organization proved too much for them. His contributions to literary theory included the popularization of the requirement to seduce the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to underpin fantastic materials.

Coleridge suffered throughout his life from poor health, complicated by mental problems difficult to diagnose retrospectively, for both of which he made extensive use of laudanum as a palliative. As with Thomas De Quincey, the hallucinations produced by the laudanum became an important source of raw material for his literary work, especially its horrific aspects. The composition of “Kubla Khan” under that influence was famously interrupted, and he also failed to finish the equally phantasmagorical “Christabel,” the first account in English of a perversely eroticized female vampire, both of which were belatedly published in 1816. The longest and most spectacular of his opium-fueled visions, however, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the first version of which was published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), was and remains his masterpiece; its vision of the horrific experiences of a mariner in unknown Antarctic waters, having been cursed after killing an albatross, was enormously influential on the imagery of subsequent marine horror stories and became a frequent reference point for subsequent writers of fantastic fiction, from Mary Shelley to William S. Burroughs and Douglas Adams. Coleridge added “glosses” to later versions that add to the intrinsic doubts as to the hallucinatory narrative’s reality, occasioned by the fact that it is insistently told to a bewildered “wedding-guest.”

In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the eponymous narrator’s account of a doomed Antarctic voyage includes many frightful moments of nightmarish dread, as when the sailors, stranded and drifting because of the narrator’s sinful killing of an albatross, encounter a ghostly ship carrying two terrible presences:

Are those her ribs through which the Sun

Did peer, as through a grate?

And is that Woman all her crew?

Is that a Death? and are there two?

Is Death that woman’s mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold:

Her skin was as white as leprosy,

The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks man’s blood with cold. (Coleridge 1845, 62)

The two, Death and Life-in-Death, are gambling for the sailors’ fates:

The naked hulk alongside came,

And the twain were casting dice;

“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”

Quoth she, and whistles thrice. (62)

The nightmarish Life-in-Death’s whistle causes the sun to sink and the stars to come out, along with a “horned moon, with one bright star / within the nether tip.” Then the terrible outcome of the game becomes clear as the narrator’s fellow sailors turn to look at him:

One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,

Too quick for groan or sigh,

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,

And cursed me with his eye.

Four times fifty living men,

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)

With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

They dropped down one by one. (62)

The sailors’ souls fly from their bodies, headed “to bliss or woe,” and the narrator himself is left to suffer the dreadful fate of remaining in living death, completely alone.

Matt Cardin

Source: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1845. The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prose and Verse. Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co.

Coleridge continued writing doggedly during the 1820s, when he was living in Highgate with the family of his physician James Gillman, mostly working on a synthesis of his philosophical explorations that he called his “opus maximus.” He failed to complete it, although Gillman’s house became a place of pilgrimage in the meantime for his many literary disciples.

Brian Stableford

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Gardner, Martin. 1974. The Annotated Ancient Mariner. New York: New American Library.

Keane, Patrick J. 1994. Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

COLLIER, JOHN (1901–1980)

John Henry Noyes Collier was an English writer, poet, and screenwriter. Assessing him is difficult, for he was a writer of many parts, some of them seemingly contradictory. The best of his stories reveal him as intensely literate, a superbly gifted miniaturist, a fine satirist, adept at fantasy as well as mainstream literature, and remarkably mischievous if not at times outright cruel and misanthropic about his characters. Although there are horrific situations in his novel Tom’s A-Cold (1933), an early postcivilization novel, it was in Collier’s short stories that his talents had their best showcase, for like such earlier writers as Saki, Collier could present horrific situations and outcomes lightly and even elliptically: the murderously scheming protagonist in “Another American Tragedy” (1940) thus gets to see himself unpacked “like a Gladstone bag,” whereas the vainly lecherous protagonist of “The Bottle Party” (1939), imprisoned by a jinn, finds his bottle purchased by some sailors who “used him with the utmost barbarity.” “Green Thoughts” (1931) not only transforms characters into sentient plants but concludes with a horrible play on words involving the idea of cutting off somebody.

In Collier’s world, love is often shown to be no protection and no solution: the narrator of “Evening Primrose” (1940) conceals himself in a department store and discovers it is inhabited by malign wraith-like beings, and though he falls in love with the girl they use as their servant, happiness is not theirs. Horrible is Maria Beasley of “Incident on a Lake” (1941), for she is “prepared to endure Hell herself if she could deprive her husband of a little of his heaven” (Collier 2003, 113), but her scheming undoes her, as it does the banal and vulgar Alice and Irwin of “Over Insurance” (1951), who insure each other and have similar ideas about expediting the collection process. Assaults on stability and happiness can come from all directions, including a droopy old parrot of “Bird of Prey” (1941), whose repetitions reveal secrets and awaken psychological horrors, but whose real secret is terrifying and reveals the vulnerability of relationships. Demons and devils may be lightly presented, as in “After the Ball” (1933), “The Devil, George, and Rosie” (1934), and “Fallen Star” (1951), among others, but there is at the stories’ core the threat of perpetual damnation and, in the latter two, rape, however amusing and distracting a line such as “I said bed. It’s singular, that is, and it’d be a lot more singular if it were plural” (Collier 2003, 46) happens to be.

Still, sometimes power encounters greater power, as in “Thus I Refute Beelzy” (1940): while pretending to be a loving parent, Simon Carter is deliberately cruel to his son Simon, belittling the boy and attempting to get the boy to renounce his imaginary friend Mr. Beelzy, but young Simon remains true to his friend, and the not-imaginary Mr. Beelzy most horrifically concludes the sham. Also oddly positive is “Mary” (1939), in which an innocent young man finds himself in thrall to a jealous pig, but true love does find a solution to Fred’s problem, and sausages are on the menu. More often, though, things end just before the worst is about to occur, and in cheerfully presenting this kind of story, Collier was peerless.

“Evening Primrose” remains one of Collier’s best-remembered works, both because it has been widely anthologized and because it has been adapted for radio, stage, and television, including as a one-hour musical production written for the short-lived American television anthology series ABC Stage 67 in 1966, featuring songs by Stephen Sondheim. Collier won both an International Fantasy Award and an Edgar Award for his now-classic 1952 fiction collection Fancies and Goodnights. He died of a stroke in 1980.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Devils and Demons; Saki.

Further Reading

Collier, John. [1931] 2003. Fancies and Goodnights. New York: New York Review Books.

Indick, Ben P. 1999. “Sardonic Fantasistes: John Collier.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 121–127. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

Kessel, John. 1985. “John Collier.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 577–583. New York: Scribners.

Warren, Alan. 1996. “John Collier, Fantastic Miniaturist.” In Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 68–75. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

COLLINS, WILKIE (1824–1889)

William Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a major Victorian (British) novelist and writer, whose The Woman in White (1859) is often considered one of the first great sensation novels. Like his friend Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins wrote voluminously on a variety of subjects, often with a view toward showing the workings of fate on humanity, but unlike Dickens, Collins was not a sustained literary genius, and it has been reasonably claimed that he outlived his talent. He was not helped by an addiction to laudanum that almost overwhelmed him.

There are dark and horrific elements in Collins’s three most notable novels, The Woman in White, Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868). The first involves criminals attempting to use a woman, unjustly imprisoned and with a falsified identity, to maintain their position. The second involves prophetic dreams, false identities, and murder, with an attractive and unrepentant female villain. The third has as key plot elements sleepwalking, mysterious Indian performers, and a stolen idol’s eye. All made Collins one of the more popular writers of the time and established his friendship with Charles Dickens, then editing Household Words, though Dickens was quite willing to reject Collins’s writing if he did not feel it would be appropriate for his readers. The Moonstone has also been claimed as the first modern English detective novel and exerted a seminal influence on later writers in the genre, including, most notably, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Although not overtly fantastic, distinctly horrific work can be found in Collins’s After Dark (1856), a collection of six linked stories. “The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed” (originally published under the title “A Terribly Strange Bed” in 1852), in which a successful gambler gradually realizes that his hotel bed is not only strange but lethal, is as tense and horrific as anything ever written. It has been fairly widely anthologized, and it might be Collins’s best-known short story. Overtly horrific and occasionally fantastic work can be found in The Queen of Hearts (1859), a collection of ten loosely connected stories that is Collins’s most substantial collection of these. “The Siege of the Black Cottage” (1857) describes a resourceful young woman protecting herself, her money, and her cat from dangerous burglars. “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman” (first published as “The Ostler” in 1855) involves a terrifying dream and its outcome: Isaac Scatchard dreams of a woman trying to stab him, then seven years later marries Rebecca Murdoch, the image of the woman in the dream, and—of course—elements of the prophecy come to pass. “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dead Hand” (first published as “The Double-Bedded Room” in 1857) begins with an unsettling situation, in which the traveling Arthur Holliday is forced to share a room with a dead body in the other bed, then gets even more uncomfortable, for during the night, the body moves. “Brother Griffith’s Story of Mad Monkton” (first published as “The Monktons of Wincot Abbey” in 1855) details the working-out of a prophetic curse connected with the ancient Monkton family: unless all are buried in the family vault, the line will perish. With this as the premise, it is but a matter of awaiting the inevitable when the uncle of young Alfred Monkton goes missing on the European continent. His body is found, then irretrievably lost when the transport ship sinks: and so end the Monktons, done in by Fate.

Although Collins was uneven as a writer, his best stories are as good as anything of their kind. In his final years he suffered a prolonged period of declining health, and he died in 1889 several months after suffering a stroke. His two most popular novels in his lifetime, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, remain in print and continue to be his best known works, and both have been adapted several times for film and television.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Ancestral Curse; Dreams and Nightmares.

Further Reading

Ackroyd, Peter. 2012. Wilkie Collins. London: Chatto & Windus.

Gasson, Andrew. 1998. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sanders, Judith. 2009. “A Shock to the System, a System to the Shocks: The Horrors of the Happy Ending in The Woman in White.” In From Wollstonecraft to Stoker: Essays on Gothic and Victorian Sensation Fiction, edited by Marilyn Brock, 62–78. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Taylor, Jenny B. 1988. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth Century Psychology. London and New York: Routledge.

“THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE”

“The Colour out of Space” was the only story H. P. Lovecraft published in the first pulp “scientifiction” magazine Amazing Stories, in the September 1927 issue. The difficulty of exacting meager payment for the story apparently deterred him from further attempting to direct his work at this particular market. This in turn probably slowed down the transformation of the implied metaphysical context of his work and maintained its obliquity until he made a more decisive move in the belatedly published At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 but not published until 1936. That said, “The Colour out of Space” might well have influenced other horrific tales of creeping extraterrestrial corruption published in the Gernsback pulps, such as A. Rowley Hilliard’s “Death from the Stars” and P. Schuler Miller’s “The Arrhenius Horror” (both published in 1931).

The unnamed narrator of the story, a surveyor, attempts to discover the reason why an area in the vicinity of the town of Arkham, known as “blasted heath,” is avoided by the local people. Ammi Pierce, who used to farm land nearby, tells him what happened when a meteorite landed on the property of his neighbor Nahum Gardner, which brought with it some kind of radiant matter, whose “colour” is only identified by analogy, the radiation being external to the visual spectrum. Although the matter disappeared, it poisoned the ground and Gardner’s well, affecting crops and local animals in strange and ominous ways. Gardner’s wife and one of his sons went mad, and his other son disappeared. Pierce witnessed the destruction of the house and its last surviving resident as the blight’s gradual effect produced a horrific climax. The narrator and a company of associates undertake further investigations, but only succeeded in restimulating the mysterious radiation and occasioning the further spread of the blight.

“The Colour out of Space” on the Screen

“The Colour out of Space” is widely regarded as one of Lovecraft’s best stories, and he himself felt that it represented one of his more successful efforts to convey what he considered to be the essence of cosmic horror. It has remained prominent among his works not only because of its excellence but because of its various adaptations for other media. Chief among these are three film versions. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) stars an aging Boris Karloff and was released by American International Pictures, the same company behind the 1960s series of successful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. The Curse (1987) was directed by David Keith and starred Claude Akins, John Schneider, and Wil Wheaton. The German-language production Die Farbe (2010) is thought by many, including Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, to be the best adaptation to date.

Matt Cardin

Lovecraft was particularly fond of the story, believing that it captured the essential mood of “cosmic horror” that he was attempting to develop and refine better than stories that attributed their baleful manifestations to traditional supernatural causes, and permitting a measured description of decay and transfiguration that he thought particularly well adapted to the effect he was trying to achieve. Although his overall approach in “The Colour out of Space” was too new to make the story immediately popular, it eventually achieved classic status as readers gradually learned to appreciate it. Because it lacks the elaborate back-stories Lovecraft provided in some of his other major fusions of horror and science fiction, such as “The Shadow out of Time” and At the Mountains of Madness, the story develops in a more focused and measured fashion, but that has made it less tempting for extrapolation by subsequent contributors to the “Cthulhu Mythos,” requiring a significant generic shift in the most elaborate sequel by another hand, Michael Shea’s The Color out of Time (1984). “The Colour out of Space” has also been the subject of several cinematic adaptations, including Die, Monster, Die (1965), The Curse (1987), and Die Farbe (2010).

Brian Stableford

See also: At the Mountains of Madness; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Shea, Michael; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

Further Reading

Cannon, Peter H. 1989. “Cosmic Backwaters.” In H. P. Lovecraft, 82–96. Twayne’s United States Author Series, 549. Boston: Twayne.

Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, 78–97. Winchester: Zero Books.

Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2001. “The Colour out of Space.” In An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, 41–43. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

COMMUNION

Communion: A True Story (1987), by the American horror writer and later paranormal celebrity Whitley Strieber (1945–), was not the first book to explore UFO sightings and abductions. Twentieth-century culture was rife with examples of this trope, going back to such things as Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which thousands of people heard and believed to be factual; Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968), which posits that humanity has been visited and influenced by alien entities since before recorded history; and the enormous box-office success of Steven Spielberg’s beneficent aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). But Strieber’s book managed to crystallize and complicate the American public’s ongoing fascination, or obsession, with UFOs and aliens.

In Communion Strieber tells the story of a paranormal abduction experience that occurred while he was staying at his upstate New York cabin in the winter of 1983. Whatever one may think of the veracity of this account, the narrative power of Communion is undeniable. An experienced writer with eight books already in print—including four horror novels, a dark fantasy, and a co-authored post–nuclear holocaust best seller—Strieber brought to Communion the professionalism and rigor of a story compellingly well told. The book’s greatest strength lies perhaps in the sympathy, and in some cases the empathy, it causes the reader to feel for Strieber because of the trauma he endured. His ability to stoke this flame makes for a gripping read.

Communion bears more responsibility for originating the idea and image of the “alien gray” than any other single work of fiction or nonfiction. With its compelling (if outlandish, by conventional standards) story, presented as truth by the author, and with its iconic cover painting by artist Ted Seth Jacobs of a gray-skinned, bulbous-headed creature with large, jet-black, almond-shaped eyes, the book may justly be credited with planting the image of the alien gray in popular consciousness and catalyzing the modern fascination with the idea of alien abduction, which swept through American popular culture—and also intellectual culture (it was the subject of a 1992 conference at MIT)—in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The significance of Communion can still be felt in the twenty-first century, as movies, books, games, and television shows about UFOs, extraterrestrials, and paranormal abductions continue to proliferate, many of them following the basic conceptual and visual template outlined by Strieber in 1987.

Matt Cardin

The book’s subtitle, A True Story, is telling. Communion is not meant as a fiction taken to be real like Welles’s broadcast; nor is it a work of amateur archaeological speculation that is easily refuted like Von Däniken’s book; nor is it like Spielberg’s film, which is an obvious work of fiction that plays on wish fulfillment fantasies of transcendence. Strieber’s book mines a deeply felt human need to be part of something larger than oneself, to experience firsthand that which is boundless, unknowable, and true.

Communion was a best seller when it was published, and it has remained in print ever since. Most readers have apparently accepted Streiber’s claims as true, or at the very least they have believed that Strieber himself believes he is relating a true experience. Critical reception, however, has been far less kind. In science fiction circles Strieber is regarded as something of an embarrassment, as his books share little with the ongoing science fiction narratives in which the genre’s best authors are substantively engaged.

But to judge Strieber solely on his contributions to science fiction is to misunderstand his greater project. Communion is, at its heart, a work of mysticism, and its author is an explorer of alternate states of being in the tradition of such looming figures in the twentieth century’s esoteric and countercultural spiritual tradition as G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Carlos Castaneda, and Timothy Leary. The great irony of Communion is that while it is the most famous and influential alien abduction text ever produced, it never claims to be about extraterrestrials per se. While “the visitors,” as Strieber refers to them throughout the book, could be extraterrestrial, the possibility is entertained as well that they are figments that have penetrated the author’s mind, working from either an internal psychic space or from some extradimensional arena. The notion of the alien—in this case the gray alien or “grays” as they are referred to in ufology culture (a figure that, not incidentally, was largely solidified by Strieber’s book)—is thus complicated in Communion, where it functions as a symbol of something that is fundamentally Other and consequently unknowable.

The book was filmed as Communion and released in 1989, with Christopher Walken playing the role of Strieber. A nonfiction sequel to Communion is Transformation: The Breakthrough (1988). Later novels by Strieber are presented as fiction and develop the notion of extraterrestrial visitors in more genre-familiar terms. At the same time, Strieber’s contributions in the specific role of horror author (which he has mostly, although not entirely, left behind in his post-Communion career) continue to have value, especially his werewolf novel Wolfen (1978), his vampire novel The Hunger (1981), and his underrated horror/dark fantasy novel Catmagic (1986), about the survival of ancient nature-based witchcraft in the modern world.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Occult Fiction.

Further Reading

Fenkl, Heinz I. 2000. “Folkroots: Abduction and Ascension—Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Realms of Fantasy 6 (February): 26–32.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2014. “Better Horrors: From Terror to Communion in Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987).” Social Research 81, no. 4: 897–920.

Pharr, Mary. 1996. “Adam’s Dream: The Gothic Imagination of Whitley Strieber.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 97–109. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Stanley, Wiater. 1988. “Beyond Communion: A Conversation with Whitley Strieber.” Twilight Zone 8, no. 1 (April): 22–25.

“Whitley Strieber.” 2015. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

CONJURE WIFE

Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Conjure Wife, originally published in the pulp magazine Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds) in 1943 and released in book form a decade later, updates classic tales of witchcraft for a modern (sub)urban milieu. The novel’s premise is simple: witchcraft continues to survive amidst contemporary women, especially those with ambitious husbands whose career goals can be advanced through sorcerous means. The protagonist, Tansy Saylor, is the spouse of a sociology professor, Norman Saylor, who moves rapidly up the academic hierarchy as a result of Tansy’s potions and spells. A skeptic himself, Norman compels Tansy to give up her “neurotic” belief in the supernatural, at which point his career takes a turn for the worse, subjecting him to the conjuring wiles of his competitors’ spouses.

Sharply satirical of small-town life, with its vicious gossip and petty rivalries, the novel is also profoundly frightening, especially a scene in which a stone gargoyle descends from a campus building to stalk Norman remorselessly. The horrific charge of the story derives from the eerie counterpoint between the secular mindset of modern suburbanites and the atavistic worldview of a secretive coven of female necromancers. As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the supernatural presence derives much of its power from the fact that skeptical modern people simply refuse to believe in it. Conjure Wife stands alongside a number of other Leiber stories of the 1940s—such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941) and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949)—in being a self-conscious updating of classic horror themes within a contemporary milieu. While there are some protofeminist aspects to the story, especially its vision of sorcerous female empowerment, the tale also relies on a number of gender stereotypes, such as the wife as selfless helpmate to her husband. Nonetheless, its vision of a furtive form of female agency, with durable ancient roots, suggests possibilities for gender solidarity that echo other protofeminist texts of the period, such as Jacques Tourneur’s classic film Cat People (1942).

Conjure Wife was an immediate mainstream success, adapted as the 1944 film Weird Woman and, two decades later, as Night of the Eagle (1962; a.k.a Burn, Witch, Burn!). It has also been deeply influential in American popular culture, the ur-text for all manner of tales of modern witchery, such as the 1950 stage play Bell, Book, and Candle, the TV series Bewitched (1964–1972), and the best-selling 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin.

Rob Latham

See also: Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Leiber, Fritz; Psychological Horror; Rosemary’s Baby; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Byfield, Bruce. 1991. “Sister Picture of Dorian Grey: The Image of the Female in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife.” Mythlore 17, no. 4: 24–28.

Leiber, Fritz. 1973. “About Gather, Darkness and Conjure Wife.” Whispers 1, no. 2: 33.

Murphy, Bernice M. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

COPPARD, A. E. (1878–1957)

Alfred Edgar Coppard was an English poet and short story writer whose work often contains horrific elements, often along with allusions to folkloric motifs, Judeo-Christian imagery, and a sophisticated use of English and Irish vernacular; he likewise used to great advantage sudden and strange shifts in perception. His first fantastic story, “Piffingcap” (1921), concerns a haunted shaving mug: those shaved from it do not need to be shaved again. This seemingly light premise leads directly to the deaths of three men sent to retrieve it after it is thrown from a bridge.

Coppard’s best-known story may be “Adam & Eve & Pinch Me,” published in 1921 in his book of the same title. It is a haunting and dreamlike account of an out-of-body experience in which Jaffa Codling witnesses three children—Adam, Eve, and Gabriel—playing in an exquisite garden. He cannot interact with them, and only Gabriel can see him. There are recurrent images and motifs—golden swords, brilliant lights, fish, fire, fruit, and the idea of good—and in the end Codling returns to his body and discovers his name is Gilbert Cannister, and that he has two children, but that his wife is pregnant with the one who will become Gabriel.

Physical horror is never far from the surface of many of Coppard’s stories. In “The Old Venerable” (1926), the impoverished Old Venerable’s dreams of independence are destroyed when his dog is shot, and he must drown the unweaned puppies, for he cannot feed them. “The Green Drake” (1931) depicts a conversation between an amiable drake and a wandering poacher; it is a conversation full of the fantastic, but the fantastic lures the duck to its death. Equally horrible is “Arabesque: The Mouse” (1920; sometimes given as “Arabesque—the Mouse”): the narrator sits in his room, watching an inquisitive mouse and recalling the horrible death of his mother, whose hands were crushed in an accident, and recalling too an encounter with a beautiful woman whose eyes were “full of starry inquiry like the eyes of mice” (Coppard 1951, 75). All recollections conclude when the trap snaps and severs the feet of the poor mouse.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to consider Coppard solely as a writer utilizing the physical horrors of everyday existence, for a number of his tales make effective use of psychic horror. The virginal Clorinda Smith in “Clorinda Walks in Heaven” (1922) is granted a glimpse of the afterlife, learning that heaven contains ghosts of her unrealized desires, but she fails to profit from her knowledge and dies alone and forgotten. Heaven is likewise denied the title character in “Father Raven” (1946) because he falsely attested to the virtue of his charges in order that they might enter heaven.

Like such literary compatriots as M. R. James, Coppard had no belief in either the supernatural or the fantastic, stating in the introduction to his 1946 collection of supernatural fiction Fearful Pleasures that “I have not the slightest belief in the supernatural. If I should ever see a ghost I should know it was time for me to consult an oculist” (Coppard 1946, vii). His stories remain acute and often psychically terrifying, but though he has received occasional academic attention, Coppard is now largely out of print, and no comprehensive collection of his fantastic fiction is available.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Body Horror; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Coppard, A. E. 1946. Fearful Pleasures. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Coppard, A. E. 1951. The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Smith, Frank Edmund. 1985. “A(lfred) E(dgar) Coppard.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 2, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 523–528. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Thompson, N. S. 2003. “A. E. Coppard.” In British Writers: Supplement 8, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

CRAWFORD, F. MARION (1854–1908)

Francis Marion Crawford was one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world of his day. Although he wrote more than forty novels, mostly historical romances, today he is remembered for a few novels of some fantasy genre interest and for a handful of important short stories in the fantasy and horror genres. He was born in 1854 to American parents in Bagni di Lucca, Italy. His father, Thomas Crawford, was the sculptor who created the “armed liberty” sculpture atop the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Julia Ward Howe, the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was his aunt. A grandson, H. Marion-Crawford, an actor, portrayed Watson in the 1954 Sherlock Holmes television series. Francis knew eighteen languages and was an avid sailor who owned three yachts, an interest that is reflected in much of his fiction. He died in 1908.

“The Upper Berth”: Creepy Maritime Horror

First published in 1886, “The Upper Berth” is recognized as the finest of the small number of ghost stories written by the popular American novelist F. Marion Crawford throughout a long career. It is told in the typically indirect manner of the time. Men are sitting around chatting. Boredom threatens. Then Brisbane, a solid, sensible man, tells his companions that he once encountered a ghost, or something very much like one, on a steamship, while sharing a stateroom with a man who committed suicide on the first night at sea. This, he discovered, had happened several times before, in that very room. The berth above his own was haunted. A porthole kept opening itself. The place smelled dank. Eventually a revenant was flushed out of the upper berth, something more solid than a traditional ghost: the reanimated corpse of a long-drowned man.

One of the most remarkable features of “The Upper Berth” is the deftness with which the details are handled. The hero does not overlook the obvious. The upper berth is searched with a bright light and found to be empty and dry. The porthole is screwed tightly shut. But the manifestations occur anyway. The story itself is a refutation of the old canard that the ghost story became obsolete with the invention of bright lights. When the lights come on in the story narrated by Brisbane, the Thing is still there and just as frightening.

Although Crawford’s mainstream writings were critical successes in their day, it is only his ghost stories that have withstood the test of time. “The Upper Berth,” which has been anthologized many times, is chief among them.

Darrell Schweitzer

Crawford was an accomplished writer, a romanticist who created vivid characters and colorful backgrounds, but he saw himself as a paid entertainer rather than as an artist. He led a colorful life and was convinced by friends to turn his real-life experiences into stories. His first venture into fiction writing was Mr. Isaacs (1882), based on people he knew in India, and cast himself pseudonymously as the first-person narrator, something he was to do repeatedly. It has only minimal fantasy or occult elements, but its success convinced him to become a novelist.

Khaled (1891) is an Arabian fantasy about a genie who is made mortal as a form of punishment and has been compared favorably to William Beckford’s Vathek. The Witch of Prague (1891) is Crawford’s one true horror novel, in which Unorna, feared as a witch, and her dwarf cohort experiment to extend the human lifespan by means of her possibly supernatural hypnotic powers.

Crawford is chiefly remembered today for eight ghostly short stories, written throughout his career and collected posthumously as Wandering Ghosts (1911). “The Upper Berth” (1886) is one the most frequently reprinted of all ghost stories. “The Dead Smile” (1899) is a tale of evil and incest, and it inspired Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin story, “The Jest of Warburg Tartaval.” “Man Overboard” (1903), a novella originally published as a separate small book, is a seagoing tale about a pair of identical twins, one of whom is murdered by the other during a storm, and who returns as a vengeful ghost. “For Blood is the Life” (1905) is an unusual story about a female vampire. “The King’s Messenger” (1907), not in the original collection but in recent reprints, involves dreams, premonitions, and death. Crawford’s popular “The Screaming Skull” (1908) has been adapted for film twice, once in 1958 as The Screaming Skull (although the screenplay’s basis in Crawford’s story was unacknowledged) and again in 1973 for an American made-for-television production. Crawford died of influenza in 1908 while doing relief work for refugees from an earthquake in southern Italy.

Lee Weinstein

See also: “The Screaming Skull”; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2004. “F. Marion Crawford: Blood and Thunder Horror.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 26–38. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Moran, John C. 1981. An F. Marion Crawford Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Morgan, Chris. 1985. “F. Marion Crawford.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 747–752. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

CTHULHU MYTHOS

“Cthulhu Mythos” is a term posthumously applied to a body of stories originated by H. P. Lovecraft and expanded upon in his lifetime and afterward by his contemporaries in Weird Tales and other fiction venues. Consequently, it represents the earliest example of a “shared universe” in popular culture. Cthulhu Mythos stories typically share four common elements: a scholarly narrator; otherworldly entities called the Great Old Ones; occult spellbooks such as Lovecraft’s mythical Necronomicon, which are employed to invoke or understand them; and often—but not exclusively—a New England setting.

The Cthulhu Mythos originated with Lovecraft’s 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” which focused on an extraterrestrial being imprisoned in an undersea Pacific Ocean vault, who reaches out to psychically sensitive human beings via telepathic dreams aimed at enticing potential victims into furthering his release. Cthulhu is vast, preternatural, and, like the mythological Kraken whom he resembles, prophesied to signal the end of the world when his enforced slumber concludes. Many Mythos concepts are conscious perversions or inversions of classical mythology.

Cthulhu Mythos Close-up: Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Return of the Sorcerer”

“The Return of the Sorcerer” by Clark Ashton Smith first appeared in the September 1931 issue of the pulp magazine Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror and was subsequently reprinted in the Arkham House collection Out of Space and Time (1942). It is of some note as an early example of a story written by one of H. P. Lovecraft’s friends who accepted the latter’s invitation to appropriate the imagery of what subsequently became known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

In the story the narrator, in need of employment, is contacted by the reclusive scholar John Carnby, who wants his help in translating an Arabic manuscript related to the original text of the fabled Necronomicon—but Carnby has acquired it by nefarious means, and his insistence that the strange sounds the narrator can hear are only due to an infestation of rats ring false. In fact, the relative he murdered to get it has made use of its nasty secrets to ensure a suitably gruesome revenge.

The story follows the standard formula of Lovecraftian horror fiction methodically, but with a measured elegance unusual in what was still at the time a species of pulp fiction, demonstrating the fashion in which the flexible template might be modified in both stylistic and imagistic terms. It thus became, and remains, a valuable exemplar for practitioners of the subgenre.

Brian Stableford

Lovecraft penned only three purely Mythos stories—“The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”—before his contemporaries commenced borrowing his concepts, characters, and impedimenta in the pages of Weird Tales. This pantheon was expanded especially in the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert Bloch. Lovecraft himself was the first to indulge in such borrowings, including formative Mythos concepts in stories he ghostwrote for Zealia Brown-Reed Bishop and Adolphe de Castro, among others. The conceit, which functioned partly on the level of a series of sly in-jokes, proliferated rapidly among the so-called Lovecraft Circle of horror writers.

Writing to August Derleth in 1931, Lovecraft observed of his self-described “Pseudomythology,” “The more these synthetic daemons are mutually written up by different authors, the better they become as general background-material! I like to have others use my Azathoths and Nyarlathoteps—& in return I shall use Klarkash-Ton’s Tsathhoggua, your monk Clithanus, & Howard’s Bran” (Joshi 2008, 21).

After Lovecraft’s 1937 death, novelist Derleth launched Arkham House Books, reprinting Lovecraft’s stories as well as those by other members of the Lovecraft Circle. In his own Mythos contributions, Derleth commenced adding elemental beings and codifying the Mythos in terms of a Christian worldview of good and evil—something to which the arch-materialistic Lovecraft did not subscribe during his life. To Derleth goes the credit for coining the term “Cthulhu Mythos,” even though Cthulhu himself was a relatively minor godlet in the growing pantheon of Great Old Ones, which included Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, and other cosmic beings.

Until his 1971 death, Derleth exerted a proprietary influence over the Mythos, sanctioning some stories and actively suppressing others. Since his death, the Mythos has been disconnected from Derleth’s peculiar set of imposed and specious limitations and his own contributions relegated to a discredited subcategory dubbed the Derleth Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos is today recognized as the property of no individual, thus liberating any author who cares to write a story set in Lovecraft’s milieu to explore and expand upon it unchallenged.

Approaching one hundred years after Lovecraft’s seminal story, the Cthulhu Mythos has exploded into a cottage industry, with new themed anthologies appearing every year. The list of contributors includes such luminaries as Colin Wilson, Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Fred Chappell, Brian Lumley, T. E. D. Klein, and Karl Edward Wagner, among others. The Mythos has also formed the basis of a long series of role-playing games, board games, and computer games, the most prominent of which is arguably the role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu, first released in 1981. Elements of the Mythos have also proliferated throughout heavy metal music, as in Metallica’s songs “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be.” The Mythos has also become something of a staple in monster-themed apocalyptic horror movies such as The Gate (1987), the Hellboy movies (2004 and 2008), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012). Ever expanding, Lovecraft’s dark and disturbing universe-view promises to endure as long as practitioners of the formal horror story continue to push the boundaries of the genre beyond the mundane monsters of mythology.

Will Murray

See also: Arkham House; At the Mountains of Madness; Barlow, R. H.; “The Call of Cthulhu”; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; Derleth, August; Devils and Demons; “The Dunwich Horror”; Howard, Robert E.; The King in Yellow; Long, Frank Belknap; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; The Mind Parasites; Schweitzer, Darrell; Smith, Clark Ashton; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2008. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books.

Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press.

D

DAGON

Dagon is a Southern Gothic novel by Fred Chappell published in 1968. Chappell is an award-winning poet and Southern regionalist writer, and his overt references in the novel to names and themes from the Cthulhu Mythos were recognized as one of the first efforts in the literary mainstream to acknowledge the literary legacy of H. P. Lovecraft.

The novel focuses on the dramatic spiritual and psychological decline of Peter Leland, a Methodist minister on sabbatical from his church in South Carolina. Peter and his wife Sheila have just moved to a farm he has inherited in an unnamed Southern town so that he can work on Remnant Pagan Forces in American Puritanism, a book whose theme has grown out of a sermon that he delivered regarding the persistence in modern times of the worship of Dagon (who is, not coincidentally, an aquatic entity worshipped as a god in Lovecraft’s fiction, notably in his story “The Shadow over Innsmouth”). Dagon, as Peter explains it, is a pagan god named in the Bible whose association as a fertility symbol resonates with the “frenzied, incessant, unreasoning sexual activity” (Chappell 1996, 22) that he sees rampant in the American culture of the time. During a picnic with Sheila, Peter unexpectedly meets Ed Morgan, a sharecropper living on his farm, and later Ed’s daughter Mina. Though Mina is slatternly and unattractive—her fishlike features are redolent of those borne by the human-amphibian hybrids in Lovecraft’s tale—Peter looks on her with “the fascination he might have in watching a snake uncoil itself lazily and curl along the ground” (19). Under the spell of Mina’s erotic allure, Peter kills Sheila and moves in with the Morgans.

Over the next few months Peter is cruelly dominated by the abusive Mina and fed a steady diet of moonshine until he is reduced to a near-bestial state. Emasculated by his lover, he increasingly comes to resemble a latter-day Samson—who, as Peter reminds the reader early in the story, destroyed the temple to Dagon where he was to be sacrificed. The book’s final chapters resonate with snatches of Lovecraftian references Peter hears throughout the novel as he is ritually prepared by Mina and a band of cultists as a sacrifice to Dagon.

Chappell leaves ambiguous how much of what Peter experiences in his final moments is a genuine confrontation with the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft’s fiction and how much is a symbolic rendering of his collapse into mania. Nevertheless, Peter’s appreciation of his suffering as “the one means of carving a design upon an area of time, of charging with human meaning each separate moment of time” (82) is an astute interpretation of the plight of humanity in an indifferent and insentient universe that informs Lovecraftian horror fiction.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H.P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

Further Reading

Chappell, Fred. [1968] 1996. Dagon. Raleigh, NC: Boson.

Clabough, Casey. 2003. “Appropriations of History, Gothicism, and Cthulhu: Fred Chappell’s Dagon.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36, no. 3: 37–53.

Lang, John. 2000. Understanding Fred Chappell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “A Talk with Fred Chappell.” Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Summer 1994, 40–43.

THE DAMNATION GAME

The Damnation Game is the first novel by the British writer Clive Barker. Published in 1985 by Sphere and met with critical praise upon publication, the novel quickly followed from Barker’s celebrated debut with the Books of Blood (1984–1985). The Damnation Game is a Gothic-horror Faustian pact tale concerning an infernal arrangement between the mysterious, near-immortal European gambler Mamoulian and the reclusive wealthy businessman Whitehead. Beginning in war-torn Warsaw, the mysterious wager between Mamoulian and Whitehead, a talented gambler, is agreed over a game of cards, later resulting in Whitehead’s ascent into wealth, power, and near immortality. Decades later, having profited from their dark arrangement, Whitehead now wishes to renege on his pact with Mamoulian, which has expectedly come due, and hires convict-turned-bodyguard Marty Strauss to protect him.

Barker’s antiheroes like Marty Strauss are typically loners who withdraw from the everyday world, enabling them to experience something profound or magical that is hidden from everyday view. Aided by his undead zombie acolyte Breer, Mamoulian’s plan to collect his infernal wager from Whitehead by any means necessary is revealed to be driven by abject loneliness; weary from immortality, Mamoulian craves a worthy companion to join him in the release of death. Strauss, a redeemed man caught between supernatural forces and his personal demons and addictions, falls in love with Whitehead’s daughter Carys, a young psychic seer troubled by drug addiction. Together, Marty and Carys attempt to save Whitehead from these supernatural threats that threaten to engulf them all.

The Damnation Game established Barker as a serious author working beyond his debut in the short story medium, emphasizing his interest in combining traditional Gothic tropes such as the Faustian pact with his uncompromising celebration of graphic body horror. This novel affirms his unique style of tight yet lyrical prose, with his material disciplined from his years of short story composition and his close editorial relationship with his publisher, Sphere. The theme of Faustian exchange and forbidden experiences would become a repeated feature in much of Barker’s later fiction, as many of his novels and film adaptations explicitly revisit this motif. The Damnation Game is best understood, then, as a foundational text to understand Barker’s core preoccupations; it reveals his authorial thematic touchstones of transcendence and metamorphosis, infernal arrangements, and the enduring hope and redemptive nature of love in the face of horror.

Drawing upon contemporary cultural and economic divisions within 1980s Britain, the novel’s depiction of social inequality and insatiable avarice lends itself neatly to the contemporary invocation of the Faustian tale amidst the pronounced misery of Thatcher’s economically riven era. In Barker’s novel, no one is immune to the temptations of money, power, or a game of chance. It is not the most well known of Barker’s horror novels (compared to, for example, The Hellbound Heart [1986] or Cabal [1988], which enjoyed film adaptations directed by Barker), but it is certainly the most devoted to the horror genre. It offers insight into Barker’s rise as an influential author of visceral horror fiction, literate in the Gothic tropes and artfully splicing them into tales that feel new and speak to contemporary concerns.

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Books of Blood.

Further Reading

Badley, Linda. 1996. “Clive Barker Writing (from) the Body.” In Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice, 73–104. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Hoppenstand, Gary. 1994. Clive Barker’s Short Stories: Imagination as Metaphor in the Books of Blood and Other Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Ní Fhlainn, Sorcha, ed. 2017. Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Winter, Douglas E. 2001. “Nowhere Land: The Damnation Game (1985).” In Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, 172–187. New York: HarperCollins.

THE DAMNED

Là-Bas (translated as Down There or The Damned) is a novel by French writer J. K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans, first published in 1891, and not published in English—and then only in a private edition—until 1928. It is the story of the author Durtal, whose research on Gilles de Rais—marshal of fourteenth-century France, whose career ended in a notorious trial for Satanism, pedophilia, torture, and child murder—leads him to a firsthand encounter with the occult. Its attempt to blend naturalism with the mystical into a kind of “supernatural realism” proved influential on subsequent horror writers, most importantly H. P. Lovecraft.

The narrative (like most of Huysmans’s work) is not linear, but rather a series of tableaux. It is punctuated by discussions between Durtal and fellow novelist des Hermies as they enjoy the hospitality of the local bell ringer and his wife. When Durtal says he wants to strengthen his understanding of de Rais’s satanic practices, des Hermies tells him that such activities still exist. Meanwhile, Durtal is contacted by a female reader, Hyacinthe Chantelouve, who leads him further into the occult underworld.

Much of the horror in the novel comes during the interstitial episodes, as when Durtal recounts the crimes of Gilles de Rais. In Chapter XI Durtal describes how, after a particularly shocking episode, de Rais stumbled through a Brittany forest. The vegetation seems to mutate in the most horrible manner: “It seemed that nature perverted itself before him [de Rais], that his very presence depraved it” (Huysmans 1972, 106). This hallucinatory experience is among the most terrifying in the book. Another disturbing subnarrative is in Chapter IX, when the astrologer Gévingey conveys chilling details regarding incubi and succubi.

Durtal’s seduction by the “femme fatale” Chantelouve becomes a metaphor for his spiritual corruption: “‘For this, basically, is what Satanism is,’ said Durtal to himself. ‘The external semblance of the Demon is a minor matter. He has no need of exhibiting himself in human or bestial form to attest his presence. For him to prove himself, it is enough that he chooses a domicile in souls which he ulcerates and incites to inexplicable crimes’” (106).

Durtal becomes convinced he has been cursed by the leader of a local satanic cult, the defrocked abbot Canon Docre. He turns to the mysterious Dr. Johannès, a “Doctor of Theology,” for supernatural protection. The novel climaxes in Chapter XIX with a horrific description of a Black Mass, “a madhouse, a monstrous pandemonium of prostitutes and maniacs” (249).

The novel is autobiographical: its three sequels document Huysmans’s conversion to Catholicism. This is foreshadowed at the end of Là-Bas when the bell ringer says: “On earth all is dead and decomposed. But in heaven! . . . The future is certain. There will be light” (287).

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Lovecraft, H. P.

Further Reading

Baldick, Robert. 1955. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cevasco, George A. 1980. J.-K. Huysmans: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Huysmans, J. K. [1928] 1972. Là-bas (Down There). New York: Dover.

Ridge, George Ross. 1968. Joris-Karl Huysmans. New York: Twayne.

THE DARK DOMAIN

In 1986, Miroslaw Lipinski, a Polish American translator based in New York City, published a home-printed journal, The Grabiński Reader. It contained translations of two stories by the early twentieth-century Polish writer of the fantastic, Stefan Grabiński: “The Area” and “Strabismus.” These were the first translations of Grabiński’s work into English. Over the next few years, Lipinski published more Grabiński translations in further issues of The Grabiński Reader and in small press anthologies. Then, in 1993, Lipinski’s Grabiński translations were collected in The Dark Domain, published by UK-based independent press Dedalus.

The Dark Domain contains stories from a number of Grabiński’s collections, all from his period of peak productivity and acclaim between 1918 and 1922, including some from his themed collections: three from The Motion Demon (1919), which collected his railway stories, and one from The Book of Fire (1922).

“In the Compartment,” which is from The Motion Demon, shows Grabiński’s fusing of Henri Bergson’s theory of élan vital—the idea that there is an internal vital impetus behind life’s processes—with scientific theories of motion. It is a story of Godziemba, ordinarily timid, a day-dreamer and a sluggard, who, when riding on locomotives, is transformed by “train neurosis” into a man of dynamism, pugnacity, sexual prowess, and murderous impulse.

Another story, “Saturnin Sektor,” deals with Bergson’s notion of time as continuous and indivisible. A mad watchmaker seems to split his personality to argue with himself about the nature of time—in his new persona, for perpetual duration; in his old, as Saturnin Sektor, for the division of time into hours, minutes, and seconds. The tale ends with the watchmaker dead, possibly a suicide, and all the clocks in town stopped at the moment of his passing.

In the tale “The Area,” Grabiński formulates a fictional counterpart, an obscure visionary writer, Wrzesmian, whose work, unlike that of other authors, which is always tied to the real world, is totally fantastic, disunited from reality, and free of influences, allusions, and allegories. But even this leaves him unsatisfied, and, led by a theory that any thought or fiction, no matter how audacious or insane, can one day be materialized, he abandons words as a creative medium and turns to projecting his psyche onto an abandoned mansion across the street from his rooms. He calls forth from the eerie house frail figures, who, when he crosses over to investigate, demand his blood and tear him apart. This story can be read as an allegory of Grabiński’s own approach to composition, and perhaps also of his fear that his writings would somehow cause him harm.

Lipinski’s original journal and small press translations of Grabiński were favorably noticed by writers such as Robert Bloch, Colin Wilson, and Thomas Ligotti. The Dark Domain received extremely positive reviews, especially in the weird fiction scene. Prominent admirers of the collection include China Miéville and Mark Samuels. Grabiński’s influence continues to grow, and more translations, from Lipinski and others, have resulted.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Bloch, Robert; Grabiński, Stefan; Ligotti, Thomas.

Further Reading

Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2005. Introduction to The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabiński, 7–12. London: Dedalus Books.

Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2012. The Stefan Grabiński Website. January 9. http://www.stefangrabinski.org.

DARK FANTASY

Dark fantasy is a loose designation for fiction that mixes elements of the fantasy and horror genres. While this much is clear, any attempt at a stricter definition will run into difficulties. The proportions may vary, with the “dark fantasy” label encompassing both fantasy stories with horrific aspects and horror stories with fantastic aspects, but overall the tendency in the genre is toward a blending of wonder and horror, beauty and ugliness. It might be said that writers of dark fantasy are indifferent to the question of whether their work should be considered horror or fantasy.

There are a number of avenues critics can follow in a search for a more exact definition. For example, they may think about the importance of story outcomes in both genres. As most fantasies seem to possess uplifting endings, it may be that dark fantasy could be defined as fantasy of a more tragic variety, tending toward depressing or bittersweet endings. Some horror stories have more or less happy endings, in which evil is vanquished, yet this does not induce critics generally to regard them as belonging to any special or separate category like dark fantasy. Such stories are simply “lighter” horror stories.

The importance of dreams in both genres is also marked, so critics in search of a definition may look to dreams for a clue. Dreamlike horror fiction is, however, not typically considered dark fantasy either, as delirium and hallucination are common elements of horror fiction properly speaking; however, if the dream has some concrete or consistent aspect, such as locations, place names, and objects, and if that dream is not a vision of any preexisting other world, such as the conventional hell or a familiar, clichéd version of the afterlife, but something original to the tale, then it would be more appropriate to consider it dark fantasy. The otherworld of the Cenobites in Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (which inspired the Hellraiser films) might be close enough to a realization of the religiously canonical hell to push the story out of the genre of dark fantasy. George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, on the other hand, is a haunting vision of a psychedelic pastoral England. While it resembles some earlier works, the dreamlike, pagan landscape MacDonald creates is more an aesthetic idea than a religious convention, and, since horror is secondary to wonder in Phantastes, it is probably more appropriate to label it dark fantasy rather than horror.

Setting, another important aspect for both genres, is also sometimes used to help define dark fantasy. Dark fantasy may be defined as fantasy fiction with a Gothic setting, or with a setting with at least a few Gothic features that play a significant role in the story. Since Gothic horror is already its own genre, dark fantasy might be defined as more modern horror fiction that nevertheless reaches back to Gothic settings.

While dark fantasy is often associated with antiheroes, the mere presence of an antihero is not enough in itself to make a story dark fantasy. It is not clear, for example, that John Gardner’s 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the story of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster, would be called dark fantasy. It might be more correct to think of dark fantasy as fantasy in which the storytellers themselves have taken up an antiheroic point of view. The attitude of the writers of dark fantasy may be the most distinctive feature of the genre, as most dark fantasy stories reflect a skepticism or pessimism about fantasy that is not typical of the nondark style.

Michael Cisco

See also: The Dark Tower; Dreams and Nightmares; The Drowning Girl; Gaiman, Neil; Grant, Charles L.; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; New Weird; The Night Land; Smith, Clark Ashton; Vathek; Wagner, Karl Edward.

Further Reading

Hoppenstand, Gary. 2004. “Francis Stevens: The Woman Who Invented Dark Fantasy.” Introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, ix–xxv. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Kaveney, Roz. 2012. “Dark Fantasy and Paranormal Romance.” In The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 214–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, Caryn G. 2000. “Dark Fantasy.” In The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 31–32. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

DARK GODS

In addition to his singular novel, The Ceremonies (1984), T. E. D. Klein has garnered fame as a horror writer from the reputation of Dark Gods, his 1985 collection of sinister short stories. Though these tales, on the surface of it, are wholly unconnected, some of their pervading themes are interestingly drawn together by the volume’s title, which hints at the existence of monstrous deities. In each of these stories, their is the ominous sense that the Christian God (or indeed a benevolent god of any kind) is nowhere to be found; instead, it is gradually suggested—or revealed—that humans are at the mercy of darker, more malevolent, and ancient forces.

The stories in this collection vividly illustrate why Klein is considered a “master of the horror genre” (Mariconda 1986, 28). Moreover, they serve to highlight some of his favorite and most recurrent themes. In each, he masterfully interweaves primordial horrors with the mundaneness of modernity—hinting, darkly, that people are naïve to assume that their more ancient superstitions are today outmoded. Klein has stated that he believes horror literature is, or should be, “a tradition-conscious genre” (Tibbetts 2011, 51), and his love and knowledge of the field ensures a consistent intertextual quality to his work. Just as The Ceremonies is an homage to Gothic literature, and most especially to Arthur Machen, Dark Gods pays tribute to many of the literary masters of horror and is most consciously indebted to the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Klein’s own style is distinguished by the deliberate vagueness of his horror; there is very little overt violence or monstrosity, as instead he delivers his own brand of the macabre through a series of ominous hints and portents. For the most part, he consciously withholds his monsters, giving only vague and horrible outlines, which readers must then color in themselves with their most personal anxieties. His specialty lies in what Mariconda has called “atmospheric tension” (20); he masterfully creates, in each of these tales, a haunting and tangible ambience of dread.

The collection is comprised of four stories in total. The first of these, “Children of the Kingdom,” centers on the filthy—and supernatural—underbelly of modern-day New York. The narrator, who is interestingly named Mr. Klein, has just placed his grandfather in a rest home. Through his grandfather, he comes to know Father Pistachio, an elderly priest who harbors strange and sinister notions about the origins of humanity. This priest believes, vehemently, that we all originated in Central America, where we lived happily until the sudden arrival of the “Xo Tl’mi-go,” or “usurpadores”: a monstrous race that is part human, part tapeworm. He claims that humans only left America and spread out across the earth as a result of trying to flee these creatures and their lust-driven violence. Slowly, the reader is presented with evidence to suggest these monsters’ continued existence. It transpires that they dwell just beneath us, in the sewers below the cities, and emerge only in the darkness to commit their atrocities. In the climax of the story, there is a citywide blackout during which the usurpadores horrifyingly emerge en masse. When the light returns, no one can describe exactly what has occurred in the darkness, though several of the women in the city have been impregnated in the night. These monsters are merely glimpsed—the reader knows only that they are cold, white, wet, and webbed—and consequently, they are all the more terrifying.

The second tale, “Petey,” follows the story of George and Phyllis, a young couple who have just purchased a huge, isolated, and mysterious home. The story unfolds on the evening of their housewarming party. It transpires that the property was purchased, at great reduction, through underhand means: its previous occupant, an unstable recluse, was forcibly evicted to enable its sale. When he was dragged from his home, this recluse, who had no family at all, screamed repeatedly for his “son,” as he was certain that “Petey” would come to his aid. Who or what “Petey” is, is only gradually revealed by fragmented and unnerving details: the reader discovers the nature of this monstrous entity primarily through a fairy tale and a tarot deck. The fairy tale tells of a lonely farmer who grows a companion—the “Petit Diablo,” or “Little Devil”—who is born with the harvest. Meanwhile, one tarot card, which is out of place in its deck, shows a strange, shapeless entity from behind. This card is repeatedly shown, and the reader discovers, to his or her horror, that its subject gradually turns toward its percipient. The tale ends with George seeing that the monster on the card has now turned to face him fully . . . at the exact same moment that there is a sudden and thunderous knocking at his door. It is implied that the insidious monster, “Petey,” is now born and has now arrived to exact his “father’s” revenge. This is the monster from the fairy tale, and the screams of “Petey” were in fact of “Petit” as the wronged recluse summoned his creation.

The third tale, “Black Man with a Horn,” centers on an old man and the interest he takes in the evil ways of an ancient Malaysian tribe, the Chauchas. His interest is sparked by a meeting with a stranger, the Reverend Mortimer. Mortimer, who is returning from Malaysia, believes he has been targeted by this ancient tribe, who have set a demon on him—the titular Black Man with a Horn, or “shugaron” in the native tongue. Soon enough, the reverend mysteriously disappears—leaving only a few fragments of lung tissue behind him—and the protagonist sets out to discover the reverend’s fate. He studies the history of the “shugaron” and discovers that it is not, in fact, a “black man with a horn,” but a monster with a horn-like mouth, designed to violently suck its victims and turn their lungs inside out. Once again, the reader does not see this monster directly, but increasingly fears its proximity. The protagonist realizes, by the end of the tale, that he is the demon’s next intended victim.

“Nadelman’s God,” the final tale in the collection, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 1986 and is heralded by many as Klein’s greatest piece of horror fiction. The story follows the protagonist, Nadelman, and his interactions with a young man named Arlen Huntoon, who reads one of Nadelman’s poems and becomes obsessed with its content. Huntoon believes that the poem, which is about an alternative and wholly malignant god, is no work of fiction; to his mind, it is a “cookbook” for creating hideous disciples to serve this monstrous divinity. Consequently, he follows the poem’s “instructions” and builds his very own terrifying effigy. Huntoon is soon killed and then Nadelman is haunted by this hideous statue. It is uncertain, even at the end, if Huntoon is simply mad, or if his twisted religion is in some way real: in other words, the reader has no idea if Nadelman’s god—a truly monstrous deity we never actually see—is in any way real. This eerie little tale preys, hauntingly, on the dreamer’s paranoia: what if, asks Klein, in imagining monsters, we are truly creating them?

Dark Gods illustrates the terrifying vagueness of horror for which Klein is renowned. In each of these tales, he posits truly frightening entities, each of which is merely glimpsed peripherally—and consequently embeds itself all the more deeply in the reader’s subconscious. With each story, it becomes increasingly apparent that humans are now devoid of an omniscient and benevolent deity: they are all at the mercy of dark gods indeed.

Elizabeth Parker

See also: The Ceremonies; Klein, T. E. D.; Machen, Arthur; Monsters.

Further Reading

Mariconda, Steven J. 1986. “The Hints and Portents of T. E. D. Klein.” Studies in Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 (Summer), 19–28.

Tibbetts, John C. 2011. “Certain Things Associated with the Night: T. E. D. Klein.” In The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media, 51–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

THE DARK TOWER

The Dark Tower is a series of books by Stephen King comprising eight volumes published between 1982 and 2012. The main narrative comprises The Gunslinger (1982), The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), Wizard and Glass (1997), The Wolves of the Calla (2003), The Song of Susanna (2004), and The Dark Tower (2004). In addition, there is the novel The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012).

Drawing on Robert Browning’s epic poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855), King’s story tells of Roland Deschain, a gunslinger in a dying land called Mid-World, who is on a quest to find the Dark Tower, the nexus of all creation. Around the tower coalesce a series of beams that bind an infinite number of parallel universes. Those beams are dying, which will make the Tower fall and mean the end of everything. Roland is aided by a group of fellow travelers, known as ka-tet, drawn via mystic doors from New York City as it exists in various worlds and times. They are Eddie from the 1980s, Susanna from the 1960s, and Jake from the 1970s. With them is Oy, a raccoon-like creature from Mid-World.

The Dark Tower is King’s cult work, read by relatively few of his millions of Constant Readers. In part this is due to its history. Written in the late 1960s, the first volume in the series, The Gunslinger, was first published serially in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1978 and 1981. In 1982 it was released as a limited edition of 10,000 copies by Donald M. Grant Publishers, making The Gunslinger a novel few of his fans knew. Grant published the second part in 1987, which was then released to the mass market by Sphere along with The Gunslinger, but sales of all the novels remained comparatively small.

The other reason why the series has not matched King’s usual success is that it is a fantasy rather than a horror text, and thus has not fit the King brand. However, during the 1980s and 1990s The Dark Tower exerted an increasing influence on King, whose novels began to connect to Roland’s adventures. Randall Flagg from The Stand (1978) appears in Wizard and Glass, while The Waste Lands features the enormous turtle from It (1986). Such links to his wider works increased in the final books, written after King was almost killed in an accident in 1999. Father Callaghan from ’Salem’s Lot appears, as does Ted Brautigan from Hearts in Atlantis (1999) and also King himself.

Because it is not considered part of the horror genre, The Dark Tower is rarely discussed as a canonical King text such as The Shining or The Stand. Yet because of this interconnectedness it is arguably the most significant of his works, and one that may come to define King’s legacy, not as a bestselling author, but as a writer and creator of worlds. In 2017, after a decade in development hell, a film adaptation titled The Dark Tower was released, starring Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as the sinister Man in Black.

Simon Brown

See also: Dark Fantasy; It; King, Stephen.

Further Reading

Furth, Robin. 2012. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

McAleer, Patrick. 2009. Inside the Dark Tower Series: Art, Evil and Intertextuality in the Stephen King Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Vincent, Bev. 2013. The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy. New York: Penguin.

DATLOW, ELLEN (1949–)

Ellen Datlow is an influential editor and publishing professional whose work as an anthologist of both reprint and original fiction has had a significant impact on the consideration of anthologies as important showcases for fantastic fiction. A number of stories first published in her anthologies have won the most prestigious awards in the horror and fantasy fields.

Datlow was hired as associate fiction editor at Omni magazine in 1979 and became fiction editor in 1981, a position she held until 1998 before moving on to online magazines Event Horizon and Sci Fiction. Between 1984 and 1989, she edited seven volumes of science fiction stories culled from the pages of Omni.

In 1988 Datlow and Terri Windling began editing The Year’s Best Fantasy (a.k.a. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as of 1991), a series that would run twenty-one volumes with Datlow picking the horror and (until 2004, when Kelly Link and Gavin Grant assumed duties) Windling the fantasy fiction. The series showcased the best short horror and fantasy fiction published in the decades when those genres established themselves as major categories in trade publishing. In 2009, after the discontinuation of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Datlow began editing The Best Horror of the Year.

In 1990, drawing on horror submissions that would not have been appropriate for Omni’s science fiction readership, Datlow edited Blood Is Not Enough, an anthology of new and reprint vampire fiction that expanded the definition of the vampire’s predatory proclivities. She followed this with an anthology of erotic horror and science fiction stories, Alien Sex (1990), and a second anthology of nontraditional vampire fiction, A Whisper of Blood (1991). In 1993, Datlow and Windling edited Snow White, Blood Red, the first in a series of anthologies in which contemporary writers of fantasy and horror retell classic fairy and folk tales for modern readers.

The themes of Datlow’s anthologies show considerable range and variety: sexual horror in Little Deaths (1994); supernatural cats in Twists of the Tale (1996); tributes to H. P. Lovecraft in Lovecraft Unbound (2009), Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014), and Children of Lovecraft (2016); movies and filmmaking in The Cutting Room (2014); carnivals and circuses in Nightmare Carnival (2014); and dolls and other simulacra in The Doll Collection (2015).

As of 2016 Datlow has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award forty-three times and won ten times, the most for any one person. She was awarded the Horror Writer Association’s Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2011 and 2014, respectively.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Link, Kelly; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

“Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling: Depth and Heart.” 2016. Locus 76, no. 6: (June): 12–13, 56–58.

“Ellen Datlow: Horror’s Queen.” 2001. Locus 46, no. 3 (March): 6, 83–84.

Gee, Robin. 1990. “Close-up: Ellen Datlow.” In 1990 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, edited by Robin Gee, 368. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books.

Hoagland, Ericka. 2009. “Datlow, Ellen.” In Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin A. Reid, 81–82. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Interview with Ellen Datlow

October 2016

Datlow here draws on her long career as an editor of horror, science fiction, and fantasy to talk about what defines horror literature as such, and to clarify its relationship with science fiction and several other well-defined genres such as Westerns and crime fiction. She also discusses her editorial process for identifying high-quality horror fiction, and she describes what she views as the negative impact of the late twentieth-century boom in horror publishing on horror literature itself. She concludes by offering some recommendations for classic and contemporary horror reading. In the latter capacity, she identifies what she regards as the most important trend in contemporary horror publishing.

Matt Cardin: Early in your career you distinguished yourself as a science fiction editor. Then you became prominently associated with horror. These two have a long history together, with the blending of horror and science fiction having yielded interesting—and in some cases, classic—results in both areas. What do you see as the relationship between SF and horror? Where does the one start and the other leave off? And why do they work so well together?

Ellen Datlow: There is a long tradition of SF/horror in literature: Frankenstein, The Fly, Who Goes There?, “Leiningen vs. the Ants,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Midwich Cuckoos, and much of Harlan Ellison’s short fiction, such as “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

It’s easy to see how dystopian and postapocalyptic fiction (Ellison’s novella A Boy and His Dog, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) blur over into horror, as dystopias by their nature are horrific. So it’s quite a natural relationship.

Horror, which is more defined by tone than anything else, combines well with several genres—as it’s not in itself a genre. Romance mixed with horror becomes the classic Gothic; Westerns as written by Joe R. Lansdale and James Lee Burke often contain elements of horror. Crime fiction such as the novels of Thomas Harris featuring Hannibal Lector are most definitely horror.

MC: What are your guiding principles as an editor and anthologist of horror fiction? Obviously, themed anthologies, such as your various projects centered on vampirism and Lovecraft, have their own specific sets of needs and rules. But when it comes to your “best of” anthologies, how do you go about deciding what to include? What, in your view, marks a given work of short-form horror fiction as being truly good, or even great?

ED: While reading year round for my next Best Horror anthology, I make a note when I find an especially good story that is horrific. Then, when the time comes for me to begin making decisions, I count up the wordage of the stories I’ve marked and reread them. I know how many words I have in my annual, and I always end up with as much as twice the number of words I can fit. So the rest of the process is eliminating stories to bring the book down to a reasonable size. Sometimes I’ll read a story three or four times. If I still love a story after rereading it: still find it startling, still find that it provides a deep abiding feel of unease, that it continues to unnerve me—that story will likely end up in the book.

During my career I’ve reprinted some stories multiple times. Those are the stories that stick with me, that continue to impress me. They’re the ones that I consider the best over the years. New stories are added to that “best” over time.

But essentially for any anthology, it must be the editor’s personal reaction to each story that counts.

MC: In addition to vampirism and Lovecraftian fiction, your themed horror anthologies have focused on sexual horror, carnivals and circuses, dolls, and movies. Why do you think horror is so portable, as it were? Why is it so applicable to virtually any type of plot, setting, theme, or motif? And what exactly characterizes it? What makes a given story a horror story instead of (or in addition to) something else?

ED: I think I started to answer that in my response to the first question. Horror is not a genre. It’s a tone, a way of approaching character, plot, and place. In a horror story the protagonist loses something—things are not what they seem. There is evil lurking—underground, around the corner, in an abandoned house. Even when characters survive, they usually lose something: their innocence, their sanity, their certainty in the way things should work. In addition to SF/horror, there’s supernatural horror consisting of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, ghouls, and so on. And there’s the conte-cruel, nicely defined by H. P. Lovecraft as fiction “in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.”

MC: You worked right through the great horror publishing boom of the 1980s and 1990s, so you had a “boots on the ground” perspective on the whole thing. What do you see as the lasting results of that phenomenon? How is the field different today because of what happened then?

ED: It hurt the field immensely. Because almost every book publisher found it expedient to create a horror line and thus fill a specific number of “slots” per month, a lot of mediocre horror was published. And most of those books did not sell. This created the perception that no horror but the big names such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice sold, and also that most horror was bad. It also encouraged a spate of awful, generic book covers that didn’t help. It’s taken decades for horror as a “market” to recover. It demonstrated quite clearly that it’s better for publishers and editors to be passionate about what they publish, than just randomly publish anything that’s submitted. If they care nothing about what they’re publishing, why should potential readers care?

Some writers who were regularly selling novels and receiving high advances discovered that once the bubble burst, they couldn’t sell their books at all, or else couldn’t make as much money with them as they had. Some writers stopped writing.

The best writers continued to create ambitious horror and to sell it. Some writers switched gears to concentrate on crime/thriller writing. Serial killer novels became quite popular for a period of time; they were often horrific but were not designated horror.

Today a lot of horror novels are published by mainstream publishers, and the reader must guess (or read reviews) to discover which are horror and which are not. It all depends on your definition of horror. I’m more open than some others in the field to what I consider horror.

I don’t think anyone in the 1980s or 1990s could have foreseen the range of short horror fiction being published today, especially by young writers from different cultures. This is a thrilling time for anyone who loves short stories. Horror stories are being published in venues ranging from small and large literary magazines, to science fiction and fantasy magazines, to webzines of all kinds. The challenge is finding them. There were never many horror magazines; even in the pulp era, most of those magazines published a mix of horror, dark fantasy, and fantasy.

MC: What classic works and authors of horror fiction would you recommend to the interested reader who might be looking to further his or her knowledge of the field? Can you name a few that are absolutely indispensable?

ED: As a short story reader, I advise readers to pick up anthologies and single author collections. Anthologies such as Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, the huge reprint anthology edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise that included mainstream writers along with the Gothic writers. A Second Century of Creepy Stories, edited by Hugh Walpole. The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural. Karl Edward Wagner’s old Bests of the Year. My old Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror. Checking out current Bests of the year is the quickest, easiest means to find out what’s going on in the field from year to year. Those are all reprint anthologies.

Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces, published in 1980, featured all new stories by a variety of writers. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edward Gorey, and Joyce Carol Oates rubbed shoulders with Gene Wolfe, Lisa Tuttle, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Theodore Sturgeon, and Joe Haldeman, among others.

MC: What about contemporary horror? Who and what should readers be watching? What are the most important trends? Where is the cutting edge located?

ED: Short horror fiction is in a golden age. That’s something I and my fellow horror editors all agree upon. There are fabulous short story writers not only from the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but from Japan, India, and the Philippines. Some names to watch: Priya Sharma, Alyssa Wong, Usman T. Malik, Carmen Maria Machado, Ray Cluley, Tom Johnstone, Tamsyn Muir, Livia Llewellyn, Alison Littlewood, and Carole Johnstone. That’s just a tiny example of relatively new writers.

Then there are more established writers working in SF/F/H who are less noticed by horror readers because they do play the field: Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Dale Bailey, Garth Nix, Kelly Link, Kaaron Warren, Angela Slatter, Pat Cadigan, Margo Lanagan, Paul McAuley, Stephen Graham Jones.

I could name a few dozen more easily.

In my opinion, the most important trend is the influx of new voices from non-Western cultures and an increase of females and people of color into the field (at least in short fiction). Small presses are filling the gap in single-author collections left by large, mainstream publishers who only publish them rarely.

MC: With the field being so broad and bristling right now, do you have any parting advice for readers who want to make the most of this new golden age of horror fiction?

ED: Horror stories can be found in many more places than you might think. Because horror is as much about tone as anything else, it can reside in all kinds of fiction. Literary journals, crime magazines and anthologies, science fiction and fantasy magazines all publish horror. So be open-minded.

DE LA MARE, WALTER (1873–1956)

Walter John de la Mare was born in Kent, England, on April 25, 1873, into a wealthy family (his father, James, worked at the Bank of England) and grew up to become one of twentieth-century Britain’s most prolific writers. A short story writer and novelist, de la Mare is probably best known for his poetry for children, among which “The Listeners” (1912) is most remembered by legions of schoolchildren and students. He also made significant contributions to the horror genre.

“Seaton’s Aunt”: A Tale of (Possible) Psychic
Vampirism

Published originally in The London Mercury in 1922, and collected in 1923 in The Riddle, and Other Stories, “Seaton’s Aunt” is one of de la Mare’s finest and most chilling psychological horror stories, and one of the foremost examples of the inconclusive ghost story for which he was known. The eponymous “Aunt” is the relative of Arthur Seaton, one of the narrator’s schoolmates, with whom he agrees to stay during the holidays. Seaton’s aunt is obsessed with death, and Seaton believes she is in communion with demonic spirits. While the narrator, Withers, refuses to believe that Seaton’s aunt wishes her nephew dead, he too becomes disturbed by her increasingly erratic behavior, and the story concludes with the death of Seaton in mysterious circumstances.

The strength of the story as a work of psychological horror lies precisely in the reader’s confusion as to whether Seaton’s aunt truly is a psychic vampire who wishes him harm, or whether the reader believes, with Withers, that Seaton is embellishing details. While de la Mare provides evidence to substantiate both viewpoints, the underlying issue is not whether something horrifying is happening, but what form exactly the horror takes. If one sides with the more rational Withers, then one must acknowledge that the aunt’s neglect of her charge is a consequence of disturbing psychological abuse that it is hinted she experiences at Seaton’s hand. De la Mare successfully heightens the ambiguity of the narrative by couching the real human horrors of ageism and emotional abuse in ambiguous supernaturalism, and succeeds in crafting a horror narrative that disturbs on a number of levels. The story was masterfully brought to life on screen as part of the British supernatural anthology television series Shades of Darkness in 1983.

Ian Kinane

After an education at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School in London, de la Mare worked as a statistician for Standard Oil Company from 1890 to 1908, during which time he began to write. His first published work, a short story entitled “Kismet,” was published in The Sketch magazine in 1895, after which de la Mare applied himself to compiling a collection of poetry for children—which later became his first published book, Songs of Childhood, published in 1902 under the pen name “Walter Ramal.” This was followed by his first novel, Henry Brocken (1904), an intriguing romance in which the wanderer-protagonist journeys through literature, encountering all manner of characters from Jane Eyre and Rochester to Shakespeare’s Titania and Bottom. It was not until 1912, though, that de la Mare achieved literary renown for his children’s collection The Listeners and Other Poems (1912).

Though comprising a relatively fractional amount of his literary output, de la Mare’s horror and supernatural writings are among the best of his work. Most of this writing can be characterized by the inconclusive nature of its horror and/or supernatural elements, as de la Mare deliberately hints at but never explicitly reveals to the reader the source of apparent supernatural happenings within his stories. For example, in one of his most disturbing psychological horror stories, “Seaton’s Aunt” (1922), de la Mare intimates that the title character, the elderly aunt of the narrator’s school friend, Seaton, with whom he visits, may be a psychic vampire in communion with the devil, and that she is out to hurt her nephew. While nothing explicit is ever shown, de la Mare carefully manipulates the reader’s perceptions of Seaton’s aunt and Seaton himself, so as to heighten the story’s ambiguity. At the end, when Seaton dies under mysterious circumstances, both the narrator and the reader remain unsure as to the cause, and the potentially supernatural elements of the story are left unexplained.

In addition to the supernatural, much of de la Mare’s work is concerned with the power of the human imagination and with the psychological connections between the human world and the paranormal realm. Spirit possession is a common trope in de la Mare’s work, particularly in The Return (1910), the author’s second novel, in which the protagonist falls asleep on a grave on unconsecrated ground and awakes bearing the physical appearance of the grave’s occupant. Spirits and ghosts also feature heavily, or are certainly strongly hinted at. The haunting central image of “The Listeners” (1912), for example, is of the crowd of silent, phantom listeners who throng the seemingly empty house to which the protagonist has journeyed. In many of his short stories, de la Mare’s spirits and ghosts are intricately tied to literature or to literary figures: in “The Green Room” (1925), a young man is haunted by the ghost of a poet when he publishes her poetry posthumously; and in the novelette “A Revenant” (1936), a literature academic is haunted by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe after he insults the writer’s work.

Haunted houses also feature greatly in de la Mare’s writing. In “Out of the Deep” (1923), the hero-protagonist returns to his dead uncle’s house, in which memories of his childhood proceed to haunt him before he dies. In “A Recluse” (1930), the owner of a house, with whom the protagonist visits, discovers his host’s dead body and realizes he has been conversing with the dead man’s ghost all along. In “The House” (1936), the protagonist is so haunted by his own childhood memories that he becomes absorbed within the walls of his old home.

The great stylistic strength of de la Mare’s atmospheric supernatural writing is matched by the keen insight he possesses into humankind, and by his reflections on the very real-world, human tragedies that befall us all. In his work, de la Mare ruminates on isolation, human existence, and the limits of love, and it is perhaps for his consideration of these deeper emotions that we might recognize the painful human element underlining all of his supernatural work.

While his 1921 novel, Memoirs of a Midget, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and his Collected Stories for Children won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1947, de la Mare was also a great literary critic who published some very insightful nonfiction works on contemporary literature, including Some Women Novelists of the Seventies (1929) and Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930). His writing proved a great influence on later authors of supernatural fiction, particularly H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell. Declining the offer of a knighthood in both 1924 and 1931, de la Mare continued to write until his death on June 22, 1956, following which he was buried in the crypt in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Ian Kinane

See also: “The Listeners”; “Out of the Deep”; The Return.

Further Reading

Adrian, Jack. 1998. “De la Mare, Walter.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 174–177. London: St. James Press.

Crawford, Gary William. 1992. “On the Edge: The Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 53–56. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

Whistler, Theresa. 1993. Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare. London: Gerald Duckworth.

“THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER”

Widely considered one of Ambrose Bierce’s finest tales of horror, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” was first published in The Wave on December 19, 1891. Two years later, it appeared in his short fiction collection Can Such Things Be? It is significant both as one of Bierce’s finest horror tales and as a kind of forerunner of the figure of the zombie that later became so central to horror fiction and film.

The tale begins with the eponymous protagonist waking in an eerie forest from a “dreamless sleep” and uttering the name “Catherine Larue.” He journeys through the forest and encounters the corpse of his mother. The second section of the story moves to Frayser’s early life in Nashville, Tennessee, where it is revealed that he is a bad poet and that he and his mother possess an inordinately close bond. Despite her objections, she allows her son to travel to San Francisco, where he is kidnapped and spends a number of years at sea. The tale then moves back to the present, where bounty hunters—a deputy named Holker and a detective named Jaralson—are seeking a criminal named Branscom, who is wanted for murder. As they enter a graveyard, they find Frayser’s strangled corpse lying atop a grave that, as they soon discover, is that of Catherine Larue. Putting together the facts, Holker recalls that Larue is Branscom’s real name and that the woman he murdered was named Frayser. The story ends with Holker and Jaralson hearing “the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh which had no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert. . . . a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable!” (Bierce 1984, 71).

“That Most Dreadful of All Existences”: “The Death of Halpin Frayser” as an Early Zombie

“The Death of Halpin Frayser” is often described as one of the forerunners of modern zombie fiction, and it is easy to see why when reading passages like the following. Notably, it not only features what inevitably appears to the modern reader as a zombie or zombie-like creature (right down to the familiar motif of the reanimated loved one who is horribly like and yet unlike the former self), but it does so in the context of the exquisite tone of dreadful nightmare that Bierce generates throughout the story.

The apparition confronting the dreamer in the haunted wood—the thing so like, yet so unlike, his mother—was horrible! It stirred no love nor longings in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past—inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. He tried to turn and run from before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the lustreless orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood—a body without a soul! In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. (Bierce 1914, 141)

Matt Cardin

Source: Bierce, Ambrose. 1914. “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” In Neale’s Monthly Magazine. Volume 3. New York: Neale’s Publishing.

Dark and unsettling in tone, oblique in upshot and meaning, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” contains two notable features that have particularly interested readers and critics alike: the Oedipus complex and a nascent form of what would later emerge as the major horror archetype of the zombie. Regarding the former, the tale does, in fact, suggest an unnatural and too-close relationship between mother and son, resulting in tragedy. Regarding the latter, the story is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of zombie fiction, as attested by, among many other things, the fact that both it and Bierce merited inclusion in 2014’s Encyclopedia of the Zombie (2014), where the story is described as “bleak and elliptical,” and as one of several stories illustrating the fact that “In Bierce’s world, the dead rarely lie still, and at times may not even be dead” (Bleiler 16). One reading of “Halpin Frayser” has it that Frayser was killed by his mother’s corpse, but the matter is inconclusive since the story’s events can be interpreted both supernaturally and naturally. In any event, the judgment of H. P. Lovecraft, who counted Bierce as a major influence, is generally shared by those who are familiar with the story; in his groundbreaking essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft grouped “The Death of Halpin Frayser” among several others in Bierce’s body of work that have a “grim malevolence stalking through all of them,” and that “stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing” (Lovecraft 2012, 66).

E. Kate Stewart

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Zombies.

Further Reading

Bierce, Ambrose. 1984. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, compiled with commentary by Ernest Jerome Hopkins. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Bleiler, Richard. 2014. “Ambrose Bierce.” In Encyclopedia of the Zombie: The Walking Dead in Popular Culture and Myth, edited by June Michele Pulliam and Anthony J. Fonseca, 15–17. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Talley, Sharon. 2009. “The Failed Journey to Self-Understanding in ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” In Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death, 17–28. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

“THE DEMON LOVER”

Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” (1944) is a compelling and ambiguous ghost story in the mold of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Bowen, in fact, was one of the most important Jamesian writers of the twentieth century, a savvy chronicler of middle-class life who was deeply attentive to the subtlest shifts of psychological mood in her characters. This sensibility served her well in the modest handful of truly eerie ghost stories she wrote during her lifetime, vivid evocations of the eruption of the uncanny into mundane contemporary settings.

Set during World War II, “The Demon Lover” centers on Mrs. Drover, a prosaic middle-aged housewife who has come to check on her shuttered London home, her family having decamped to the country to escape the blitz. There she finds a letter, apparently from a former lover who died during the First World War, promising to return to claim her. Mrs. Drover at first refuses to believe the evidence of her senses: that some strange supernatural agency has intervened into her stolid middle-class life, disrupting its orderly norms forever. Bowen sustains an atmosphere of mounting dread, bordering on hysteria, as Mrs. Drover struggles to come to grips with her experience, and it culminates in an explosion of shrieking terror that lingers long in the reader’s mind.

The story’s title cites the folkloric tradition of demon-lover ballads, in which deceased suitors haunt and possess their former flames, but Bowen gives the genre a Freudian twist, as Mrs. Drover’s passionate past wells up, like the return of the repressed (the Freudian psychoanalytic term for the tendency of unconscious thoughts and emotions to reappear spontaneously in altered form in consciousness and behavior), and overwhelms her mundane present. As in James’s pitch-perfect novella, the reader is kept in suspense with regard to the reality of the demonic threat: it could be authentic, or it could be the product of a disordered mind. The tale also captures the wartime climate vividly, conveying a sense of everyday life disrupted and besieged by malign forces. It is significant that Mrs. Drover lost her lover during an earlier spasm of military violence; indeed, the story strongly suggests that the cataclysm of war is so powerful, it can shake loose potent demons of memory and regret.

Bowen, who died in 1973, was one of the finest British short story writers of the twentieth century. “The Demon Lover” is a classic.

Rob Latham

See also: James, Henry; Psychological Horror; The Turn of the Screw.

Further Reading

Fraustino, Daniel V. 1980. “Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’: Psychosis or Seduction?” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (4): 483–487.

Hughes, Douglas A. 1972. “Cracks in the Psyche: Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover.’” Studies in Short Fiction 10, no. 4: 411–413.

Thompson, Terry W. 2010. “‘A Face You Do Not Expect’: The Female Other in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 54 (Spring). http://jsse.revues.org/1036.

DERLETH, AUGUST (1909–1971)

August Derleth was an American writer and editor of fantasy, horror, and science fiction whose reputation is inextricably bound up with that of H. P. Lovecraft, the writer for whom he was a leading exponent and advocate. As a publisher, Derleth was instrumental in establishing the specialty press as a driving force in genre publishing.

Derleth’s first professional sale, “Bat’s Belfry,” appeared in the May 1926 issue of Weird Tales when he was just seventeen years old. Over the next twenty-eight years, he published several hundred more stories in virtually every magazine that catered to readers of horror and fantasy fiction, and became the second most published author in Weird Tales. Among Derleth’s influences, as he noted in the introduction to his first short fiction collection, Someone in the Dark (1941), were M. R. James and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and although he wrote on a wide variety of horror themes, many of his stories were in the genteel ghost story tradition associated with those writers. Derleth acknowledged that most of his short weird fiction was written as filler, and he seems to have thought more highly of his mainstream fiction concerned with the people and history of Wisconsin’s Sac Prairie, which was earning him a reputation as a distinguished writer of regional fiction in the1930s and 1940s. In the introduction to his third weird fiction collection, Not Long for This World (1948), Derleth dismissed as mediocre most of his weird fiction for his first two decades as a writer, but he did produce several outstanding weird tales, among them the humorous ghost story “Pacific 421” (1944), the amusing vampire story “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?” (1952), the “invisible friend” story “Mr. George” (1947, as by “Stephen Grendon”), and the “evil place” story “The Lonesome Place” (1948). The simplicity of Derleth’s weird tales made them ideal for adaptation to other media, and thus “The Return of Andrew Bentley” (1933) and “Colonel Markesan” (1934), both written in collaboration with Mark Schorer, as well as “A Wig for Miss Devore” (1943), were all televised for Boris Karloff’s Thriller. “Logoda’s Heads” (1939) was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Derleth began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s, and he was one of the first writers to attempt a pastiche of Lovecraft’s fiction when “The Lair of the Star Spawn” (written in collaboration with Mark Schorer) was published in the August 1932 issue of Weird Tales. In the 1940s and 1950s, in a cycle of Lovecraft pastiches published mostly in Weird Tales and later collected in The Mask of Cthulhu (1958), and in the episodic novel The Trail of Cthulhu (1962), Derleth began to codify as the Cthulhu Mythos the myth pattern behind much of Lovecraft’s weird fiction and the tales that Lovecraft’s Weird Tales colleagues had written in the spirit of his fiction. This entailed recasting Lovecraft’s extradimensional monsters as earth elementals and rethinking Lovecraft’s horror of cosmic indifference in terms of battles between good and evil entities. Derleth pursued the same strategy in his so-called posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft, in which he expanded on incomplete fragments left among Lovecraft’s papers, as in The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), or elaborated on ideas in Lovecraft’s commonplace book for stories that appeared in The Survivor and Others (1957), The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959), and The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966). This culminated in the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969), for which Derleth collected stories from Lovecraft and his weird fiction colleagues as well as new works by writers whom Derleth had authorized to contribute to the Cthulhu Mythos, having discouraged other writers over the preceding decades. Derleth’s regulation of the Cthulhu Mythos and his protection of it as a brand associated with Arkham House, the publishing company that he founded, is regarded as controversial by many of his critics.

Derleth founded Arkham House with fellow Lovecraft acolyte Donald Wandrei in 1939 when the two were unable to interest trade publishers in a collection of Lovecraft’s fiction. Initially, Derleth planned only to publish Lovecraft’s fiction and letters under the Arkham House imprint, but he expanded his program and eventually published first hardcover collections of short fiction by many of the best writers from Weird Tales, including (among others) himself, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Henry S. Whitehead, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. While running Arkham House, Derleth edited anthologies of weird fiction for other publishers—among them Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), The Night Side (1947), and The Sleeping and the Dead (1947)—that were top-heavy with contributions from Arkham House authors. Arkham House was the first of many specialty fantasy, horror, and science fiction publishers to come into existence in the twentieth century, and its success made a considerable impact on modern genre publishing.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; The Lurker at the Threshold; Wandrei, Donald; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Copper, Basil. 2008. “August Derleth: A Giant Remembered.” In Basil Copper: A Life in Books, edited by Stephen Jones, 56–63. Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1998. “August Derleth.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 177–180. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

Long, Frank Belknap. 2009. “The Contributions of August Derleth to the Supernatural Horror Story.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 466–473. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press. Originally published in Return to Derleth: Selected Essays, vol. 2, edited by James P. Roberts (White Hawk Press, 1995).

Price, E. Hoffmann. 2001. “August W. Derleth.” In Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others, 267–295. Memories of the Pulp Fiction Era. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Spencer, Paul. 1992. “The Shadow over Derleth.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 114–119. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

Tweet, Roald D. 1982. “August Derleth.” Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume II, edited by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Scribners.

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

The Devil Rides Out, first published in 1934, is a novel by the British author Dennis Wheatley, who was known for his novels of occult horror infused with conservative values. It is the first and most famous of his eight black magic novels.

Wheatley had an encyclopedic knowledge of and fascination with the occult, which underpins the idea of summoning interdimensional creatures from the otherworld and makes logical both the likelihood that, as in this novel, the devil could appear at an inn when a group of friends deliberately make a magic circle, and that faith, community, trust (all good, wartime values), occult knowledge, and muscle could control and defeat its monstrous powers. Like Wheatley himself, his recurring character, the Duke de Richleau, an occult investigator, has a fine library containing occult masterpieces, and he takes his impeccable research to far-fetched but logical extremes. The duke and his tough, strongly built friend Rex van Ryn pit their wits against a satanic cult in the British countryside in The Devil Rides Out, which presents a blend of imperial adventure and the occult. While staying at a country inn, the duke and his friends are endangered by the advent of the devil, a terrifying hoofed beast. They “could see the cabbalistic characters between the circles that ringed the pentacle, and the revolving bookcase, like a dark shadow beyond it, through the luminous mist. An awful stench of decay” (Wheatley 1934, 99). However, they fling a powerful jewel into the center of the circle, causing searing pain, destroying it and its power. As with Bram Stoker’s crucifix- and gun-wielding masculine vampire hunters in Dracula (1897), forceful men, harnessing occult and religious lore and objects, keep the violent, intrusive forces of evil at bay though they howl, beat their wings, or stamp their hooves.

Wheatley’s horror is clean cut. Good and evil are distinct, and conservative morality regarding sexual behavior predominates. In The Devil Rides Out evil takes over bodies and souls of local people, who are nightly found dancing in circles in hollows in the darkened countryside lit with garish fires, clad in robes or seminaked, their souls in thrall to the devil. However, law, order, decency, fast cars, decisive action, and religious symbols beat back the forces of darkness, preventing the devil from riding out freely into the shires. The legacy of the investment by Wheatley and others in occult knowledge fused with adventure fiction emerges in much modern horror and fantasy, as in the character of librarian Giles in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Heroism, occult knowledge, and foreign evil reappear in the Indiana Jones films.

The Devil Rides Out was adapted to film in 1968 by Britain’s Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and with a screenplay by Richard Matheson. Released in the United States as The Devil’s Bride, the film version is widely regarded as an excellent example of occult horror cinema.

Gina Wisker

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Haggard, H. Rider; Occult Detectives; She; Wheatley, Dennis.

Further Reading

Baker, Phil. 2011. The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus.

Caines, Michael. 2013. “Feasting with Dennis Wheatley.” The TLS Blog at The Times Literary Supplement. December 31. http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2013/12/feasting-with-dennis-wheatley.html.

Wheatley, Dennis. 1934. The Devil Rides Out. London: Hutchinson.

Wisker, Gina. 1993. “Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: The Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 99–110. London: Pluto.

DEVILS AND DEMONS

Devils and demons refer to specific monsters and minor deities from the occult and religious imagination and are often connected to other magical creatures such as witches and necromancers. Historically, demons can be good, bad, or neutral. Despite this, demon narratives frequently represent them as malicious personifications of evil. Demons have no single origin, although researchers in the area of demonology and ancient religions agree that they are one of the oldest forms of supernatural belief found in various occult and religious writings dating as far back as the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Representations of devils and demons are diverse and manifold and have been located in Egyptian, Babylonian, African, Persian, and ancient Iranian literatures. In pharaonic Egypt, demons were categorized by the illnesses that they created. In the ancient Persian culture of modern-day Iran, they were reputed to live in caves and enchant young women into marrying them. In European pagan folklore, they appear as benign nature spirits. In Christian theology, demons are malignant former angels that accompanied Satan in the fall from heaven. They are also frequently referred to in grimoires, a modern and European term to describe books of ancient knowledge and magical spells written during the medieval period. Grimoires had many purposes both practical and philosophical. The name demon is derived from the Greek word daimon, meaning god-like power and knowledge. Thus, one of the main purposes of grimoires was to obtain knowledge and power over nature and other worlds by summoning demons, angels, and other supernatural spirits. The sixteenth-century German legend of Faust is one of the most famous stories of the dangers of meddling with magic and demons. In the story, Faust uses a grimoire to conjure the demon Mephistopheles and bargain his soul for twenty-four years of power and pleasure. Needless to say, things don’t end well for Faust.

During the eighteenth century, there was a revival of interest in demonology and grimoires among writers and intellectuals. The interest increased throughout the nineteenth century, led by the publication of Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1804), James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (1818), and the renaissance of interest in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–1321). A serious intellectual interest in the supernatural occult was maintained into the twentieth century by British occultist Aleister Crowley. In The Book of the Law (1904), Crowley claimed that a new religion called Thelema was dictated to him by a demon entity called Aiwass. Demon summoning, however, was not a frequent activity for a lot of occultists, and, throughout its long revival, the occult came to be associated with things secret and recondite, rather than with a direct knowledge of demons. Nonetheless, imaginative depictions of demons in art, philosophy, and literature remained throughout the fin de siècle (late nineteenth-century) period and well into the twentieth century.

This was nowhere more true than in the burgeoning genre of horror fiction, which frequently features demons as nightmarish visions of metaphysical fallenness, moral temptation, and affliction. The use of demons in horror literature was concretized by the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in which the fall of the character Ambrose is partly attributable to a licentious female demon called Mathilda. The demon lover as sexual predator, figure of conflict, and metaphor for unhealthy passions prevailed in European and American horror fiction. In those stories that center on a female protagonist, the demon often acts as misogynistic punishment for women who have stepped outside the perimeters of socially acceptable behavior. In those that focus on men, the demon lover motif tends to be a figure of decadence and moral ambiguity, signifying the sensualism, unhealthy obsessions, and queer sexuality connected to artistic genius. At the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the demon contributed to the iconic representation of urban horror in stories such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890). Representations of demonic queerness are also present but subverted in the works of late twentieth-century horror author Clive Barker—for example, in the sadomasochistic Cenobites of The Hellbound Heart (1986) and Baphomet the demon king of Meridian in Cabal (1988).

The linking of demons to children is also prevalent in the horror literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diabolical sexual assaults and deformed children in Machen’s other stories are drawn from descriptions of incubi and succubi in the medieval occult. Similar devils and demons, distinguished by grotesque breeding, moral decay, and ancient religious practices, make up H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional universe, the Cthulhu Mythos. Walter de la Mare describes a child’s death at the hands of a demon in “The Guardian” (1955). A nice young girl is possessed by the devil in William P. Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971). A satanic impregnation occurs in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and a diabolic child features in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988). In Stephen King’s novels it is adults such as Randall Flagg in The Stand (1978) that are demons and children such as Franny’s unborn baby that are the antidote to their diabolical activities. Similarly in Desperation (1996) the boy, David, is led by visions and religious experiences into a battle with the demon, Tak.

The presentation of demons in these and many other contemporary works of horror fiction is influenced by a Christian theology, but the handling of it is quite varied. Like demons and minor devils, the representation of the supreme demon, Satan, is often unstable and variable. In fact, Satan appears only a handful of times in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, but certain patterns and behaviors—for instance, Satan’s mysteriousness, his love of trickery and game playing, and his divided nature—can be traced back not only to the Bible but to later theological writings such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Other satanic ambiguous traits such as rebelliousness, fallenness, nihilism, and human advocacy are evidenced in diverse horror works such as Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1916), Robert Bloch’s That Hellbound Train (1958), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1966), Jeremy Leven’s Satan (1982), Harlan Ellison’s The Deathbird Stories (1974), King’s Needful Things (1991) and Barker’s The Damnation Game (1985).

Eleanor Beal

See also: Barker, Clive; Cthulhu Mythos; The Damnation Game; The Exorcist; Incubi and Succubi; Melmoth the Wanderer; Rosemary’s Baby; “Young Goodman Brown.”

Further Reading

Cardin, Matt. 2007. “The Angel and the Demon.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi, 31–64. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

Carus, Paul. 2008. The History of the Devil. New York: Dover.

Guiley, Rosemary. 1998. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. New York: Checkmark Books.

Owen, Alex. 2007. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.

DICK, PHILIP K. (1928–1982)

The American writer Philip K. Dick was the author of 44 novels and 121 short stories that have exerted a profound effect on the science fiction field. His particular approach to science fiction also imbues his work with significance for the horror genre. The question of what it means to be human, the fear of losing identity, the threat of totalitarian government, and the disorienting impact of drug use and mental illness are central themes in Dick’s fiction. Many of his protagonists experience dread and disorientation as they are trapped in societies in which they have no control or understanding, and Dick employs different worlds, alternate universes, and imagined futures as settings for his protagonists facing psychological isolation and horror.

Dick grew up in the San Francisco area and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied history, psychology, and philosophy. He left the university without a degree in 1949 and sold his first story in 1950. Throughout most of his career Dick struggled financially. He also became addicted to amphetamines, and after several mental health episodes, which included prolonged hallucinations, he attempted suicide in 1972. Despite his lack of financial success, Dick was popular with science readers and appreciated by critics for his genre-bending use of horror and science fiction. During his life he received the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the French Graquilly d’Or. He was also nominated for five Nebula awards.

Despite his immense productivity and praise from critics and readers of science fiction, Dick never achieved either the sales or the popularity he wanted during his lifetime. It was only later, when his work began to be adapted for film and television, that his dark work became known to a wide and appreciative audience.

The first major film adapted from one of his stories was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969). Released in 1982, Blade Runner—and especially the more cinematically successful director’s cut of the same film—is an excellent example of Dick’s combination of horror and science fiction. It is the story of a private bounty hunter working with police on a dying, dystopic earth, who finds to his growing horror that he might not be human. Dick suggests that empathy may be the way to face the fear of identity loss, but both the novel and the film posit growing despair.

Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven, is based on Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966). Again Dick examines the boundaries of science fiction and horror as he explores the confusion and disorientation of a man who has been given a memory implant and cannot tell whether his memories are real or hallucinations.

Dick employs the convention of alternate history rather than a futuristic setting in The Man in the High Castle (1963), which was adapted for television in 2015. He sets his story in an America that lost the Second World War to the Germans and Japanese, who now occupy the United States. In this alternate America the protagonist attempts to survive in a fascist world that has experienced one nuclear holocaust and is threatened by the real possibility of another.

In these and Dick’s other works, the horror of losing one’s identity to an intrusive and powerful authority in a decaying world is dramatized and explored. Dick’s characters are powerless seekers caught in nightmare worlds. The continued interest in and popularity of his work, especially as it is presented in extraliterary adaptations, suggest that many readers experience similar fears.

During the last decade of his life, Dick’s work as an author of fiction became increasingly intertwined with his existential reality as he experienced a series of spiritual and paranormal events that, he thought, indicated the everyday world of mundane reality is a kind of virtual construct presided over by a demiurgic higher power. He eventually termed this power VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System) and spent his final years writing novels and keeping a journal—published in 2011 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick—in which he laid out the details and ramifications of this vision. He died on March 2, 1982, after suffering two strokes.

Jim Holte

See also: Moore, Alan; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Arnold, Kyle. 2016. The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rose, Frank. 2003. “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick.” Wired, December 1. http://www.wired.com/2003/12/philip/?pg=6.

Sutin, Lawrence. 2005. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Carroll & Graf.

DOUBLES, DOPPELGÄNGERS, AND SPLIT SELVES

The uncanny shadow, reflection, twin, or double is a key device in Gothic and horror fiction. The dread these doubles often invoke is underpinned by ancient myth. From the earliest theologies, chaos and order or good and evil have used twins or doubles to figure primordial warring forces, such as Gilgamesh and Enkidu (Mesopotamia), Osiris and Set (Egypt), or Cain and Abel (Old Testament). Greek and Roman mythology abounds in twins, as do many storytelling cycles of Native American and African cultures. The double is a portent, one that can signify great fortune, but more often taken as a harbinger of misfortune. Celtic and other northern folklores regard seeing one’s double or “fetch” as foretelling death. Some cultures venerate twins, but many more have killed them at birth as unlucky signs.

Since the eighteenth century, post-Enlightenment thinkers have understood the double less in metaphysical or theological terms and more as another part of the self. This has been integral to the development of modern psychology. Indeed, the demonic, persecutory “other” typical of Gothic fiction is inextricably related to the development of these psychological models of selfhood. Late nineteenth-century psychologists coined the term “double personality” and were fascinated that consciousness could apparently split spontaneously or be artificially induced to divide through hypnotism. Modern trauma theory continues this fascination through the terminology of dissociation or multiple personality.

German romanticism explored doubles as people with strange spiritual affinities, almost occult in their connection. Jean Paul Richter, who coined the term Doppelgänger in 1796, had a huge influence on Goethe’s and Kleist’s pursuit of the theme. It was rendered Gothic by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s use of the double in The Devil’s Elixirs (1814) and most famously in “The Sand-man” (1816). The latter’s delirious proliferation of doubles was the subject of Sigmund Freud’s study of the unheimlich or “the uncanny,” where the double is theorized as a species of familiar thing rendered unnerving or strange, such as a lifelike doll, waxwork, automaton, corpse, or identical other. Freud, following Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic essay “The Double” (1914), reads the figure as a projection from the inside that returns as an implacable persecutor from the outside.

Fevered horror at the double’s awful proximity entered English literature most memorably with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous creation becomes an intimate shadow and relentless destroyer. This logic echoed her father William Godwin’s study of paranoid persecution, Caleb Williams (1794), and went on to influence a whole chain of fictions about persecutory doubles, such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846). One of the most sustained explorations of the theme was in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, who spoke of his own double life in Edinburgh, between pious family and student debauchery, and who was fascinated by the real-life case of Deacon Brodie, the outwardly respectable Edinburgh citizen who concealed a criminal double life. His interest culminated in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the story of an artificial splitting of personality by a doctor in which the second self, initially more virile and energetic than the cramped and timid professional medic, spirals down into degeneracy, crime, and eventual self-destruction. The book was instantly taken up as a defining metaphor of modern man both in conventional moral terms and in modern psychological theory. Frederick Myers, who coined the term “multiplex personality” in 1885, warmly praised Stevenson for providing a new language for a psyche where consciousness was a narrow part of the spectrum, hiding the powers of the “subliminal” mind. Stevenson’s double was a decidedly physical creature; Guy de Maupassant’s masterpiece, “The Horla” (1887), renders the double more ambiguously a subjective, psychological split.

Frankenstein’s monster warns his maker, “I shall be with you on your wedding night,” and fulfills the promise, arriving to kill the bride and leave the two locked in a perpetual warring dyad. The overtones of sexual panic in the theme of the double have been constant since the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection. In the modern era, it becomes a means of exploring same-sex desire without quite naming it. This is implicit in, say, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (although some of his first readers saw it plainly enough), or in Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908), or even more obliquely in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1912). Oscar Wilde, however, rendered this subtext dangerously explicit in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and the text was used as damning evidence at Wilde’s prosecution for “acts of gross indecency” in 1895. Even at this critical moment in the formation of modern sexual identities, however, the theme of the double was flexible and not always reducible to sexual meanings. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the mirroring and constant inversion of the values of light and dark, West and East, Europe and Africa, Marlow and Kurtz, use doubling to very different effect to explore the complicities of geopolitical interdependence.

Since 1980 and the emergence of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, dissociative disorders have often been investigated in the wider culture through the Gothic trope of the double. Stephen King, for instance, has explored traumatically dissociated selves from The Shining (1977) to Dolores Claiborne (1992) and explored psychic splitting as the core of his own creative process, as in The Dark Half (1989). The terror of doubling haunts the films of David Lynch, as the demonic double continues to be an abiding theme of modern horror film, with perennial remakes and adaptations of Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and explorations of psychic splitting from Black Swan (2011) to the update of Dostoevsky’s The Double (2014).

Roger Luckhurst

See also: Frankenstein; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; “The Horla”; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; “The Sand-man”; The Shining; Stevenson, Robert Louis; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Uncanny; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Further Reading

Binet, Alfred. 1977. On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies. Washington: University Publications of America.

Freud, S. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” Translated by David McLintock. In The Uncanny, edited by A. Phillips, 121–162. New York: Penguin Books.

Rank, Otto. 2009. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated by Harry Tucker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Tymms, Ralph. 1949. Doubles in Literary Psychology. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes.

DRACULA

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was not the first vampire story published, but it was the most important, establishing the popularity and conventions of the vampire narrative. Vampires, creatures who return from the dead to feed upon the living by drinking their blood, have been popular figures in European and Middle Eastern folklore, and classical literature mentions several vampires. The history of the vampire in English is also older than Dracula; John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) was popular, as was James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–1847) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Stoker’s Dracula, however, fixed in the popular imagination the image of the night-stalking, garlic-fearing vampire as a dark, mysterious, cloaked European aristocrat who can transform himself into a bat and who searches out and destroys his victims, usually beautiful young women.

Dracula is an epistolary novel; it is told through the letters, journal entries, telegrams, and diaries of Dracula’s victims and hunters. The novel begins with solicitor Jonathan Harker leaving London for Transylvania to assist Count Dracula, who is planning to move to England to purchase several properties. Once there he discovers that Dracula is a vampire, is attacked and bitten by him, and is left a prisoner in Dracula’s castle. Dracula journeys to England by ship, and when he arrives he attacks the beautiful young Lucy Westenra and then Mina Murray, Jonathan’s fiancé. Lucy dies and becomes a vampire and Mina sickens. Jonathan, who has escaped from the castle, marries Mina and together, with the help of Lucy’s three suitors and a learned German doctor and vampire hunter, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, they hunt Dracula, who flees to his castle in Transylvania only to be killed by the fearless vampire hunters.

The novel is far more complex than suggested by its plot summary, which has become a stereotype after its use in the many Dracula film and television adaptations. Stoker’s vampire narrative works because he was successful in using the plot to develop complex characters and address significant social issues while writing an effective horror story. Dracula himself is no one-dimensional monster. Although a ruthless killer and sexual predator, Dracula is also capable of human fear and love, aware of his long history, and interested in modern life and science. Abraham Van Helsing is a professor of medicine, psychology, literature, and law who combines modern (nineteenth-century) science (he uses blood transfusions and the telegraph) with traditional religion (he carries a crucifix and a blessed communion host) to save Mina and destroy the vampire. Mina Murray Harker is probably the most complicated character. She is a “modern woman,” which at the turn of the twentieth century meant that she questioned the secondary role women held in Western society. She works. She knows how to use the latest technology, including the typewriter and recording cylinder. And although in Dracula she plays the role of the traditional vampire victim, she is also the one who pulls together all of the various observations and insights about Dracula that enable the novel’s male heroes to track down and finally destroy the vampire.

The Beetle by Richard Marsh: The Book That Outsold Dracula

The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh is a Gothic novel involving an ancient Egyptian creature that has traveled to London to take revenge upon a member of Parliament. Published at the end of the nineteenth century, The Beetle was a massive commercial success that for years outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published only two months earlier.

Situated in a period marked by increasing unease concerning Britain’s growing empire as well as other issues such as the New Woman and modernity, The Beetle explores this anxiety with an unsettling finesse. Divided into four sections that are each narrated by a different character, The Beetle focuses on Paul Lessingham, a lawmaker who harbors a great secret regarding time spent in Egypt. Lessingham, a rising political star in Parliament, is pursued by the Beetle, a horrific Egyptian creature that has infiltrated London and is able to take control of the bodies of those unfortunate enough to cross its path. As a member of the political body responsible for the growth of the British Empire, Lessingham is the standard nineteenth-century colonialist whose exploits across the globe have made entire cultures and people beholden to the British crown. Yet the Beetle’s pursuit of Lessingham through London raises the issue of when the colonialist becomes the colonialized; the central fear that Britain itself could be colonialized due to its central role as a colonizer are explored in haunting detail by Marsh’s text. The Beetle thus voices late nineteenth-century concerns related to the fears of radical change in the social order without any strong resolution, suggesting that there is little the British people can do to reverse the change to their society that they have unwittingly brought about.

Joel T. Terranova

One of the reasons for the popularity of Dracula is its dramatization of the cultural conflicts facing Western readers both at the time of its original publication and afterward, right up to the present day. At the end of the nineteenth century, many European and American readers saw white, patriarchal, Christian, European society under attack from within and without. The values of colonialism and the superiority of European culture were questioned. Traditional roles of workers and employers were being challenged, and feminism raised questions about the nature of the family and sexuality. Dracula was presented as an aristocrat with “the blood of Attila” in his veins who was planning to invade England, seduce and mesmerize women (the pure heart of the family according to Victorian ideology), and infect the population with his vampirism. He represented a physical and moral threat to the English homeland. Dracula’s weapons of violence, sexuality, and supernatural power could only be confronted by the best of Western culture, and Stoker’s team of vampire hunters include a learned professor, a doctor, a lawyer, an American businessman, an English nobleman, and a woman pure of heart—the best of the West against the foreign threat.

Stoker secured the dramatic rights to Dracula when it was published, and upon his death his wife gave permission for the development of a theatrical version of the novel by British actor, director, and playwright Hamilton Deane. The production opened in London on February 14, 1927. After a successful British run the play was brought to New York, where, with Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the title role, it was successful again. Carl Laemmle of Universal Studios bought the film rights to the play and the novel, and in 1931 director Tod Browning’s movie Dracula was released, with Lugosi starring in the title role. Dracula has returned to large and small screens in a variety of adaptations ever since. Among the most famous and most successful of these later versions are director Terence Fisher’s Dracula, a.k.a. Horror of Dracula (1958), for Hammer Films, starring Christopher Lee as a powerful, dominating Dracula (Hammer Films went on to make six additional Dracula adaptations, all but one starring Christopher Lee); John Badham’s Dracula (1979) starring Frank Langella as a romantic Dracula; and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), one of the only major adaptations that attempts to remain largely faithful to the novel. A number of film critics argue that the best adaptation of Dracula is F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which was made in Germany without the permission of the Stoker estate, and which remains one of the finest examples of silent film. Another candidate for the “best” accolade, and another example of an adaptation that remains faithful to the source novel, is Philip Saville’s 1977 BBC miniseries Count Dracula.

In 1972 a renewed fascination with Dracula began with the publication of In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends, written by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, who asserted that Stoker based his character on Vlad Tepes, a fifteenth-century Wallachian prince who ruled Transylvania, a province in Romania, and was known as “Dracula” or “the Son of the Dragon.” Vlad was popularly known as Vlad the Impaler because of his penchant for impaling his enemies on wooden stakes. Stoker’s Dracula and the historical Dracula have thus become linked in the popular imagination, although most scholars agree that Stoker borrowed only the name “Dracula” and did not draw on the actual history of Vlad when he was imagining his immortal vampire count.

Jim Holte

See also: Carmilla; The Historian; Stoker, Bram; Vampires; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.

Further Reading

Holte, James. 1997. Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Klinger, Leslie S. 2008. The New Annotated Dracula. New York: W. W. Norton.

McNally, Raymond, and Radu Florescu. 1972. In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society.

Miller, Elizabeth, ed. 2005. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 304. Detroit: Thomson Gale.

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

Dreams—the sensations and images in the mind during sleep—have existed since the dawn of consciousness. When a dream causes psychological or physical terror, it is called a nightmare. The horror story is related to dreams and nightmares on many dimensions. Horror fiction attempts to emulate the feelings of the nightmare—panic, fear, terror, disorientation. In terms of plotting, horror stories run the gamut in their use of dreams: the entire “real” narrative is revealed to have been a dream; the story is a mix of dream and waking; the “dream” is revealed to have been real.

In On the Nightmare (1931), Ernest Jones—one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis—remarks that “there is in English no term that indicates the precise combination of fearful apprehension, of panic-stricken terror, of awful anxiety, dread and anguish that goes to make up the emotion of which we are treating. The striking characteristic of . . . [the] Nightmare is its appalling intensity” (Jones 1931, 24). He examines several motifs characteristic of the nightmare (and also of horror fiction): incubi, witches, demons, vampires, and werewolves.

Jones also focuses on a particularly intense type of nightmare that may be experienced while falling asleep or awakening. During these “hypnagogic” dreams (a term Jones does not use himself), which occur in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, the sufferer believes that he or she is conscious, and may actually rise to a state of semiconscious awareness, but it is a state characterized by physical paralysis; a crushing sense of suffocation, often felt as a literal weight on the chest; and emotions of unbearable terror. Perhaps most distressingly, the hypnagogic visions in this type of dream generally take the form of a malevolent supernatural presence, including such “classic” forms as the “night hag” (a witchlike old crone) and the demonic incubus and succubus of medieval lore. Such experiences have been reported throughout history in cultures all over the globe, and their impact on horror literature and related art has been incalculable.

“Lukundoo”: Inspired by a Nightmare

“Lukundoo” is Baltimore schoolteacher Edward Lucas White’s best known and most reprinted horror story. He wrote it in 1907, but its grotesque nature made it unsalable until 1925, when it was finally published in Weird Tales. White suffered from vivid nightmares, which he often turned into short stories. He said he wrote “Lukundoo” exactly as he had dreamed it, and that he had the nightmare after reading “Pollock and the Porroh Man” by H. G. Wells.

Both stories involve white men on expedition in Africa who are driven to suicide by witch doctors’ curses, and both involve decapitated heads and the unreliability of human senses. In Wells’s story, Pollock has a witch doctor murdered and is haunted by his decapitated head throughout his journey back to England. It is ambiguous whether it is a hallucination; he sees it, later he hears it, and then he feels it. Finally, totally unable to trust his senses, he slits his throat. In “Lukundoo,” the narrator, Singleton, is taken to Ralph Stone, an explorer cursed for humiliating a Mangbetu witch doctor. Stone is afflicted with boil-like swellings on his body and has been overheard conversing with a shrill voice while alone. Singleton witnesses miniature living heads bursting through Stone’s skin, and Stone slicing them off. Stone finally succumbs and dies. Singleton relates that he is still unable to believe what he saw and heard.

Generally, in White’s nightmare-inspired stories, suggestive clues build up to a horrifying denouement. Here, tension builds slowly as the reader is told first of the tiny dried heads resembling the witch doctor. This is followed by Stone’s unusual boils, his self-treatment by razor, the mysterious shrill voice, and finally the revelation of the curse. There are also hints that the curse is somehow connected with his past in America and his ex-wife.

Lee Weinstein

One of the most prominent instances of this influence may be seen in the iconic “Nightmare” series of paintings by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, which depict a woman lying unconscious on a bed or couch with an ugly demon squatting on her chest and a supernatural horse peering out from behind a curtain in the background. This basic image, which is believed to have been inspired by Fuseli’s own personal experiences with the nightmare state in question, has sometimes been called the master image of the Gothic horror genre, and it has exerted a powerful influence on literature, as in, to name just one notable case, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, wherein Shelley’s description of the scene when Victor Frankenstein bursts into the bedroom on his wedding night to find that his monster has murdered Elizabeth is probably modeled on Fuseli’s paintings. Other instances of the classic nightmare being used to powerful effect by horror authors include E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (German: Der Sandmann, 1816) and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887), which stands as the paradigmatic example of the use of the hypnogogic dream in horror fiction.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the dream was used as a framing device for the allegorical tale. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nightmares became prominent in the fiction of the Romantics, who saw emotion as the authentic source of aesthetic experience. Dreams featured in many Gothic novels, notably Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796) and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century (1806). By the mid-nineteenth century, writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey showed intense interest in altered states of consciousness, including nightmares. As early as 1866, when Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” was published, dreams were being used as a central narrative component of horror fiction; subsequent far-reaching “dream worlds” were created by authors as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft (The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath) and Philip K. Dick (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch).

In the short story, many writers used dreams as key elements of their tales. Edward Lucas White (1886–1934) claimed that his plots came from actual nightmares. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom” (1903) relates how the sounds, odors, and other sensations “leak” from the narrator’s dreams into reality. F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood Is the Life” (1911) draws parallels between the effects of chronic nightmares and vampirism. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), set in the far future, is told in the form of the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century. During this period, nightmares are conspicuous in the work of Algernon Blackwood, Nikolai Gogol, Stefan Grabiński, Arthur Machen, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and others.

The Symbolists pushed past literal narrative to accentuate dreams and the associative powers of the imagination. Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, 1846–1870), Georges Rodenbach, Stefan Grabiński, and Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) created stories in which images and metaphors become the actual—rather than merely the literary—representations of perception. By the mid-1920s, the Surrealists declared dreaming to be no less vital than waking. Subsequent writers including Bruno Schulz, Jean Ray, Michel de Ghelderode (1898–1962), and others used a sense of intense estrangement from the generally accepted sense of reality as a source of horror. This stream reaches its apex in the “weird” work of Thomas Ligotti, whose tales often employ incongruous images to produce an effect of terror.

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Blackwood, Algernon; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Dick, Phillip K.; Gogol, Nikolai; Grabiński, Stefan; “The Horla”; Incubi and Succubi; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; The Night Land; Ray, Jean; “The Sand-man”; Schulz, Bruno; The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror); Surrealism.

Further Reading

Brook, Stephen, ed. 2003. The Oxford Book of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Ernest. 1931. On the Nightmare. London: Hogarth Press.

Khapaeva, Dina. 2012. Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project. Boston: Brill.

Pepper, Dennis. 2001. The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

THE DROWNING GIRL

Irish American writer Caitlín R. Kiernan’s novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) has received widespread critical acclaim, winning both a Bram Stoker and a James Tiptree Jr. award. Combining complex psychological realism with elements of dark fantasy, its fragmentary first-person narration and meta-fictional focus, like those of Kiernan’s 2008 novel The Red Tree, are a stylistic departure from her earlier series of dark fantasy novels, from Silk (1999) through Low Red Moon (2005). The Drowning Girl is nonetheless connected to them both thematically and through shared settings.

Haunted by memories of her mother’s suicide, The Drowning Girl’s narrator, a young woman named India Morgan Phelps who refers to herself as Imp, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Imp struggles to comprehend a series of uncanny events linked to her childhood fascination with a painting titled “The Drowning Girl” by (fictional) American painter Philip George Saltonstall, and her encounter with an enigmatic woman named Eva Canning, whom Imp at various points in the novel imagines as a mermaid, a werewolf, or a ghost. Imp gradually uncovers connections between Eva Canning and Jacova Angevine, the leader of a cult called the Open Door of Night, whose worship of the Lovecraftian marine deity Mother Hydra and eventual mass suicide are recounted in a number of Kiernan’s earlier fictions, most notably the story “Houses Under the Sea” (2007). Imp’s growing obsession with Eva alienates her from her lover Abalyn Armitage, leading her ever further into a mysterious world that she, and the reader, can never be entirely sure is not the product of her own schismatic psyche.

With its dedication to Peter Straub, whose classic Ghost Story (1979) Kiernan has often cited as an influence, and with Imp’s opening statement that she is “going to write a ghost story now” (Kiernan 2012, 1), The Drowning Girl situates itself within the long tradition of ghost stories, but in an untraditional way. With its stream of consciousness technique, it draws inspiration from Modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf, and from postmodern novels including Mark Danielew-ski’s House of Leaves (2000). Like most of Kiernan’s fictions, The Drowning Girl engages in what she calls a “feminization of the weird”; incorporating concepts and quotations from Poe, Lovecraft, and other writers associated with the history of weird fiction into her narrative, Imp (whose name itself echoes Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse”) interrogates them from a queer and feminist perspective, even as she attempts to understand how they shape her own self-perception and identity. In this respect, The Drowning Girl also works within the female Gothic tradition. Originating with eighteenth-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe and continuing through the work of writers including Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the nineteenth century and Shirley Jackson in the twentieth, the female Gothic focuses on women’s struggles to define their identity against patriarchal, and often predatory, authorities.

Sean Moreland

See also: Dark Fantasy; House of Leaves; Jackson, Shirley; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Radcliffe, Ann; Straub, Peter; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Further Reading

Brusso, Charlene. 2012. “Pernicious Thought Contagions: PW Talks with Caitlín R. Kiernan.” Publishers Weekly (January 30): 39. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/50378-pernicious-thought-contagions-pw-talks-with-caitlin-r-kiernan.html.

Kiernan, Caitlín R. 2012. The Drowning Girl. New York: ROC.

Moreland, Sean. 2016. “‘Not Like Any Thing of Ours’: Waking (to) Poe and Lovecraft in Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl.” In The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation and Transformation. Lanham, MD: Lehigh University Press.

DU MAURIER, DAPHNE (1907–1989)

Daphne du Maurier, born in London in 1907, was one of the greatest British female writers of Gothic horror in the twentieth century. She upset romantic fictions with her novel Rebecca (1938), exposing the damage of flawed romantic narratives that imprison and constrain women’s opportunities and worldviews. Her father was the famous actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, her grandfather was writer George du Maurier (who wrote Trilby, 1894), and her sister Angela was also a writer.

Du Maurier’s first published fiction, The Loving Spirit (1931), is a ghost story, informed by the supernatural. Early reception of her work, including Cornwall-based Jamaica Inn (1936, turned into a BBC1 TV series in 2014) and Frenchman’s Creek (1941), misunderstood it as middlebrow genre writing. Among du Maurier’s short stories and novelettes are “The Birds” (1952; filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963), The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (1952), Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1953), The Birds and Other Stories (1963), and “Don’t Look Now” (1971), which was memorably filmed by Nicholas Roeg in 1973. The time-slip novel The House on the Strand (1969), also set in Cornwall, presents a tale in which mind-altering drugs transport the protagonist Dick back to medieval times, where life is meaningful, if violent.

“The Birds”: Social Commentary and Avian
Eco-Horror

First published in Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 fiction collection The Apple Tree, “The Birds” is an influential story in the subgenre that has come to be known as eco-horror, and its status in cultural memory has been greatly enhanced by the fact of its film adaptation by director Alfred Hitchcock.

Set in coastal Cornwall, where du Maurier lived (in Fowey), “The Birds” focuses on a community that is shockingly attacked by flocks of everyday garden birds and seabirds, threatening civic order and causing unease. The story’s historical setting is just after the Second World War, and the coastal attack recalls Britain’s fear of invasion from the sea and the sky. Invasion and body horror are intermixed with creature horror, since the birds go for eyes, overwhelming children and adults. The main character, a farmhand, tries to protect his family by boarding up windows and hiding inside, but the birds break in. Their insistent, incessant attack is a reminder of the futility and helplessness of people when nature or war take over. The protective power of family men is also undermined, and this is a theme that du Maurier explored elsewhere, as in her story “Don’t Look Now” (1952).

In 1963 The Apple Tree was reprinted as The Birds and Other Stories, and simultaneously Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds, starring Tippi Hedren, which moves the events to the United States. The film holds an iconic place in Hollywood history. In 2009 Irish playwright Conor McPherson adapted “The Birds” for the stage at Dublin’s Gate Theatre.

Gina Wisker

In Rebecca, a dark, Gothic anti-romance that was du Maurier’s most popular novel, the young second wife of the dashing Maximilian de Winter moves in with him at his country house, Manderley, and is there dominated by his sinister and imperious housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The novel eventually reveals Maxim as the murderer of his beautiful, sexually independent first wife, Rebecca, who haunts (without actually being a ghost) both the nameless second wife—who narrates the novel—and Manderley, which serves as an index of the decadence of a partying generation that failed to see approaching war. The novel is recognized as exploring confinement, conformity, and containment of sexual rebellion and social rebellion in women. Rebecca was written and published in 1938, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reportedly carried a copy in his briefcase when trying to ensure peace prior to World War II.

Rebecca revitalized women’s Gothic horror writing, introducing studies of domestic tensions and crimes, doppelgängers, and hauntings without a ghost, and influencing countless writers, including Ruth Rendell, Stephen King, and Angela Carter. Du Maurier’s short stories, for their part, such as “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now,” undercut the myth of the strong father figure’s ability to cope with human and natural forces. In “The Birds,” a father cannot protect his family from the invasion of the family home by garden and sea birds. In “Don’t Look Now,” another father, seeking his dead daughter, is murdered by a masquerading dwarf—he, too, has failed in his role as solver of mysteries and bringer of order.

Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik revived critical interest in du Maurier in the 1990s, and a number of Cornwall-based conferences followed. Du Maurier’s life and work have often been explored, and Margaret Forster focused on her work in various papers discussing and debating her lesbianism. Daphne du Maurier was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1969.

Gina Wisker

See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Trilby.

Further Reading

Du Maurier, Daphne. 1938. Rebecca. London: Victor Gollancz.

Du Maurier, Daphne. 1971. “Don’t Look Now.” In Not After Midnight. London: Victor Gollancz.

Flanagan, Padraic. 2014. “Daphne du Maurier: Literary Genius Hated by the Critics?” The Telegraph, April 14. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10765991/Daphne-du-Maurier-literary-genius-hated-by-the-critics.html.

Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 1998. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Wisker, Gina. 2003. “Dangerous Borders: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shaking the Foundations of the Romance of Privilege, Partying and Place.” Journal of Gender Studies 12, no. 2: 83–97.

DUE, TANANARIVE (1966–)

Tananarive Due is an American journalist and author best known for her supernatural thriller series about a secret colony of Ethiopian immortals, the Life Brothers, whose blood has the ability to heal: My Soul to Keep (1997), The Living Blood (2001), Blood Colony (2008), and My Soul to Take (2011). In addition to her “African Immortals” books and many other horror fictions, Due has also written mystery, historical, and nonfiction works. She worked as a journalist for the Miami Herald before turning to a full-time writing career.

Due’s short fiction is frequently anthologized and she has won several literary awards, including a 2002 American Book Award for The Living Blood. Her first novel, The Between (1995), was nominated by the Horror Writers Association for a Bram Stoker award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, and My Soul to Keep was also nominated for a Stoker award. Her novella “Ghost Summer” (2008) received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her collection of short stories Ghost Summer won a 2016 British Fantasy Award. Her novels The Good House (2004) and Joplin’s Ghost (2005) are also supernatural narratives. Writing with her husband Steven Barnes, Due has also published the apocalyptic zombie novels Devil’s Wake (2012) and Domino Falls (2013), continuing a history of fruitful collaborations with other authors. The husband and wife writing team have also created a short film, Danger Word, based on a short story set in the same universe as Devil’s Wake and Domino Falls. My Soul to Keep is also being adapted to film.

Born January 5, 1966, in Tallahassee, Florida, Due is the daughter of renowned civil rights activists. Her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was jailed for forty-nine days in 1960 for refusing to pay a fine for sitting in at a Woolworth’s counter, and, with Tananarive, co-wrote the civil rights memoir Freedom in the Family (2003). Due’s fiction is characterized by a strong antiracist sensibility, standing out in the speculative fiction genres for placing the struggles and perspectives of black protagonists at the center of her stories. Often her protagonists grapple, not only with supernatural issues, but with the racism and multiple injustices of their societies. Her mystery novel In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Story (2008; written with Blair Underwood and Steven Barnes) received the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award.

As a black author working in genres overwhelmingly dominated by whites, Due is often compared to other black speculative fiction writers, including Steven Barnes, Octavia E. Butler, and Samuel Delany. In an interview with prominent horror editor Paula Guran, Due noted the slipperiness of applying such categories as horror to nonwhite communities: “the black community draws on so many belief systems that they take the supernatural for granted. I also find that a lot of black readers are willing to share their stories of prophetic dreams or ghost sightings, and to them, that isn’t horror or dark fantasy, it’s true life” (Guran 1997). In a separate interview with Publishers Weekly, Due observed that she wanted to find her own voice as a black writer rather than attempting to be another Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, and that writing horror fiction gave her a “prism” through which to confront her fears (Dziemianowicz 2001, 81).

Critics have remarked upon the preoccupation with the ethics of using power underlying the plot conflicts in Due’s works (Mohanraj 2002). For example, in The Living Blood, Jessica Wolde, who receives the titular blood gift from her Immortal husband, Dawit, must struggle with the ethics of dispensing her healing blood to diseased and suffering patients from her clinic in Botswana. Her daughter Fana, who received the blood in utero, gains even greater power than the men in the colony but must resist the temptation of the “Bee Lady” to give in to her anger and pain, and use her power to hurt those around her.

Aalya Ahmad

See also: Ancestral Curse; Bram Stoker Award; Butler, Octavia E.; Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Ghost Stories; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Occult Fiction.

Further Reading

Due, Tananarive. 2001. The Living Blood. New York: Pocket Books.

Due, Tananarive, and Dianne Glave. 2004. “‘My Characters Are Teaching Me to Be Strong’: An Interview with Tananarive Due.” African American Review 38, no. 4: 695–705.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2001. “PW Talks to Tananarive Due.” Publishers Weekly, March 19: 81.

Guran, Paula. 1997. “Tananarive Due: Unique Name for a New Dark Star.” Dark Echo. http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/archives/due.html. Originally published in Omni Online.

Mohanraj, Mary Anne. 2002. “Power Dynamics in the Novels of Tananarive Due.” Strange Horizons 20. http://www.strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/power-dynamics-in-the-novels-of-tananarive-due.

Morris, S. M. 2012. “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Fledgling’.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 3: 148–168.

Pough, Gwendolyn D., and Yolanda Hood. 2005. “Speculative Black Women: Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural.” Femspec 6, no. 1: ix–xvi.

Thomas, Sheree, ed. 2000. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books.

“THE DUNWICH HORROR”

First published in Weird Tales for April 1929, “The Dunwich Horror” has long been one of the most popular and influential of H. P. Lovecraft’s works. It was influenced in turn by a number of writers and stories that Lovecraft admired, including Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” and Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Great God Pan,” the latter of which is directly mentioned by a character in “The Dunwich Horror.”

The story is set in the farm country near the imaginary town of Dunwich, Massachusetts, where a child named Wilbur Whateley is born to an albino woman, Lavinia Whateley, and no known father. Lavinia’s sinister father, “Wizard Whateley,” makes the prophetic utterance to the startled townspeople that “some day yew folks’ll her a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!” (Lovecraft 2001, 211). By age thirteen young Wilbur is hideous and nearly seven feet tall. Lavinia Whateley disappears, never to be seen again. Some time later, Wizard Whateley likewise disappears, but not before people note that the walls and floors of the Whateley barn have been torn out, as if to contain something immense. Intellectually precocious, Wilbur begins corresponding with scholars on esoteric matters. He tries to borrow the dreaded Necronomicon from the Miskatonic University library, then attempts to steal it, but is killed by the watchdog. Meanwhile, whatever has been kept in the barn breaks out and terrorizes the countryside. Professor Armitage, the head librarian at Miskatonic, has figured out what is going on: the Whateleys have effected a mating between the horrific other-dimensional being Yog-Sothoth and Lavinia, so that “outside” creatures might gain a foothold in our dimension, destroying all humanity as they transform the world into a realm of unimaginable strangeness, in which Wilbur hoped to find a place. Armitage and two colleagues master enough of the spells from the Necronomicon to put an end to the monster, which, sure enough, calls out to Yog-Sothoth in extremis. It was Wilbur’s nonidentical twin brother, which took after its father more than Wilbur did.

The description of Wilbur Whateley’s corpse after he is killed by the watchdog at Miskatonic University is among the high points in Lovecraft’s career of envisioning hideously malformed (by human standards) monsters in the category of “things that should not be.” Wilbur’s top half is deformed, but “below the waist” anatomy turns to sheer nightmare:

The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it. (Lovecraft 2001, 223–224)

Matt Cardin

Source: Lovecraft, H. P. 2001. “The Dunwich Horror.” In The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, 206–245. New York: Penguin.

Here, in this story, is the basis for most of what followed from other writers as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” August Derleth in particular latched onto the idea that Lovecraft’s monsters could be defeated by sufficiently brave and knowledgeable humans. This led Derleth into the very un-Lovecraftian notion of “good gods” vs. “evil gods” and an implied moral order in a dualistic universe, something Lovecraft himself completely rejected. In Lovecraft’s view, if humans survive such encounters, it is entirely a coincidence and likely only for a short time. A close reading of “The Dunwich Horror” suggests that the only reason Armitage succeeded was that, with Wilbur dead, proper rites had not been performed, and the opportunity to open the way to Yog-Sothoth had already passed, so the monster was already “useless” for the grand design.

In mythic terms, if Wilbur and his brother are taken as the “hero,” then this story becomes a blasphemous caricature of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, or even of the story of Jesus: virgin birth, mysterious childhood, and finally a “savior” crying out to its father at the moment of its “crucifixion” atop a hill. Regardless, as a rip-roaring occult melodrama, “The Dunwich Horror” has never lacked readers. It was included in the landmark anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural in 1944 and has been anthologized many times since. In 1970 it was adapted as a campy low-budget horror movie starring Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, produced by Roger Corman for his American International Pictures.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; “The Great God Pan”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; “The Novel of the Black Seal.”

Further Reading

Burleson, Donald. 1981. “The Mythic Hero Archetype in ‘The Dunwich Horror.’” Lovecraft Studies 4: 3–9.

Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence, The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, 716–721. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2001. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, 79–81. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Lovecraft, H. P. 2001. “The Dunwich Horror.” In The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, 206–245. New York: Penguin.

E

ELLISON, HARLAN (1934–)

Extremely prolific, frequently controversial, and consistently brilliant, the acerbic American speculative fiction author and editor Harlan Ellison is known as much for his confrontational personality as for his hundreds of short, sharp stories. His first publication in 1956, and the early work that followed, established Ellison’s distinctly angry narrative voice, even if it was expressed in derivative stories that were otherwise indistinguishable from other magazine fodder. By the early 1960s, however, Ellison began to hit his imaginative stride with important contributions to genre fiction in various outlets not limited to genre publications and including television (he wrote the screenplay for the 1967 Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”) and comics (with short but memorable 1–2 issue stints on Detective Comics, The Avengers, Daredevil, and The Hulk). He is considered to be one of the giants in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His influence has been widespread and his impact, if problematic, no less profound.

Now in his sixth decade as a published writer, Ellison has never stopped writing. As recently as 2011 he was awarded a Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America for his story “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (2010). But the stories he is best known for were produced during an especially fertile period that ran from the mid-1960s to the late-1970s. Such stories as “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman” (1965); “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967); “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1968); “A Boy and His Dog” (1969); “The Deathbird” (1973); “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (1973); “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54’ N, Longitude 77° 00’ 13” W” (1974); and “Jeffty Is Five” (1977) showcase Ellison’s remarkable strengths as a writer during this time: his efficient and creative use of language, his inventiveness, his sheer readability—remarkable given his often brutal subject matter and often grisly approach. He moves effortlessly between fictional and nonfictional genres, and while much of his output is categorized as science fiction, his work can be read just as easily as horror or dark fantasy—all the more so, perhaps, given that science fiction’s concern with understanding the world is secondary to Ellison, who is more invested in highlighting the world’s continued failings and the psychic fallout that results.

Many of the stories collected in Deathbird Stories (1975) and Strange Wine (1978) are significant for readers interested in horror fiction. In Deathbird Stories these include “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54’ N, Longitude 77° 00’ 13” W,” “Paingod,” and “The Deathbird.” In Strange Wine these include “Croatoan,” “Hitler Painted Roses,” “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet,” “Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time,” “Emissary from Hamelin,” “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” and “Strange Wine.” (Stephen King, in his nonfiction study of the horror genre, Danse Macabre [1981], refers to “Strange Wine” as one of the finest horror fiction collections since 1950.) A sampling of other stories of interest include “Jeffty Is Five” and “All the Lies That Are My Life” in Shatterday (1980); “Djinn, No Chaser” in Stalking the Nightmare (1982); “Paladin of the Lost Hour” in Angry Candy (1988); and “Chatting with Anubis” and “Mefisto in Onyx” in Slippage (1997).

Ellison’s best stories are often fueled by anger at what he perceives to be, and very often is, injustice and ignorance. When this anger subsumes the narrative it may come across as didactic or judgmental. But that same anger, channeled effectively, lends great weight and power to Ellison’s stories. Even when his work presents problematic characterizations of women and nonwhite characters, there remains nonetheless an abiding authorial concern for the individual. Despite this empathy on his part, Ellison might also be accused of introducing into the world the very same pain to which, as the speculative literature critic John Clute has observed, he also serves as an eloquent witness. Ellison has been notoriously difficult to work with, as evidenced by the many lawsuits he has brought against companies and individuals, especially those associated with the film and television industries. He has also infuriated female writers and critics in and outside genre fiction with stories like “A Boy and His Dog,” where the male protagonist chooses to cook and eat his love interest rather than sacrifice the dog he shares a psychic connection with. Though not necessarily negative, there is a quality to Ellison’s oeuvre and to the author himself that seeks controversy, or at the very least attention. Some of the stories in Strange Wine, for example, were written in a bookshop window, allowing crowds a view of the artist at work, and the vignettes that were written in response to Jacek Yerka’s art and collected in Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka/The Fiction of Harlan Ellison (1994) can also be considered performances of a sort. Ultimately, Ellison’s polarizing personality and the contradictions found in both him and his stories point to the complexity and importance of the artist and his work.

Ellison has also been active as an editor, with his best and most important work being Dangerous Visions (1967) and, to a lesser degree, its companion Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Compiled as in dialogue with the (mostly British) New Wave movement in science fiction, these anthologies focused perhaps too much on some aspects of the New Wave (its emphasis on sexuality and breaking of taboos) and not enough on others (its genuine concerns for injecting into science fiction literary elements modeled in part after literary Modernism). Still, there are some stories of interest to horror genre readers, especially Ellison’s “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” which appears in the first volume. Medea: Harlan’s World (1985) is more formally an experiment, and a successful one, in science fiction world building (and self-mythologizing). Ellison’s nonfiction includes autobiographical essays, reflection pieces on his work, and commentary, usually scathing, on the media industry, The Glass Teat (1970) being perhaps the best known of these.

Ellison has received numerous accolades for his work over the years, including eight Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, five Bram Stoker Awards, two Edgar Awards, two World Fantasy Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), the Eaton Award, and an unprecedented three Writers’ Guild of America Awards. In 2011 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Bram Stoker Award; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.

Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

ETCHISON, DENNIS (1945–)

Dennis William Etchison is arguably the best American author of horror short fiction since Ray Bradbury. Starting in the 1960s, Etchison began publishing brilliant stories that won him a devoted following among horror connoisseurs—especially in Great Britain, where his savagely bleak “The Dark Country” won the 1981 British Fantasy Award—and led eventually to a series of beautifully wrought collections published by Scream Press: The Dark Country (1982), Red Dreams (1984), and The Blood Kiss (1987). These collections, along with The Death Artist (2000) and Talking in the Dark (2001), contain what are considered some of the finest works of horror literature published in English during the last four decades.

Etchison’s short fiction explores the ambiguous landscapes of Southern California with a corrosive precision that recalls Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West. The characteristic scenes of his stories—half-empty multiplex cinemas, all-night laundromats and convenience stores, bleak highway rest-stops, neon-lit beachside motels—evoke the aimlessness and weary boredom of contemporary suburban experience, a spiritual wasteland in which sinister forces incubate. Stylistically, the tales are models of concision, stark montages of hallucinatory details pregnant with psychological nuance. “It Only Comes Out at Night” (1976) captures the accumulating dread of a driver who realizes he is being tracked by a killer, while “The Nighthawk” (1978) offers a subtle study of a young girl who suspects that her brother is a shape-shifting monster. Only a few of the tales—such as “The Late Shift” (1980), in which dead-end service jobs are staffed by reanimated corpses—are overtly supernatural, most conveying mere glimpses of the numinous that remain inscrutable, hauntingly elusive. Filled with grim hints and nervous portents, his stories amount to a collection of cryptic snapshots of contemporary suburbia and the lost souls who inhabit it.

Etchison’s novels have failed to capitalize on the brilliance of his short fiction, upon which his considerable reputation rests—although he has shown skills as an editor, with award-winning anthologies such as Meta-Horror (1992) to his credit. His novels—Darkside (1986), Shadowman (1993), California Gothic (1995), and Double Edge (1997)—feature the author’s shrewd eye for telling social detail, especially regarding California lifestyles, but they are all flawed in significant ways, informed by a retrograde nostalgia altogether lacking in his more hard-edged short stories. While his portraits of middle-class characters struggling in the ruins of their shattered ideals have at times a genuine poignancy, they also tend to degenerate into polemical disquisitions on cultural malaise. Ultimately, Etchison will be remembered for his muted, haunting, and ferociously downbeat short stories, which are among the best that modern horror has produced.

Rob Latham

See also: Bradbury, Ray; Novels versus Short Fiction; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 1994. “Dennis Etchison: Spanning the Genres.” Studies in Weird Fiction 15 (Summer): 30–36.

Mathews, David. 1998. “Arterial Motives: Dennis Etchison Interviewed.” Interzone 133 (July): 23–26.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1985. “The Dark Side of the American Dream: Dennis Etchison.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, 48–55. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

EWERS, HANNS HEINZ (1871–1943)

Few literary figures blurred the boundary between their fiction and their biography as thoroughly as Hanns Heinz Ewers. The fascination with blood, eroticism, and the occult exhibited by many of his characters was apparently shared by the author himself. His horror stories and novels have been admired by everyone from H. P. Lovecraft to Dashiell Hammett to Adolf Hitler. During his lifetime Ewers was among the most popular authors in his native Germany.

Born Hans Heinrich Ewers in Dusseldorf in 1871, he came by his artistic inclinations honestly; his mother Maria was a raconteur and his father Heinz was court painter for the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. As a boy Ewers would often serve as the model for the grand duke’s court children. Forced to stand still for hours while wearing regal finery, young Hans learned the power of storytelling from his mother’s telling of fairy tales and German folklore, which she did to keep Hans entertained while he modeled for his father’s canvases. Along with literary leanings, Ewers also shared with his mother a hunger for diablerie (demonic sorcery); in girlhood Maria Ewers spoke of her earnest desire to meet the Devil in the flesh. Her son would eventually tour Europe giving a lecture entitled Die Religion des Satan (The Religion of Satan).

Ewers began his publishing career in 1898 with the poem “Mutter” (“Mother”). His debut short story collection, Das Grauen (The Grey) was published in 1907, and its contents reflected many of his personal experiences from both travel and his deepening interest in Spiritualism (he was reportedly a gifted medium). In 1908, Die Besessenen (The Possessed) featured Ewers’s most reprinted story, “The Spider,” in which a medical student falls under the sinister spell of a hotel room where a chain of suicides have occurred. “The Spider” featured a morbidly erotic femme fatale–type character, which Ewers considered a manifestation of “the Eternal Feminine.” This was to become a recurrent theme in his fiction.

He penned a trilogy of novels featuring the character of Frank Braun, a scholar, occultist, traveler, and Nietzschean soul (one aspiring to superhuman greatness of the type written about by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche); in other words, a thinly veiled idealization of Ewers himself. Alraune (1911), a gory, sexual riff on both Frankenstein and the mandrake myth, became the author’s most successful book.

Ewers continued to write and travel until the First World War. In America, his propagation of German Nationalist literature around New York aroused the attention of the U.S. Secret Service, and in 1918 Ewers was arrested as an enemy agent. He remained imprisoned until the summer of 1920.

The Germany he returned to was embroiled in political and social turmoil. Ewers’s innate nationalism seemed to flourish through the 1920s as he began to make contacts within the burgeoning Nazi Party. While these affiliations very likely saved his life, eventually Ewers’s philosemitism (respect for Jews and Judaism), along with his morbidly decadent imagination and hedonistic views of sex and intoxicants (he had been using and praising hashish and alcohol since 1893), led him to being declared an unperson by the Third Reich. His books were ordered to be burned. He lived until June 12, 1943, when tuberculosis and heart failure claimed him.

In the wake of World War II, Ewers’s legacy disintegrated. However, new English translations began to appear at the dawn of the twenty-first century, sparking a resurgence of interest in his grisly, passionate, and singular fiction.

Richard Gavin

See also: Alraune; Meyrink, Gustav; Spiritualism.

Further Reading

Ewers, Hanns Heinz. 2012. Brevier. Edited by Arthur Gersel and Rolf Bongs. Newcastle: Side Real Press.

“Hanns Heinz Ewers.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Koger, Grove. 2007. “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works 1. Salem, MA: Salem Press.

THE EXORCIST

The 1971 publication of American author William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist signaled a radical change in supernatural horror fiction. Exploiting a deep-seated and practically universal human anxiety about the loss of self, autonomy, and identity to invading, invisible forces, the novel presents readers with a vividly detailed depiction of the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl named Regan MacNeil. Written in the third person, the novel reveals the progress of Regan’s possession primarily through the eyes of her mother, actress Chris MacNeil, and Catholic priest and psychiatrist Damien Karras. Attempting to liberate Regan from her possessed state, Karras enlists the aid of an experienced exorcist, Jesuit priest and archaeologist Lankester Merrin, whose character is loosely based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. The novel is among the most iconic works of twentieth-century horror fiction and remains the most influential fictional account of demonic possession ever written.

Though The Exorcist was Blatty’s fifth novel, it was both his first foray into supernatural horror and his first major popular success. While its sales were initially slow and critical response was mixed, Blatty’s appearance on The Dick Cavett Show helped bring the novel, and the phenomenon it treated, into the spotlight. The Exorcist went on to spend more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list, its popularity further boosted by the 1973 release of a film adaptation, scripted by Blatty and directed by William Friedkin. The film broke a number of box office records and was an unprecedented commercial success, spawning dozens of imitations in the following decades and irrevocably establishing demonic possession as among the most popular tropes of horror film. It shocked and traumatized many filmgoers, inspiring religious revivalism, moral panic, and eventually the creation of a clinical psychiatric category, “cinematic possession neurosis,” to describe those who became convinced they were demonically possessed after viewing the film.

The World’s Scariest Christian Novel?

The fact that The Exorcist has generally been remembered as one of the most frightening horror novels ever published—something intimately linked to the parallel reputation of its legendary film adaptation as “the scariest movie ever made”—both fulfills and, to an extent, obscures Blatty’s stated purpose in writing it. What has been lost in general public awareness of the book is that, in its aftermath, Blatty said he had intended it as a Christian novel. By his own account, he was deeply disturbed by the rising nihilism of secularized Western culture in the mid-twentieth century, and his driving ambition in writing The Exorcist was to convey to a jaded, despairing, and disillusioned modern public a sense of the horror of demonic evil, in the hope that this would automatically convey an accompanying emotional sense of the obverse: the existence of angels and God and eternal life, and what these would entail.

Matt Cardin

The Exorcist draws on a long history of writings about demonic possession, from those that appear in the Gospels and early Patristic writings to modern literary treatments. While not a staple of either early or Victorian Gothic fiction, demonic possession had been obliquely treated by Dark Romantic writers including E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, who linked it most often to mesmerism as much as traditional theology. Aldous Huxley wrote about the phenomenon in The Devils of Loudun (1952), a lightly fictionalized treatment of a historical case that Blatty’s novel makes repeated reference to. Huxley’s book in turn served as the source for Ken Russell’s cinematic extravaganza The Devils, released contemporaneously with Blatty’s novel in 1971. However, where Huxley and Russell focused on the dangers of sexual repression and religious irrationalism, Blatty took an entirely different approach, producing a fast-paced thriller that fused anxieties about social change, Catholic theology, and visceral horror into an original and powerful compound.

The Exorcist was written during a period of radical social change in the United States. The civil rights movement, feminist activism, and anti–Vietnam War peace protests formed its backdrop and are implicated in the plot, as Regan’s actress mother is playing the lead role in a film about student activism on the campus of Georgetown University when Regan’s possession occurs. The novel also reflects conservative and Christian anxieties about the rising popularity of “New Age” and occult spiritual beliefs and practices, causally implicated as Regan is shown innocently experimenting with a Ouija board prior to her possession. Both novel and film suggestively link this experimentation to Regan’s adolescent sexuality; it is her playing (Ouija) with herself that seems to trigger her possession.

Blatty, a practicing Catholic, has stated that the novel was partially inspired by his own crisis of faith, a crisis given its most acute expression through Karras, who wrestles with despair and disbelief throughout the novel. Blatty drew some of the details of the exorcism from a case he had read about while a student at Georgetown University, in which a young boy was supposedly successfully exorcised by Jesuit priest and educator William S. Bowdern. Blatty’s decision to make the possessed child female both reflects the majority of reported cases of possession and plays into the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking, in which it is most often the body of a threatened woman that bears the viewer’s gaze and is used to generate dramatic tension.

While Blatty’s novel of satanic supernatural horror came in the wake of the popular success of Ira Levin’s best-seller Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and Roman Polanski’s even more successful film of the same title (1968), the two novels are radically different creatures. Levin’s is urbane, often sardonic, and satirical of, among other things, religious irrationalism and middle-class materialism. Blatty eschews liberal irony in favor of emotional immediacy, spiritual intensity, and an emphasis on visceral body horror, anticipating much of what would come during the mass market “horror boom” that followed in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The Exorcist’s popularity influenced the creation of numerous horror novels focused on spirit possession, from “horror boom” titles including Frank di Felitta’s Audrey Rose (1975), Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Christine (1983), and James Herbert’s Shrine (1983) to more contemporary reinventions including Sara Gran’s Come Closer (2003), Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist (2013), and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015).

Sean Moreland

See also: Devils and Demons; Possession and Exorcism; Rosemary’s Baby.

Further Reading

Ballon, Bruce, and Molyn Leszcz. 2007. “Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma?” American Journal of Psychotherapy 61, no. 2: 211–230.

Clover, Carol J. 1992. “Opening Up.” In Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 65–113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mäyrä, Frans Ilkka.1999. “The Inarticulate Body: Demonic Conflicts in The Exorcist.” In Demonic Texts and Textual Demons, 143–168. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press.

Morgan, Chris R. 2016. “Archetypes of Exorcism.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life 263(May): 63–64. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/04/archetypes-of-exorcism.

Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2008. American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Winter, Douglas E. 1996. “Casting Out Demons: The Horror Fiction of William P. Blatty.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale, 84–96. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

F

“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”

Originally published in 1839, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories. It is a quintessential Gothic story, written at a time when the traditional Gothic novel had run its course, so that Poe’s use of stock Gothic materials is turning in a new direction. Rather than merely tell of crypts and haunted castles, Poe made such elements symbolic of his characters’ mental states, so that inner madness becomes physically manifest.

An unnamed narrator arrives at the crumbling mansion of his old school friend, Roderick Usher, whom he has not seen in years. He remarks at some length on how the mere sight of the place fills his soul with depressive gloom, and he observes a crack in the overall structure of the house. Roderick Usher had asked him to come, hoping that the presence of a friend would help dispel his own depression. Usher is the last of his line, suffering from a mysterious malady that has heightened all his senses. He cannot bear strong light, or any but the blandest foods, or any but certain musical notes. Meanwhile, Roderick’s sister Madeleine, with whom he has a strange, possibly incestuous relationship, is dying of a wasting illness of her own. She apparently dies, and the narrator and Roderick carry her coffin down into a crypt to leave it there for a fortnight before final burial. If this is a precaution against premature burial, it is an odd one, because they screw the coffin lid shut and close the heavy metal door to the vault. In the next few days, Roderick begins to behave strangely, and even the narrator is certain he is hearing noises from below. He tries to calm his friend by reading aloud from a chivalric romance, but even as the knight in the story strikes a gate with his mace, the two men hear a crash. As a dragon shrieks, they hear a cry. Roderick, with his heightened senses, has been aware for days that Madeleine is alive within her coffin. Now she has broken out and stands outside his chamber. When he opens it, she falls dying into his arms, and he dies too. The narrator escapes just in time, as a whirlwind crashes the entire structure into the surrounding tarn (lake).

Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Haunted Palace”

After publishing “The Haunted Palace” in a magazine in 1839, Poe incorporated it into “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where it is presented as having been written by Roderick Usher himself.

In the greenest of our valleys

By good angels tenanted,

Once a fair and stately palace—

Radiant palace—reared its head.

In the monarch Thought’s dominion—

It stood there!

Never seraph spread a pinion

Over fabric half so fair!

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

On its roof did float and flow

(This—all this—was in the olden

Time long ago)

And every gentle air that dallied,

In that sweet day,

Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

A wingéd odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,

Through two luminous windows, saw

Spirits moving musically

To a lute’s well-tunéd law,

Round about a throne where, sitting,

Porphyrogene

In state his glory well befitting,

The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing

Was the fair palace door,

Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,

And sparkling evermore,

A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty

Was but to sing,

In voices of surpassing beauty,

The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch’s high estate.

(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

And round about his home the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim-remembered story

Of the old time entombed.

And travellers, now, within that valley,

Through the encrimsoned windows see

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody,

While, like a ghastly rapid river,

Through the pale door

A hideous throng rush out forever,

And laugh—but smile no more.

Matt Cardin

Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 1914. Vol. 10. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 32–33.

Critics have made much of all this, citing numerous symbolic aspects, notably parallels between the disintegrating house and Roderick Usher’s disintegrating mind. This is brought out even more explicitly in the poem “The Haunted Palace,” which is given in the story as the composition of Roderick Usher. Poe scholar Thomas Olive Mabbott credited H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” for a solution to the central mystery: that Roderick, Madeleine, and the house share the same soul, and so all perish at the same instant. The story has been filmed many times, most memorably by Roger Corman in 1960.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Bailey, James O. 1964. “What Happens in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’?” American Literature 35, no. 4 (January): 445–466.

Cook, Jonathan A. 2012. “Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ Papers on Language & Literature 48, no. 2: 3–44.

Gargano, James W. 1982. “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: An Apocalyptic Vision.” University of Mississippi Studies in English 3: 53–63.

Kendall, Lyle H., Jr. 1963. “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ College English 24, no. 4 (March): 450–453.

Mabbott, Thomas Ollive. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1978. In The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches 1843–1849, 392–422. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Moss, William. 2014. “The Fall of the House, from Poe to Percy: The Evolution of an Enduring Gothic Convention.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crowe, 177–188. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

Timmerman, John H. 2003. “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ Papers on Language & Literature 39, no. 3 (Summer): 227–244.

FARRIS, JOHN (1936–)

John Lee Farris, born in Jefferson City, Missouri, is an American writer best known for his psychic horror novel The Fury (1976), which was made into a successful film directed by Brian De Palma in 1978. A true artistic polymath, Farris has written screenplays—most notably, the script for The Fury—plays, and poetry, and he even directed a film, Dear Dead Delilah (1973). He is, however, best known for his work in horror prose. Although substantially less popular than some of his contemporaries, especially Stephen King, alongside whom he would appear in the second volume of Transgressions in 2006 as one of two New York Times best sellers, Farris’s oeuvre is vast and thematically varied.

After a first period in which he concentrated on thrillers and noirs, sometimes publishing under the pen name Steve Brackeen, Farris started to combine the successful Harrison High School series (1959–1974) with a string of horror novels. Following the television adaptation of When Michael Calls (1967) in 1972, Farris began working in the horror genre in earnest, which he sometimes combined with the psychological thriller and serial killer genres in novels such as Sharp Practice (1974), Shatter (1980), and Nightfall (1987).

The success of the telekinetic terrors of The Fury would lead Farris to mine more obviously occult and supernatural areas in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, and to become a full-time horror writer. His work during this, his “peak” period shows an understanding of the publishing market; the demonic Son of the Endless Night (1984), for instance, draws on the success of The Exorcist (1971) and The Omen (1976). But his very personal literary vision—which resorts to anything from Aztec rites in Sacrifice (1994) to Nordic folklore in Fiends (1990), voodoo cults in All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977), or vanished magical civilizations in Catacombs (1981)—prevails.

His last horror writing period, after a brief slew of thrillers published from 1995 to 1999, began in the new millennium. Apart from the collection Elvisland (2004) and the novels Phantom Nights (2004), You Don’t Scare Me (2007), and his first werewolf novel, High Bloods (2009), also his last work to date, the rest of Farris’s postmillennial books have been dedicated to reviving The Fury.

Although Farris’s books are now largely out of print, a number of his “classics” have recently become available in eBook format, a venture that has rescued some of his best novels from oblivion. In the 2010s, specialist publisher Centipede Press also paid homage to Farris by publishing five of his novels in deluxe limited editions.

Xavier Aldana Reyes

See also: The Exorcist; King, Stephen; Psychological Horror; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “John Farris.” In Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Essays on Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors and Others, edited by Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, 80–82. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Errickson, Will. 2015. “Evil Eighties: The Paperback Horrors of John Farris.” Tor.com, February 13. http://www.tor.com/2015/02/13/evil-eighties-the-paperback-horrors-of-john-farris.

FAULKNER, WILLIAM (1897–1962)

William Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel laureate who is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which illustrate the intricate links between race, class, and gender in the U.S. South at the turn of the twentieth century. His fiction is characterized both by distinctive writing techniques—including deconstructed timelines, shifting points of view, stream of consciousness, and unreliable narrators—and recurrent motifs such as moral and social decay in the American South, rape, lynching, incest, miscegenation, psychological distress, physical and mental disability, and pathological bonds between individuals, families, and the community.

“A Rose for Emily”: Classic Southern Gothic

“A Rose for Emily” was first published in the April 1930 issue of the Forum, and it went on to become Faulkner’s most anthologized story. Integral to the Southern Gothic tradition, it is noted for its twist ending, involving necrophilia. It is narrated in the first-person-plural point of view by the collective voice of the citizens of the fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi, and the story unfolds in nonlinear fashion, beginning with the funeral of Emily Grierson, the last in the long line of a Southern aristocratic family. The story then examines the peculiar events of her life: a rotting smell coming from her house; the time she bought poison; and her romance with a Northern man named Homer Barron, who mysteriously disappears. It all ends with Emily’s death and the townspeople’s discovery of Homer’s decayed corpse lying on a bed in a locked upstairs room, where Emily’s silver hair is found on the pillow next to him. The clear implication is that Emily, who had long been feared and viewed as an eccentric crank by the townspeople, murdered Homer and then slept beside his corpse for years in the solitude of her reclusive abode.

“A Rose for Emily” explores the tropes of death and decay, nostalgia for a romantic past (as exemplified by the modern world’s encroachment on the decaying Old South), and the iron-fisted control of Southern patriarchy. With its striking viewpoint and voice, it is an early example of a modernist take on literary horror, and it has been widely anthologized and included in high school and college literature textbooks. A PBS short film adaptation of “A Rose for Emily” was produced in 1983, starring Anjelica Huston as Emily.

Chun H. Lee

Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner spent most of his life at his estate of Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, from which he also derived the inspiration for much of his writing. The innovative quality of his prose and his attachment to his Southern background have often led him to be categorized as an author of both the modernist movement and the Southern Renaissance. However, Faulkner’s taste for disturbing, often macabre storylines, as well as uncanny atmospheres, also made him responsible, alongside authors such as Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe, for the emergence of Southern Gothic fiction in the early 1930s. Major figures of the genre have acknowledged their debt to Faulkner, such as Flannery O’Connor, who wrote that “the presence of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do” (O’Connor 1969, 45).

Although Faulkner’s reputation as a writer is currently well established, his fame came relatively late. Prior to achieving success, he spent several years in California and New Orleans publishing screenplays for Hollywood, essays and sketches, and poetry. While in New Orleans, he became acquainted with Sherwood Anderson, who recommended he should write about his native region and the idiosyncrasies of the “southern character.” Following this advice, Faulkner proceeded to write the first book of the Yoknapatawpha saga, which would be published under the name Sartoris (1929). While waiting for it to be published, Faulkner embarked on a second novel that would be his ticket to fame: The Sound and the Fury.

Published in October 1929, the novel is widely regarded as a revolutionary masterpiece. It recounts the gradual decay of a Southern bourgeois family through the successive points of view of four of its members: Benjy, the youngest son, whose mental disability prevents him from having any sense of time, place, and people, to the point that he does not recognize his own image in the mirror; Quentin, the eldest son, whose incapacity to deal with his ambiguous feelings for his sister leads him to flee the South and commit suicide in the Charles River; Jason, the last son of the lineage as well as a bachelor who abuses the women of his family and drunkenly drives around the town of Jefferson chasing after his young niece; and finally, Dilsey, the black maid who has lived through the family’s downfall and is the last one standing to take care of the disabled son and the estate. The Sound and Fury is a challenging book in both form and content. To learn the truth about the Compson family, the reader must piece together many different plot elements scattered through the broken timeline and the stream of consciousness narrations. The horror and the violence of the plot are made apparent in the process of reading, through careful innuendos, ellipsis, and understatements. This novel set the tone for the other novels and stories to come: through convoluted narrative techniques and baroque prose, Faulkner was to paint life in the South as a horror story made of violence, unruly bodies, and perverted morals and manners. Exploring the whole social, racial, and gender spectrum from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Faulkner spares his reader no gruesome details.

His next novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a macabre and ludicrous mock-epic in which a family of poor farmers embark on a disastrous journey to bury the body of the mother that has just died. The many obstacles they face see their task put to a gruesome test, especially when the corpse inside the coffin starts rotting and carrion birds start following them everywhere they go. The macabre humor of As I Lay Dying is also to be found in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), a short story now considered a foundational text of Southern Gothic literature. Told from the collective point of view of the townspeople of Jefferson, the story tells of Emily Grierson, an old maid from an aristocratic family of Jefferson who has probably gone mad. In a final plot twist, the town realizes on the day she dies that she murdered her lover some fifty years ago and has been sleeping next to his decaying body every night since.

With Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner’s sulfurous detective-story, he earned the nickname “the corncob man”: the story follows a young white girl named Temple Drake as she runs away from college. She falls into the hands of an impotent thug named Popeye who eventually rapes her with a corncob in an abandoned grange. Even though the rape itself is left out of the text, the suggested violence of the scene was such that the novel was almost banned, under claims that no one but a pathological reader could enjoy being sadistically aroused by it.

Light in August (1932) is a collection of intersected stories that all come together through the violent beheading of Joanna Burden by her lover Joe Christmas, who consequently gets lynched by a white supremacist bearing the ominous name of Percy Grimm. Though Joanna’s murder seems to be the peak of violence in the novel, the rest of the novel is seething with racial hate and sexual abuse that is only solved through explosions of violence such as murders or lynching.

Absalom, Absalom (1936) is Faulkner’s Gothic grand oeuvre. Very much in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it depicts the downfall of a family, brought about through generations of incestuous desires, greed, envy, and racial divides, climaxing in the literal destruction of the family home. Haunted by the presence of a member of the family whom everybody thought long gone, the Sutpen mansion goes down in flames, leaving nothing of the patriarch’s dream of grandeur but a couple of ghost stories told by the elders of the community.

Faulkner’s artistic vision stood in complete contradiction to the predominant discourse of the time that portrayed the South as a lost Eden. His callous prose earned him the ire of the Southern literary scene, which, as early as 1935, labeled him and other writers of the time as “the real equerries of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones,” “merchants of death, hell and the grave,” and “horror-mongers in chief” (Bassett 1997, 352). Fellow Southern writer Ellen Glasgow called Faulkner out for letting his literature “crawl too long in the mire” (Bassett 1997, 359). She found his style too macabre, labeling it “Southern Gothic” in a pejorative way; in an attempt to disparage Faulkner, Glasgow both coined the term and tied it forever to his name. The label stuck, and distinguished authors such as O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Toni Morrison, all of whom wrote in a Southern Gothic vein themselves (with the term eventually losing its negative connotation), held Faulkner as a major point of reference.

Elsa Charléty

See also: The Grotesque; Morrison, Toni; O’Connor, Flannery; The Uncanny; Welty, Eudora.

Further Reading

Bassett, John Earl, ed. 1997. Defining Southern Literature: Perspectives and Assessments, 1831–1952. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Faulkner, William. 2003. The Portable Faulkner. New York: Penguin.

Fiedler, Leslie A. [1960] 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, 36–50. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Sundquist, Eric J. 1983. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

FEAR

Fear is a novel of psychological horror by L. Ron Hubbard that was first published in the July 1940 issue of the pulp fantasy magazine Unknown. Editor John W. Campbell touted it as the type of horror story that he hoped other authors would contribute to his magazine of modern fantastic fiction.

The protagonist of Fear is James Lowry, a professor of anthropology and ethnology at Atworthy College. A scientific rationalist, Lowry has just published an article in the Newspaper Weekly dismissing humanity’s belief in devils and demons as a type of mental illness promulgated in times past by witch doctors who hoped to control the masses through their fear of the supernatural. The head of Lowry’s department interprets the article as an attack not just against superstition but against religion, and he fires Lowry for besmirching the university’s reputation with what he considers an exploitative attempt at self-aggrandizement. Reeling from this unexpected twist of fate, James visits the home of his friend and colleague, Tommy Williams, who disagrees with James’s rationalism and warns him that “that man is the safest who knows that all is really evil and that the air and earth and water are peopled by fantastic demons and devils who lurk to grin at and increase the sad state of man” (Hubbard 2000, 14).

At the start of the novel’s second chapter, James comes to his senses, disoriented, and discovers that four hours have passed since he left Tommy’s house for which he cannot account. Furthermore, he has lost the hat that he was wearing, and his hand bears a cut and a bruise whose cause he can’t recall. At first James attributes his disorientation to a recent bout of malaria that he picked up during his overseas travels. But over the next few hours, he moves through landscapes of seemingly impossible topography—among them, a stairway that leads to impossible subterranean depths—and as he tries to conduct his life normally with Tommy, his wife Mary, and his students, he experiences a variety of increasingly eerie and enigmatic visions, among them the legendary hangman Jack Ketch, a young girl, an invisible thing that keeps nudging his leg at a table, and an elderly crone who warns him that “if you find your hat you’ll find your four hours, and if you find your four hours then you will die!” (29). These visions culminate in a final one in which James is told that he is the only real person in the surreal universe that he is navigating, at which point he acknowledges what happened during his lost four hours—he mistakenly assumed that Tommy and his Mary were having an affair, killed them, and tried to conceal their bodies—and accepts that all of his encounters and experiences following this have been completely illusory, the product of his psychotic break with reality.

The thunderclap revelation at the end of Fear is that the world James has moved through for most of the novel is a completely internal landscape shaped by his denial and feelings of personal guilt over his actions. In that landscape, demons—incarnated in a pair who hover on the periphery of the narrative, speaking in editorial asides, and who present themselves as enacting Lowry’s ordeal in order to teach him a lesson—do exist. As Brian Stableford observes in his critique of Hubbard’s novel, “there are demons and they do torment us, but they are one with ourselves and haunt us from within” (Stableford 1979, 764). Praising the rigorous internal logic that gives the story its narrative cohesion, Stableford notes the parallels between Hubbard’s novels and the tenets of Scientology, the psychoanalytic discipline he would later found: “There is surely a moral in the fact that Hubbard went on to invent a new school of psychoanalysis based on the thesis that all the ills of mankind stem from blotted out memories (‘engrams’), suppressed because of their inherent unpleasantness, which plague and torment us, and that this new psychoanalysis was ultimate reincarnated as a religion whose dramatic revelation is that we are all potentially godlike if only we can clear away our inner demons and ‘audit’ ourselves back to our inherent superpowers” (764–765).

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Devils and Demons; Hubbard, L. Ron; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror.

Further Reading

Budrys, Algis. 1991. “Books.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 80, no. 4: 28–29.

Hubbard, L. Ron. [1940] 2000. Fear. Los Angeles, CA: Galaxy Press.

Stableford, Brian. 1979. “Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, edited by Frank N. Magill, 761–765. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

FÉVAL, PAUL (1816–1887)

Paul-Henri-Corentin Féval was born in Rennes in Brittany, France, and his interest in the history, legends, and folklore of Brittany was a strong element in his literary work, providing the basis for his early collections Contes de Bretagne (1844) and Les Contes de nos pères (1845), and a frequent stimulus to the newspaper serials he produced in great abundance, especially during the Second Empire (1851–1870), when he became famous as the chief proponent of swashbuckling “cape-et-épée fiction.” Such serial fiction traded very heavily in suspenseful melodrama and employed horrific motifs as a staple element of the threats prolifically addressed to their heroes and (more particularly) heroines.

Convention favored the rationalization of seemingly supernatural materials, and Féval constantly found his far-reaching imagination forced to operate within an editorially imposed straitjacket that required tokenistic explanation of supernatural manifestation in naturalistic terms, which resulted in extravagant novels like Le Livre des mystères (1852; also known as La soeur de fantômes and Les Revenants; tr. as Revenants) and La Vampire (1856; tr. as The Vampire Countess) becoming strangely awkward hybrids. More license was granted to writers when employing shorter formats, so Féval was allowed to let his love of the supernatural run riot in such exuberant novellas as La Fille de Juif-Errant (1864; tr. as The Wandering Jew’s Daughter), Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1867; tr. as Knightshade), and Le Ville-Vampire (1875; tr. as Vampire City), which juxtapose their horrific elements with humor in a fashion that was not to become commonplace until the late twentieth century. Le Chevalier Ténèbre introduces a “double act” of two brothers who are ingenious in all kinds of evil, who also excel in telling creepy stories to divert their intended victims, while the classic Le Ville-Vampire features the English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe as a heroine, visiting the other-dimensional vampire city of Selene as an eccentric literary ancestor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Féval made considerable use of naturalistic horrific motifs in his pioneering crime fiction, especially Jean Diable (1862; tr. as John Devil) and the classic series launched by Les Habits Noirs (1863; tr. as The Parisian Jungle), featuring a criminal gang with elaborate connections in all strata of society, whose nefarious exploits are masterminded by the sinister Corsican Colonel Bozzo-Corona and his brutal right-hand man Monsieur Lecoq.

After making and losing a fortune, Féval underwent an ostentatious reconversion to devout Catholicism in 1876, after which he rewrote many of his novels to reduce their horrific elements and bring them into line with pious virtue, but those he considered morally unsalvageable—including La Vampire, which includes some fine phantasmagorical vignettes—continued to be reprinted regardless. His son, Paul Féval fils, also became a prolific writer in various genres, similarly intruding elements of horror into much of his melodramatic fiction.

Brian Stableford

See also: The Grotesque; Hugo, Victor; Penny Dreadful; Vampires.

Further Reading

Rohan, Jean, and Jacques Dugast, eds. 1992. Paul Féval: romancier populaire. Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Introduction” and “Afterword” in Paul Féval, The Vampire Countess. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press.

FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE OR POWER

The theme of forbidden knowledge has its roots in ancient Greek literature. Early examples revolve around a set of ideas, the comprehension of which has been prohibited by a figure of (often divine) authority. Access to this knowledge can confer superhuman or supernatural power on the individual, though this is often presented in negative terms. Contemporary fiction frequently replaces the idea of a singular authoritative figure with moral, ethical, and social proscriptions, though narratives commonly focus on the consequences of transgressing. There are two narrative traditions of forbidden knowledge, which are traditionally (though not necessarily) gendered.

One of the earliest seekers of forbidden knowledge is Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE). In this story, Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to humanity. In Works and Days (ca. 700 BCE), Hesiod expands this, suggesting that the forbidden fire is related to the creation of life itself. Prometheus is punished for his crime with eternal torment. Prometheus’s willful challenge of Zeus’s authority is echoed in Christian narratives of Lucifer/Satan’s war against God. The story of Lucifer found in Isaiah 14:12 condemns the “morning star” for his pride; however, later stories (such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost) connect Lucifer’s rebellion specifically with the pursuit of prohibited power and knowledge. As the devil or Satan, this figure becomes a temptation to other men, from Adam (in biblical tradition) to Faust (in German folklore and literature). Prometheus and Lucifer’s desire to attain knowledge that would make them “like gods,” despite the horrendous consequences, is also reflected in stories of people who attempt to transgress natural and social “laws,” such as in Frankenstein (1818), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Jurassic Park (1990).

Prometheus and Pandora

Narrative traditions of forbidden knowledge can be divided into two general streams or types:

Promethean: Named for the Greek god Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals, this type consists of narratives in which excessive ambition leads characters to rebel against conventional limits in the search for power and/or knowledge.

Pandoran: Named for Pandora, the woman in ancient Greek mythology who inadvertently loosed evil into the world (and who was the wife of Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother), this type consists of narratives in which characters are motivated not so much by ambition as by a transgressive curiosity to know things that they, and that mortals in general, are not meant to know.

Matt Cardin

A parallel tradition also begins with Hesiod’s Works and Days and the story of Pandora, the woman entrusted with a jar (or box) containing all the evils of the world. Although instructed not to open the jar, she cannot help but look inside, and thus evil enters the world. Elements of the Pandora story can be seen in various versions of Eve’s temptation by Satan, where the woman is compelled to take a bite of “forbidden fruit” despite knowing exactly what will happen if she does. Transgressive curiosity is also the theme of the Bluebeard story, as told, for example, by Charles Perrault. In this folkloric tale, a young woman marries a man who prohibits her from looking in one particular room in his castle. The woman eventually looks in the room and is confronted by the bodies of her husband’s former wives. Bluebeard’s wife is the direct ancestor of many Gothic heroines, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), but she is also echoed in the many contemporary horror characters who are unable to resist trying something, despite receiving multiple warnings and prohibitions.

The “Prometheus” and “Pandora” traditions of seeking forbidden knowledge frequently intersect in horror fiction and, while the traditions remain gendered to some degree, it is possible to find a male Pandora or a female Prometheus. In some fiction, seekers of knowledge are depicted as rebellious and heroic; nevertheless, much contemporary horror relies on the older trope of knowledge that has been forbidden for the good of humanity.

Hannah Priest

See also: Conjure Wife; Frankenstein; The Historian; The House of the Seven Gables; Mad Scientist; “The Monkey’s Paw”; “The Music of Erich Zann”; Our Lady of Darkness.

Further Reading

Athanassakis, Apostolos N. (trans.) 2004. Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. 2nd ed. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Colavito, Jason, ed. 2008. “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

Shattuck, Roger. 1997. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.

Tatar, Maria. 2004. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

FRAME STORY

The “frame story” is a narrative device that, although now associated with horror and other genre writing, has been used by some of the foundational texts of world literature, including Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1380–1400), Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1349–1353), and One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights (ca. ninth century). The frame story usually establishes a situation in which a represented narrator (a character in the frame story) is brought together with a represented audience (other characters in the frame story) to whom he or she then imparts a story or stories.

Typically, several of these “tales within a tale” will be linked together within the frame story. The origins of the form are perhaps to be found in its expediency in corralling oral folk traditions for the printed page, imposing a structure that allows the reader to more easily navigate otherwise disparate contents. Another facet, identified by genre critic John Clute, is that its use creates a critical distance between the reader and the composite tale, facilitating a suspension of disbelief in the face of accounts of often wondrous or supernatural events. In other words, Clute has argued, we are led to understand that “a tale is being told” rather than reality being directly represented. Before the story is related, an atmosphere of contemplative expectation is usually established, and the everyday concerns of the audience are suspended for the duration of the narrative. Through this setup, actual readers feel vicariously reassured that they are free to question the veracity of the story, rather than required to accept an often incredible anecdote at face value.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several Gothic novels used the device, notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but also Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (ca. 1815) by Jan Potocki, both of which significantly complicate the conceit. The increase in print culture and the associated rise of the short story form in the nineteenth century created conditions for the proliferation of the use of the frame story, since the device was a convenient and commercially expedient way whereby short stories previously published in journals could be “fixed up” into a book-length text for republication. Examples include J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882), and Robert Louis and Fanny Vandergrift Stevensons’ More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1882). Arthur Machen similarly recycled existing material within the frame story of his weird horror classic The Three Impostors (1895).

Clute (2011) has also identified the fin de siècle (late nineteenth century) and Edwardian periods as ones that saw the rise of what he calls the “club story.” The narrowest definition of the club story involves the represented narrator relating an allegedly autobiographical experience to his fellow club members (usually male). The telling of the tale can be precipitated by something raised in preceding general discussion, which triggers a specific memory; fulfilling an expectation of the auditors (who may regularly gather for that specific purpose); or offered by way of simple entertainment to ameliorate an otherwise dull evening. Numerous ghost stories use the technique of a represented narrator recounting an “unusual” experience. Notable examples in horror fiction of the period include William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories and F. Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” (1894). However, the basic iteration of the club story motif had become so ubiquitous by 1924 that H. P. Lovecraft was critical of its overuse in Weird Tales magazine, describing “the club-room with well-groomed men around the fire” as “hackneyed stuff” (Lovecraft 1924, 3). Lovecraft’s own “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) represents, by contrast, a far more sophisticated deployment of the device.

Versions of the frame story persisted in horror fiction throughout the twentieth century, including, for example, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984–1985). In the latter, much like his nineteenth-century antecedents, Barker uses the device to yoke together otherwise unrelated narratives. However, perhaps the most notable twentieth-century examples have been in horror cinema. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Anglo-American studio Amicus in particular produced a string of “portmanteau” horror films heavily influenced by the use of the conceit in the horror comics of the 1950s (specifically EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt), for example Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Torture Garden (1967), and Asylum (1972). The early twenty-first century has seen the frame story continue to be effectively applied in horror fiction, and interesting new formulations of the device are to be found in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Timothy J. Jarvis’s The Wanderer (2014).

James Machin

See also: Books of Blood; “The Call of Cthulhu”; House of Leaves; In a Glass Darkly; Interview with the Vampire; Machen, Arthur; Melmoth the Wanderer; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Baldick, Chris. 2008. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clute, John. 2011. Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. Essex: Beccon.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1924] 2015. Letter to J. C. Henneberger, February 2. In James Machin, “Fellows Find: H. P. Lovecraft Letter Sheds Light on Pivotal Moment in His Career.” Harry Ransom Center, January 27. http://blog.hrc.utexas.edu/2015/01/27/fellows-find-h-p-lovecraft-letter/.

FRANKENSTEIN

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is a Gothic novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It ranks among the most famous stories in modern human history and has had an immeasurable impact on the development of both horror and science fiction literature (and other media). Indeed, horror and science fiction most commonly meet in representations of scientific endeavor gone horribly awry. The origins of this cultural myth can be most clearly found in Shelley’s novel.

The Monster Wakes

Frankenstein’s monster as originally portrayed in Mary Shelley’s novel differs dramatically from the mute, shambling version of it that was burned into public consciousness by Universal Studios’ 1931 film adaptation. So does the scene of its animation: in the novel when Victor brings his creation to life, the violent thunderstorm and Gothic laboratory full of sparking electrical equipment are distinctly absent, as are the elatedly histrionic shouts of “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips. (Shelley 1823, 77)

Matt Cardin

Source: Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1823. Frankenstein. A New Edition. London: Printed for G. and W. B. Whittaker, Ave Maria Lane.

It was first published in 1818 by the London publishing house Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jones. This first edition was published anonymously, though it included both a dedication to William Godwin, Mary’s father, and a preface written by Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. G. & W. B. Whittaker published a second edition of the novel in 1823. This edition contains few noteworthy changes from the 1818 text and is relatively ignored in critical histories of the novel. The major significance of the 1823 edition is in marking the first time that Mary Shelley attributed her name as author of the novel. Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley published a third “revised” edition of the novel as a single volume in 1831. Both the 1818 and 1831 versions of the text remain in print, though the latter edition is more commonly available.

Though there are substantive differences between the editions, they are subtle and thematic rather than narrative. Whereas the 1818 edition presents Victor Frankenstein as a man driven by pride and personal ambition, the 1831 version gives more scope for sympathy, presenting Victor as a victim of cruel fate. For scholars, the most significant addition to the 1831 text is Mary Shelley’s preface, in which she outlines the origins of the novel (an event that has itself become a famous story in literary history). The 1831 preface has also become famous for Shelley’s statement: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (Shelley 2012, 169). Such phrasing suggests an intended link between Shelley’s creation of the novel and Victor’s construction of the monster, and it has in turn had a major impact on critical and autobiographical interpretations of the novel over the last two centuries.

Shelley’s implied comparison is important, as Frankenstein is indeed a novel about the processes and perils of creativity. Constructed as a frame narrative with multiple levels, it relates the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young nobleman who, early in life, develops a keen scientific interest. After he enrolls in the University of Ingolstadt, this interest mutates into a fixation on the origins and properties of life. In pursuit of answers he constructs a human figure from the disparate remains of corpses and successfully imbues it with life. Appalled at the monstrosity he has constructed, Victor rejects his creation. The nameless creature wanders the rural wilderness, where he discovers the nature of humanity, both in the reading of classical literature and through his own human encounters.

After a further rejection by the poor De Lacy family, the creature becomes embittered and vengeful. He returns to Victor to demand that his creator at least end his isolation by creating a mate. Victor initially agrees but, at the last moment, reflects that if these creatures were to breed, “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (Shelley 2012, 119). He rends the constructed body into pieces, enraging the creature, who vows eternal vengeance. The creature systematically destroys Victor’s life and family, climaxing in his promise to Victor that “I will be with you on your wedding night” (136). The threat is borne out when the creature murders Victor’s beloved Elizabeth in their honeymoon bed. The promise has also served as a tool in numerous queer readings of Frankenstein and in those critical responses that focus on the doubling present throughout the novel. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, reads Frankenstein as part of a subgenre of “paranoid” Gothic novel in which a man finds himself “persecuted,” “transparent to,” and “under the compulsion” of another male (Sedgwick 1985, 91).

The novel ends with Victor pursuing the creature to the Arctic aboard a ship captained by Robert Walton, one of the novel’s many narrators. Victor eventually dies before he is able to destroy his nemesis, but not before he is able to warn Walton of the dangers inherent in ambition, hubris, and the unchecked pursuit of knowledge. Walton, who was previously willing to risk his crew’s life in pursuit of his own exploratory ideals, heeds the advice. The novel closes when the creature invades the cabin and bears his creator away into the freezing wastes.

Frankenstein is open to multiple, almost innumerable interpretations, further expanded by the changes between the 1818 and 1831 versions. It has been read as a biographical account, most notably revealing Mary Shelley’s guilt over the death of her mother and the loss of her infant daughter. Ellen Moers describes the novel as a birth myth that is particularly female in its “emphasis not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth” (Moers 1979, 93).

Frankenstein has also been interpreted as both pro- and anti-revolutionary. Readers’ stances on this depend largely on whether they consider the creature or the scientist to be the “real” monster of the novel. Originally the creature may have been seen to represent the threat of violent, uncivilized revolution that seemed poised to sweep across Europe in the years preceding the novel’s publication. To the modern reader, however, the creature seems a sympathetic figure: a victim of authority and inhumanity that is extremely relevant in the contemporary capitalist world. The contemporary trend for redeeming monsters—making them sympathetic, understandable, even attractive—owes a huge debt to Frankenstein. This may be the novel’s most important ongoing purpose: to force readers to rethink what is acceptable, what is moral, and what is human.

The novel has been the subject of a multitude of adaptations for stage, cinema, television, comic books, video games, and other media. The most famous adaptation is Universal Studios’ 1931 film Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, which gave the world the iconic image of the rectangular-headed, bolt-necked monster.

Neil McRobert

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Frame Story; Gothic Hero/Villain; Mad Scientist; Monsters; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary.

Further Reading

Botting, Fred. 1991. Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

Moers, Ellen. 1979. “Female Gothic.” In The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, 90–98. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shelley, Mary. 2012. Frankenstein. Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

Tropp, Martin. 1976. Mary Shelley’s Monster: The Story of Frankenstein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

G

GAIMAN, NEIL (1955–)

Born in Hampshire, United Kingdom, and currently living in the United States, Neil Gaiman is a celebrated writer of dark fantasy. His works cross over from many genres and mediums. He is known for writing comics, short stories, novels, children’s picture books, essays, and more. Although Gaiman does not consider himself to be a horror writer, he loves the genre and regards it to be a “condiment rather than a meal” (Gaiman and Olson 2002) in his works.

Gaiman started his writing career as a journalist, but moved on to comic books in the late 1980s. After meeting with some success in titles like Marvel Man and Black Orchid, he was offered an opportunity to take on a long-forgotten detective character from the golden age of comics named the Sandman and reinvent the comic as he wished. Gaiman’s The Sandman was a huge departure from the detective character. It was instead an adult take on dark fantasy, centered on the god-like living personification of dreaming, one of the Endless, named Dream or Morpheus. It often featured stories of mythic gods and figures, complications of magic set upon the human world to horrific effect, and explorations into the power of dreams and nightmares. Some of the impactful characters that have come from this title include the Corinthian, a living nightmare; Death, another aspect of the Endless; and Lucifer Morningstar, Gaiman’s take on the biblical figure of the Devil. Many scholars consider Gaiman’s seventy-five-issue run on The Sandman to be a seminal work in the graphic novel field, and it is thought of as “highly allusive, psychologically astute, and brilliantly conceived” (Wolfe 2003). The Sandman won numerous Eisner Awards, and even the World Fantasy Award in literature. It is credited for being a major influence in putting comics into the hands of adult readers.

Gaiman firmly established himself in the literary world with the 2001 release of his dark fantasy novel American Gods. The book’s premise, gods from the Old World surviving and fighting to exist in America, allowed Gaiman to write a travel narrative featuring fantastic American places and eccentric personalities. Charles De Lint describes Gaiman’s ability to balance the light and dark aspects of the storyline to have moments that are “utterly whimsical” or “filled with doom and dread” (2001). American Gods won several speculative fiction awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Stoker.

Coraline (2002), the follow-up to American Gods, maintained the common Gaiman theme of finding magic or the unworldly in unexpectedly everyday locales, but focused it through a child’s eye and her new home. Coraline took Gaiman ten years of sporadic writing to complete. It features a monster made to channel the fear of the familiar turned distorted and terrible. The “Other Mother” is a wonderful combination of the temptations a child Coraline’s age would want from a parent and the hauntingly dreadful and unexplainable: she wants Coraline to live with her forever at the cost of having her eyes replaced by buttons. Coraline won several accolades and awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Stoker. Gaiman went on to garner even more success with his next children’s novel, The Graveyard Book. Featuring Nobody Owens, a young boy who escapes his own death on the night of his family members’ grisly murders, The Graveyard Book was heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Both texts feature a young boy raised by unconventional guardians. In the case of The Graveyard Book, ghosts teach important life lessons to the young boy as he develops. The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal and other prestigious speculative fiction awards. When asked why he would choose to write a children’s horror novel, Gaiman replied by arguing for “inoculation” to the frightful and terrorizing.

Laurie Penny noted that while other writers may “have a political agenda, however covert,” with a few exceptions in his early years, “Gaiman’s work is pure escapism” (Penny 2013). His form of fantasy draws from the urge to discover and find wonders or horrors, whether they are behind a mysterious door or beyond the world of dreaming. Gaiman remains active in the dark fantasy genre, having returned in 2013 to write The Sandman: Overture and promising a sequel to American Gods. He is well known for his readings and speeches, which are often crowded media events. In 2012 his commencement address “Make Good Art” at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia garnered viral attention and eventually became a publication of its own.

Chun H. Lee

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Kipling, Rudyard; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

De Lint, Charles. 2001. “Review of American Gods.” Fantasy & Science Fiction 101 (3): 97–98.

Gaiman, Neil, and Ray Olson. 2002. “The Booklist Interview: Neil Gaiman.” Booklist 98 (22): 1949.

“Neil Gaiman: Keynote Address 2012.” 2012. The University of the Arts. May 17. http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012.

Neil Gaiman. 2016. Neilgaiman.com. June 8. http://www.neilgaiman.com.

Penny, Laurie. 2013. “An Interview with Neil Gaiman, the Internet’s Favorite Fantasy Writer.” New Republic. November 21. https://newrepublic.com/article/115682/neil-gaiman-interview.

Wolfe, Gary K. 2003. “Gaiman, Neil 1960–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 369–375. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Yuen, Wayne, Rachel Luria, and Tracy Lyn Bealer. 2012. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild! Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2012. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).

GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE (1811–1872)

Théophile Gautier was a leading figure in the French Romantic movement whose principal works—most notably Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), whose introduction is a manifesto of sorts—champion the doctrine of “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake). In his introduction to the third edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, published after that poet’s death, he provided a similar championship of “Decadent style,” taking up an adjective first hurled at romanticism as a term of abuse by the critic Desiré Nisard, but reconstrued as praise by Baudelaire. Gautier’s own works, especially his stories employing horrific motifs, are archetypal models of Decadent prose style, and perfect illustrations of the manner in which focus on style, employing the artistry of representation for its own sake, transfigures horrific imagery into something beautiful as well as sublime, producing a distinctive aesthetic effect.

Gautier pioneered a rich French tradition of lush historical fantasies in “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838), translated by Lafcadio Hearn as the leading items in the classic collection One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882), which also contains the classic erotic vampire story “La Morte amoureuse” (1836; tr. under various titles, usually “Clarimonde”) and another femme fatale story, “Arria Marcella” (1852). Gautier’s other supernatural fantasies include Avatar (1856), about an identity exchange undertaken for erotic purposes, and Jettatura (1857; tr. as “The Evil Eye”), a more straightforwardly horrific account of a man who falls prey to the eponymous curse. Spirite (1866) is an account of a love affair between a young man and a female ghost written for the dancer Carlotta Grisi, although it was Carlotta’s sister Ernesta who bore him two daughters, including the writer Judith Gautier (1845–1917), whose own work included several Decadent horror stories, and who was married for a while to another important Decadent fantasist, Catulle Mendès.

In Gautier’s “La Morte amoureuse” (English: “The Dead in Love,” but most commonly translated as “Clarimonde”), a young Catholic priest named Romauld is seduced by a woman named Clarimonde, who turns out to be a vampire. His elderly spiritual guide, Sérapion, stands against Clarimonde and helps to rescue him from her. The story is one of the most famous nineteenth-century vampire fictions, and it contains a number of scenes that are recognizable as “classic” motifs in the world of vampire literature as a whole. Among these is the scene when Sérapion opens Clarimonde’s coffin and destroys her in front of Romauld:

He wrenched apart and tore up the lid, and I beheld Clarimonde, pallid as a figure of marble, with hands joined; her white winding-sheet made but one fold from her head to her feet. A little crimson drop sparkled like a speck of dew at one corner of her colourless mouth.

Sérapion, at this spectacle, burst into fury: “Ah, thou art here, demon! Impure courtesan! Drinker of blood and gold!” And he flung holy water upon the corpse and the coffin, over which he traced the sign of the cross with his sprinkler. Poor Clarimonde had no sooner been touched by the blessed spray than her beautiful body crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frightful mass of cinders and half-calcined bones. (Gautier 1908, 50).

“Clarimonde” was adapted as a 1998 episode of the vampire-themed horror television series The Hunger.

Matt Cardin

Source: Gautier, Théophile. [1836] 1908. “Clarimonde.” In Stories. Translated by Lafcadio Hearn. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Gautier’s short stories sometimes contained transfigured elements of horror, most notably the doppelgänger story “Le Chevalier Double” (1840; tr. as “The Duplicated Knight”) and “Deux acteurs pour un rôle” (1841: tr. as “Two Actors for One Role”). The great majority of his works were collected in twenty-two volumes as Oeuvres (1855–1874; tr. in twenty-four volumes edited by F. C. Sumichrast). Gautier’s key works represented the ultimate in Romantic fantasy; his feverish idealizations of erotic sensibility crystallized the imagery of the femme fatale, arguing flamboyantly that death might be a price worth paying for the rewards such magically attractive sexual partners might have to offer. He pointed the way for many subsequent writers to reinterpret the imagery of horror as a form of fabulously perverse eroticism, “La Morte amoureuse” being the most pivotal work in the process of the symbolic reconfiguration of vampiric lust, which eventually extended far beyond Decadent fantasy to become a staple of modern popular fiction.

Brian Stableford

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dark Fantasy; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Vampires.

Further Reading

Richardson, Joanna. 1958. Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times. London: Max Reinhardt.

Smith, Albert Brewster. 1977. Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic. University, MS: Romance Monographs.

“THE GHOST SHIP”

A perennial entry in ghost-fiction anthologies, “The Ghost Ship” is not actually a horror story, but more a gentle whimsy. It contains much that is echoed in later fantasies ranging from Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. In a rural English town, people treat their ghosts like ordinary citizens, making it the “ghostiest” place in the land. One night a storm blows a ghost ship inland, into the middle of a turnip patch. The captain proves a genial fellow, whose tasty rum is having a scandalous effect on the local ghosts. The narrator and a local parson confront the captain, who assures them that he will be leaving soon. Another storm blows the ship away with most of the local ghost population aboard and the village idiot aboard too. The captain, we learn, is the infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts (early eighteenth century) who continues his piratical career in the hereafter. The idiot returns after two years, but, yearning for that ghostly rum, soon runs away again.

Arthur Machen wrote, “I would not exchange this sort, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels” (Machen 1913, xiv). The story is actually quite unusual for its author, most of whose output is melancholy and frequently grim. Richard Middleton (1882–1911) was of a romantic disposition and wildly impractical in day-to-day life. He tried to make his living as a poet, but the result was poverty and depression. Even though he enjoyed some success in magazines, he could not get any publisher to bring out a book of his poems or stories. He would have appreciated (and probably anticipated) the irony that as soon as he was dead (by suicide) he was proclaimed a lost genius and virtually his entire literary output, five volumes, appeared in book form within another year. A final collection followed in 1933, but in the long run he is mostly remembered for this one story, often cited as the most successful humorous ghost story in English.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Gaiman, Neil; Machen, Arthur.

Further Reading

Machen, Arthur. 1913. Preface to The Ghost Ship and Other Stories by Richard Middleton, vii–xiv. New York: Mitchell Kennerly.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1998. “Richard Middleton: Beauty, Sadness, and Terror” in Windows of the Imagination, 115–120. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

GHOST STORY

Ghost Story is a 1979 novel by Peter Straub. Its significance for modern horror literature is almost incalculable, both because of its intrinsic brilliance and because of its timing. The novel appeared right at the beginning of the late twentieth-century “horror boom,” and was in fact one of the central texts that helped to launch it. Ghost Story acknowledged its deep debt to the long tradition of ghost stories and Gothic literature that had come before it, while simultaneously presenting an original, striking, and frightening treatment of the tradition’s core themes. Straub’s fourth published novel, it represented a watershed both for his career and for the horror genre.

Reduced to its bare essentials, Ghost Story can be described as a superior tale of supernatural revenge. Five young men—Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Edward Wanderley, Lewis Benedikt, and John Jaffrey—accidentally kill a woman named Eva Galli. They panic and decide to cover up her death by putting her body in a car and driving it into a lake. But as the car is sinking, they glimpse Eva’s face through the rear window, and for a moment it appears that she is still alive. Deeply shaken, they take a vow to keep her death a secret. The incident will, however, haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Fifty years later, the five men, now prosperous and content, still live in their (fictional) hometown of Milburn, New York, and call themselves “The Chowder Society.” Although they meet regularly to swap ghost stories, they never speak of Eva. This all changes when Edward dies of fright during a party given in honor of a mysterious young woman, an actress who goes by the name Anne-Veronica Moore. The remaining members experience a series of disquieting dreams in which several of them die, leading them to conclude that Eva Galli has somehow reentered their lives and is seeking revenge.

Unable to admit fully to themselves that their past deeds have come back to haunt them, they reach out to Ed’s nephew, Don Wanderley, for help. Don is a writer who has produced a horror novel titled The Nightwatcher, which is based on his own experiences with Eva, whom he knew by the name of Alma Mobley; the old men sense that he may have insights into their situation that may be key to their very survival. Don’s arrival in town appears to serve as a signal to the evil threatening the group, resulting in the deaths of Lewis and John. The surviving members, Sears and Ricky, band together with Don and Peter Barnes, a young man who has also suffered at the hands of Eva—who has become a supernatural shape-shifter—and the supernatural minions that she now commands. Together they struggle to locate and eliminate their nemesis as Eva slowly goes about destroying all that is dear to them.

From the novel’s very first sentences, Straub sets a tone that defines the whole book. Those sentences take the form of a question and response: “‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ ‘I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing’” (Straub 1980, 3). Straub then proceeds, through the novel as a whole, to explore the terrifying notion that ghosts may be unique to those they haunt, that victims may somehow summon their torturers from some dark place within their own psyches. Stephen King has described this as “a very Henry Jamesian theme. . . . the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them” (King 2010, 271). Straub leaves it unclear whether Eva/Alma/Anne-Veronica could thrive if she were not sustained by the belief of her victims. It is never made clear whether her existence is objective and independent, symbiotic, or dependent on those she seeks to destroy, and Straub’s clues muddy the waters—apparently deliberately—as when Eva and another shape-shifter are asked, “Who are you?” and they answer with maddening ambiguity, “I am you” (Straub 1980, 26).

Straub has openly acknowledged the debt Ghost Story owes to Stephen King’s second novel, ’Salem’s Lot, which was published four years earlier, in 1975, and which likewise had a seismic impact on the shape of modern horror fiction. Although both books do share similar themes, plot points, and even settings—a small American town besieged by a supernatural horror—’Salem’s Lot seems to have provided a template of sorts, a kind of guide or catalyst that enabled Straub to intuit larger possibilities in the literary form of the horror novel. In the final analysis, Ghost Story may be seen as the marriage of two sensibilities: King’s, from which it derives its more operatic moments, and Straub’s, who used it to fulfill his ambition to enlarge the boundaries of the traditional ghost story. Notably, it also stands as the first example of Straub’s trademark exploration of the dormant power of secrets, and of the power of storytelling to uncover core truths. Much as King’s book pays homage to writers such as Bram Stoker and Richard Matheson, who had produced canonical vampire novels before him, Straub’s stands as a tribute to previous writers in the long tradition of ghost stories, including some who are specifically referenced in the book (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James) and some who are not (such as Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and M. R. James).

Hank Wagner

See also: James, Henry; King, Stephen; Psychological Horror; Straub, Peter.

Further Reading

Andriano, Joseph. 1993. “From Fiend to Friend: The Daemonic Feminine in Modern Gothic.” In Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction, 135–144. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Bosky, Bernadette. 1999. “Peter Straub: From Academe to Shadowland.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 3–17. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

Neilson, Keith. 1980. “Ghost Story.” Magill’s Literary Annual 1980, 1–4.

Straub, Peter. 1980. Ghost Story. New York: Pocket Books.

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

The Girl Next Door is an extreme horror novel written by Jack Ketchum. It was first published by Warner Books in 1989; Leisure Books published the mass market paperback in 2005. Though it has elements of horror, particularly in the stark depictions of violence, Ketchum’s book is best categorized as crime fiction, as it is loosely based on the true-life events of the torture and eventual murder of Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1965. It has been called “Suburban Gothic,” given its setting and how Ketchum is able to describe such horrendous violence in what is otherwise considered a safe place.

The novel is narrated by David, an adult who is remembering his youth in what appears to be a typical 1950s suburban neighborhood, not unlike many that can be found almost anywhere across the United States. The innocuous setting only serves to intensify the horrific events that happen. Teenager Meg, along with her younger sister, Susan, are sent to live with Ruth, a single mother who is raising three boys of her own. Ruth, struggling with poverty, stress, depression, and substance abuse, allows her sons—and eventually other boys from the neighborhood—to imprison Meg in the basement and perform increasingly vile acts of torture, including rape, on the captive girl.

In 1996, a limited edition of the book was published, featuring an introduction from fellow horror writer Stephen King. In describing Ketchum, he wrote, “Jack Ketchum is a brilliantly visceral novelist whose bleak perception of human nature is perhaps only rivaled by that of Frank Norris and Malcolm Lowry” (quoted in Beahm 1998, 113). The extreme violence in Ketchum’s novel divides critics and readers. While some are turned off by the gore, some, like King, understand that Ketchum has a unique ability to look into the dark soul of humanity and to plumb the depths of human depravity in order to ask why evil exists in the world.

In 2007 the novel was adapted into a film, Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Reviews were mixed, as most critics and audiences considered the violence too graphic to be shown on screen. The same year saw the release of another film inspired by the story of Sylvia Likens. Titled An American Crime, this one did not use Jack Ketchum as a source, instead choosing to go to the original murder case as inspiration.

Lisa Kröger

See also: Ketchum, Jack.

Further Reading

Beahm, George. 1998. Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel.

Hipson, Richard. 2007. “Jack Ketchum Talks About the Horrors That Live ‘Next Door.’” Dark Scribe Magazine, November 15. http://www.darkscribemagazine.com/feature-interviews/jack-ketchum-talks-about-the-horrors-that-live-next-door.html.

“Retold: Torture Death of Sylvia Likens.” 2015. Indianapolis Star, October 22. http://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2013/10/24/sylvia-likens/3178393.

Rhyne, Leah. 2014. “Prose and Conversation: ‘The Girl Next Door’ by Jack Ketchum.” LitReactor, February 21. https://litreactor.com/columns/prose-conversation-the-girl-next-door-by-jack-ketchum.

“THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES”

Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) is a classic vampire story that updates the genre’s conventions for the world of modern consumerism. Its protagonist—a lean young advertising model known simply as “The Girl”—is essentially the undead embodiment of consumer desire itself, of half-formed cravings that can never be fully satisfied. The narrator, a down-on-his-luck photographer who snaps the Girl’s first promotional glossies, almost succumbs to her eerie blandishments, yet manages at the last minute to shake free. Meanwhile, the Girl goes on to infest the urban marketplace, her face gazing down from billboards, her appetite as unquenchable as the inchoate longings of the hapless consumers upon whom she preys.

“The Signal-man”: Urban Horror ahead of Its Time

One of the first instances of urban horror, “The Signal-Man,” predates Fritz Leiber’s use of the form in “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by nearly a century. If this 1866 ghost story by Charles Dickens, sometimes called “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man,” had involved nautical signals or stagecoaches, it would have been effective, but unremarkable. A man is plagued by an apparition that warns of upcoming disaster. The third time, it presages his own death. What makes this more interesting is that it is about a railway signal operator and takes place among the soot and grime of early industrial England. Dickens builds up the atmosphere deftly, the setting being the signalman’s cabin in a low, dank, walled trench near the opening to a railway tunnel. The train, roaring out of the dark tunnel mouth, becomes an effective emblem of menace. The story may have been inspired by a real place, the Clayton Tunnel in England, where a notable collision occurred in 1861.

The first time the “ghost” appears, there is a train wreck. The second time, a woman dies mysteriously aboard a train, and the third time the signalman himself is hit by one. On this final encounter it is unclear whether he actually saw a ghost or the operator of the third train, who is described as waving and shouting in exactly the same manner as the apparition. This could be read as a case of precognition, not haunting in the usual sense.

Fictional ghosts had long haunted gloomy castles, remote crossroads, and lonely sea strands, but Dickens was one of the first to realize the potential of a modern, urban landscape for horror fiction. This was so far ahead of its time that it still seemed revolutionary when Fritz Leiber did something similar with “Smoke Ghost” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” eight decades later.

Darrell Schweitzer

Like a number of Leiber’s other works of the 1940s, such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941) and Conjure Wife (1943), “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” takes a perennial horror icon and situates it within a contemporary milieu. In essence, Leiber asks: what would a vampire look like in a world dominated not by the Gothic trappings of the past but by the most up-to-date technologies and ideologies? A major innovation of the story is to see the vampire not as a physical predator, sucking blood, but as a psychological parasite, battening on and draining emotional energy. A possible influence was Mary Wilkins-Freeman’s “Luella Miller” (1902), with its eponymous psychic leech; yet “The Girl” in Leiber’s story is no shrinking violet but rather a boldly libidinous huntress stalking the modern world. Like Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel (1897), who advances his undead campaign by means of real estate agents and railway timetables, Leiber’s “Girl” draws victims to her via photography agencies and fashion magazines.

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” is the forerunner of an entire subgenre of contemporary vampire stories that link feral appetite with modern communications media and high-tech consumption. S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) and Anne Billson’s Suckers (1992), for example, both connect vampiric thirst with consumer desire, its undead creatures animated by marketing strategies. David J. Schow’s World Fantasy Award–winning story “Red Light” (1986) is virtually an homage to Leiber in its tale of a beautiful photographer’s model who is both a victim of male lust and a subtle predator upon it. Leiber’s tale has been filmed twice: in 1972 as an episode of Rod Serling’s anthology series Night Gallery, and then in 1995 as a low-budget horror movie directed by Jon Jacobs.

Rob Latham

See also: Conjure Wife; Dark Fantasy; Incubi and Succubi; Leiber, Fritz; Psychological Horror; Vampires.

Further Reading

Auerbach, Nina. 1995. “Vampires and Vampires.” In Our Vampires, Ourselves, 101–111. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Langan, John. 2008. “Feed Me, Baby, Feed Me: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.’” In Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays, edited by Benjamin Szumskyj, 101–115. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

GOGOL, NIKOLAI (1809–1852)

Nikolai Gogol was a Ukrainian Russian writer and dramatist. Best known for his tales set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and for his macabre, absurdist, and grotesque style, Gogol also achieved literary prominence in his lifetime for stories inspired by Ukrainian folklore. His work demonstrates a profound attention to psychological complexity, everyday life, and the common person, prompting nineteenth-century critic Vissarion Belinsky to name him the father of the “natural school” of Russian literary realism. However, Romantic writers such as Aleksandr Pushkin and E. T. A. Hoffmann also influenced Gogol’s writing, resulting in an idiosyncratic fantastic realism in which the supernatural, grotesque, and surreal violently intrude upon the banal realities of everyday life.

A tendency toward chaos, a preoccupation with the vulgarity of life, an overriding belief in evil as a ubiquitous presence, and a characteristic dark humor permeate Gogol’s work from his earliest collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832). Heavily influenced by Gogol’s Ukrainian childhood and by traditional Ukrainian culture and folklore, Evenings contains eight stories that present the Ukrainian countryside as a place of myth, magic, and the supernatural. Cossacks, maidens, witches, devils, sorcerers, ghosts, and deadly acts of vengeance haunt its pages, combining folkloric figures with Gothic literary tropes, a highly developed dark wit, and a Romantic sense of the sublime. “A Terrible Vengeance”—an unsettling tale of sorcery, dark magic, and obsession—offers an early example of Gogol’s talent for depicting the grotesque, while “Christmas Eve,” with its humorous portrayals of vanquished devils and comely maidens, exhibit Gogol’s absurdist, cynical dark humor.

Evenings was followed by the short story collections Mirgorod (1835) and Arabesques (1835). Ranging from satire to the Gothic to the absurd, these tales demonstrate both Gogol’s expansive talent and his tendency to defy classification. With Mirgorod, Gogol presented a cycle of tales that returned to rural Ukrainian settings and folklore. “Viy,” a tale of witchcraft, demons, vengeance, and a less-than-pious clergyman, has left a particularly pronounced impression on both the Soviet and Russian Gothic-horror traditions and has been adapted for film numerous times both within and outside Russia. With Arabesques, Gogol moved his tales from rural Ukraine to his adopted city of St. Petersburg. “The Portrait,” “Nevsky Prospect,” and “Diary of a Madman” are perhaps the most Gothic tales in this collection, presenting a labyrinthine city dominated by rigid social hierarchies, pettiness, and vice. Gogol’s characters in these tales are often young and relatively powerless artists and petty bureaucrats, easily overwhelmed by the temptations of—and social barriers to—a luxurious urban lifestyle. Here, it is both the urban environment and a pervasive bureaucracy that destroys the common person: “Diary of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospect,” for instance, depict St. Petersburg as a disorienting force overlaid by a mechanical, pointless bureaucracy that crushes the individual, while “The Portrait” is a tale of demonic ambition that recalls earlier themes from Evenings.

Gogol’s later work prominently featured St. Petersburg as an indifferent, imposing city largely controlled by the administrative class. “The Nose” (1836) and “The Overcoat” (1842) are perhaps Gogol’s most well-known short works and are both exemplars of Gogol’s late absurdist, grotesque style. “The Nose,” a masterful tale of pure absurdity and dark humor, depicts a civil servant of average rank who awakens to discover that his nose has not only gone missing but has also begun to pose as a human and, to his horror, has even surpassed him in rank. In “The Overcoat,” obsessions with rank, social status, and the meanness of urban life drive a lowly civil servant to increase his social standing by saving for a new overcoat. When the coat is finally purchased and immediately stolen, the civil servant falls into a fever and dies, returning as a ghost to haunt—and steal overcoats from—passersby on the city streets. The tale is considered a masterwork of Russian literature and exerted a profound influence on later writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is famously said to have proclaimed, “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’”

Though Gogol’s oeuvre was composed over the relatively short period of 1830–1842, ending with his satirical and widely praised novel-poem Dead Souls (1842), Gogol’s influence on writers, directors, and composers has been monumental and long-lasting, resulting in numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations of his work, including the famous Soviet horror film Viy (1967). Gogol died in 1852 after falling into a deep depression, during which time he burned his final manuscript.

Brittany Roberts

See also: The Grotesque; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Fanger, Donald. 1979. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gippius, Vasilii. 1981. Gogol. Translated by Robert A. Maguire. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

Nabokov, Vladimir. 1944. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, CT: New Directions.

THE GOLEM

The Golem is a novel by Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932). Written in German under the title Der Golem, it was published first as a serial between 1913 and 1914, and then as a book in 1915. The first English translation appeared in 1928.

The setting is Prague, a city with a large Jewish population and a reputation for alchemy and sorcery. Meyrink draws on a Jewish legend about a wonder-working rabbi who is able to bring to life the massive clay statue of a man, the Golem, who protects the Jews of Prague from persecution. (This same legend inspired several silent films by the German Expressionist director Paul Wegener, but despite the identical titles, his films are not adaptations of Meyrink’s novel.)

While Prague is the setting of the novel, it is also almost a character as well, actually manifesting itself as the Golem. The novel is alive with Meyrink’s own preoccupations, involving the blending of psychology and mysticism in a way that aligns him with other contemporary writers such as Carl Jung and William Butler Yeats. The plot does not follow conventional lines of cause and effect, preferring instead to connect events using a subtle inner logic of correspondences that hints at the unfolding of an ineffable cosmic plan. This plan is impossible to understand for those who lack some form of spiritual enlightenment.

The first section of the book tells the story of a young man named Athanasius Pernath, who is framed for murder and loses everything. In the second section, however, the reader learns that Pernath’s story is all a dream; the dreamer, who is also the narrator, has taken Pernath’s hat away with him from a restaurant by mistake, and evidently for this reason has dreamed about him. Haunted by the dream, the narrator begins searching for Pernath. In his search, he seems to become lost in a phantasmagorical delirium of Prague. He meets the Golem, who is like the spirit of the city, a man-made thing animated by human activity but somehow lacking human consciousness. Eventually, the narrator finds Pernath, and, through him, a higher spiritual plane of existence.

The Golem is an example of the artistic movement known as expressionism. Expressionist art tries to capture the ways in which a single person’s point of view alters, or distorts, experience. In painting, film, poetry, and fiction, the result is typically a work that tries to make the audience aware of the way an individual’s desires shape his or her perspective. In effect, expressionism sacrifices conventional realism, the attempt to record events objectively, in order to be more realistic about the experience of an event for an individual. For this reason, much expressionist fiction is structured by affinities, rather than modeled on everyday events. Instead of depicting the way one event leads to another, expressionist novels like The Golem will often set events side by side because they share the same mood, or seem to point to the same mysterious idea beyond experience.

It may be noted that The Golem is also an important novel for its Jewish characters, some of whom correspond to the viciously anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time. Others, as if in compensation, have an equally exaggerated saintliness.

Michael Cisco

See also: Meyrink, Gustav.

Further Reading

Barnett, David. 2014. “Meyrink’s Golem: Where Fact and Fiction Collide.” The Guardian, January 30. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jan/30/the-golem-gustav-meyrink-books.

Irwin, Robert. 1985. “Gustav Meyrink and His Golem.” In The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, 1995, translated by Mike Mitchell, 15–20. Monroe, OR: Dedalus.

“GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE”

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People” was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1955 and then in O’Connor’s collection of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). It stands among the most anthologized tales that she ever wrote, alongside “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The story is highly representative of O’Connor’s dark humor as well as the Southern Gothic style: it features grotesque characters from the rural South with physical deformities and moral failings who bring about their downfall through their own stubbornness.

Mrs. Hopewell is a well-off widow who runs a farm in rural Georgia with the help of her tenants, Mrs. Freeman and her two daughters, whom she believes are “good country people.” They contrast heavily with Mrs. Hopewell’s own daughter, a thirty-two-year-old spinster called Joy who lost a leg in a gunshot accident. Joy came back to live on the farm after earning a PhD in philosophy but failing to make it in academia because of her physical deformity. As a consequence, she is bitter and condescending to the country people’s lack of philosophical insight.

One day, a Bible salesman named Manley Pointer shows up at the farm. He shows interest in Joy and invites her on a date. Overnight, Joy pictures herself seducing the young man to mock his country ways and his faith. During the picnic, Pointer convinces Joy to go in a barn loft and to take off her prosthetic leg. He confesses that he pretends to be an innocent Bible seller in order to steal prosthetic limbs. He then runs away with the leg, leaving Joy to go back to her mother, humbled and limbless.

The story, labeled by O’Connor as a “low joke” (O’Connor 1969, 98), follows the narrative pattern of the trickster being tricked. Priding herself on her philosophical knowledge and atheism, Joy devises a scheme to expose the bigotry of country folks, but her intellectual arrogance and contempt for the material world are exposed when Pointer seduces her and steals her prosthetic leg. Joy turns out to be greatly attached to her fake limb, and the loss of it shatters her image of a detached and independent intellectual. She has to admit that her physical impairment makes her reliant on her mother and the Freeman women, whether she likes it or not.

Joy is one of O’Connor’s most grotesque creations. Her moral failings and physical handicap make her amusing and horrifying to the reader. There is humor in her condescending attitude, as it becomes clear to the reader that she is a caricature of an intellectual, but there is something deeply unsettling in the sexual farce Pointer plays on her. His fetish for the leg as well as the pleasure he takes in humiliating Joy contradicts the idea that country people are inherently “good” and gives the story a dark turn. “Good country people” can be as cruel as anyone, and the fault lies both in Joy’s cynical attitude toward them as well as in her mother’s blindness to their potential evil, as the latter insists, until the end of the story, that they are indeed good.

Elsa Charléty

See also: Body Horror; The Grotesque; O’Connor, Flannery.

Further Reading

Di Renzo, Anthony. 1995. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Kirk, Connie Ann. 2008. Critical Companion to Flannery O’Connor. New York: Infobase.

O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. New York: Macmillan.

GOTHIC HERO/VILLAIN

The Gothic hero/villain is a type of male character, especially found in Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century, who appears to have the qualities of both good and evil. Contrary to a traditional romance hero, represented as a dutiful, sensitive, and pious gentleman, the Gothic hero/villain is dark, brooding, and sometimes cruel or abusive, but also capable of displaying strong, passionate feelings. The aura of mystery that surrounds him makes him both attractive and repulsive to the Gothic heroine who usually falls under his influence, and his moral ambiguity makes it difficult for the reader to place a definite judgment on him.

Examples of Gothic Hero/Villains

•Manfred in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)

•Vathek in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)

•Montoni in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

•Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)

•Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)

•Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819)

•Melmoth in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

•Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)

•Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

•Lestat in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles (1976–)

Matt Cardin

Heroes with moral ambiguities can be found all through the history of literature, from the protagonist Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey to Elizabethan theater (Hamlet, Macbeth, Faust), but the hero/villain of nineteenth-century Gothic literature finds his origin in the real-life figure of the English poet Lord Byron. As the author of narrative poems such as Don Juan (1823) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), Lord Byron is both the creator and the inspiration for this character whom Lord Macauley described as a “proud, moody, cynical man, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart” (Christiansen 1989, 201). Byron’s tumultuous life, made of scandalous affairs and excess, bore so many echoes of the male characters found in his poetry that this type of hero would be called “Byronic.”

The Gothic hero/villain is a flawed but passionate figure who challenges the ideas of his time. He conforms to neither morals nor religion, and is a believer in the ideologies of the Enlightenment, mainly those of freedom and knowledge. However, the relentless pursuit of his ideals often leads him to extremes as he indulges in abuse, excess, or self-destruction. The Gothic hero/villain embodies the darker side of romanticism, as he constantly questions and defies authority by destructive means.

Even though this male character is defined by his ambiguity, three main types of Gothic hero/villain can be identified: the satanic, the Promethean, and the Caliban hero/villain. The satanic hero/villain, much like the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, possesses a brilliant mind and a power of persuasion over weaker individuals. He manipulates people around him with subtle words and action, and seduces them, regardless of their gender. The magnetic aura that surrounds him makes him a dangerously attractive character, often to the detriment of the good hero. Examples include John Polidori’s Ruthven (in “The Vampyre”), the original vampire of English literature, who was modeled directly on Byron; Ann Radcliffe’s Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); and Bram Stoker’s titular vampire in Dracula (1897).

Recalling Prometheus, the ancient Greek deity who defied the gods by giving fire to humankind, the Promethean hero/villain transgresses the essential laws of nature in pursuit of a greater good. He acts not out of love, but out of passion for science and knowledge. He is ready to cross all boundaries for the advancement of humanity, even the sacred one between life and death. Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous tragic protagonist and “mad scientist” from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is a telling example, since the book’s full title is Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.

The Caliban hero/villain is a raw force of nature. Like Shakespeare’s creature in The Tempest, the Caliban hero/villain has failed to be fully subjugated to modern civilization. He is brutal, impulsive, and cruel to humans and animals alike. His feelings are strong and unconditional, and his love is as intense as it is destructive. The best example of this type is Heathcliff, the dark and haunted lover of Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

Twentieth-century incarnations of the Gothic hero/villain tend to be stripped of their Gothic component while keeping the complex moral ambiguity of the character. Crime fiction and psychological thrillers often resort to this type of character. Both genres owe much to the figure of the Gothic hero/villain for achieving some of their most characteristic effects, as he is useful for heightening tension and allowing for major plot twists. The figure of the private detective, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (an obsessive-compulsive maniac addicted to morphine) and Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (grumpy alcoholic loners emblematic of noir fiction), embody this hero/villain of a new genre. Other modern examples may include the mysterious phantom from The Phantom of the Opera (1910), the sociopathic antihero Alex in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), the masked anarchist freedom fighter V. in Allan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1988); and Dexter, the vigilante serial killer from the HBO series of the same name.

Elsa Charléty

See also: The Brontë Sisters; Byronic Hero; The Castle of Otranto; Dracula; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Phantom of the Opera; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Vampires; “The Vampyre.”

Further Reading

Behr, Kate E. 2002. The Representation of Men in the English Gothic Novel, 1762–1820. Vol. 69. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Christiansen, Rupert. 1989. Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age, 1780–1830. London: Random House UK.

Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marshall, Bridget M. 2000. “The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 6, no. 2: 161–172.

Morrison, Robert, and Chris Baldick. 1997. Introduction to The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. New York: Oxford University Press.

Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. 2004. The Gothic. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.

GRABIŃSKI, STEFAN (1887–1936)

Stefan Grabiński was a Polish writer of what he termed “psychofantasy” or “metafantasy,” tales of the dark fantastic that explore the inner realm of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical concerns. He enjoyed a brief period of critical and popular acclaim early in his career, but his renown waned and he died impoverished and forgotten. However, after World War II interest in his work was rekindled, and his reputation has grown.

Grabiński was born on February 26, 1887, in Kamionka Strumiłowa, a small town in the eastern provinces of Poland, now part of the Ukraine. He had a quiet and comfortable childhood, though marred by ill health; he inherited a genetic form of tuberculosis from his father, which, starting in his bones and later spreading to his lungs, was to cause him suffering his whole life. After Grabiński’s father’s death, the family moved to Lwów, capital of Polish Galicia, where Grabiński studied Polish and classical literature. After graduating, he began working as a teacher of Polish, mostly in local schools. He would remain a provincial teacher the rest of his life, a job he found frustrating, as he felt it sapped his creative energy. He was, though, by all accounts, a good teacher.

As a child, encouraged by his mother, who was a great lover of books, Grabiński would read while laid up on his sickbed. It is likely Grabiński’s sickness, a constant reminder of his mortality, and his introspective personality led him to dark fantasy and to an interest in the esoteric. In his own writing he took influences from Edgar Allan Poe and writers of the Polish Decadent and avant-garde movements. He was also inspired by classical thinkers, such as Heraclitus and Plato, and contemporary philosophers, particularly Henri Bergson and Maurice Maeterlinck. And he was intensely spiritual throughout his life, a pantheist who read the Christian mystics, Eastern religious texts such as the Indian Vedas, and works of theosophy and demonology.

In 1906, supported by his mother, Grabiński began writing. In 1909, he self-published a collection of stories under a pseudonym. This book did not find an audience, but his second volume of tales, On the Hill of Roses (1918), published some time later, after the upheaval of World War I, had a more encouraging critical reception. In 1919 The Motion Demon followed, a compilation of fantastical railway stories written for magazines and newspapers. It was a very popular collection, partly due to the interest in rail travel of the time, and was well regarded by critics. Karol Irzykowski, a leading writer of the Polish avant-garde, called it a perfect example of its genre and hailed Grabiński as the “Polish Poe.” Grabiński’s take on the railways is mystical, based on an esoteric theory of motion. He merged Bergson’s theory of élan vital—the idea that evolution can be explained by an internal vital impetus that drives organisms to develop—with scientific theories of motion from Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

The Motion Demon sold well enough that it was expanded and reprinted in 1922. It was followed by further collections: Pilgrim’s Madness (1920), A Mystery Tale (1922), and Book of Fire (1922). The latter, like The Motion Demon, had a unified theme.

In his stories, Grabiński is modern and does not turn to the past, to the rich folklore of Poland. But he was also an opponent of mechanization; he had a sense that the modern world was a place where humankind’s original sense of self and of harmony with nature was being erased by machines, materialism, and bureaucracy. In his work, and in particular his railway tales, demonic forces are fused with modern machines.

Grabiński had a close relationship with his mother and lived with her for most of his life. Though he was married in 1917, the relationship did not last, ending in 1921 when his wife left him, taking their two daughters with her. These things may have affected his attitudes toward women: in his fiction they are often sweet, pliant, and voluptuously monstrous at the same time. Many of his stories, such as “In Sarah’s House,” “The Black Hamlet,” and “Passion,” deal with the destructive power of lust. Grabiński’s focus on the erotic can also be explained by his interest in in the human mind, psychoanalysis, and madness—he relished writing the lunatics in his fiction, for they shared his maverick perspective.

In the essay “Wyznania” (“Confessions,” 1926), Grabiński writes, “Wonder and fear—these are my guiding motives” (Lipinski 2014, 7). And he was as much a writer of ecstasy as he was of horror, balancing and mixing the two emotions in his stories.

The heights of Grabiński’s early tales were never regained, and the fame and material comfort they bought faded quickly. He tried his hand at novels and dramas, but they lacked the tautness and economy that made his short fiction catch fire and were too dependent on obscure occult iconography and terminology.

During this time, Grabiński’s deteriorating health increasingly kept him housebound. He became bitter. In 1929, his tuberculosis spread to his lungs, with hemorrhaging. His financial situation also grew increasingly precarious. Still he continued to work, and in 1936 he published a novel, Itongo Island. It received bad reviews, and it was to be his last book.

Grabiński died on November 12, 1936. On his deathbed, he complained bitterly about having been misunderstood and forgotten in his native land. But interest in his work was revitalized in Poland in the late 1940s, and he was later championed by Stanisław Lem, the great Polish science fiction writer, who edited a collection of Grabiński’s work and his influence has grown since. Several Polish films have been based on his work, and in the English-speaking world, thanks largely to the pioneering translations of Miroslaw Lipinski, begun in the 1980s, Grabiński’s work has found favor among writers and readers of weird fiction. In Poland, the Year of Grabiński was held in 2012, with scholarly works and symposia dedicated to the writer.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: The Dark Domain.

Further Reading

Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2012. The Stefan Grabiński Website. January 9. http://www.stefangrabinski.org.

Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2014. Introduction to The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabińksi, 7–11. New York: NoHo Press.

Mills, Adam. 2012. “Interview: Translator Miroslaw Lipinski on Stefan Grabiński.” Weird Fiction Review, July 10. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/07/interview-translator-miroslaw-lipinski-on-stefan-grabinski.

GRANT, CHARLES L. (1942–2006)

Charles Lewis Grant was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor/anthologist who specialized in dark fantasy and what he called “quiet horror,” a term that became associated with his name and eventually came to define his work in the minds of his many admiring readers. He was born in 1942 in New Jersey, and he spent most of his life as a resident of the northwestern part of the state.

Grant’s first novel, The Shadow of Alpha (1976), was a work of science fiction. He published a number of books in that genre before the end of the 1970s, switching to horror when the market for science fiction weakened. His first work of horror was a werewolf novel titled The Curse (1977). Grant would subsequently publish a total of eighty-five novels in myriad genres under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, many of which had their origins in bodies of water; thus, the pen names Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Timothy Boggs, and Simon Lake. He penned dozens of short stories that were later collected in six books. He also edited twenty-five anthologies, among them twelve volumes of one of the enormously influential horror anthology series Shadows (1978–1991). As an editor, he worked with some of the biggest names in the genre, and he also gave many fledgling writers their start.

He was known as a master and champion of quiet, subtle horror, as opposed to the more visceral and gaudy horror pioneered by Clive Barker in his Books of Blood and by the other so-called “splatterpunks” who rose to prominence in the late 1980s. While appreciating the effects those authors created, Grant preferred to suggest the horrific rather than render it explicitly. His great influence on the field is indicated by an insightful comment from author David Morrell in Douglas Winter’s book of interviews, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (1985): “Stephen King and Peter Straub are like the luxury liners of the horror field. They’re always visible on the horizon when you look over these deep, dark waters. But Charlie Grant—he’s the unseen power, like the great white shark, just below the surface” (Winter 1985, 109). Besides creating a vivid mental image, the quote is notable for the accurate portrayal of Grant acting as a secret master of the genre, subtly exerting profound influence on all those in his orbit. Grant led by example, publishing the best prose he could craft, and by educating the rest of his colleagues through the numerous anthologies he edited, announcing by their inclusion in these volumes that certain writers had “arrived” and that these stories were worthy of readers’ attention.

Of particular importance in Grant’s own body of work is his fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station. Although many writers have explored the subject of small town horror—including, notably, Shirley Jackson in “The Lottery” (1948), Thomas Tryon in Harvest Home (1973), and Stephen King in ’Salem’s Lot (1975)—few have done it as well, or as long, or in as many and varied ways, as Grant. Starting with The Hour of the Oxrun Dead in 1979, he went on to write a total of eight novels and a series of four collections of novellas set in the secluded Connecticut hamlet, concluding in 1995 with the collection The Black Carousel. As a set, the Oxrun books represent a grand, wildly successful experiment in horror, as Grant effectively explores dread and disquiet in many forms, whether it be the threat of harm from satanic cults; classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, or mummies; the pain of loneliness; or the confusion and despair caused by mental illness. Individually, many of these stories are classics of the genre, expertly evoking fear, terror, and horror, and providing readers with fleeting, disturbing, and memorable glimpses of what lurks in the shadows.

Grant won many awards over the course of his career, including two Nebulas plus multiple World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild awards. Late in his career he was honored with awards for lifetime achievement from the Horror Writers Association, the World Horror Convention, the British Fantasy Society, and the International Horror Guild. His profound influence on the horror genre is also evidenced by two tribute collections. The first, Quietly Now (2004), edited by Kealan Patrick Burke, presents tributes to Grant by various writers and critics in the field. The second, Scream Quietly (2011), edited by Stephen Jones, presents the best of Grant’s short fiction.

Grant suffered from declining health in his later years. He was residing in Newton, New Jersey, with his second wife, the speculative fiction writer and editor Kathryn Ptacek, when he died of a heart attack on September 15, 2006.

Hank Wagner

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; International Horror Guild Award; Vampires; Werewolves; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Mcdonald, T. Liam. 2003. “Grant, Charles L. 1942–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, 391–402. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Neilson, Keith. 1983. “The Subtle Terrors of Charles L. Grant.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Volume 3, edited by Frank N. Magill, 1191–1195. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Charles L. Grant.” In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of Supernatural Horror, 47–57. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Winter, Douglas E. 1985. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books.

“THE GREAT GOD PAN”

“The Great God Pan” is a classic horror novella by the Welsh author Arthur Machen. It caused something of a sensation when it was published, and it has become one of the central texts in the history of weird fiction in the English language.

The novella’s first section, “The Experiment,” was originally published as “The Great God Pan” in the short-lived Whirlwind in 1890, which styled itself a “lively and eccentric newspaper” and whose contributors included Stéphane Mallarmé, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Walter Sickert. Machen expanded this original iteration into its final form for publication in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894), one of John Lane’s “Keynotes,” a book series associated with the literary Decadent movement of the 1890s.

Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s conceit in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Machen was convinced that a similarly “scientific” plot device was necessary for the modern reader to accept an unusual narrative, where traditional supernatural horror tropes would no longer be convincing. Thus the opening section of “The Great God Pan” relates a scientific (or rather, pseudoscientific) experiment on the brain of a young girl by Dr. Raymond, intended to give her access to other realms of perception.

In Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Dr. Raymond’s explanation of what it means to “see the god Pan” lays out a philosophical viewpoint that resonates with weird horror fiction’s central concern, and that stands as a quintessential articulation of it:

Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these “chases in Arras, dreams in a career,” beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan. (Machen 1894, 3)

Matt Cardin

Source: Machen, Arthur. 1894. The Great God Pan. London: John Lane, Vigo St.

The ensuing narrative is fragmented, offering different perspectives on the events precipitated by the experiment, provoking the reader into active construction and interpretation of the central plotline. During her ordeal, the girl encounters what is (perhaps only euphemistically) described as the Greek deity Pan, rendering her both insane and mysteriously pregnant. The resulting child, Helen Vaughan, is shunned by the rural Welsh community in which she grows up and where she is the subject of disturbing rumors. As an adult, Vaughan moves through London society leaving in her wake insanity and a series of suicides. She is eventually tracked down by two men, Villiers and Clarke, who have learned something of her history and become convinced of how dangerous she is. They confront Vaughan and coerce her into killing herself. The final paragraphs describe Vaughan’s preternatural “dissolution,” through a reverse evolutionary process, into protoplasmic material.

“The Great God Pan” received largely negative reviews upon publication for its gruesome subject matter as well as its association with controversial new literary freedoms. Its theme of pagan resurgence destabilizing bourgeois metropolitan society resonated with fin-de-siècle (literally “end of the century,” a phrase used at the close of the nineteenth century to define what was perceived as a significant cultural and historical moment) anxieties provoked by the erosion of old religious certainties. Although the climactic physical dissolution of Vaughan has been regularly discussed in the context of the fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration (biological, cultural, and racial), it is likely Machen was as much influenced by his formidable knowledge of medieval alchemy as he was by specific contemporary discourse.

The story has occasionally been criticized as misogynistic and cited as evidence that Machen had a morbid fear of human sexuality. Recent critics who have advanced this view include S. T. Joshi in his Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012/2014), China Miéville in his essay “Weird Fiction” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009), and Andrew Smith in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2012) (although Smith also notes that “the silence of the central female character”—which has been the focus of claims of the story’s misogyny—also contributes to the story’s overall narrative effect, since it increases “the mystery and terror at the heart of the story, linked to a predatory female sexuality” by maintaining the mysterious ineffability of what it means to glimpse “the Great God Pan”; see Smith 2012, 225). However, when considered within the wider context of Machen’s life and work, the notion that he had a particular animus against women, or that he was squeamish about sex, seems unconvincing. Indeed, the renowned literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has used Machen as an example to demonstrate his concern that “too direct application” of psychoanalysis to literature can result in both misrepresentation of the author and simple reiteration of “initial presuppositions” regarding the text (Todorov 1975, 152–153).

Indicative of the impact of “The Great God Pan” is the fact that it was almost immediately parodied, in Arthur Sykes’s “The Great Pan-Demon” and Arthur Compton-Rickett’s “A Yellow Creeper.” However, it was also a commercial success and established Machen’s reputation as a writer of weird horror in the Stevenson mold. Vernon Lee’s “Dionea” (from Hauntings, 1890) is an interesting comparison, although Lee uses an epistolary form to relate her similar tale of a destabilizing pagan influence channeled through an amoral female character never directly represented. Machen’s presentation of his story as a puzzle of different testimonies from a variety of sources anticipates the similar structure used by Bram Stoker in Dracula, and its influence in this respect can be clearly seen in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” also uses a near-identical central conceit of a child born of congress between a human and a supernatural entity. Stephen King has stated that Machen’s novella is “one of the best horror stories ever written. . . . Maybe the best in the English language,” and M. John Harrison’s 1988 story “The Great God Pan” is so titled in explicit homage.

James Machin

See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; The Ceremonies; “The Dunwich Horror”; Machen, Arthur; “The Novel of the Black Seal.”

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Luckhurst, Roger, ed. 2005. Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miéville, China. 2009. “Weird Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–515. London: Routledge.

Smith, Andrew. 2012. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard and Robert Scholes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

“GREEN TEA”

One of the most frequently anthologized of supernatural stories, “Green Tea,” by the Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), first appeared in the journal All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), in 1869. It was subsequently incorporated in Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872. The “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to “Green Tea” are integral to the narrative and should be read in conjunction with the main body of the tale.

“Green Tea” shows the influence of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg on Le Fanu’s thought and work. The story takes one of Swedenborg’s basic ideas—that of the opening of the “inner eye,” the faculty of spiritual sight—and gives it a supernatural horrific slant. The text itself essentially explains this, as it presents, at one point, several excerpts from one of Swedenborg’s books, as read by the character of Hesselius:

I lighted upon a complete set of Swedenborg’s “Arcana Celestia,” in the original Latin, a very fine folio set, bound in the natty livery which theology affects, pure vellum, namely, gold letters, and carmine edges. There were paper markers in several of these volumes, I raised and placed them, one after the other, upon the table, and opening where these papers were placed, I read in the solemn Latin phraseology, a series of sentences indicated by a penciled line at the margin. Of these I copy here a few, translating them into English.

“When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.”

. . . “If evil spirits could perceive that they were associated with man, and yet that they were spirits separate from him, and if they could flow into the things of his body, they would attempt by a thousand means to destroy him; for they hate man with a deadly hatred.” (Le Fanu 1994, 14–15)

Matt Cardin

Source: Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. [1872] 1886. “Green Tea.” In a Glass Darkly. London: Richard Bentley & Son.

The “Prologue” is written by an anonymous English editor responsible for disseminating the clinical and philosophical work of the deceased German physician Martin Hesselius. The narrative of “Green Tea”—and, by implication, the four stories that follow it in In a Glass Darkly—have been selected by the editor not for their clinical insight but rather for the amusement they might bring to a general reader. That amusement is implicitly somewhat sardonic, for the story that follows is one of medical mismanagement and purblind dogmatism. The date of the narrative is not given, but the events of “Green Tea” appear to take place in London and southern England during the earlier years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Hesselius encounters the Reverend Mr. Jennings, an Episcopalian clergyman, at a London gathering. Realizing that there is something amiss with the cleric, he visits him at his London residence and learns that the scholarly gentleman is subject to a recurrent and distressing hallucination. Jennings has, for some time, been subject to periodic visitations by a malevolent monkey, visible only to him, which at first merely stalked him silently but which latterly has begun to speak, to utter blasphemies that interrupt the sermons he delivers in his rural parish, and to encourage him to take his own life.

Hesselius counsels Jennings that the monkey is a delusion brought about by the clergyman’s excessive consumption of green tea as a stimulant to support his nocturnal researches into paganism, and promises to return to him should the monkey again manifest itself to the cleric’s sight. He neglects, however, to leave an address at which he might be contacted, and when the monkey returns, angry at Jennings having consulted a physician, the apparition goads his victim into suicide. Hesselius’s “Conclusion,” subtitled “A Word for Those Who Suffer,” is a consummate exercise in deflecting the blame from the irresponsibility of the physician onto the hereditary disposition of the unfortunate patient.

“Green Tea” is a significant narrative for a number of reasons. First, it is very much implicated in the popular medicine of its day, and the notion that Jennings’s vision might be affected by the innocuous beverage he has consumed parallels Ebenezer Scrooge’s interpretation of why he sees the ghost of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Second, it is a narrative that, like Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), is heavily influenced by the writings of the visionary philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Third, as a self-contained and disturbing short work it typifies, despite the absence of a conventional human specter, the genre of the ghost story, a tradition that is associated with, but distinct from, the Gothic novel.

William Hughes

See also: In a Glass Darkly; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Occult Detectives.

Further Reading

Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Hughes, William. 2005. “The Origins and Implications of J. S. Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea.’“ Irish Studies Review 13, no. 1: 45–54.

Sullivan, Jack. 1981. “‘Green Tea’: The Archetypal Ghost Story.” In Literature of the Occult, edited by Peter B. Messent, 117–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wegley, Mark. 2001. “Unknown Fear: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Literary Fantastic.” Philological Review 27.2 (Fall): 59–77. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, vol. 84, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, 2006, Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale.

THE GROTESQUE

The grotesque in horror literature is conventionally defined by representations of human excess, the abnormal, the repulsive, the ugly, and the nightmarishly or ludicrously fantastic. Rather than being the shock that horror elicits, or the dread and imminent sense of fear that terror connotes, the grotesque is rooted in physicality and the visual. It is a physical manifestation of horror and terror that is created by deviation, dichotomy, and excess. The grotesque and horror are inextricably connected. How “the elusive nature of the grotesque” (Barasch 1968, v) is defined in relation to horror has been debated by scholars and critics from the seventeenth century into the present.

The term “grotesque” has undergone redefinition since it was first used during the Italian Renaissance to describe unearthed Roman frescos at Domus Aurea as “grottesca” from grottos or caves. As an aesthetic mode applied to visual mediums, the “grottesche” implied the fantastic imaginings of Roman artists (in the era of Vitruvius). The frescos were seen to depict chimeric images of decadence and absurdity made more sepulchral and ethereal by their discovery in grottos. Early literary usage of the term appears in the sixteenth century with Montaigne, who linked the grotesque to monstrosity and experimentation.

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a short story written by American author Flannery O’Connor. First published in 1953, it is now the most read and recognized of O’Connor’s work due to its inclusion in numerous anthologies.

It begins with the portrayal of a “comically vapid, ill-tempered, and self-centered” (Harris 1990) family from Georgia on a cross-country trip to Florida. The story shifts dramatically after a car accident, which results in the family meeting the Misfit and his homicidal gang. The Grandmother unintentionally identifies these escaped convicts, and this leads to the murder of the family.

Critics often find the character of the Misfit to be a curiosity of contradictions. For example, he is full of Southern courtesy and politeness while also killing innocent people; he agonizes over faith while also admitting he is “doing all right” without prayer; and he feels he never deserves any punishment, but admits to several instances of wrong-doing. All of this contributes to his aptly named moniker.

The story’s climax, a conversation between the Grandmother and the Misfit, circles around the subject of religion. It features the grandmother undergoing a spiritual epiphany while under intense duress, a common theme in O’Connor’s works.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is often noted for its Southern Gothic themes, including its use of grotesque, realistic horror, outcasts, and nostalgia for an idealized South. In fact, O’Connor’s work is noted for helping to establish the genre of Southern Gothic itself.

Chun H. Lee

Source: Harris, Laurie Lanzen. 1990. “Overview: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’” In Characters in 20th-Century Literature. Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale.

The grotesque as an element of horror literature became enmeshed with the Gothic mode through Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Walpole imbued grotesque horror with buffoonery and the sublime in the preface to his second edition. In the nineteenth century, Mary Shelley stitched the grotesque body to horror fiction in Frankenstein.

Victor Hugo’s Preface de Cromwell (1827) popularized the use of the term. With Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and a century later H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), the concept of the grotesque moved toward the current idiom.

Important recent scholars of the grotesque include Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Frances K. Barasch, Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, and Wolfgang Kayser. The latter’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1963) emphasizes the horror, estrangement, and demonic as central to its definition. Theories of the grotesque that rely on power structures, aberration, and horror are visible in Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and John Ruskin. Tzvetan Todorov examines the grotesque in relation to the fantastic, and Freud through the uncanny. In the nineteenth century, Ruskin’s study of the symbolic grotesque merges horror with the ludicrous, where the grotesque’s playful comic tendency threatens to descend into terror. He separates the noble from the barbarous grotesque, which is associated with terror and the horror genre. Mikhail Bakhtin’s text Rabelais and His World (1965) emphasizes the carnivalesque, realism, and structures within the grotesque. Significant contributions to the literature of the term include Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, Lovecraftian horror, the religious visions of Flannery O’Connor, the realistic aesthetics of Sherwood Anderson and Cormac McCarthy, the self-reflexive grotesque of Patrick McGrath, and others.

Today the grotesque is still a complex and diffuse theme with little clear consensus. Often critics describe it as a structure in which estrangement and deviation are expressed. It is tied to paradoxical combinations of the ludicrous and the terrifying. Grotesque, as a literary term, has been connected variously with the uncanny, the sublime, and the absurd as it has transformed over time. Recent scholars such as Edwards and Graulund connect a global definition of the grotesque to these associated literary themes through reliance on multiple grotesques and sociocultural contexts, thus further obscuring a concise definition. Conversely, Shun-Liang Chao and Frances S. Connelly root the grotesque back within the physical or visual, where some combination of the ridiculous and horrific is always at play.

Naomi Simone Borwein

See also: Body Horror; Hugo, Victor; Koja, Kathe; McGrath, Patrick; O’Connor, Flannery; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; The Uncanny; Welty, Eudora.

Further Reading

Barasch, Frances K. 1968. “Introduction.” In A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, by Thomas Wright (1865), vii–ix. New York: Frederick Ungar.

Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund. 2013. The Grotesque. London: Routledge.

Kayser, Wolfgang. 1963. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nelson, Victoria. 2001. “Grotto, an Opening.” In The Secret Life of Puppets, 1–24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

H

HAGGARD, H. RIDER (1856–1925)

Like his close friend Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Rider Haggard was a quintessential literary spokesman for the British Empire, a devotee of the imperial ideology bringing order to the world and uplifting “uncivilized” peoples. He was of enormous cultural significance in his own day, inspiring a generation of young Englishmen to seek careers in the service of the empire. His main subjects were Africa, ancient Egypt, and the occult. His depictions of Africa in particular captured the imagination of the public. In this, he can be seen as a predecessor of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, although unlike Burroughs he had actually been to Africa in the imperial service and was describing peoples and landscapes he knew firsthand. His racial attitudes are of his time. He never sees black Africans as equals, but desires benevolent rule for them. He thought himself a friend of the Africans, and by Victorian standards, he was. He first achieved prominence with the African adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), written on a bet from his brother that he could not write a better book than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Haggard was something of a believer in the occult, or at least in supernatural destiny, and it is largely for this that his work is relevant to weird fiction. His most famous novel, She: A History of Adventure (1886), spawned an entire subgenre of imitations: the Lost Race novel, which invariably deals with the discovery of some isolated remnant of an ancient civilization, found in a remote place, replete with some wondrous phenomenon unknown to the rest of the world. In She the heroes reach a lost city in Africa where Ayesha, a 2,000-year-old white queen, rules over a tribe of “savages.” She is under a romantic curse, having killed her lover, Kallikrates, in ancient times, and is doomed to wait, undying, for his return. One of the explorers is the reincarnation of Kallikrates. When she tries to make him immortal and renew her own immortality, she steps into the flaming Pillar of Life, its effects are disastrously reversed, and she withers away.

The novel was a smash bestseller, and there were sequels. Ayesha herself was reincarnated as the awesome femme-fatale/sorceress in countless subsequent fantasy novels. Indeed, part of the Lost Race formula all but requires that one of the European heroes becomes romantically entangled with a fabulously beautiful princess or temptress. The influence of She extended ever further when Edgar Rice Burroughs transported the entire scenario to another planet in A Princess of Mars in 1911.

Haggard made a similar mistake in killing off the main character in his bestselling Allan Quatermain (1887), but then “discovered” several memoirs of earlier adventures, including the reincarnation story The Ancient Allan (1920), set in prehistoric times. Quatermain met Ayesha in She and Allan (1921).

Supernaturalism in Haggard’s work otherwise varies widely. One of his rare short stories, “Only a Dream . . .” (1905), is horror. The ghost of a man’s dead wife haunts him on the eve of his second marriage. She leaves her skull behind. In the novella “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1913), a man lingers in a museum after closing time and witnesses a gathering of ancient Egyptian spirits returning to their mummies. Eric Brighteyes (1890) is a surprisingly effective pastiche of a medieval Norse saga, with a vivid mix of heroism, dooms, and sorceries. A later novel of particular interest is Red Eve (1911), which begins as a costume romance set in fourteenth-century Europe, but becomes genuine weird fiction with the introduction of the character Murgh, a personification of the Black Death, who arrives in Venice on a corpse-laden ship. The hero develops a strange acquaintance with Death, and for a time he is spared. The 1903 novel Stella Fregellius involves a disastrous attempt to contact the dead by scientific means. There are many fantastic elements in most of Haggard’s African novels. Nada the Lily (1892) is an epic set among the Zulus, featuring omens, fate, a sky goddess, and a supernatural wolf pack. The Ghost Kings (1908), which Kipling helped plot, introduces the sorcerous Ghost People, who are linked to trees and die if their trees are destroyed. However dated Haggard’s ideas may sometimes seem, he remains an extremely entertaining writer, strong on both authentic detail and eerie atmosphere when the story requires it.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Kipling, Rudyard; She.

Further Reading

Cohen, Morton, 1960. H. Rider Haggard, His Life and Work. London: Macmillan.

Katz, Wendy, 1987. H. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. “Rider Haggard among the Mummies.” In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, 185–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

HAINING, PETER (1940–2007)

Peter Alexander Haining was a British journalist and publishing professional who wrote and compiled numerous nonfiction books on horror, fantasy, and mystery themes, including An Illustrated History of Witchcraft (1975), The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack (1977), The Mystery and Horrible Murders of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), and the illustrated The Art of Horror Stories (1976). He also compiled “scrapbooks” and miscellanies concerned with the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, and H. G. Wells, and collections of macabre fiction by John Buchan, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Bram Stoker.

Haining is best known as a compiler of both general reprint anthologies, among them Beyond the Curtain of Dark (1966) and The Unspeakable People (1969), and thematically specific anthologies: The Ghouls (1971) featured horror stories that had been adapted as movies, and The Hollywood Nightmare (1970) stories were concerned with show business; The Fantastic Pulps (1976) and Weird Tales (1976) both drew from the rich legacy of twentieth-century pulp fiction magazines; and The Midnight People (1968) collected vampire stories. The themes of The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse (1988), Supernatural Sleuths (1986), Zombie: Stories of the Walking Dead (1985), and Werewolf: Horror Stories of the Man-Beast (1987) are self-evident. A number of Haining’s best anthologies combined scholarship with their fiction reprints, including The Penny Dreadful; or, Strange, Horrid and Sensational Tales (1976) and The Shilling Shockers: Stories of Terror from the Gothic Bluebooks (1978).

Haining compiled a number of anthologies under the pseudonyms Ric Alexander, William Pattrick, and Richard Peyton, and he authored three novels. Although the reliability of his research and sources has been questioned by some scholars, his work as an anthologist helped to shape perceptions of the anthology as a vital medium for genre fiction. He was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2001.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Pulp Horror; Stoker, Bram; Weird Tales; Wells, H. G.; Wharton, Edith.

Further Reading

Haining, Peter, ed. 1972. Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States 1765–1840. New York: Taplinger.

Haining, Peter, ed. 1976. The Penny Dreadful; Or, Strange, Horrid & Sensational Tales! London: Victor Gollancz.

Haining, Peter. 1976. Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines. New York: A & W Visual Library.

“Peter Haining.” 2007. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

HAND, ELIZABETH (1957–)

Elizabeth Hand is an American writer of dark fantasy, horror, and neo-noir. She is perhaps best known for her thrillers featuring Cass Neary, a hard-boiled photographer and reluctant crime fighter who has been compared to Liz Salander, the lead character in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Hand has lived in rural Maine in the United States since 1988, but she also spends a significant amount of time in London, England. She has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Waking the Moon (1994); the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bibliomancy (2002), her novel Illyria (2008), and “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” (2010); and the Shirley Jackson Award for the first Cass Neary novel, Generation Loss (2007), which is set in Maine.

Her characters are generally troubled individuals living on the very rough edges of society, but they are also often highly creative: artists, musicians, photographers, and writers, whose interests give them access to the darker realms of modern life and culture. Hand began her career as a fantasy and science fiction writer not unlike the American feminist science fiction writer Sheri S. Tepper in style; her first novel, Winterlong (1990), and its sequels, Aestival Tide (1992) and Icarus Descending (1993), are set in an alternate, dystopian universe. However, it was with Waking the Moon, centering on a fictional university in a broadly realist Washington, D.C., that Hand gained critical recognition and began to engage with horror motifs such as ritual murder and Lovecraftian monstrosity. Waking the Moon, which revolves around gory sacrifices to a newly awakened Mother Goddess, is also particularly noteworthy for its subtle critique of 1990s neo-paganism and Wicca, a critique successfully balanced with a more pragmatic feminist message. This complex mix of feminism and images of genuinely frightening feminine evil is continued through the postapocalyptic Glimmering (1997, reissued in a new, updated edition in 2012), the historical fantasy Mortal Love (2004), and the haunted house novella Wylding Hall (2015).

Hand’s work overall is heavily allusive, integrating song lyrics; references to real artists, writers, and photographers; and quotations from and echoes of the work of T. S. Eliot, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Straub, among many others.

She published Hard Light in 2016, the third Cass Neary novel, even as she was working on the fourth thriller in the series, The Book of Lamps and Banners. In many respects, this marks a move away from horror as such, though as with much crime writing, Hand’s work repeatedly integrates gothic tropes. She also indicated that she was working on another novella and some short fiction, which may extend the ongoing centrality in her oeuvre of violence, personal demons, and the darker aspects of myth and fantasy.

Dara Downey

See also: Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; Jackson, Shirley; Shirley Jackson Awards; Straub, Peter; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Attebery, Brian. 2014. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“Elizabeth Hand.” 2011. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. 2009. A Short History of Fantasy. Faringdon: Middlesex University Press.

Thirsty. 2016. “A Conversation with Novelist Elizabeth Hand.” Stay Thirsty Magazine, Spring. www.staythirstymedia.com/201604-092/html/201604-hand.html.

Wein, Cherie. 2003. “Hand, Elizabeth 1957–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 1, edited by Richard Bleiler, 413–417. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

THE HANDS OF ORLAC

The Hands of Orlac is an influential French 1920 horror novel written by Maurice Renard (1875–1938). Renard, who is today better known by French critics and readers than English or American ones, was a literary theorist as well as a writer who called his work “le roman merveilleux-scientifique” (the scientific-marvelous novel), which he considered a new literary genre. Renard’s most successful novel, Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac), was published in 1920 and translated into English in 1929.

Orlac is the story of a famous pianist, Stephen Orlac, who loses both his hands in a train accident and receives the hands of an executed murderer in a transplant operation. He begins to believe that he is being controlled by his newly transplanted hands, and he starts to experience violent urges. When he discovers that his father has been killed by the same knife that was used by the murderer, he begins to fear he may be the culprit. Struggling for the truth and his own sanity, he eventually discovers that he has been set up by a con man.

The Hands of Orlac reflects Renard’s interest in the scientific developments of his time, including in the fields of psychology, biology, and surgery. It also reflects his interest in adapting science to tales of horror and the marvelous. In practicing this approach, Renard followed the lead of H. G. Wells, who employed the same structure in his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), which Renard acknowledged as an influence.

Today The Hands of Orlac is best known as the source for director Robert Wiene’s silent 1924 German Expressionist film adaptation, starring Conrad Veidt as Orlac. German Expressionism was an extreme anti-realistic cinema style in which the external images of the film, such as unusual camera angles and lighting, as well as exaggerated acting and makeup, represent the internal states of the characters. Wiene’s film, now considered a classic, was a critical and financial success and has been remade several times, most successfully by director Karl Freund in 1934 as Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The film was also remade in 1960 in a version that starred Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee.

Both the original novel and the film adaptations of The Hands of Orlac are significant for a number of reasons. First, Renard’s novel is an excellent early example of speculative fiction, a genre that combines diverse interests and forms. Renard took contemporary developments in biology, psychology, and medical practice in the early twentieth century and placed them in the world of horror, using rational means to explore the irrational. Second, the original 1924 film adaptation is one of the earliest and best examples of body horror cinema, in which horror is caused by the disfiguration, decay, or mutilation of the body. Other well-known body horror narratives include the films Freaks (1932), The Fly (1958; remade in 1986), The Blob (1958; remade in 1988), Alien (1979), and American Mary (2012), all of which owe some debt to Orlac because of its seminal position in the subgenre. This influence can be seen even more directly in a number of horror films that offer new takes on the idea of individual body parts possessing an evil will of their own, such as Body Parts (1991) and Idle Hands (1999).

Jim Holte

See also: Body Horror; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Goldberg, Ruth. 2002. “Of Mad Love, Alien Hands and the Film under Your Skin.” Kinoeye 2, no. 4 (February 18). http://www.kinoeye.org/02/04/goldberg04.php.

Olney, Jan. 2006. “The Problem Body Politic, or ‘These Hands Have a Mind All Their Own!’: Figuring Disability in the Horror Film Adaptations of Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34, no. 4: 294–302.

Reyes, Xavier Aldana. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

HARDY, THOMAS (1840–1928)

A poet, novelist, and short story writer whose most significant work spans the final three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, Thomas Hardy is a major figure in English literary history, renowned for his realistic treatment of rural settings and his pessimistic view of human existence as tragedy. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, Hardy’s poetry and “Novels of Character and Environment” (also known as the “Wessex Novels”) dramatize “the plight of mankind trapped in a universe oblivious to human feelings and ethical aspirations” (Schweik 1999, 63), usually by presenting passionately aspiring characters who become victims of indifferent forces that exceed their control and ultimately master or destroy them.

Born in the southwestern county of Dorset into a working-class family steeped in local folk traditions, Hardy also became an avid antiquarian and folklorist, committed to preserving in his fiction and poetry “a fairly true record of a vanishing life” (Hardy 1967, 22) during a period when industrialization, modernization, and urbanization were dismantling the traditional communities and folkways of the English countryside. Among the numerous traditional customs, stories, and superstitions that Hardy incorporated into his depictions of rural life in “Wessex” (a fictionalized version of his native Dorset), several figure with particular prominence throughout his career: the belief in ghosts (Tess of the d’Urbervilles; “The Superstitious Man’s Story”; “A January Night”; “The Harvest Supper”; “A Sound in the Night”; “At Shag’s Heath”), fairies (The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the d’Urbervilles), witchcraft (“The Withered Arm”; Under the Greenwood Tree; The Return of the Native; The Woodlanders), and assorted predictive superstitions such as omens, premonitions, and divination (The Return of the Native; Far From the Madding Crowd; Jude the Obscure; The Woodlanders).

In addition to providing Hardy’s fiction and poetry with authentic touches of local color that are ornamental and atmospheric, the evocation of occult folk belief serves narrative and thematic purposes as Hardy routinely adapted folk traditions to the needs of plotting, tone, and symbolism. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), for instance, the tale of the phantom coach presaging death and perceptible only to those of true d’Urberville ancestry has a basis in the Dorset tradition of a haunted carriage that could only be seen by members of a family named Turberville. Narrative accounts by the heroine’s two lovers of this spectral coach of ill-omen, in which a beautiful woman was once abducted and possibly murdered by a d’Urberville, heighten suspense around the fates of Tess and her lovers, which it obliquely foreshadows. More profoundly, the fatal coach is also a microcosm symbolizing the prison-like universe ruled by Fate against which Hardy’s archetypal heroine struggles. The ghost-coach in Tess, which functions both as a symbol of death and as an omen, epitomizes the role of supernatural belief in Hardy’s fiction, which is to create the uncanny atmosphere of fatality and predetermination that characterizes Hardy’s conception of a universe that is grotesquely indifferent to human striving.

As a narrative realist, Hardy did not generally grant the ghosts of his novels objective phenomenal existence; for the most part, they exist only as stories told by rustics and believers. Yet Hardy, in spite of his religious skepticism, was himself profoundly drawn to a belief in ghosts, and following his turn away from fiction toward poetry, Hardy became less coy about depicting ghostly phenomena, which acquire objective existence in his many ghost poems.

Hardy died in 1928, and his ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey. His heart is buried in the grave of his first wife, Emma Gifford, in Stinsford Churchyard.

Brian Johnson

See also: The Uncanny.

Further Reading

Firor, Ruth A. 1968. Folkways in Thomas Hardy. New York: Russell & Russell.

Gatrell, Simon. 2000. “Ghosts.” In Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, edited by Norman Page, 138–139. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hardy, Thomas. [1911] 1967. “General Preface to the Novels and Poems.” In Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, edited by Harold Orel, 44–50. London: Macmillan.

Robson, Peter. 2011. “Thomas Hardy’s Ghosts.” Tradition Today: The Journal for the Centre of English Traditional Heritage 1: 26–34. http://centre-for-english-traditional-heritage.org/traditiontoday1a.html.

Schweik, Robert. 1999. “The Influence of Religion, Science, and Philosophy on Hardy’s Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, 54–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HARRIS, THOMAS (1940–)

Thomas Harris is a writer of Gothic thrillers. He was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and is most well known for creating the character of Hannibal Lecter. He has published five novels and currently resides in South Florida.

Harris started his writing career after graduating from Baylor University and working as a local newspaper reporter in Waco, Texas (something he had done while earning his English degree at Baylor). Jason Cowley notes that Harris spent time working for the Associated Press in New York “where he excelled as a crime reporter, showing an unusual curiosity in the finer details and nuances of the crimes he wrote about, no matter how bleak” (2006). In 1975 Harris published his first novel, Black Sunday, while also working as a reporter. It is a thriller about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl using a blimp loaded with explosives. It met with only moderate success, but its rights were purchased by Hollywood. This gave Harris the freedom to write fiction for a living.

Harris’s second book, Red Dragon (1981), features FBI profiler Will Graham assisting in the hunt for serial killer Francis Dolarhyde or “the Tooth Fairy.” It also introduces the character of Hannibal Lecter as a psychopath that Graham must speak with in order to capture Dolarhyde. The novel is notable for its carefully detailed look into the world of FBI profiling. The research that Harris undertook for this was extensive; he even attended some behavioral science classes at the FBI Academy in Quantico. This detail-oriented focus became a signature element in Harris’s writing, enhancing his horror with procedural realism and journalistic integrity.

In 1988 Harris made Lecter a major character in his next book, The Silence of the Lambs. This part of the Lecter series switched protagonists with the introduction of Clarice Starling as an FBI trainee who is asked to speak with the psychopath in order to find the serial killer, Buffalo Bill. The book was well received, winning the Bram Stoker and the Anthony awards for best novel. In 1991 it was adapted to film by director Jonathan Demme, with Sir Anthony Hopkins taking on the role of Lecter. The film won several Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and cemented Hannibal Lecter into American culture.

Harris based the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs on the real-life Ed Gein, who in 1950s Wisconsin murdered two women and robbed multiple graves to create a collection of costumes and memorabilia out of human female skin and body parts. Gein was likewise the inspiration for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, and several additional literary and cinematic serial killers and mass murderers.

Matt Cardin

The third book in the Lecter series, Hannibal (1999), features Lecter returning to Clarice while also escaping the clutches of the deformed magnate Mason Verger. The novel’s controversial ending, which involves Lecter brainwashing Clarice and taking her as a lover, divided critics and readers.

Harris’s final venture into the Lecter world was a prequel titled Hannibal Rising (2006). It tells the story of a young Lecter extracting revenge on his sister’s killers. This book met with mixed reviews, and it was suggested that the book was only written because movie producer Dino De Laurentiis intended to move forward on a cinematic version of the project with or without Harris’s help.

Harris’s work and his signature character of Hannibal Lecter were reconceptualized for television with the three-season run of NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015). Harris, known as a reclusive author, has not signaled an intent to publish another novel.

Chun H. Lee

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Cowley, Jason. 2006. “Creator of a Monstrous Hit.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/19/fiction.thomasharris.

Fierman, Daniel. 2007. “Hannibal Lecter Meets His End: One of the Best Horror Franchises in History Falls Apart.” Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/article/2007/02/16/hannibal-lecter-meets-his-end.

Grixti, Joseph. 1995. “Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Cultural Icons.” Journal of American Culture 18: 87–96.

Magistrale, Tony. 1996. “Transmogrified Gothic: The Novels of Thomas Harris.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 27–41. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

HARTLEY, L. P. (1895–1972)

Leslie Poles Hartley was an English writer and reviewer who achieved considerable fame in the mid-twentieth century, especially for his 1953 novel The Go-Between, a best seller that was adapted multiple times for stage and screen. In addition to publishing popular novels, he wrote many short stories, thirty-seven of which are fantastic, often horrifically so.

Hartley’s most horrific stories tend to work by indirection, a deliberate vagueness that adds emphasis to the horrors. The titular story of Night Fears (1924), his first collection, thus describes a secure and set night watchman whose snowy vigil is interrupted by a nameless stranger who, with but a few questions and sneers, destroys everything the watchman holds dear; the watchman commits suicide, and the stranger’s departing footprints lead to a blind alley. “A Visitor from Down Under” (1926) uses clues and indirection to show a newly returned colonial being pursued, haunted, and ultimately removed by James Hagberd, the revenant of the man he murdered in Australia. In “Podolo” (1948) the peripherally seen horror may resemble an ape, but as the visitors to its island learn, it is devastatingly hungry and vicious.

Indirection likewise plays a role in “Someone in the Lift” (1955), which is told largely through a child’s eyes: little Peter Maldon glimpses a shape in the elevator that no one else can see; he discovers its horrible identity on Christmas, when his father does not return. The admirably brief “The Waits” (1961) shows an apparently happy family visited by a pair of carolers on Christmas Eve: the ghosts of the people the father drove to murder and suicide. Several stories seem to pile on the horrors, then conclude just before anything is seen, letting the reader determine whether or not they are supernatural. For example, the nameless narrator of “A Summons” (1954) has agreed to assist his sister if she dreams of being murdered in her bed and knocks on the adjoining wall; he elects not to assist, and the knocking grows fainter and fainter. The question of what he will find remains unresolved, as it does in the marvelous “The Shadow on the Wall” (1969), in which houseguest Mildred Fanshawe learns that the room adjacent to hers is being held for the mysterious Count Olmütz. Fanshawe glimpses in the shadows a corpse with its throat cut, and from its head she recognizes it as a man she knows, but whether there is really a body is left unanswered; the story concludes with the opening of the count’s door.

In his introduction to Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book (1955), Hartley provided a rationale of the ghost story: “even ghosts must have rules and obey them. In the past, they had certain traditional activities; they could squeak and gibber, for instance; they could clank chains. They were generally local, confined to one spot. Now their liberties have been greatly extended; they can go anywhere, they can manifest themselves in scores of ways” (Hartley 2001, xiii). For all that Hartley chose to show these manifestations, he recognized that too much horrific material can lose its effectiveness, and a black humor thus enlivens many stories: “The Travelling Grave” (1929), for example, contains a conversation in which baby carriages are confused with coffins. Death assumes physical reality in “Mrs. Carteret Receives” (1971), but he is very ordinary and prosaic, “ugly, dirty, and wet through” (Hartley 1986, 648).

In the past several decades, Hartley’s stories have been made conveniently available to current readers in collected editions. Significantly for those who are interested in his fantastic and horrific writings, The Collected Macabre Stories, published by Tartarus Press in 2001, contains several stories that do not appear in The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, published by Beaufort (1973).

Richard Bleiler

See also: Arkham House; Machen, Arthur.

Further Reading

Athos, John. 2009. “L. P. Hartley and the Gothic Infatuation.” In Short Story Criticism, vol. 125, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic. Detroit: Gale. Originally published in Twentieth Century Literature 7.4 (Jan. 1962): 172–179.

Hartley, L. P. 1986. The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley. New York: Beaufort Books.

Hartley, L. P. 2001. The Collected Macabre Stories. Leyburn, UK: Tartarus Press.

Wright, Adrian. 2001. Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley. London and New York: Tauris Park.

HARVEST HOME

Harvest Home (1973) was the second novel by former Hollywood actor Thomas Tryon. It received both critical and popular acclaim, and is generally regarded as one of the most significant novels in the subgenre of rural horror. In the novel, myths that rural life is superior to urban life because it is more innocent and natural are inverted, along with gender roles. S. T. Joshi has described Harvest Home as “one of the great weird novels of our time, and a virtual textbook on how to update the form while simultaneously drawing upon history to lend texture and substance” (Joshi 2001, 200).

The plot is centered on Ned and Beth Constantine and their daughter, Kate, who move from New York City to Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut, a farming community whose inhabitants resist any changes to their longstanding way of life. These ways are derived from ancestry in Cornwall, England, where fertility rites were significant in growing corn as a staple crop. Ned, who narrates the novel, proves to be something of an unreliable narrator specifically in this area, because the information given to him about the longstanding traditions and practices of Harvest Home is oblique, and this contributes, with progressively increasing suspense, to the horror of the novel’s final revelation.

The Constantines are initially welcomed into this usually closed community because the Widow Fortune—who has been mother, nurse, midwife, and overall guiding spirit to the community for many years—thinks that permitting them to move into Cornwall Coombe will provide new bloodlines to promote high-quality physical and mental health among the citizenry. Ned, however, is sterile, and this contributes to disharmony in his and Beth’s marriage. Beth, for her part, proves receptive to the Widow Fortune’s influence, which Ned finds increasingly oppressive and sinister. He does not readily comprehend or participate in Cornwall Coombe beliefs and customs, and thus he is ultimately ostracized and accorded drastic physical punishment for his scoffing at and interfering with “the old ways.” Ironically, he does not realize that his efforts to befriend various persons, notably young Worthy Pettinger, who becomes the designated Harvest Lord for the community’s climactic Harvest Festival that year—but who refuses to act as such—are deemed outrageous and dangerous by the locals. Several betrayals by community members, especially by several females (ultimately including Kate, who has adopted the area’s traditions), lead to his downfall.

In the rural Gothic, pastoral settings are used for Gothic or horrific effects, often by placing city dwellers in a geographically and socially isolated pastoral environment where the local inhabitants and the landscape itself become the locus of a claustrophobic, “backwoods” type of horror as dark secrets and dreadful cultural practices are revealed. Harvest Home illustrates this pattern as Ned’s probing of the mysteries of local life in Cornwall Coombe ultimately exposes physical and emotional violence and horrors, most appallingly in the novel’s climactic scene, where Ned spies on a forest ceremony and discovers that the community’s seasonal agricultural cycle is climaxed by a pagan ritual of human sacrifice. As the novel closes, Kate is teamed with local boy Jim Minerva, upcoming Harvest Lord, whose union with her will presumably produce offspring who will in turn contribute new life to the community. Kate is fully and joyfully enfolded within the community’s life and traditions. And Ned inhabits his own home as a prisoner, having had his eyes put out for his transgression.

The idea of protagonists from late twentieth-century urban-technological societies stumbling upon evidence of pagan nature-based sacrificial rituals surviving in isolated rural locales was popular in early 1970s horror, with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man (1973) both being released the same year as Harvest Home, and both dealing with this very thing. A decade later, T. E. D. Klein’s novel The Ceremonies (1984) mined the same territory. It has since become a recognized and established trope in the genre—a development that can be traced in no small part to the influence of Harvest Home.

Benjamin F. Fisher

See also: Burnt Offerings; The Ceremonies; The Other; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

“Thomas Tryon.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE OR CASTLE

A haunted house may be defined simply as a dwelling that is inhabited by or visited regularly by a ghost. But the variants of this—the building, the circumstances, the type of supernatural intrusion, and the potential physical and emotional repercussions—are limitless. As a classic trope and setting in horror literature, the haunted house or castle has thus been subjected to a multitude of variations.

As Sigmund Freud points out in his famous essay (1919), the very notion of “The Uncanny” could not exist without the concept of “home.” The haunted house story has to have, needless to say, a house—or, as it may be, a castle, chateau, of other place of assumed safety. In terms of plot line, the haunted house has to be the nexus of a series of supernatural events, and the best tales have a backstory (the history behind the situation that exists at the start of the main story) of the provenance and discovery of these events.

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) first elevated the haunted castle from a mere setting to part of the narrative fabric in The Castle of Otranto (1764). Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) contributed skeletal remains under the floor, weird portraits turned toward the wall, and a suit of bloodstained armor. Ann Radcliffe developed these motifs to the fullest in her signature work The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is the father of the modern haunted house novel. Nathaniel Hawthorne weaves the theme so finely into the fabric of the story that it dominates the novel without overpowering the plot and characterizations. J. Sheridan Le Fanu has several masterly instances of the haunted house. In “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” (1861), a woman is literally scared to death in what may be the worst possible encounter of its kind. Even infants—as in “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853) and “The Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” (1863)—are not spared Le Fanu’s terrors. “Who Knows?” (French: “Qui sait?”; 1890) is a haunted house tale that is both horrifying and amusing in manner unique to Guy de Maupassant. Returning at night from the theater, the solitary narrator feels uneasy as he approaches his house and hears a commotion. Then he realizes what the noise is: all his possessions are animate and fleeing his domicile. His efforts to recover them are correspondingly eerie.

The twentieth century saw new variants of the traditional theme. In Walter de la Mare’s “A Recluse” (1926), the narrator is out for an automobile ride, but is compelled to pull over to look at what appears to be an unoccupied house. Ray Bradbury created a poignant new variant in “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950): a mechanized house that can speak and maintain itself expires after its human occupants are vaporized by a nuclear explosion.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), widely recognized as the greatest haunted house novel, is emphatically supernatural in its premise: four individuals sensitive to psychic phenomena come to Hill House to analyze its odd manifestations, and one seems to become so psychically fused with the house that she is unable to leave it. The novel was adapted to film in The Haunting (1963). Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) is a haunted house novel perhaps second only to Jackson’s. In it, a family rents a strange old house for an unusually cheap rate. There is an elderly woman upstairs who is never seen. The wife becomes attached to the woman and to the house, which seems to regenerate in threatening ways. The novel was adapted by Hollywood in 1973. Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971) has a plot roughly similar to Jackson’s Hill House—four people gather in a purportedly haunted house to investigate—and was adapted for film in the 1973 British production The Legend of Hell House.

The haunted house story has proved amazingly flexible in accommodating a wide variety of themes: good versus evil, science versus the supernatural, economic conflict, class, gender, and so on. Over three centuries, the theme has been a compelling vehicle for the horror narrative, and it will doubtless continue to be so.

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Burnt Offerings; The Castle of Otranto; de la Mare, Walter; The Haunting of Hill House; Hell House; The House of the Seven Gables; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Maupassant, Guy de; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Uncanny; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

Further Reading

Bailey, Dale. 2011. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Janicker, Rebecca. 2015. The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King and the Horror in Between. Jefferson NC: McFarland.

Mariconda, Steven J. 2007. “The Haunted House.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 267–306. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.

Railo, Eino. 1927. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: G. Routledge & Son.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

The Haunting of Hill House is a Gothic novel written by Shirley Jackson, first published in 1959 by Viking/Penguin. In the novel, Jackson created Hill House, which has come to be the prototype for the haunted house. The book not only helped secure Jackson’s legacy as a horror writer, earning her a nomination for the 1960 National Book Award for Fiction, but it also inspired decades of writers to pen their own ghost stories.

Jackson’s novel is the quintessential haunted house story. A group of people is invited to Hill House, an old mansion, by Dr. Montague, a specialist in the occult hoping to prove the existence of a true haunting. Among his guests are Eleanor, a young woman seeking a place in the world; Theodora, a free spirit; and Luke, the heir to Hill House. The story is largely told from Eleanor’s perspective, and Jackson spends a great deal of time examining Eleanor’s relationship with Theodora. Both women are unique in that they explode the traditional gender roles of the day (neither woman is the typical wife and mother that would be considered the norm). These psychic detectives encounter what has now become commonplace in haunted house tales: unexpected cold spots, mysterious and ominous messages scribbled on the wall, a child’s cry when no children are around. Jackson deviates from the traditional haunted house tropes by introducing Eleanor as an unstable and unreliable witness, leaving readers to speculate whether the haunting is indeed real or only a manifestation of a troubled mind. In this way, The Haunting of Hill House could be considered the literary heir to Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, in which readers are never told whether the ghosts that plagued the governess and her two charges are real or not. Jackson was intrigued with psychic phenomenon and those who studied it; it was a scholarly interest for much of her adult life. She had the idea of writing a ghost story after learning about the Society for Psychic Research, a nineteenth-century group formed to study the possibility of ghosts. One such group rented a house that was rumored to be haunted for exactly such a purpose; once Jackson read the account, Hill House was born.

Ghost Hunters

The Haunting of Hill House has been adapted twice by Hollywood, first in 1963 by director Robert Wise and again in 1999 by director Jan de Bont, both times under the title The Haunting. But its cinematic influence extends much further, as its central motif of paranormal investigators taking up residence in a supposedly haunted house to investigate purportedly supernatural events has been seized upon by countless additional movies and television shows. From the 1973 horror film The Legend of Hell House (based on Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel, which took direct inspiration from Jackson) to the twenty-first century’s bumper crop of “ghost hunting” paranormal shows on cable television, Shirley Jackson’s most famous novel casts a long shadow across the landscape of subsequent paranormal media. This is despite the fact that she did not originate the theme in question, whose earliest clear incarnation may be Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1859 story “The Haunted and the Haunters,” which likewise has an investigator stay in a haunted house. There is also a long tradition of occult detectives and paranormal investigators in horror fiction hailing from the century between the publication of Bulwer’s story and the publication of Jackson’s 1959 novel. But The Haunting of Hill House remains the most prominent and influential such work.

Matt Cardin

Hill House and the people who come to study the mansion have become the prototype for nearly every haunted house story that has followed the first printing of Jackson’s book. Richard Matheson’s Hell House, published in 1971, and the film adaptation that followed (The Legend of Hell House, 1973) are both greatly influenced by Jackson’s story. Matheson’s Belasco House, like Hill House, is haunted, and like Hill House, it draws a team of psychic researchers. Unlike Jackson, however, Matheson favored shock over subtlety, making the ghosts in the house undeniably real. The idea of the house that was “born bad” (as opposed to human monsters or some other outside evil) became prevalent in the horror novels of the following decades. Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978) deviates in that the house in question is not an old Gothic manor—it’s a sleek modern design—but the premise is still the same: the house is a living, breathing organism that has evil intent toward any occupants who dare to step across the threshold. Stephen King has mentioned his admiration for Shirley Jackson in his nonfiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), and readers can see the influence of The Haunting of Hill House throughout his works. Both the novel (and the later film) The Shining (1977) and the television miniseries Rose Red (2002) feature remote places that attract the paranormal. King’s novel Carrie (1974) even includes a brief nod to Hill House’s Eleanor: both Carrie and Eleanor have experienced psychic phenomena at a young age, specifically in the form of rocks raining down on the roofs of their childhood homes.

In 1963, director Robert Wise brought Jackson’s novel to the silver screen with his adaptation, The Haunting. Wise cast Julie Harris as Eleanor and Claire Bloom as Theodora. The film was a critical success and earned Wise a Golden Globe nomination for best director. In 2014, Wise’s film was nominated for a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films. In 1999, director Jan de Bont made another adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, likewise titled The Haunting. Though the film was cast with popular stars (Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta Jones, Owen Wilson), de Bont’s film was not met with the same critical acclaim.

Lisa Kröger

See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Hell House; The House Next Door; Jackson, Shirley; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Anderson, Melanie R. 2016. “Perception, Supernatural Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill House.” In Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 35–53. London: Routledge.

Haggerty, George E. 2006. “‘Queer Company’: The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House.” In Queer Gothic, 131–150. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. 2003. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hodges Holt, Shari. 2016. “The Tower or the Nursery? Paternal and Maternal Re-visions of Hill House on Film.” In Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 160–182. London: Routledge.

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

Lootens, Tricia. 2005. “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” In Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, 150–168. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Wilson, Michael T. 2015. “‘Absolute Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.1: 114–123.

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864)

Born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne, like Jane Austen, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, and Alexander Pushkin, is a major nineteenth-century writer from European traditions whose work is speckled with but not exhausted by Gothic effects and supernatural overtones. In his twenties, Hawthorne added a letter to his surname (much as fellow Gothic regionalist William Faulkner would do about a century later). He almost suppressed his anonymous first Gothic romance, Fanshawe (1828), after its commercial failure. Romance is a term Hawthorne used for novel-length fictions in marvelous or imaginative modes beyond the strict, mannered realism he saw novels demand.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter”: A Poisonous Beauty

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter: From the Writings of Aubépine” (1844) was initially published alongside Edgar Allan Poe marginalia. The tale’s forematter presents it as the work of a Gallicized persona of Hawthorne. This sixth-to-final piece of Hawthorne’s short fiction culminates prior themes of scientists and inventors tampering with dangerous forces in other tales that were likewise collected in his Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), such as “The Birth-Mark” (1843) and “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844). Beatrice Rappaccini, as a dying and deadly beautiful woman, literalizes a literary commonplace from contemporaries such as Louisa May Alcott and Poe.

The tale offers deep ambiguities. Student Giovanni Guascontis falls in love with Beatrice, daughter of Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, after spying on her in her father’s garden. Having grown up in the presence of the poisonous plants cultivated by her father, Beatrice is herself poisonous, so flowers and insects die upon her touch. Giovanni’s feelings for Beatrice alternate between desire, loathing, and confusion, even as he himself becomes poisonous in Beatrice’s father’s secret experiment. A rival of Rappaccini gives Giovanni an antidote to save Beatrice, but the attempted cure kills her. The tale occurs in Padua, Italy, of unclear date, and alludes to Genesis, Mudrarakshasa, The Divine Comedy, Macbeth, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Paradise Lost, St. Leon, and Frankenstein.

The tale informs Oliver Holmes’s romance of serpentine original sin, Elsie Venner (1861). Adaptations of it occur in poetry, operas, plays, radio, television, and popular music, and the Rappaccinis inspired several comic book antiheroines and villainesses. A cinematic adaptation, Twice-Told Tales (1963), is part of the U.S. and U.K. 1960s–1970s trend of horror anthology films. The tale’s segment, unlike the others, somewhat follows Hawthorne’s plot and characterizations but dampens the scientists’ rivalry, irradiates Beatrice’s blood, has Vincent Price play Giacomo in a mode more Freudian and Puritan, and climaxes with a triple suicide.

Bob Hodges

Hawthorne toiled on tales and literary sketches in the 1830s and 1840s for initially obscure publications, until collected reprints began to attract critical and commercial notice. Twice-Told Tales (2 vols., 1837, 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, expanded 1854), and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852) collect the bulk of his short fiction. Hawthorne follows Washington Irving in using detailed U.S. locales and histories for his tales, something New England predecessors John Neal, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child also explored in their longer romances.

Some of the best commentary on Hawthorne comes from his successors: Herman Melville, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and Jorge Luis Borges. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) draws an extended contrast between the short fiction of Hawthorne and his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe. Poe represents a more calculated and impersonal supernatural fiction aimed at producing specific horrific effects on the reader often via violence, sensation, a general sense of cosmic indifference, and/or more indefinite, hence universal, settings and situations. In contrast, Hawthorne’s supernatural fiction poses indefinite but persistent allegory, melancholy, specific regional and historical detail, and concern with possibly irredeemable human sin and worldly evil. Lovecraft sees Poe as the paramount artist of modern horror, but his extensive treatment of Hawthorne evidences the latter’s influence on the weird. The seminal pulp magazine Weird Tales often reprinted nineteenth-century U.S. supernatural fiction and poetry before 1940, and they ran eight of Hawthorne’s tales, more than any writer except Poe.

Several Gothic Hawthorne tales stage ambivalent encounters for the reader with revolutionary violence. In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832) Robin undertakes a confused, surreal, nocturnal journey within eighteenth-century Boston to find the titular kinsman and the advancement he offers. Robin finds his corrupt kinsman tarred, feathered, and led by a mob with a satanic Janus-faced figure at its head, which presages philosopher Walter Benjamin’s Janus-like angel in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). The ghostly title figure of “The Gray Champion” (1835) manifests to spur on Puritans at key moments of political violence. The internal splits between Congress-men and King’s men and the latter’s doomed cause in the U.S. revolution are symbolized via a revel (which was influential on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” [1842]), a satanic portrait, a pestilent piece of aristocratic dress, and a timely death in Hawthorne’s four-part “Legends of the Province House” (collected together 1842): “Howe’s Masquerade” (1838), “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (1838), “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” (1838), and “Old Esther Dudley” (1839). “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844) speculates on humanity’s either past or future immolation of all tokens of political, sexual, militarist, penal, economic, literary, and religious authority.

Hawthorne’s short fictions’ major theme offers various haunting yet obscure epiphanies that vex characters’ relations with their intimates as well as their society and its values. “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) recounts the shattering effect on the seventeenth-century Puritan title character’s religious, social, and marital faiths (his wife is even named Faith) after a nocturnal forest experience or dream of a satanic encounter and a witches’ sabbath. The eighteenth-century Rev. Hooper veils himself in “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) for life and even burial against a never specified sin with seeming sexual overtones. His veil feminizes him, breaks his engagement, and makes him a social pariah. Originally intended for a longer romance, the title character of “Ethan Brand” (1850) returns home after a long, successful search for an unpardonable sin that he found within his own intellect.

One of Hawthorne’s most overt ventures into the didactic is “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), for the titular scientist’s sociological experiment hinges on the short-term Fountain of Youth. Perhaps Hawthorne’s most interesting film adaptation, Twice-Told Tales (1963), ironically adapts only that tale from the collection along with “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and Hawthorne’s second major romance The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The Twice-Told Tales film participates in the 1960s–1970s U.S. and U.K. trend of horror anthology films and stars Vincent Price in the midst of his ten-film cycle of (loose) Poe adaptations (1960–1969). Consequently, the segment for “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” alters the tale into a romantic, Poe-esque rivalry between old friends over corpse preservation and resurrection occasioned by mysterious water.

Despite his central concern with sin, Hawthorne explored many variants of the Gothic. The frontier Gothic “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) offers the failure of funerary rites for its title character in the Fourth Anglo-Abenaki War in what is now Maine. The riddle story “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” (1834) centers upon a murder mystery. It and London’s simultaneous moral confusion and intimate surveillance in “Wakefield” (1835) anticipate Poe’s proto-detective tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) and subsequent detective fiction. “The White Old Maid” (1835) is near to a traditional ghost story, and its emphasis on unsettling feminine mourning anticipates Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930). “Feathertop” (1852) follows the Gothic tradition of asexual reproduction and synthetic life from Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (1817) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). A witch animates the title character, a scarecrow that thinks it is a man, to court a judge’s daughter for an unspecified revenge. “Feathertop” is one of the most adapted Hawthorne tales, both in its original form and as extended into Percy MacKaye’s stage melodrama The Scarecrow (1908), which adds sentiment and Satan. Hawthorne was an early U.S. speculative fiction writer with tales such as “The Birth-Mark” (1843), “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” but Feathertop’s smoking iconography influences the titular automaton of the first science fiction dime novel, Edward Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868).

Hawthorne’s first three years of the 1850s mark one of the most impressive productive periods of any U.S. writer; in addition to his final achievements in short fiction like “Ethan Brand” and “Feathertop,” he released his first three major romances: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance (1852). The Scarlet Letter presents itself, in the Gothic tradition of James Macpherson and Horace Walpole, as a found manuscript, incorporating historical figures of seventeenth-century Boston and the sinister forest surrounding it. The colony’s Puritan authorities impose the eponymous scarlet “A” upon Hester Prynne for her adultery and refusal to name the father of her infant daughter Pearl. But the ambivalent symbol also has enchanted and artistic overtones, and a few years later it provides a strange communion for Pearl, an impish and religiously irreverent child. The Scarlet Letter is one of the most striking treatments of crime and punishment in U.S. literature, with scenes of Hester’s social exclusion and her and later her secret lover’s suffering on the scaffold. Hester’s lover, Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, is mercilessly shadowed by her cuckold, the sinister scholar and physician Roger Chillingworth. The reverend’s and the doctor’s scenario follows the combination of demonic malignancy and homoerotic intimacy within Gothic romances like Frankenstein and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

The Blithedale Romance (1852), a roman à clef, fictionalizes Hawthorne’s time at the 1840s Brook Farm commune, based upon Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism. The romance is Hawthorne’s brightest and least Gothic, but its narrator remains dissatisfied with rural idiocy and toil in its commune as well as alienated, modern Boston. Of the two major female characters during the romance’s climax, one is unveiled as the mysterious mesmerist referenced throughout, and the other, driven by a striking but unclear provocation, drowns herself. The recovery of the rigid, drowned corpse provides the most haunting scene. Hawthorne’s romance likely influenced George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859) given their shared enervated, acute male protagonists; independent women seen as inscrutable and fatal; ingratiating, transgressive scientists; and twining of clairvoyance with modern media technology.

The House of the Seven Gables exerted a profound influence on New World Gothic and New England horror writers. But perhaps Hawthorne’s most underappreciated achievement is his final complete long work. The Marble Faun (1860) combines Gothic romance, a novel of artists, and an Italian travelogue from Hawthorne’s and his family’s tour abroad. The Marble Faun culminates tendencies toward urban Gothic in his prior major romances and tales like “Molineux” and “Wakefield.” Its descriptions of the Eternal City render Rome’s catacombs and carnival as a sprawling web for his characters, at once inspiration and ensnarement. Hawthorne’s intricate Roman cityscape anticipates Sigmund Freud’s extended metaphor in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), conjoining the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious to the city’s fragmentary and sometimes unexpected preservation of its long architectural history. The romance’s plot concerns three young U.S. fine artists and the Italian count of Monte Beni. Following the mold of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne contrasts his two female painters. Miriam, the archetypal Dark Lady, is speculated to be of Jewish-, German-, or Afro-American ancestry with a sinister past. Joyful Count Donatello, thought to be part human and part faun, falls in love with Miriam, who inadvertently suborns him into murdering a mysterious figure from her past. The painter-copyist Hilda, the Fair Maiden, is an innocent but dreadfully harsh in her judgment of Donatello and Miriam for this crime. She is loved by the sculptor Kenyon. This romance of secret sin and ambiguous enthrallment informs Louisa May Alcott’s late thrillers involving foreign liaisons and artists as well as Henry James’s narratives of artists, U.S. expatriates, and tourists in Italy, despite his critical reservations about this particular Hawthorne work. The complex overlays of different narratives and its vivid descriptions of place and art make The Marble Faun a sophisticated elevation of Hawthorne’s Gothic project.

Ill health in his last years limited Hawthorne’s writing, but he left several variant manuscripts for two different romance narratives, one inspired by his consular service in England and a superstition about an ancestral curse of bloody footprints as well as another concerning the Elixir of Life in revolutionary Concord. Some of these variants were posthumously published in the nineteenth century. He died in his sleep in 1864 and is buried at Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord, Massachusetts, near Louisa May Alcott and many other renowned U.S. writers. He was survived by his wife Sophia, née Amelia Peabody, a fine artist and diarist. They had three children: Una, who edited one of her father’s manuscripts but died young; Julian, a notable writer and editor of romances and mysteries; and Rose, a poet and later a nun.

Bob Hodges

See also: Alcott, Louisa May; Ancestral Curse; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; The House of the Seven Gables; Lovecraft, H. P.; Mad Scientist; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Weird Tales; “Young Goodman Brown.”

Further Reading

Bidney, Martin. 2008. “Fire, Flutter, Fall, and Scatter: A Structure in the Epiphanies of Hawthorne’s Tales.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50, no. 1: 58–89.

Brodhead, Richard. 1990. Introduction to The Marble Faun, ix–xxix. NY: Penguin, 1990.

Elbert, Monika. 2008. “Dying to Be Heard: Morality and Aesthetics in Alcott’s and Hawthorne’s Tableaux Morts.” In Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Elizabeth Dill and Sheri Weinstein, 19–36. Newcastle: Cambridge.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Pearson, Leland. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Twice-Told Tales. 2005. DVD. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1963. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM Midnite Movies.

Wineapple, Brenda. 2003. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House.

HEARN, LAFCADIO (1850–1904)

Best remembered today for his volume of Japanese ghost stories Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), Patrick Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn was in his day the chief interpreter of Japanese culture and literature for Western audiences. In Japan he is still well regarded, although considered old-fashioned. Like many Westerners of the era, he took a romantic view of the Orient, celebrating its ancient and traditional culture at precisely the time (particularly in Japan) when that culture was vanishing in the face of rapid modernization. His writings hover on the borderline between folklore and literature, a mixture of translation, retelling, and his own embellishments.

Hearn was born on the Greek isle of Lefkada to an Irish father and a Greek mother. The father soon abandoned the family. Hearn was raised in Dublin for a time, then sent to school in France and England. He lost sight in one eye during a schoolyard “accident” in England, which may have been an incident of bullying. He was essentially dumped in America, penniless, and left to make his way. After enduring great poverty and sleeping on the streets, he eventually became a journalist in Cincinnati, where he specialized in accounts of lurid crimes and other salacious stories. He married a black woman, Alethea Foley, which was illegal at the time. This “scandal” cost him his job and brought more poverty. The marriage was not a success. He continued as a journalist and moved to New Orleans, and also spent some time on the island of Martinique, where his extensive writings about these places brought him some measure of fame.

The Touch of Nightmare

One of Hearn’s most fascinating contributions to the literature of horror is a little piece—part story, part essay, part memoir—titled “Nightmare-Touch.” Collected in his book Shadowings (1900), it sets out to examine the question of why, exactly, people are afraid of ghosts. Hearn’s answer is penetrating and highly memorable:

Nowhere do I remember reading a plain statement of the reason why ghosts are feared. Ask any ten intelligent persons of your acquaintance, who remember having once been afraid of ghosts, to tell you exactly why they were afraid,—to define the fancy behind the fear;—and I doubt whether even one will be able to answer the question.

. . . Now I venture to state boldly that the common fear of ghosts is the fear of being touched by ghosts,—or, in other words, that the imagined Supernatural is dreaded mainly because of its power to touch. Only to touch, remember!—not to wound or to kill.

But this dread of the touch would itself be the result of experience,—chiefly, I think, of prenatal experience stored up in the individual by inheritance, like the child’s fear of darkness. And who can ever have had the sensation of being touched by ghosts? The answer is simple:—Everybody who has been seized by phantoms in a dream.

Elements of primeval fears—fears older than humanity—doubtless enter into the child-terror of darkness. But the more definite fear of ghosts may very possibly be composed with inherited results of dream-pain,—ancestral experience of nightmare. And the intuitive terror of supernatural touch can thus be evolutionally explained. (Hearn 2010, 224–225)

Matt Cardin

Source: Hearn, Lafcadio. [1900] 2010. “Nightmare-Touch.” In The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce, edited by Michael Newton, 224–230. New York: Penguin Classics.

Hearn always had a taste for the bizarre and colorful, and he gathered much supernatural lore. A collection of writings from this period, Fantastics (1914), contains stories and prose sketches, some of them developed into full stories, all in a florid, poetic style. He published several highly regarded translations, including translations of Théophile Gautier’s One of Cleopatra’s Nights (1838) and Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874).

By this time he had already showed an interest in the Orient, retelling Chinese legends as Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), but when Harper & Brothers sent him to Japan in 1890 to write books and magazine articles, he fell in love with the country and stayed there, eventually becoming a Japanese citizen. His Japanese tales, found in such books as Kwaidan, Shadowings (1900), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Kotto (1902), The Romance of the Milky Way (1905), and others are of great interest to connoisseurs of the fantastic and horrifying. His wandering samurai, Buddhist priests, and ordinary peasants are constantly encountering malevolent ghosts, faceless demons, a lethal female snow demon, vampire-like creatures whose heads detach and fly around at night, a corpse-eating ghost that is the spirit of a greedy priest punished for his sins, and many more spooks and situations unfamiliar to Western readers, all told in beautiful prose, which becomes more spare and restrained in Hearn’s later period. Also of interest is his 1898 lecture “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction,” in which he argues that both tales of the supernatural and real-world beliefs in supernatural phenomena have their origin in dreams and nightmares.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Devils and Demons; Gautier, Théophile; Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things; Vampires.

Further Reading

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. 1898. “(Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos) Hearn.” In American Short-Story Writers, 1880–1910, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel and William E. Grant. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 78. Detroit: Gale.

Hearn, Lafcadio. [1898] 2008. “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction.” In “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 267–278. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

McWilliams, Vera, 1946. Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

HELL HOUSE

Richard Matheson’s Hell House is a 1971 horror novel about four individuals—physicist/parapsychologist Professor Lionel Barrett, his wife, Edith; and two spirit mediums, Benjamin Fischer and Florence Tanner—employed by a wealthy, dying man named Rolf Rudolph Deutsch to investigate whether there really is life after death. As part of this enterprise, they must enter Maine’s notorious Belasco House, possibly the most haunted house on Earth, and live there for a week in order to divine whatever secrets of immortality it may contain, to be rewarded later with a sum of $100,000 as compensation for enduring its reputed horrors. As is related in the book, the place earned its reputation as “Hell House” due to the diabolical activities of the previous owner, Emeric Belasco.

As the inquiry proceeds—contrasting the scientific observations of the disturbing phenomena (via Barrett) with the otherworldly aspects of what might be happening (by way of the medium Tanner)—the characters are attacked by the evil dwelling in the house, as the malevolent forces attempt to prey on each individual’s personal fears and weaknesses. The author later adapted the novel into a film, The Legend of Hell House (1973).

Though arguably one of Matheson’s better known works—a fact that is at least partly due to the popularity of the film adaptation—it is also one of his weakest offerings (something Matheson acknowledged in later interviews). The characters seem dated in retrospect, and the story drags in the second half of the book. But the main weakness is the way Matheson chose to express the notion of evil via sex and gratuitous violence. There is a distracting preoccupation with “corrupt” sexual acts (mainly in the guise of lesbianism and orgies), along with scenes of overt (and grisly) violence, both of which are uncharacteristic of the author’s normal output, and which are unconvincingly rendered in places, probably due to his discomfort with such blatant demonstrations in his work. The end result is a mixed affair, and more than one reader has come away from the book disappointed and comparing the final reading experience unfavorably to author Shirley Jackson’s seminal work, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which Matheson himself noted later as an influence, though he was not conscious of it at the time he wrote the novel. In the end, Jackson was better able to instill a feeling of dread and fear than Matheson achieves, effectively bridging the divide between a classic Gothic tradition (especially Poe) and the modern sensibilities of jaded audiences who, by the time of Hill House (the late 1950s), had been exposed to the brutal horrors of two World Wars and the blossoming of the mass media with its increasingly bold radio, cinematic, and television fare. Possibly only Peter Straub, author of 1979’s Ghost Story, would consistently approach Jackson’s work in this area, but not until the mid-1970s/1980s.

Hell House undoubtedly has its adherents. Dean Koontz praised it and predicted its endurance as a major novel of supernatural horror in an introduction written for one edition of the book and later reprinted in editors Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve’s The Twilight Zone and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. Laudatory blurbs from the likes of Straub and Stephen King were printed on some of the book’s various published editions, with the latter declaring that it “may be the scariest haunted house novel ever written.” Nevertheless, Hell House could be judged a rare miss for Matheson, if success is measured in terms of content and relevance.

Jason V Brock

See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Matheson, Richard.

Further Reading

Bradley, Matthew R. 2010. “Richard Matheson—Storyteller: Fresh Hell.” Tor.com, November 9. http://www.tor.com/2010/11/09/richard-matheson-storyteller-fresh-hell.

Koontz, Dean. 2009. “Introduction to Hell House.” In The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson, edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, 100–107. New York: Citadel Press Books.

Pulliam, June M., and Fonseca, Anthony J. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

HERBERT, JAMES (1943–2013)

James John Herbert was an English writer of horror fiction who achieved fame with his first novel, The Rats, in 1974. Over a 40-year career he became Britain’s best-selling author of popular fiction, and his novels played a significant role in the horror publishing boom of the 1970s through the 1990s.

Herbert was born in London in 1943, the son of market stall traders, and grew up in the postwar bomb-damaged East End area of Whitechapel. Having studied graphic design and printing, he worked for an advertising agency in London, and it was there that he wrote The Rats, which was an instant best seller upon its publication. He went on to publish twenty-three more novels during his career, plus two nonfiction books and a graphic novel.

In his landmark survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King describes Herbert as “probably the best writer of pulp horror fiction to come along since the death of Robert E. Howard” (King 1981, 336). King suggests that the way Herbert approaches horror is uncompromising: Herbert “seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces” (339), and this became evident early in his career. In books such as The Rats, The Fog (1975), and The Dark (1980), Herbert reveled in graphic depictions of violence, including a gym teacher stripped and beaten to death by his aroused students, a child eaten by rats, and an entire football stadium crowd descending into frenzied murder. King felt the need to defend Herbert, who he said was held in “remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre” (336). Arguably it was this tendency toward the explicit that branded Herbert the lesser, more “pulpy” writer, yet a lack of critical appreciation was compensated for by popularity. At the time of his death, Herbert had sold more than 50 million books.

Herbert shattered the British tradition of historically set, Gothic-inflected horror featuring middle-class intellectual heroes and aristocratic monsters. Instead, his stories are contemporary, urban, and working class. His main characters are mostly ordinary, professional men who are ill-equipped to deal with the forces against them, from bodyguard Liam Halloran facing ancient Sumerian evil in Sepulchre (1987) to the sleazy paparazzo Joe Creed beset by disenfranchised demons in Creed (1990).

Often these characters’ investigations lead them from their London flats to large country estates, blue-collar men drawn into the murky world of the wealthy country elite, and Herbert never shied away from political or social commentary. He earned the wrath of the British neo-Nazi movement with The Spear (1978), in which Nazi sympathizers worship a zombiefied Heinrich Himmler. In The Secret of Crickly Hall (2006) he wrote about child abuse in orphanages, while Others (1999) addressed the mistreatment of disabled children. In later years he critiqued big business, such as the Magma Corporation in Sepulchre and the powerful yet mysterious Illuminati-like The Inner Court in Ash (2013).

Such commentary stemmed from Herbert’s roots. Growing up in the East End, he saw successive governments fail to improve the living conditions of the poor, and his distrust of authority became the backdrop to his stories, with his heroes lifting the veil on the rich, powerful, and corrupt. Another key theme drew on his Catholicism, explored in detail in Shrine (1983), which tells the story of Alice, a deaf-mute girl who, after apparently seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary, can hear, speak, and perform miracles. Herbert’s story involves a Catholic church that exploits the miraculous Alice and the blind followers who idolize her, only to find that she is possessed by Elnor, a seventeenth-century nun who was a witch and a spirit of evil. Herbert’s critique here is aimed at all forms of blind faith and fanaticism. Alice is ultimately murdered by a lonely young man who is obsessed with Mark Chapman (John Lennon’s killer) and John Hinkley (would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan).

While graphic scenes of death and sex in his first novels gave Herbert a reputation as an enfant terrible of pulp horror, other early works demonstrated a softer side to his writing that would eventually come to the fore. The Survivor (1976) downplayed horror in favor of the supernatural in its tale of pilot David Keller, the single survivor of a plane crash that kills 300 people. The book is part mystery thriller, as Keller investigates the crash and a series of other bizarre deaths that occur around the crash site, but it also increasingly becomes a Catholic-inflected musing on the afterlife. Herbert expanded on this in his next book, Fluke (1977), a fable about a man who dies and is reborn as a dog, and who tries in his canine form to discover the circumstances of his death. Both Fluke and The Survivor were filmed, the former in Hollywood in 1995 and the latter in Australia in 1981. Fluke was sold as a children’s film, while The Survivor was a little seen and even less loved horror movie, as was Deadly Eyes (1982), a Canadian adaptation of The Rats. It was arguably the lack of success in transforming Herbert’s work into movies in the early 1980s that contributed to his becoming less of a cultural icon than King.

Although he returned to gore in novels such as The Spear, The Dark, and Sepulchre, increasingly Herbert focused on the supernatural, with later novels such as The Magic Cottage (1986) and Haunted (1988) becoming progressively elegiac in tone. Herbert’s softer side and huge achievement led to his eventual acceptance by the establishment. He was awarded the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010, and the same year he received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award from Stephen King. In the year before his death, after a checkered relationship with screen adaptations, Herbert saw his The Secret of Crickley Hall adapted by the BBC into a well-received three-part miniseries.

Herbert died at his home in West Sussex in March 2013. No cause of death was given. While the gentle Fluke was his personal favorite, his true legacy is found in the savage early works that revolutionized British horror writing and inspired a generation of young British readers to embrace the genre.

Simon Brown

See also: Psychological Horror; The Rats.

Further Reading

Cabell, James. 2013. James Herbert—The Authorised True Story 1943–2013. London. John Blake.

Jones. Stephen. 1992. James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

King, Stephen. 1981. Danse Macabre. New York. Everest House.

Spark, Alasdair. 1993. “Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 147–160. London and Boulder: Pluto Press.

HICHENS, ROBERT (1864–1950)

Robert Smythe Hichens was a prolific English novelist and short-story writer. He did not originally claim credit for a successful roman à clef (a fictional story about real people) about Oscar Wilde, The Green Carnation (1894), but was deeply affected by a tour of the Nile made in the company of Lord Alfred Douglas, transfigured in his phantasmagoric novel An Imaginative Man (1895), and seems to have retained traumatic guilt feelings from it that also fueled his work.

Lord Frederick Hamilton, editor of the Pall Mall Magazine, was sufficiently impressed by Hichens’s account of a transmigration of souls in “A Reincarnation” (1895) to commission him to develop a plot of his own in “A Tribute of Souls,” featuring a diabolical bargain. But Hamilton subsequently found Hichens’s “The Cry of the Child” too nasty-minded to print. That harrowing tale of a man haunted by the ghostly cries of a child whom he allowed to die of neglect appeared in Hichens’s finest collection, Tongues of Conscience (1900), a book of five horror stories that also featured his masterpiece, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea.” The more sedate Bye-Ways (1897) had previously reprinted “A Tribute of Souls” alongside “The Charmer of Snakes,” in which a man loses his wife to the seductive music of a snake-charmer.

“How Love Came to Professor Guildea”: A Neglected Masterpiece of Ghostly Horror

Hichens’s novella “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” was first published in the collection Tongues of Conscience (1900) but is based on a shorter story, “The Man Who Was Beloved,” published in the October 1897 issue of Pearson’s Magazine. The central character, a scientist, is fond of explaining to his only friend, a priest, that there is no scope in his well-ordered life for emotion or affection, but he then becomes the object of the slavish infatuation of a ghostly stalker that suffers from a severe mental deficiency. The ghost is invisible to him but not to his pet parrot, whose mimicry of the moronic phantom reveals her fawning all too clearly. In the first version of the story, the idea of the parrot’s mimicry is simply used as a twist in the tale, but the fuller version brings out the desperate unease of a man who has eliminated love from his existence but finds himself persecuted by it in an insidious fashion that seems uniquely horrible to him.

Although many ghost stories are, in effect, tales of stalking, those prior to the publication of Hichens’s story that credited amorous motives to the specters tended to render the eroticism more rewarding, unless or until spoiled by jealousy. Hichens provides a far more distinctive and intense psychological study, which makes the novella one of the great English ghost stories. It has been widely anthologized, although it has somehow escaped the attention of most scholars of horror and supernatural fiction. It has also been adapted several times for radio and television, including an episode of the popular 1940s CBS radio show Escape and an episode of the pioneering 1950s horror-suspense television series Lights Out.

Brian Stableford

Flames (1897) is a remarkable novel in which an effortlessly moral socialite wants to feel the temptations that torment his imperfect friend, and so he proposes a magical exchange of souls that goes awry. The friend’s body is possessed by the soul of an evil occultist, whose influence threatens to corrupt him irredeemably. The Dweller on the Threshold (1911) revisits the theme of Flames, and Hichens wrote a third, more enigmatic version of the plot in “The Sin of Envy,” published in his The Gardenia and Other Stories (1934). In the title story of The Man in the Mirror (1950) a portraitist attempts to paint his doppelgänger, with disastrous consequences.

Hichens never quite made up his mind where he stood on the matter of the fashionable occultism that pervaded British and American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This uncertainty in the face of supernatural phenomena weakened many of his horror stories, but the strange psychology of his work remains a fascinating case study.

Brian Stableford

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Cooper, Frederic T. [1912] 2008. “Robert Hichens.” In A Hideous Bit of Morbidity: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 307–324. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Stableford, Brian. 1998. “Robert Smythe Hichens.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 268–270. Detroit: St. James Press.

HILL, JOE (1972–)

Joe Hill is the pen name for Joseph Hillstrom King, an American author. Born in 1972 to horror writer Stephen King and his wife Tabitha, also a writer, Hill chose a pseudonym to achieve success on his own, apart from his famous family name. He was able to write for nearly a decade, publishing a collection of short stories, while keeping his identity secret. He is best known for horror and science fiction novels and comic books.

His first book, a critically acclaimed short story collection titled 20th Century Ghosts (2005), garnered numerous awards, including a Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection and two British Fantasy Awards. Hill has said that his fiction, particularly his short fiction, is greatly influenced by Bernard Malamud, especially the idea that short stories can contain elements of fantasy and magic next to stark reality. Critics have described his writing style as “slipstream,” which crosses and combines genre elements of horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and literary fiction.

With the publication of his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Hill won literary success, but he also found that he could no longer hide the connection to his famous father. Eventually, he gave in to the family connection and published several Kindle Singles with his father, including In the Tall Grass (2012) and Throttle (2012). Like Stephen King, Hill is probably best known for his horror novels: Heart-Shaped Box, Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016). In 2014, Horns was adapted into a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple, directed by Alexandre Aja. NOS4A2 inspired a comic series called Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland (2013–2014). Wraith followed on the heels of Locke and Key (the first in the series debuted in 2008), another comic book series penned by Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. In 2011, a television series adapted from Locke and Key was highly anticipated by fans, and a pilot was filmed, though the Fox network ultimately passed on the project. Hill has continued to work with various artists and IDW Publishing on several horror comic projects, including The Cape (2012) and Thumbprint (2013).

In 2016, a landmark year in Hill’s writing career, The Fireman hit #1 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, the first work of his to reach the top spot. In interviews, Hill has said that he identifies more as a comic writer than anything else, though he continues to write across mediums. At the time of this writing, a new television adaptation of Locke and Key was rumored to be still in the works, with Hill saying that he did not want to give up on the project.

Lisa Kröger

See also: King, Stephen.

Further Reading

Dionne, Zach. 2013. “Owen King and Joe Hill on Their New Novels, Sibling Rivalry, and Stephen King’s Shadow.” Vulture, May 2. http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/joe-hill-owen-king-interview.html.

“Joe Hill.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

Joe Hill Fiction. 2016. Accessed June 15. http://www.joehillfiction.com.

Niehart, Ben. 2007. “Prince of Darkness.” New York Times Magazine, March 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/magazine/18hill.t.html?_r=0.

HILL, SUSAN (1942–)

British author Susan Hill, winner of the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham, and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is well known as an accomplished author of contemporary ghost stories: The Woman in Black (1983), The Mist in the Mirror (1992), The Man in the Picture (2007), several short stories, and also crime and other contemporary fictions. Both her tales of the strange living and of the dead impinging on the living depict individual feelings and the confusion of relationships and hidden family secrets. She creates social microcosms with delicacy, vulnerability, and a sense of threat.

Hill’s revival of the British ghost story in The Woman in Black (1983) engages readers with the power of Gothic horror to reveal horrible secrets of the past and their deadly legacy in the present, putting spectral flesh on hidden, repressed stories, versions, perspectives, and lives, and inviting readers to look again at social mores and understand them differently. The titular woman in black is the marginalized and maddened ghost of Jennet Humfrye, who wreaks fatal revenge on local children for the loss of her illegitimate child Nathaniel, who, after being adopted by Jennet’s wealthy sister, Mrs. Drablow, drowned in an accident crossing the marshy spit to her remote mansion. The novel is interpretable in light of Julia Briggs’s feminist exploration of women’s ghost stories, which recuperated and emphasized their importance for reading the hidden lives of women in periods when they had no property and little education, and were expected to be silent. Ghosts, says Briggs, lure readers into a space of tension “between certainty and doubt, between the familiar and the feared, between rational occurrence and the inexplicable” (Briggs 2012, 176).

In Hill’s The Mist in the Mirror, on a dark and rainy night Sir James Monmouth returns to England after a lifetime of traveling, intent on discovering more about himself and his obsession, explorer Conrad Vane. Sir James, warned against following Vane’s trail, experiences disturbing events leading to questions concerning a sad little boy, an old woman hidden behind the curtain, chilling screams, and desperate sobbing. Travel and entrapment reappear in The Man in the Picture, set in Cambridge, London, a remote country house, and Venice at Carnival time, a popular city for tales of ghosts, death, confusion, and loss (as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, 1912; Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” 1971; and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, 1981). Here people wear masks concealing secrets, which are revealed in a terrifying painting in which the man in the picture comes to life. Hill’s dark short stories also dramatize ghostly revenge. For example, in “The Small Hand” (2010) a murdered child leads a researcher close to death, reenacting his own drowning at the hand of the man’s brother, who, faced with his own guilt, commits suicide. Retribution, malice, and uncanny returns dominate Hill’s socially engaging horror.

Gina Wisker

See also: The Woman in Black.

Further Reading

Briggs, Julia. 2012. “The Ghost Story.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 176–185. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hill, Susan. 1983. The Woman in Black. London: Vintage.

Hill, Susan. 1992. The Mist in the Mirror. London: Sinclair Stevenson.

Hofer, Ernest H. 1993. “Enclosed Structures, Disclosed Lives: The Fictions of Susan Hill.” In Contemporary British Women Writers, Narrative Strategies, edited by Robert E. Hosmer Jr., 128–150. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jackson, Rosemary. 1982. “Cold Enclosures: The Fiction of Susan Hill.” In Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley, 81–103. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.

Quema, Anne. 2006. “Family and Symbolic Violence in The Mist in the Mirror.” Gothic Studies 8, no. 2: 114–135.

THE HISTORIAN

The Historian is the 2005 debut novel by Elizabeth Johnson Kostova (1964–). It involves characters in three different decades attempting to discover the truth behind the legends surrounding the ruthless fifteenth-century Romanian leader Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the historical figure who may have served at least in part as an inspiration for Bram Stoker when he created the character of Dracula.

In the earliest of three interwoven threads, historian Professor Bartholomew Rossi searches for Dracula in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. In 1952, one of Rossi’s doctoral students, known only as Paul, tries to discover what happened to Rossi after he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Finally, in 1972, the student’s unnamed daughter searches for her father. As they travel the European continent, each scours libraries for hidden clues about where Tepes was buried. The three historians come to believe that Tepes really was a vampire and that he survives to this day. Except for the 1972 storyline, the novel is told through discovered letters, some many pages long, mirroring the epistolic style (i.e., told in the form of letters) of Dracula.

The unnamed narrator learns that she is a direct descendant of Dracula. When the vampire finally enters the story, he is unable to live up to the legend. He admires modern developments—the atomic bomb and the Cold War, for example—but he seems interested in little more than cataloging his vast library. He waxes poetic about the purity of evil, but is not very threatening and is apparently dispatched by a silver bullet to the heart.

Kostova was inspired by stories her father told her as a child while they lived in Slovenia and traveled throughout Europe. She researched and wrote the novel over a ten-year period, in part while teaching at various universities. In search of creative mentoring, she entered the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where the as-yet-incomplete manuscript won the Hopwood Award in 2004.

The book drew immediate interest from publishers and made headlines because of the $2 million advance paid for it at auction, as well as a similar payment from Sony for the film rights. Due to its reliance on solving puzzles and uncovering ancient conspiracies, Little, Brown and Company marketed the novel by comparing it to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, despite the fact that The Historian is much slower paced than the Brown thriller.

The Historian was the first debut novel to land at number one on the New York Times best-seller list during its first week and is still the fastest-selling debut novel in U.S. history. Reviews, however, were decidedly mixed, in part due to the lack of variation in voice among the various narrators. The movie adaptation has never been produced.

The Historian ends in a manner that invites a sequel—either Dracula is still alive or one of his minions has taken his place—but Kostova has stated that she has no intentions of continuing the story, preferring to leave it for her readers to speculate about what happens next.

Bev Vincent

See also: Dracula; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; Psychological Horror; Vampires.

Further Reading

“Elizabeth Kostova.” 2010. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

“Interview: Elizabeth Kostova Discusses Her First Novel, ‘The Historian.’” 2005. Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR, June 26.

Sanow, Anne. 2005. “Vivifying the Undead.” Publishers Weekly 11 (April): 32.

HODGSON, WILLIAM HOPE (1877–1918)

William Hope Hodgson was a British author known for his science fiction-based horror fiction. He was born in Essex in 1877, the second of twelve children of an Anglican priest. At fourteen he left school and joined the Merchant Marines, first as a cabin boy and later as a first mate, a deeply traumatic experience that was to inform his writing. While at sea he took up photography and also body-building. He died in 1918.

After quitting the sea, Hodgson wrote and sold articles about physical culture and life at sea. Self-taught, he soon began writing fiction. His short horror stories and novels do not feature standard supernatural elements such as ghosts or vampires, but monstrous life forms, sometimes evolved here on earth, and sometimes invading from other planes of existence.

Hodgson’s recurrent themes include horror at sea, most often the Sargasso Sea, and people besieged by monsters. His earliest published horror story, “A Tropical Horror” (1907), is typical, involving sailors barricading themselves against a huge, dangerous, but unknown sea creature. His two best short stories are “The Voice in the Night” (1907; adapted for the television series Suspicion in 1958) and “The Derelict” (1912). The former concerns a couple marooned on an island covered with a strange gray fungus, and the latter is about an abandoned ship that hosts a horrifying new form of life.

His first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), is about shipwreck survivors who encounter trees that absorb people and a ship besieged by tentacled humanoid creatures. In The House on the Borderland (1908) a man experiences involuntary visionary trips beyond the solar system and into the remote future. The Ghost Pirates (1909) is set aboard a ship that is attacked and eventually overtaken by other-dimensional beings. The Night Land (1912) is a visionary tale of the remote future that is at once horror, science fiction, and romance. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1910) is a collection about an occult detective who investigates hauntings caused by quasi-scientific phenomena.

Hodgson’s fiction anticipates that of H. P. Lovecraft, who independently created a similar approach to horror. But the Lovecraftian universe is harsh and apathetic, whereas Hodgson’s balances good and malign forces. Hodgson’s stories also often include overly sentimental romantic elements. He was notable for being able to create and sustain a mood of horror, even at novel length. He is primarily remembered for The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, “The Voice in the Night,” “The Derelict,” and the Carnacki stories, which are still being written today by other authors who expand on Hodgson’s original concept.

His writings were critically well received at the time but nearly forgotten until their rediscovery in the 1940s. He died in Ypres, Belgium, in 1918, a casualty of World War I.

Lee Weinstein

See also: The House on the Borderland; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Night Land; Occult Detectives.

Further Reading

Berruti, Massimo, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford, eds. 2014. William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland: Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.

Bruce, Samuel W. 1997. “William Hope Hodgson.” In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 121–131. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 178. Detroit: Gale.

Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.

Joshi, S. T. 2012. “William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds.” In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century, 445–451. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.

The Night Land: The Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://nightland.website.

Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

Weinstein, Lee. 1980. “The First Literary Copernicus.” Nyctalops 15 (January). https://leestein2003.wordpress.com/the-first-literary-copernicus.

HOFFMANN, E. T. A. (1776–1822)

Ernest Theodore Wilhelm (Amadeus) Hoffmann was a German writer, artist, composer, lawyer, and theater manager. He was one of the most important figures in the cultural movement known as romanticism, and a highly influential writer in both European and American literature.

Hoffmann was born in the city of Königsberg, which at that time was in Germany; Königsberg is now part of Russia and has been renamed Kaliningrad. He trained initially for a career in the law and practiced as a lawyer. However, his interest in art was both deep and wide; he wrote novels, short stories, and poetry; he painted and created illustrations; and he also both performed and composed music. His passion for Mozart’s music was so great that he began replacing one of his middle names, “Wilhelm,” with “Amadeus,” which was also Mozart’s middle name. Hoffmann even composed an opera, “Undine,” which was based on a fantastic 1811 novella by his friend Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, who assisted him with the lyrics.

His first short story was published in 1809, and his first collection, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Stories in the Style of Callot), appeared in 1814. Much of this collection was devoted to writings about music; however, it also included an important early tale, “The Golden Pot: A Fairytale of Modern Times.” In this story, the somewhat awkward hero, Anselmus, falls in love with Serpentina, the daughter of a salamander escaped from Atlantis. The story presents a more light-hearted and bizarre side of Gothicism than many of his later tales, and resorts to the unusual tactic of bringing the narrator directly into the story in order to finish it. Crossing the boundaries between the real and the unreal would prove to be a constant theme running through Hoffmann’s work.

His first novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir) appeared in 1815 and proved to be a far darker story than “The Golden Pot.” The influence of The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, on The Devil’s Elixir is obvious. In this novel, the figure of the double, or “doppelgänger,” plays an important role, and Hoffmann’s subsequent writing was full of secondary characters who seemed to reflect the main characters.

In 1817, what is today arguably Hoffmann’s most famous work, “The Sand-man,” was published in his collection Nachtstücke (Night Pieces). It is the story of a young man named Nathanael who, as a boy, may have witnessed the death of his father during an alchemical experiment. His father was not alone at the time, but in the company of the mysterious and terrifying Coppelius, a man the young Nathanael suspects might be the actual Sand-man. In German folklore, the Sand-man is an evil spirit who steals the eyes of children. As a young man, Nathanael encounters an Italian eyeglass-maker named Coppola, who seems to be Coppelius in disguise, and falls in love with his beautiful, shy daughter Olimpia. When Nathanael realizes that Olimpia is actually an “automaton,” a machine built by Coppola, he goes mad. The theme of reality and unreality runs through “The Sand-man,” which is a sustained meditation on the reliability of vision, of experience, as a way of understanding reality. Sigmund Freud, the most important figure in modern psychotherapy, wrote extensively on “The Sand-man” in his 1919 psychological treatise, The Uncanny.

Hoffmann’s next collection, Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), published in 1819, included the now-classic tale “Nutcracker and Mouse-King,” which inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker.” Other well-known stories from this collection include “The Mines of Falun,” “Councillor Krespel,” and “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” which is considered by many to be the first story of the detective genre. While much of Hoffmann’s fiction would not appear in English until the 1850s, it is generally believed that Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by “Mademoiselle de Scuderi” to write his own important early detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

In general, Hoffmann’s style is important for the way he combines the psychological and the supernatural. While he recycles certain Gothic images, settings, and situations, drawing from Gothic sources such as Matthew Lewis and, particularly, the short fiction of Horace Walpole, Hoffmann is original in the way he handles Gothic material. By reexamining the Gothic from a fresh point of view, which was formed by the developments in German philosophical thinking about the nature of the mind and its relationship to experience, Hoffmann was able to bring a new dimension into Gothic fiction. His delirium and grotesqueness are not just exciting Gothic effects; they give him a way to question humanity’s grasp on reality itself. Time and again, Hoffmann’s characters are swept up in the tumult of their own desires and become unable to tell what is dream and what is not; but they are not fools—their problem is only a more acute form of a problem faced by all human beings. Hoffmann deliberately withholds whatever information would be necessary to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the experiences of his narrators are not supernatural. Understanding this tendency helps to explain the importance of delusional personas, figures like Coppelius, who act as a focus for the delusion of the main character. These personas are often depicted as malevolent beings who are aware of the role they play and seek to carry it out as if it were a mission.

Hoffmann’s influence is extensive. Major authors both in and out of the horror genre reflect the results of reading Hoffmann, including not only Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United States, but Russian authors such Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens and George MacDonald in England, and Charles Baudelaire in France. H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann” has a decidedly Hoffmann-like quality, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s character, Dr. Hesselius—a scholar of supernatural events and a forerunner of Bram Stoker’s Dr. Van Helsing—bears a resemblance to some of Hoffmann’s characters as well. The composer Jacques Offenbach wrote an opera entitled Tales of Hoffmann, which was adapted for film in 1951. In later days, animators such as the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer seem to have derived some inspiration from Hoffmann, who was fond of depicting inanimate objects coming to life and moving of their own accord.

Michael Cisco

See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Gogol, Nikolai; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; “The Music of Erich Zann”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; “The Sand-man”; The Uncanny; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Duroche, Leonard L. 1988. “Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1776–1822.” In Writers for Children: Critical Studies of Major Authors Since the Seventeenth Century, edited by Jane M. Bingham, 283–288. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–162. New York: Penguin.

Willis, Martin T. 1994. “Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen.” Extrapolation 35, no. 3: 186–200.

“THE HORLA”

The influential short story “Le Horla” (The Horla) by the French writer Guy de Maupassant is a salient example of French weird fiction, praised by H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). A stark tale about the metaphysics of invisibility that takes the form of a confession to a physician, it was published under the title “Lettre d’un fou” (Letter from a Madman) in Gil Blas, a popular Parisian magazine, in February 1885 under the pen name of “Maufrigneuse.” Maupassant then published (also in Gil Blas) the first version of “Le Horla” in October 1886, with the tale now featuring a framing device legitimating the narrator’s sanity—and thereby inviting the reader into a macabre world that casts light on the limitations of the natural sciences when confronting the impossible. The final version of the story was published as “Le Horla” (1887) in Le Horla, a collection of Maupassant’s short stories edited by Paul Ollendorff.

In the final version, Maupassant cuts out the frame narrative, instead organizing the story as a chronological series of journal entries told entirely from a first-person perspective and expressed in a lucid prose style. The narrator’s protracted reflections on nonhumans and the strange occurrences to which he bears witness, however, veer uncontrollably into metaphysical abstraction and Schopenhauerian (in the style of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer) pessimism, thereby engendering affective dread and despair. The story describes the arrival on earth of an invisible entity from beyond the veil of human knowledge, an arrival that implies for its narrator the obliteration of the human species by extradimensional beings. The narrator’s commitments to reason and faith collapse when confronting the titular “Horla,” thus opening onto a vision of an incomprehensible cosmos. The tale illustrates weird fiction’s penchant for speculating on realities that horrify readers before returning them to mundane reality with a more complex understanding of their embeddedness in cosmic immensities.

The narrator’s inability to rationalize the manifestations of the invisible creature leads him to concoct a plan to trap it in his house with iron shutters in order to burn it alive. Yet, in his frantic efforts to rid himself of Le Horla, he forgets to inform his servants of his plan, and they are killed in the process. The story concludes grimly with the narrator, who is trapped in an existential nightmare in which he believes the horrid being is still alive, choosing to commit suicide.

In 1892, only five years after the publication of “Le Horla,” Maupassant would himself attempt suicide, thereby paving the way for critics to speculate on the relationship between the story and the author’s life. Regardless of biographical relevance, “Le Horla” remains a striking monument to the weird’s capacity to unsettle and horrify both philosophically and psychologically, and it has had a profound influence on subsequent horror literature, including Lovecraft’s classic story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). It has been adapted as, and/or has exerted an influence on, multiple movies and radio and television program, including a loose adaptation as the 1963 American horror film Diary of a Madman, starring Vincent Price.

Sean Matharoo

See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; Frame Story; Maupassant, Guy de; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Fitz, Brewster E. 1972. “The Use of Mirrors and Mirror Analogues in Maupassant’s Le Horla.” The French Review 45 (5): 954–963.

Goulet, Andrea. 2013. “Neurosyphilitcs and Madmen: The French Fin-de-siècle Fictions of Huysmans, Lermina, and Maupassant.” In Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, edited by Stanley Finger, François Boller, and Anne Stiles, 73–91. Amsterdam and Oxford: Elsevier.

Showers, Brian J. 2010. “The Horla.” In Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, edited by S. T. Joshi, 146–148. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of four novels by Arthur Conan Doyle that feature fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his loyal friend Dr. John Watson. Serialized in The Strand magazine from 1901 to 1902, it was the first Sherlock Holmes story to be published since 1893, when Doyle memorably killed off his hero in The Final Problem. However, due to immense public pressure to write more Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle produced The Hound of the Baskervilles, set sometime before Holmes’s fateful battle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

Like the majority of Sherlock Holmes stories, the story is told by Dr. Watson’s narrative, but also in the epistolary format using letters and old manuscripts. Regarded as a little old-fashioned by the advent of the twentieth century, when modernism was on the rise, this format is nevertheless used to great effect by Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles as the mystery is gradually explained. Though typically classed as a detective story, the novel features many tropes common to Gothic literature, for example, the Gothic mansion of Baskerville Hall and the windswept moors. But unlike many Gothic and horror stories, there is a rational explanation for all of the strange events that occur.

The mystery in The Hound of the Baskervilles is a complex one, with a multitude of characters, multiple plot strands, and many false clues. Due to its length, Doyle was able to develop a much more intricate story than in the short fiction he had published previously. The mystery focuses on the ill-fated Baskerville family, who are apparently haunted by a demonic hellhound. Holmes does not believe in hellhounds, of course, and he and Watson set out to solve a puzzle with a very human (and canine) evil at its center.

The scene late in The Hound of the Baskervilles when the title creature is finally revealed remains as thrilling today as it was to Arthur Conan Doyle’s readers in 1901–1902. Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade (a detective from Scotland Yard, and an old acquaintance of Holmes’s) are out on a fog-shrouded moor at night when they first hear the hound, followed by its appearance:

There was a thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank. The cloud was within fifty yards of where we lay, and we glared at it, all three, uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it. I was at Holmes’s elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog. (Doyle 1902, 251–252)

Matt Cardin

Source: Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. February 1902. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The Strand Magazine. Volume XXIII.

Like the contradictory character of Holmes himself, The Hound of the Baskervilles combines the outrageous with the reassuringly rational. Doyle uses many sensational elements in his novel, such as diabolical criminals, ghostly seeming hounds, and manhunts across the moors, but always reduces the apparently uncanny to something explicable.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was a huge success, and it led to Doyle’s reviving Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House, with the detective dramatically revealing he had faked his own death. The novel has been adapted for both the cinema and the television screen on numerous occasions. It has even lent its name to a statistical observation known as “the Baskerville effect,” the effect being that mortality due to heart attacks is increased by psychological stress. It continues to be one of the best-known and most popular Sherlock Holmes stories. It has also earned a place in the horror canon, a fact demonstrated by Christopher Frayling’s choice to include it along with three other iconic works of horror literature—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—in his 1996 BBC series Nightmare: The Birth of Horror and its accompanying book, in which he details the background, origin, and impact of each work.

Carys Crossen

See also: Ancestral Curse.

Further Reading

Frank, Lawrence. 2003. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Frayling, Christopher. 1996. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, 162–214. London: BBC Books.

Kestner, Joseph A. 2010. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Farnham: Ashgate.

Priestman, Martin, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

The House Next Door is a 1978 novel by Anne Rivers Siddons. While at its core The House Next Door is a haunted house story, it could also be considered the anti–haunted house story. After all, the haunted house in question is not even built when the novel opens, and no ghosts actually come into the storyline, even though horrific things happen to anyone who moves into the home.

The novel is told from the perspective of Colquitt Kennedy, a Caucasian housewife living an ideal life in suburban Atlanta with her husband, Walter. Their domestic bliss is interrupted, however, when architect Kim Dougherty (whose orphan status and red hair makes him a prime candidate to be the source of the novel’s evil) builds his masterpiece next door. The novel is told in three parts, each detailing the three families who move in. Drawing heavily on haunted houses such as Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the titular house next door to the Kennedys appears to have been created with horror inside its bones; the structure itself houses some kind of evil that brings about the downfall of its inhabitants. Unlike her predecessors, Siddons forgoes the traditional Gothic mansion in favor of a contemporary home, with a sleek and modern design. The home itself isn’t menacing; rather, the true horror comes from witnessing the effects of the new structure on the families who live there—and, by proximity, the Kennedys, who stand as witness. By removing the traditional elements of a horror story, Siddons is able to highlight the real horror that plagues humanity: war, loss, broken relationships, damaged trust.

In his book on the nature of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King devotes an extended section to The House Next Door, comparing it both to the haunted house tradition of Shirley Jackson and to the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner. Even though Siddons strips away the traditional architecture of the haunted house, King claims that she still holds on to the heart of the horrific, in that carefully constructed social norms have been broken down to the point that they are irreparable. The Kennedys are forever changed; in the end, they cannot return to their former suburban lives.

In 2006, Siddons’s novel was adapted into a made-for-television movie for Lifetime, with Lara Flynn Boyle playing the character of Col Kennedy, Colin Ferguson as her husband (named Walker for the film), and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as the architect Kim. The film did not receive good reviews.

Lisa Kröger

See also: Burnt Offerings; Faulkner, William; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House, Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.

Further Reading

Bailey, Dale. 1999. “Middle-Class Nightmares: Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door.” In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Eggener, Keith. 2013. “When Buildings Kill: Sentient Houses in Fiction and Film.” Places Journal, October. https://placesjournal.org/article/when-buildings-kill.

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

HOUSE OF LEAVES

House of Leaves is an experimental horror novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski. It was originally published on Danielewski’s website and circulated in the early years of Internet “viral” culture. Since its publication in print form in 2000, it has become a touchstone of postmodern writing and a referent for almost all subsequent experimental horror fiction.

House of Leaves is a difficult text to synopsize. It is comprised of a series of concentric but interlinked narratives. At the center of the novel, both structurally and thematically, is the house on Ash Tree Lane belonging to photographer Will Navidson and his young family. Navidson discovers a profound spatial paradox when a hallway appears in his home, leading down into a labyrinth that vastly exceeds the dimensions of the house. He puts his visual skills to good use in a recorded exploration of the impossible space and its malign influence on his family. The novel’s textual appearance mirrors the physical labyrinth at the heart of the story. Danielewski uses color, typography, layout, and elaborate citation to present a textual composition that is dizzying and difficult to navigate.

Navidson’s video is the subject of House of Leaves’ bifurcated, competing narratives. The majority of the text is devoted to a pseudo-academic analysis of Navidson’s film, written by the reclusive, blind Zampanò. His analysis, “The Navidson Report,” is an in-depth deconstruction that parodies academic discourse while illustrating the uncanny, frightening properties of Navidson’s home. It is full of footnotes and citations, some of which reference authentic sources, while others are entirely fictitious.

Just as Zampanò reflects upon Navidson’s film, his analysis is in turn the subject of the next layer of the text: a stream-of-consciousness account by Los Angeles drop-out Johnny Truant. Johnny is the involuntary recipient of Zampanò’s study after he finds it in the dead man’s apartment. He appoints himself an unofficial editor of “The Navidson Report” and relates his own experience in the marginalia and footnotes to that text. As well as a commentary on the report, however, his narrative reveals the sinister consequence of reading Zampanò’s work. He becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced that he is being pursued by an entity that may or may not reside in Navidson’s labyrinth. The implication, of course, is that the same fate may befall the reader in turn. As Johnny explains: “focus on these words and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you” (26).

The horrors in House of Leaves are many and varied and exist at every level of the text: Johnny’s paranoia, Zampanò’s lonely death, the destruction of the Navidsons’ domestic space, and the death of their friends in the labyrinth. At the heart of the novel, however, is the notion of fallible truth: the idea that reality itself is unstable. This is foregrounded in various ways. The most shocking occurs late in the novel when Navidson finds himself alone and lost in the labyrinth reading a book by the light of a burning page. The book, of course, is revealed to be House of Leaves. Thus the text becomes as impossible a space as the labyrinth itself, and any perspective on what is “real” (within the context of the fiction) is entirely lost.

Danielewski’s novel has been influential in the development of a critically aware, self-reflexive, media-savvy breed of horror fiction. Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) both follow in House of Leaves’ wake as horror fictions focused on the uncanny properties of media and mediation, and both have been termed successors to Danielewski’s novel. Its influence may also be discerned in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Bram Stoker Award–winning novel The Drowning Girl (2012). Danielewski has himself returned to the elaborate experimental form in the first two volumes of an intended twenty-seven-volume novel, The Familiar. It remains to be seen, however, whether any novel will equal the marriage of self-conscious commentary, innovative technique, and existential horror presented in House of Leaves.

Neil McRobert

See also: The Drowning Girl; Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; New Weird; The Uncanny; Unreliable Narrator; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Horror Criticism; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror.

Further Reading

Belletto, Steven. 2009. “Rescuing Interpretation with Mark Danielewski: The Genre of Scholarship in House of Leaves.” Genre Forms of Discourse and Culture 42, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter): 99–117.

Danielewski, Mark Z. 2015. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. New York: Pantheon.

McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. 2003. “Haunted House: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Critique 44/2: 99–135.

Pessl, Marisha. 2013. Night Film. New York: Random House.

Pressman, Jessica. 2006. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1: 107–28.

Tremblay, Paul. 2015. A Head Full of Ghosts. New York: William Morrow.

Watkiss, Joanne. 2012. Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

Published in 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second major romance, The House of the Seven Gables, competes with his first, The Scarlet Letter (1850), for pride of place amidst his oeuvre. Its influence as both a Gothic romance and a work of literature in general has been immense.

The titular gabled House, modeled after one in Salem, is set in a nameless New England town and built on land seized by one Col. Pyncheon via a false accusation of warlockery against Matthew Maule, who, as he was being hanged for witchcraft, laid a bloody curse on the Pyncheons. The primary action occurs in the mid-nineteenth century as Hepzibah Pyncheon, a destitute aristocrat, opens a shop and takes a boarder in the gabled house. The boarder, Holgrave, is a daguerreotypist (early photographer) and mesmerist (hypnotist), smitten with Hepzibah’s newly arrived cousin, Phoebe. Hepzibah’s paroled brother Clifford returns unhinged by prison after another cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, probably framed Clifford for Jaffrey’s uncle’s death from Maule’s curse or a hereditary Pyncheon condition. The “curse” kills Jaffrey, which allows the Pyncheon siblings to inherit his estate and escape the house, and permits Holgrave, a Maule descendant, to become engaged to Phoebe.

The romance has had four cinematic adaptations. The two most interesting star Vincent Price. Twice-Told Tales (1963) adapts “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and House in three segments. Made while Price was in the midst of his ten-film cycle of (loose) Poe adaptations (1960–1969), the segment highlights the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s less subtle “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) on House as well as other sensational elements of Poe’s and Hawthorne’s supernatural fiction as walls and Col. Pyncheon’s portrait bleed, Phoebe cum Alice is buried alive, Hannah cum Hepzibah is a witch, Price as Gerald cum Jaffrey is a maniacal killer, and the house collapses. Universal’s The House of the Seven Gables (1940) hews closer to the romance but rearranges Pyncheon family structure and assigns a lengthy murder trial to Price as Clifford. Ironically, given Hawthorne’s racism and lack of support for abolition, Holgrave becomes an abolitionist jailed alongside Clifford, and Jaffrey swindles a gullible deacon into embezzling abolitionist funds into the slave trade.

Built over an Unquiet Grave

In this paragraph from the opening pages of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne lays the groundwork for the curse and the haunting that serve as the novel’s main focus. He also establishes the brooding and gloomy tone that will dominate throughout, as well as the narrator’s habit of referring to local gossip in framing perceptions of people and events:

After the reputed wizard’s death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon’s grasp. When it was understood, however, that the colonel intended to erect a family mansion—spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity—over the spot first covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity, throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they nevertheless hinted that he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule’s crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly-plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and melancholy house. (Hawthorne 1851, 13)

Matt Cardin

Source: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1851. The House of the Seven Gables. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.

H. P. Lovecraft admired House the most among Hawthorne’s works but frankly assessed that Hawthorne’s singular style, unlike Poe’s, had inspired few inheritors. That assessment has its truth, but subsequent history allows nuance. A vicious, variegated New England horror tradition succeeded without imitating Hawthorne, including occasional works by Edith Wharton, Lovecraft himself, and Shirley Jackson. Moreover, the cursed aristocratic inheritance exerts tremendous influence on high achievements of twentieth-century New World Gothic: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

Bob Hodges

See also: Ancestral Curse; Beloved; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; The Haunted House or Castle; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Jackson, Shirley; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Wharton, Edith; Witches and Witchcraft; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition.

Further Reading

Bailey, Dale. 1999. “The Sentient House and the Ghostly Tradition: The Legacy of Poe and Hawthorne.” In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, 15–24. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

The House of the Seven Gables. 2010. DVD. Dir. Joe May. 1940. Universal City: Universal.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Martin, Terence. 1983. “The House of the Seven Gables.” In Nathaniel Hawthorne, revised edition. Twayne’s United Authors Series 75. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Siebers, Tobin. 1983. “Hawthorne’s Appeal and Romanticism.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, 100–117. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.

Twice-Told Tales. 2005. DVD. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1963. Beverly Hills: MGM Midnite Movies.

THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1908, is a portmanteau novel (one consisting of multiple different parts) in which four narrative episodes and two brief connecting passages, allegedly contained in a manuscript, are presented within a frame narrative, prefaced by an introduction and a poem. Two of the episodes describe the haunting of a house in Ireland by creatures from a nearby pit; one of the others is a vision in which a replica of the house is surrounded by a fabulous landscape inhabited by loathsome monsters, and the last a cosmic vision in which the dreaming narrator witnesses the end of the world and visits the binary star at the center of the universe, which is also an allegory of human life and death.

Although it represented a decisive break from the sea stories that were Hodgson’s principal stock in trade as he tried to make a living as a professional writer, the novel transports the metaphysical schema outlined in several of those stories, with its attendant psychological fascinations, into a broader visionary area in order to display them more elaborately. The enigmatic house is symbolic of the troubled mind of its inhabitant; the pit on whose brink it is precariously situated is the well of his unconscious. The main visionary sequence is both an attempt to place human existence in the frame of space and time established as true by contemporary science and an attempt to develop a metaphysical framework that might make that placement meaningful, subjectively if not objectively.

The idea of a marginal region incompletely separating our world from another plays a significant role in almost all of Hodgson’s fiction, where breaches in the barrier and irruptions from the world beyond are invariably seen as baleful; significantly, they are usually characterized as animalistic even when frankly supernatural; his “phantoms” always have a carnal repulsiveness about them, often porcine, as in this instance. That aspect of Hodgson’s work is distinctive, at least in the intensity of his preoccupation with it.

The fact that the novel is a patchwork of pieces that were presumably written separately makes its narrative flow awkward and detracts from its overall coherency, but the resulting disorder is by no means inappropriate to the nature of the exercise, and is amply compensated in terms of its imaginative ambition and graphic imagery. As in Hodgson’s The Night Land, to which it is closely related in terms of its underlying endeavor, its clumsiness is part and parcel of its ambition, a consequence of its reach exceeding its grasp. For that reason, The House of the Borderland has exerted a long-lasting fascination over many devoted admirers and remains a key work in the history of imaginative fiction that defies easy classification. Its influence on subsequent writers of horror and fantasy fiction, including major figures such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, has been profound. In 2001 a graphic novel adaptation of the novel was published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics.

Brian Stableford

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; The Haunted House or Castle; Hodgson, William Hope; The Night Land; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

Further Reading

Berruti, Massimo, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford, eds. 2014. William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland: Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.

Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.

Joshi, S. T. 2012. “William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds.” In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century, 445–451. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.

Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

HOWARD, ROBERT E. (1906–1936)

Robert E. Howard, who was born and lived most of his life in rural Texas, was a prolific American writer for pulp fiction magazines. Although he wrote for a wide variety of fiction markets, including adventure and sports publications, he is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian and the fantasy subgenre of sword-and-sorcery. He was a titan of the pulp era in American popular fiction, and his work crossed over in many significant ways with dark fantasy and horror.

“Pigeons from Hell”: Atmospheric Southern Gothic Horror

“Pigeons from Hell” was first published in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales. One of Howard’s best-known tales of horror, it is set in an unspecified rural locale in the American South where two young men, Griswell and John Branner, stop overnight at an abandoned mansion. During the night Griswell awakens from sleep to see Branner ascend the stairs as though in a trance and then return as a walking corpse, his head split with a hatchet which he is bearing to kill Branner. Griswell flees the house in terror and runs into Buckner, the local sheriff, who accompanies him back to the house. From Buckner and Jacob, a black voodoo man living nearby, Griswell learns that the house is the ruins of the Blassenville plantation, which fell into decline after the American Civil War. Local legend has it that the pigeons that flock to the house are the souls of the Blassenvilles, let out of hell at sunset. Celia Blassenville, the last of the family, was notorious for abusing her slave, Joan, and it is believed that Joan went through an occult ritual to become a zuvembie (a type of immortal monster) to avenge herself on Celia. When Branner and Buckner decide to stay the night, they discover the truth about the zuvembie who murdered John Branner.

“Pigeons from Hell” is an atmospheric Southern Gothic story, one of several that Howard based on the regional folklore of his native Texas. Perhaps its most impressive aspect is its successful use of its rich setting to generate an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread from what amounts to a kind of mixed kettle of horror tropes. It was memorably adapted as an episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller television series in 1961 and has been adapted several times in comic book form.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

Howard made his first professional fiction sale in 1925 to Weird Tales, the magazine that would become his best market. The April, 1926 issue carried his “Wolfshead,” a werewolf tale whose muscular style and historical setting anticipated his approach in much of his heroic fantasy fiction. Other sales to Weird Tales included the witchcraft tale “Sea Curse” (1928), the ghost story “Man on the Ground” (1933), and the Native American–themed “Old Garfield’s Heart” (1933). Several of Howard’s most highly regarded works of horror were published posthumously, among them “Black Canaan” (1936) and “Pigeons from Hell” (May, 1938). Both of these stories are Southern Gothic tales steeped in the folklore of Howard’s native American South: they bristle dramatically with racial tensions between blacks and whites, and they are memorable for horrors rendered in Howard’s trademark visceral style. “The Dead Remember,” a tale of vengeance from beyond the grave published in the August 15, 1936 issue of Argosy, is another notable regional horror tale.

Howard began corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft in 1930, and he contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of cosmic horror fiction inspired by Lovecraft’s stories. As Marc Cerasini and Charles Hoffman have noted, most of Howard’s mythos tales—including “The Children of the Night” (1931), “The Thing on the Roof” (1932), “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (1936), and “Dig Me No Grave” (1937)—do not represent his best work, since his attempts to evoke the futility of human endeavor that distinguishes Lovecraft’s fiction forced him to suppress the heroics characteristic of his best fiction. An exception is “The Black Stone” (1931), an effective Lovecraftian horror story about a contemporary traveler in Hungary who is privy to a vivid dream vision of an ancient rite of sacrifice to a monstrous entity. This story introduced the mad poet Justin Geoffrey and the book of occult lore, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults), both referenced afterward in stories by Lovecraft and other contributors to the mythos.

Many tales featuring Howard’s serial heroes are punctuated with incidents of horror and the supernatural. “Worms of the Earth” (1932), featuring Pict warrior Bran Mak Morn, is one of several stories in which Howard developed the theme of a bestial prehistoric race, driven underground, that later gave rise to folk legends of the little people. In “Red Shadows” (1928), “The Moon of Skulls” (1930), “The Walking Dead” (1930), and “Wings in the Night” (1932), Howard’s puritan swordsman Solomon Kane becomes enmeshed in sorcerous intrigues in Africa. In many of Howard’s tales of Conan, incidents of physical horror and the supernatural provide challenges to the masculine prowess of the hero.

Howard committed suicide in June 1936 as his dying mother lay in a coma. The 1996 film The Whole Wide World depicts the romantic and intellectual relationship between Howard (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) and Novalyne Price (played by Renée Zellweger), as based on Price’s memoirs of her time with Howard.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950.

Further Reading

Bleiler, Everett F. 1985. “Robert E. Howard: 1906–1936.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s.

Cerasini, Marc A., and Charles Hoffman. 1987. Robert E. Howard: Starmont Reader’s Guide 35. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

HUBBARD, L. RON (1911–1986)

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard is best known as the founder of Scientology, a controversial religious system advocating the acquisition of knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through a course of study and training. Hubbard is also known as a prolific author of science fiction, having produced more than 250 short stories and novels. Nineteen of his books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. He began his authorial career writing science fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories for such pulp magazines as Thrilling Adventures and Astounding Science Fiction in the 1930s, and he continued to publish in those genres through the 1950s, a period that has been called the “Golden Age” of pulp fiction, during which time he achieved a considerable reputation, especially as a science fiction writer. Some of his work also touched on themes of horror, especially of the psychological variety.

Return to the Stars (1954) and Battlefield Earth (1982), both traditional science fiction narratives, are Hubbard’s best-known novels. Two other works, Typewriter in the Sky (1940) and Fear (1940), explore questions of identity and perception within the framework of the horror narrative.

Typewriter in the Sky, first published as a two-part serial, uses the conventions of a time-travel narrative to explore the growing fear of the loss of identity and self-awareness. The hero, Mike de Wolf, receives an electric shock and is thrown back to the sixteenth century, where he has high adventures in the Caribbean. He becomes aware that during his adventures he can hear the keys of a typewriter, and he begins to question his existence, wondering whether he is human or simply a character in someone else’s novel.

Even more disquieting is Fear. Ethnologist James Lowrey returns from an expedition to Central America to discover that he is being fired from his college for denying the existence of a spiritual world. During the course of the novel, Lowrey, suffering from the effects of malaria, blacks out for four hours and then begins to experience visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations. As he searches for his lost hours, demons and devils speak to him, offering godlike powers of perception and/or horrible death. He slowly loses his connections to reality, and in the end of the novel Lowrey discovers or imagines that he has killed his wife and best friend with an axe. Fear is widely considered a masterful description of a descent into madness and is recognized as a significant example of psychological horror.

In much of his fiction Hubbard develops themes related to Scientology, depicting establishment systems and beliefs, such as the banking system, the law, and especially psychiatry and psychology, as oppressive structures blocking the development of self-awareness and the acquisition of the means to develop human potential. In The Typewriter in the Sky and especially Fear, he dramatizes the internal horror of psychological deterioration and the inability of rational systems to provide help. Although the prominence of Scientology in popular consciousness has mostly eclipsed the memory of Hubbard’s career as a novelist, several of his novels, including these two, still stand as significant works of speculative fiction with connections to the literary horror tradition.

Jim Holte

See also: Devils and Demons; Fear; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Adrian, Jack. 1996. “L. Ron Hubbard: Overview.” St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. New York: St. James Press.

Hubbard, L. Ron. 1950. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. New York: Hermitage House.

Hubbard, L. Ron. 1977. Fear & Typewriter in the Sky. New York: Popular Library.

Miller, Russell. 1988. Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard. New York: Holt.

Stableford, Brian. 1979. “Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol. 2, edited by Frank N. Magill, 761–65. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

HUGO, VICTOR (1802–1885)

Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and playwright who is regarded as one of France’s greatest writers. He became the effective figurehead of the French Romantic movement (which dominated French literature in the first half of the nineteenth century) following the premiere of his play Hernani in February 1830. The French consider him one of their greatest poets, but internationally his fame rests more on his novels, especially Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), the latter of which is better known to English-speaking readers as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hugo’s authorial career was divided into several phases by the fallout from mid-nineteenth-century French political events. His Republican sympathies led to his taking an active part in the 1848 Revolution against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and he accepted a post in the new government. However, when the elected president, Louis-Napoléon, staged the coup d’état in 1851 that transformed the Republic into the Second Empire, Hugo was exiled; he refused to accept the offer of amnesty made some years later, and he did not return to France until the emperor was forced to abdicate in 1870. Hugo completed the second major phase of his literary work while residing on the Isle of Jersey; the third, begun after his return to France, was ended by a disabling stroke that he suffered in 1878.

Hugo was sixteen years old when he initially wrote his novel Bug-Jargal, about the friendship between a French military officer and the eponymous African prince during the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that led to Haitian Revolution, but he revised the text before publishing it in 1826. It features a dwarfish obi (a sorcerer or witch-doctor) and includes a fanciful account of the syncretic process that created the religion later known as voodoo. Much of Hugo’s subsequent prose fiction, including Han d’Islande (1823; translated as Hans of Iceland), features a similar mixture of melodrama and political polemic, embodying an odd fascination with human deformity that would now be considered politically incorrect. The supernatural plays no explicit role in Hugo’s fiction, where the horrors are always naturalistic. Le Dernier jour d’un condamé à mort (1829; translated as The Last Day of a Condemned Man) obtained him a reputation as a pillar of what Charles Nodier dubbed the “frenetic school” of French horror fiction (Hughes 2013, 107), while emphasizing the seriousness of his crusading purpose.

Hugo’s most famous novels, Notre-Dame de Paris—1482 and Les Misérables, retain an element of the frenetic but operate on a larger scale with far greater artistry. The former, especially in its characterization of the lustful cleric Claude Frollo and his remarkable protégé Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer, provided a significant archetype for the writers of popular newspaper serials who laid the foundations of modern popular fiction in the 1840s and 1850s; its imagery is prolifically echoed in the works of Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval. The novel likewise influenced popular film, with The Hunchback of Notre Dame receiving several memorable cinematic treatments, including, especially, the silent 1923 version starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and the lavish 1939 Hollywood production starring Charles Laughton.

Hugo’s superbly flamboyant melodrama L’Homme qui rit (1869; translated as The Man Who Laughs) recounts the bizarre adventures of Gwynplaine, the last victim of a child-mutilating comprachicos (or “child-buyer,” a term coined by Hugo to refer to those who, according to folkloric accounts, mutilated children in order to make them sellable as exotic specimens) before and after he comes into his legitimate inheritance as an English peer, having been saved from an early death by the vagabond philosopher Ursus and his pet wolf Homo. Gwynplaine’s particular mutilation—the cutting of his mouth into a perpetual grin—has been memorably portrayed in a number of films, most notably the 1928 American silent film The Man Who Laughs, directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni and starring Conrad Veidt. Hugo’s reach into the fantastic and speculative realms of international popular culture was further extended when Veidt’s portrayal of Gwynplaine later contributed to the inspiration behind Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker, “another mutilated, grinning character who defies the established order and demonstrates its weakness” (Heldenfels 2015, 98).

Brian Stableford

See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Féval, Paul; The Grotesque; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.

Further Reading

Brombert, Victor. 1984. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Heldenfels, Richard D. 2015. “More Than the Hood Was Red.” In The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, edited by Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner, 94–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Houston, John Porter. 1974. Victor Hugo. Boston: Twayne.

Hughes, William. 2013. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Lanham, MD; Toronto, Canada; and Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press.

HUYSMANS, J. K. (1848–1907)

Charles Marie Georges Huysmans was a nineteenth-century French author who wrote under the name Joris-Karl (J. K.) Huysmans, and whose Decadent and Symbolist writings were an important influence on horror fiction. His fierce blend of the antihuman, the antisocial, and the antirational, coupled with a hypnotic prose style that combines realist precision with strange flights of fancy, inspired not merely H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, but also Clark Ashton Smith, Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite, and others. Huysmans’s fiction contains little supernaturalism, but is punctuated by compelling intervals of the horrible.

Huysmans’s career had three phases. In the first phase (1874–1884), he worked as a naturalist under the influence of Émile Zola. This effort enabled Huysmans to develop an astonishing mastery of description that he put to use subsequently when describing the bizarre, the repulsive, and the ineffable. In the second phase (1884–1891), which is of most relevance here, his novels embodied the concept of “supernatural realism,” where narrative precision is occasionally pushed into the realm of the eccentric when something hideous is described. In the final phase (1895–1907), Huysmans recounted his religious conversion.

Huysmans influenced horror fiction, first, with his sensibility. He seems to find something of the sublime in things that would normally evoke disgust. Second, Huysmans discarded linear plot development for a series of loosely connected set-pieces or tableaux. Instead of incidents, he made language itself—that is, the mood or atmosphere of the narrative—the central feature of his work.

The influential À Rebours (variously translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884) is the primary example of Decadent literature, in which the artificial is seen as superior to the natural world. The jaded des Esseintes secludes himself in the countryside and attempts to amuse himself with, among other things, grotesque flowers and plants, strange literature and art, and a “mouth organ” that dispenses “inner symphonies” of liqueurs. Some of the narrator’s flights of fancy, such as his wild imaginings regarding Gustave Moreau’s painting L’Apparition (1874), shade into the realm of horror.

In En Rade (variously translated as Becalmed, A Haven, or Stranded, 1887), Jacques Marles takes refuge from his Parisian creditors in a remote, run-down château. He finds the countryside disturbing, the local peasants offensive, and the house potentially haunted. Interspersed with the narrative are three dream sequences that include some of the most excitingly weird prose Huysmans wrote.

In Là-Bas (Down There or The Damned, 1891), the novelist Durtal undertakes biographical research on fourteenth-century satanist and child-murderer Gilles de Rais, and discovers that occult rites are still being practiced in Paris. Huysmans’s vivid description of a Black Mass is as hideous as anything in modern horror fiction.

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Brite, Poppy Z.; The Haunted House or Castle; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Smith, Clark Ashton; The Sublime; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition.

Further Reading

Antosh, Ruth B. 1986. Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Baldick, Robert. 1955. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cevasco, George A. 1980. J.-K. Huysmans: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Ridge, George Ross. 1968. Joris-Karl Huysmans. New York: Twayne.

I

I AM LEGEND

A dystopic vampire novel from 1954, I Am Legend is one of writer Richard Matheson’s best-known works. The plot concerns the fate of the last remaining human on earth, Robert Neville, who is a survivor of a war-driven plague that has turned the rest of humanity into monstrous versions of themselves with symptoms resembling vampirism. Neville, who has lost his entire family, is desperate to find a cure for the pandemic, to which he alone is immune.

Frightened and lonely, he barricades himself in his house, which becomes a symbol for the last vestiges of society as it was before the catastrophe. Groups of vampires try to overwhelm him every night, led by Ben Cortman, his neighbor. Eventually, in his daily forays to find food and supplies (the plague victims cannot go out in the daytime), he stumbles upon a woman, Ruth, who appears to be uninfected. After a time, he learns that she is a spy sent by the others to gather data, and that she was slowly able to overcome the aspect of the illness that prevented her from traveling in the daylight, thus enabling her to masquerade as a human.

After a warning to leave or he will be killed, Neville is injured mortally in another skirmish with the nocturnal army of vampires. As he is dying, Neville realizes that he is simply a memory waiting to happen, the residue of an older time. In the new society that will live after him, he will be remembered as a legend. He hastens his own end by committing suicide rather than dying from his wounds or facing execution at the hands of his adversaries.

The relationship between I Am Legend and its multiple cinematic adaptations is more than a little ironic. The first direct adaptation, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, retained the novel’s identification of the reanimated dead as vampires. The second, 1971’s The Omega Man, changed this to nocturnal albino mutants. Then 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, which was largely inspired by Matheson’s novel, recast the novel’s vampires as shambling, flesh-eating ghouls and created the modern image and idea of the zombie. Four decades later, in 2007, another cinematic adaptation of I Am Legend appeared, this one titled directly after the book—but the word “vampire” is never mentioned in it, and the monsters are now presented as murderous mutants that are, effectively, zombies.

Matt Cardin

With this important novel—which appears to expand on similar ideas from the masterful 1951 novella Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller Jr.—Matheson firmly established himself as a force in American horror literature and a major influence on subsequent writers in the genre (including Stephen King, who has cited Matheson, and particularly I Am Legend, as a chief influence on his own writing). Rife with symbolism and infused with a rich thematic subtext—the new consuming the old and effecting change (revolution); groupthink as an infectious and toxic technique to blunt individualism; the dangers of technology run amok; the crushing hell of existential nothingness—the book is still a benchmark in the field, and it holds up well more than six decades after its first publication. Transcending the vampire myth, it has been a chief inspiration for the postapocalyptic zombie and disease tropes so prevalent in the postmodern era, especially in film and comics—beginning with the first film adaptation of the book, The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price and penned by Matheson himself under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson (a name he reserved for works he contributed to, but which were altered beyond his comfort level as a creator). There have also been two additional versions, The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith. The book’s profound impact on popular culture is also visible in the precipitous rise and eventual dominance of zombies in horror entertainment; I Am Legend was a prime catalyst for George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead (1968), the movie that introduced the now-iconic zombie of pop culture.

In 2011 the Horror Writers Association gave the novel a special one-time Bram Stoker Award for Best Vampire Novel of the Century.

Jason V Brock

See also: Vampires; Zombies; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond.

Further Reading

Clasen, Mathias. 2010. “Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.” Philosophy and Literature 34, no. 2: 313–328.

Ketchum, Jack. 2009. “On I Am Legend.” In The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson, edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, 57–61. New York: Citadel Press Books.

Miller, Walter M., Jr. 1951. “Dark Benediction.” Fantastic Adventures 13, no. 9 (September). Chicago: Ziff-Davis.

Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

“I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM”

First published in 1967, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a bleak, postapocalyptic story that takes place more than a century after a nuclear war between the United States, Russia, and China. The nuclear holocaust is initiated when one of the three nations’ supercomputers becomes sentient. The self-named AM, frustrated by its disembodiment, kills every human being in the world except for five individuals, whom it has psychologically and physically altered and kept alive to torture.

The story is told from the perspective of the youngest among them, Ted, an unreliable narrator who suffers from paranoia, but who considers himself to be the only unaffected individual in the group. The other four characters include Benny, a former scientist who has been transformed into a near-mindless, ape-like figure with grotesquely enlarged sexual organs; Gorrister, formerly a principled intellectual who is now apathetic and in a constant state of languor; Nimdok, so named by AM and the oldest of the group, who suggests that they go on a quest for a cache of canned food; and Ellen, the sole woman and African American among them, whom AM has altered to be sexually insatiable. The story follows these characters on their journey to find sustenance, all the while being tortured in various ways by AM. The supercomputer (or A.I., as it would be more commonly called today), starves them only to later provide a menu of increasingly disgusting foodstuff, which the protagonists have no choice but to consume. As well, AM creates bizarre creatures that hunt them, tortures them with sounds, blinds Benny, and continuously plays on their collective angst. After an arduous journey the group finally reaches the stash of canned foods, but realize they have no way of opening the cans. The entire expedition, it seems, has been a ruse crafted by AM, a seed of false hope planted as another means of torment. At this point Ted, realizing that killing his fellows is the only way to save them from their predicament, attacks and kills Benny and Gorrister. Ellen, reaching the same conclusion, kills Nimdok and is in turn killed by Ted. AM, furious at what has occurred, alters Ted into a blob of flesh, trapping his consciousness forever in an unresponsive and helpless physical and mental prison.

The events that motivate “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” read like a checklist of cultural anxieties especially prevalent at the time the story was published: cold war paranoia, fear of nuclear destruction, and distrust of technology, especially the increasingly widespread use of computers in industry. These concerns and others are displayed in full force in the story and are given additional weight by Ellison’s unabashed narrative voice that revels in the extremity of the author’s terrible vision.

A well-received video game based on the story and with input from Ellison was published in 1995. In 2009 the story was selected for inclusion in the Library of America’s two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales, representing the best in American fantastic and horror fiction that has been published from the eighteenth century to the present.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Ellison, Harlan; Unreliable Narrator; “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.

Further Reading

Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena: Salem Press.

Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

IN A GLASS DARKLY

One of the most lauded and studied works by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), the collection of short fictions In a Glass Darkly represents the height of its author’s subtle power in penning terror and suspense alongside keen insights into the human mind and conscience. Collected in three volumes in 1872, the year before Le Fanu’s death, In a Glass Darkly includes five previously published tales now presented together as case studies from the personal papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician and practitioner of metaphysical medicine.

Comprising the first volume of In a Glass Darkly, the three tales “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle” exhibit a specific similarity in that they each recount the story of an esteemed professional (a reverend, a naval officer, and a judge, respectively) who becomes haunted by a presence that no one else can see. Le Fanu plays skillfully with the uncanny, providing some evidence for the reality of these supernatural entities while also including more than a suggestion that these men are—more naturally—haunted by their own flaws, the entities they see being only psychological manifestations of moral failings or selfish compulsion.

The latter interpretation is further supported by the theme of the fourth tale, The Room in the Dragon Volant, a masterful nod to the earliest staples of the Gothic genre—an adventurous mystery of romance and evil intent. While part of the mystery involves a room known to have been the place of mysterious disappearances, the narrative is one of the “supernatural explained.” The mysterious room is a setting only of mere human deceits, but deceits that nearly cost the protagonist his life as he becomes ensnared in a confidence scheme to steal his fortune and is nearly buried alive. As in the previous stories, Le Fanu suggests that this mystery is also a moral tale exposing the weaknesses of romantic, idealistic, and selfish thinking when such supersedes proper restraint.

The finale of In a Glass Darkly is also Le Fanu’s most influential work: the homoerotically charged vampire novella Carmilla. In contrast to the previous stories, Carmilla is undeniably fantastical. The vampire is real, and the young protagonist, Laura, is saved from danger by the insights of Baron Vordenburg’s occult scholarship. Several attributes of Carmilla were a direct influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), including the sexualizing of the vampire and the juxtaposition of ancient superstition with modern science. Dr. Martin Hesselius and Baron Vordenburg serve as models for Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing. Like Stoker’s more famous work, Carmilla draws attention to the moral and physical dangers of sexual and intellectual repression in civilized society. Only in facing challenges responsibly with knowledge and temperance may people find victory over that which haunts them. Removed from danger, Laura concludes her story, explaining that “often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” (Le Fanu 1993, 319). Whether real or imagined, the fears Le Fanu masterfully mirrors in In a Glass Darkly are clear reflections of the human psyche.

Mark Wegley

See also: Carmilla; Gothic Hero/Villain; “Green Tea”; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Psychological Horror; Terror versus Horror; The Uncanny; Vampires.

Further Reading

Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Harris, Sally. 2003. “Spiritual Warnings: The Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” Victorians Institute Journal 31: 9–39.

Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1871–1872] 1993. Carmilla. In In a Glass Darkly, 243–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Melada, Ivan. 1987. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne.

Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Tracy, Robert. 1993. Introduction. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wegley, Mark. 2001. “Unknown Fear: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Literary Fantastic.” Philological Review 27, no. 2 (Fall): 59–77.

INCUBI AND SUCCUBI

Incubi and succubi are male and female demons that, according to folklore and legend, engage in sexual intercourse with human beings, draining their life force and, if allowed to continue, eventually destroying them. Beliefs about such demons have played an important role in the religious and folkloric belief of Western Christian culture for more than a thousand years. Incubi and succubi have also played a significant role in horror literature and cinema.

The idea of sexual contact between humans and the ghost world seems to be a very old one. The Chaldeans, a Semitic people in the south of Mesopotamia (ca. first millennium BCE), had their “demons of nocturnal emission,” and the Israelites also knew a cult involving sexual contact with demonic goats, which was forbidden by the Bible (Leviticus 17:7). The Greeks had their fauns and sylvan spirits, and Middle Eastern peoples believed in djinn who lusted after women.

The first mention of incubi (the male variety of these demons) can be found in the writings of Aurelius Augustinus (354–430 CE)—better known as Saint Augustine—especially in his monumental De Civitate Dei or The City of God (written between 413 and 426). He asserts that common folk call the dreaded fauns and sylvan ghosts “incubi,” but he is not sure whether these beings are capable of sexual intercourse with humans since they only have an “aerial” body (Augustinus 1841, book 15, chapter 23). It is worth remarking that Augustinus saw these pagan spirits as demons, so through him they became a part of the Christian religious system.

From the eleventh century CE, incubi and succubi were treated as scientific fact in Western culture. Authors such as Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280), Bonaventura (1221–1274), John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308), William Durandus (1230–1296), and Peter of Aquila (d. 1361) asserted that demons have a body that is apt to have intercourse with humans. The most important propagator of this opinion was the great Catholic scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274). He affirmed in his highly influential Summa Theologica (written ca. 1265–1273) that sexual contact between demons in the form of incubi or succubi and humans cannot be denied. Aquinas thought it possible that children may be born of such a union. These children, he said, are not the children of demons but of humans, since demons are not able to produce semen. They collect it as succubi from male persons and pass it over to women after having changed their form into that of incubi (Thomas Aquinas 2012, p. I, qu. LI, art. III).

This concept of incubi and succubi became an integral part of the later witch trials that began as a mass phenomenon throughout Europe in the late 1400s and reached their peak (having spread to America as well) in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The most notorious book on witches and witchcraft, the witch-hunt manual Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), first published in 1487, has a lot to say about incubi and succubi. The author of this book, the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer, was of the same opinion as Aquinas concerning procreation by demons, teaching that they can beget children by stealing semen. They feel no lust, says Kramer; their only purpose is to lead humanity into sin. The witch, on the other hand, lusts after the incubus and embraces him willingly, so she sins of her own free will.

Nicholas Rémy (ca. 1530–1612), a provost (judge) of Nancy (a city in Lorraine, a territory on the border between France and Germany, eventually annexed by France in 1766), wrote an important book on witchcraft, Daemonolatreia (1595), in which he treats incubi and succubi among many other subjects. He writes that the demons assume bodily form, “but I think that body will be either the corpse of a dead man, or else some concretion and condensation of vapours” (Rémy 2008, 12). Following Aquinas’s theory, Rémy maintains that the incubus injects the semen he previously collected as a succubus, and he adds that “if the Demon emits any semen, it is so cold that they [the witches] recoil with horror on receiving it” (12–13). In contrast to Thomas Aquinas and the Malleus Maleficarum, Rémy does not believe that children can be born from the borrowed semen.

The Franciscan theologian Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (1622–1701) produced a whole book on the subject of incubi and succubi under the title De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis, written around 1700 but not published until 1875. Sinistrari details all the theories here described, plus many stories of the workings of the demonic incubi and succubi, but he introduces a new element that might explain why his book was not printed during his lifetime. In contrast to the teachings of the church authorities, he sees the incubi and succubi not only as spiritual beings but also as corporeal beings: “ those creatures would be made from the most subtile part of all elements. . . . God Himself, through the medium of Angels, made their body as He did man’s body, to which an immortal spirit was to be united” (Sinistrari 1927, 35, 36). Sinistrari calls these beings animals, and he is of the opinion that they have a soul and are capable of salvation. So for him they lose a great part of their demonic nature and return to what they initially were: fauns and sylvan beings.

This deep history of theological speculation and, as it may seem to modern sensibilities, supernatural obsession lies behind the long-lived substream of horror stories about sexual demons (or sometimes, if not specifically demons, then supernatural sexual predators), even in those instances when the incubus and succubus are not explicitly named, and/or when the basic idea of them has been abstracted away from overtly theological concerns as such and placed in the service of fictional works more generally concerned with evoking a thrill of horror. A notable early example is Matthew Lewis’s classic novel The Monk (1796), in which the succubus-like character of Mathilda, empowered by the Devil himself, seduces the saintly priest Ambrosio with her sexual wiles, leading him inexorably to his eventual doom and spiritual damnation. Additional examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. J. K. Huysmans deals with incubi and succubi along with many other supernatural and occult matters in his 1891 novel The Damned. F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood Is the Life” (1905) relates the tale of a murdered woman’s vampiric spirit that drains the vitality of the young man she loved from afar in life. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Short Trip Home” (1927), published in The Saturday Evening Post, tells of a young female college student being seduced by an incubus, in this case the ghost of a dead young man. In Rosemary’s Baby (1967) Ira Levin has the Devil himself, aided by a modern-day coven of witches, play an incubus-like role by impregnating a woman. In Ray Russell’s The Incubus (1976), a series of rapes and murders in a California coastal town are the work of a demonic incubus that is trying to impregnate human women. In Frank De Felitta’s The Entity (1978)—a fictionalized account of a real-life paranormal assault case in 1974—two parapsychology graduate students investigate the case of a California woman who has been repeatedly raped and assaulted in her home by an invisible presence.

Rosemary’s Baby, The Incubus, and The Entity were all adapted to film (the first in 1968, the latter two in 1982), and the results represent just three entries—the first a classic horror film directed by Roman Polanski, the second something considerably lesser, the third a notorious and increasingly valorized entry in modern horror cinema—in the onscreen careers of demonic sexual spirits. As with the literary incarnations of incubi and succubi, additional examples in cinema are plentiful. But of more significance in establishing the import of incubi and succubi for horror fiction is the fact that near the end of the eighteenth century, the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) produced what has sometimes been characterized as the master image of the entire Gothic horror movement, and this took the form of an explicit representation of the incubus. Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which he painted in 1781 and then went on to reproduce in several alternate versions when it proved extremely popular, depicts a woman fallen backward across a bed in a swoon while a spectral horse peers out from behind a curtain. On the woman’s stomach squats a leering, apelike gargoyle or demon. The specific meaning is unclear, but the painting’s subject is plainly that of a woman being assaulted and oppressed in her sleep by an imp or demon, whether real or the product of a nightmare. London’s Tate Britain museum, in notes written for a 2006 exhibition of works by Fuseli and William Blake, describes the painting as “an enduring image of sexual terror” (“Gothic Nightmares” 2006).

Fuseli apparently suffered from what would now be called sleep paralysis—an experience of coming to consciousness from sleep and finding oneself paralyzed with a sense of suffocating weight on one’s chest, often accompanied by terrifying perceptions of a threatening supernatural presence—and his painting is often interpreted today as a depiction of that experience. Not insignificantly, this same experience was the original referent of the English word “nightmare,” which has since devolved to mean simply a bad dream. Also not insignificantly, it has often been invoked in the modern world as an explanation for the many firsthand reports throughout history of apparent attacks by incubi and succubi. Whatever the case, Fuseli’s painting caused a sensation when it was first displayed in 1782 at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London, and it went on to exert a profound influence over Gothic and horror fiction, being used as a model, for instance, by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein for her description of the scene in which the monster kills Elizabeth, and then again by director James Whale for the analogous scene in the classic 1931 Universal Studios adaptation of Shelley’s novel. Echoes of it, and thus of the basic incubus/succubus dynamic, have also been discerned in much vampire fiction and film, where the basic idea of the vampire, which drains people’s life blood—a trope that is obviously and easily relatable to the sexual drainings of the victims of incubi and succubi—is often presented in scenes of a sleeping man or woman being assaulted by a creature that leans or hovers over them.

The upshot for the world of horror literature is that the incubus and the succubus are not just two monstrous figures existing on a level with many others (such as the zombie, the werewolf, and the mummy), but are somehow implicated in the roots of literary horror as a whole. Originally conceived in Western Christian culture as sexually predatory demons that try to destroy people’s bodies and souls, and given paradigmatic treatment by such towering figures as Augustine and Aquinas, the incubus and succubus were incorporated into horror literature on a veritably genetic level right from the start.

Michael Siefener and Matt Cardin

See also: The Damned; Devils and Demons; Dreams and Nightmares; The Monk; Rosemary’s Baby; Russell, Ray; “A Short Trip Home”; Vampires; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Andriano, Joseph. 1993. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

“Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination: Room 8.” 2006. Tate. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/gothic-nightmares-fuseli-blake-and-romantic-imagination/gothic-6.

Moffitt, John F. 2002. “A Pictorial Counterpart to ‘Gothick’ Literature: Fuseli’s The Nightmare.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35, no. 1: 173–196.

Rémy, Nicolas. [1595, 1930] 2008. Demonolatry: An Account of the Historical Practice of Witchcraft. Translated by E. Allen Ashwin. Introduction and notes by Montague Summers. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Sinistrari, Ludovico Maria. [ca. 1700, 1927] 2014. Demoniality. Translated by Montague Summers. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing.

Stephens, Walter. 2002. Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Stewart, Charles. 2002. “Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 2 (June): 279–309.

INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION

The International Gothic Association (IGA) is the organization that brings together critics and scholars of the Gothic from around the world. It does so in various ways: through its website, through its biennial conferences, and through its journal, Gothic Studies. It also acts as an informal network, which has had tremendous benefits in terms of joint publication, multiauthored books, and research projects. It was founded in 1991 at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

The IGA’s website, www.iga.stir.ac.uk, is currently hosted by the University of Stirling and provides information about current and future events, including conferences, publications, and contact details, as well as a Postgraduate Forum and a Directory that offers links to other Gothic-related resources.

The biennial conferences have been held over the years at the universities of East Anglia, Stirling, Liverpool Hope, Lancaster, Surrey, and at St. Mary’s College Twickenham in the United Kingdom; at Mount Saint Vincent, Simon Fraser, and Montréal/Wilfrid Laurier universities in Canada; at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France; and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The 2017 conference was held in Mexico.

Gothic Studies was first published in 1999 and is a fully refereed journal appearing twice a year. Its founding editor, William Hughes, remains in that post; at present the journal alternates between “general issues” and issues devoted to a special theme in the Gothic. A particularly impressive spin-off from the journal is the new series of books, International Gothic, published by Manchester University Press.

The IGA elects a president for a two-year period, although this has often been extended to four years by mutual agreement. Past presidents include the late Allan Lloyd Smith; Robert Miles; Jerrold E. Hogle; Steven Bruhm; Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik; and, currently, Catherine Spooner and Angela Wright. It operates through an Executive Committee, consisting of the president(s), the executive officer, the chair of the IGA Advisory Committee, and the editor of Gothic Studies. The Advisory Committee, a larger body, has an additional number of members, between fifteen and twenty; its chair is David Punter. There is an Annual General Meeting of the IGA each year, in person during conference year and electronically in the other years.

The IGA is committed to furthering and promoting the study of the Gothic in all its forms, from traditional Gothic fiction through contemporary Goth culture, including arts ranging from literature to the visual arts and music. It seeks to capture and discuss Gothic as it has manifested itself historically, from the medieval to the modern, and to ensure that scholars of the field are able to access resources—human and technological—that will aid them in their research.

The IGA has proved resilient in its approach to changing practices in research, as well as in contemporary developments in the meaning of Gothic, which continue to evolve as Gothic finds new modes of expression in cultures worldwide. The IGA has proved itself, and continues to do so, an organization responsive to new trends, even as it endeavors to keep alive the memory of past cultural traditions.

David Punter

See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Criticism.

Further Reading

International Gothic Association. Accessed June 27, 2016. http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk.

INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD AWARD

The International Horror Guild (IHG) (originally the International Horror Critics Guild) was created in 1995 as a means of recognizing the achievements of creators in the field of horror and dark fantasy, supplementing other similar genre awards such as the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. The last awards (for works from 2007) were announced in 2008.

The IHG Awards, which were spearheaded in their last years of existence by editor and critic Paula Guran, were decided by a jury of notable, knowledgeable horror/dark fantasy critics and reviewers. Over the years, Edward Bryant, Stefan Dziemianowicz, William Sheehan, Ann Kennedy Vandermeer, Fiona Webster, and Hank Wagner served as judges for the awards. Although it was a juried award, the IHG judges requested recommendations from the public to help them in their search for the most deserving candidates. Those recommendations were then considered when determining the nominees for the awards. The judges decided on winners in each category from the final ballot of nominees. The list of categories included Novel, Long Fiction, Mid-Length Fiction, Short Fiction, Collection, Anthology, Periodical, Illustrated Narrative, Nonfiction, and Art.

The IHG Awards were usually announced annually during a special presentation at a convention or other event. The awards were hosted by the World Fantasy Convention (WFC), World Horror Convention (WHC), and Dragon*Con. The IHG was in no way officially affiliated with WFC, WHC, or with Dragon*Con, nor was it considered a sponsor of any event.

Each year, the IHG presented a “Living Legend” award for outstanding contributions to the field. Harlan Ellison was the first recipient in 1995, and Peter Straub was the last in 2008. Along the way, several other notables were recognized, including Ramsey Campbell, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Gahan Wilson, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Hugh B. Cave, E. F. Bleiler, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, and Clive Barker.

A lasting legacy of the IHG Awards is their usefulness to readers who are interested in discovering high-quality work in the fields of horror and dark fantasy, since the works of those named as Living Legends by the IHG can provide a valuable guide to recommended reading, as provided by a knowledgeable group of judges who loved and respected genre fiction. The annual listings of the nominees in each award category are also helpful. As of this writing, a listing of all nominees and winners is still being maintained at www.horroraward.org.

Hank Wagner

See also: Barker, Clive; Bleiler, E. F.; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; Campbell, Ramsey; Dark Fantasy; Ellison, Harlan; King, Stephen; Matheson, Richard; Nolan, William F.; Shirley Jackson Awards; World Fantasy Award; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.

Further Reading

International Horror Guild. 2008. http://www.horroraward.org/index.html.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

Interview with the Vampire is the first novel by Anne Rice. Published in 1976, it raises existential questions about the meaning of good, evil, life, and death in the modern world, and it contributed to a renewed cultural fascination with the vampire by abandoning the conventionally tyrannical villain in the Dracula mold that had become a staple of the genre.

The novel is presented as an interview with one Louis de Pointe du Lac, who, in the late twentieth century, recounts the story of how he was turned into a vampire in the eighteenth century by a vampire named Lestat; how he struggled against his vampire nature, regularly clashing violently with his maker, who encouraged him to embrace this dark gift; and how the two settled into an unsettling domestic unity in New Orleans, following their “creation” of Claudia, a vampire destined to remain a child in body, if not mind, for eternity. Through Claudia, Rice introduces one of the more disturbing characters in horror literature. Claudia is a taboo-breaking creation who crosses many cultural and social boundaries, embodying both innocent victim and monstrous creation; child and lover; the dead child but also the child who will never die. While Louis is the narrator, it is Claudia’s story that haunts the novel, bubbling beneath the surface, generating unease and discomfort because she is fundamentally unknowable. Through this unholy union between Louis, Lestat, and Claudia, the novel offers a fascinating and perverse representation of family, bound by blood and death.

A Template for Goths

Interview with the Vampire was not commercially successful when it was first published, but its reputation steadily grew, and this was linked in part to its profound influence on the nascent Goth subculture. As Gothic scholar Catherine Spooner has observed, “Despite preceding the first wave of Goth, Interview with the Vampire (1976) created, in its angst-ridden hero Louis and hedonistic anti-hero Lestat, Goth fictional icons. . . . The novel provided a template for the emergent Goth scene to project itself onto” (Spooner 2012, 358).

Matt Cardin

Source: Spooner, Catherine. 2012. “Goth Culture.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 350–366. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Key influences on Rice’s novel were Richard Matheson, whose horror and science fiction writing reimagined familiar genres through a contemporary lens, and the Universal horror film Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which is notable for its sympathetic and yet morally complex female vampire, who longs for release from the curse of vampirism, while remaining driven by her insatiable physical desire for blood. Rice would draw into her novel the film’s exploration of the tension between desire and guilt, between self-loathing and the sensual pleasure in being a vampire. These characteristics were enhanced by the novel’s first-person narration.

While Rice did not originate the figure of the sympathetic vampire, her novel emphasized the importance of the vampire having its own voice, making the novel particularly significant in a period when marginalized groups sought to articulate their perspective through the civil rights, gay rights, and women’s movements. This is one reason, alongside the novel’s evocation of polymorphous sensuality among its primarily male vampires, that it was perceived to operate as an elongated allegory for homosexual desire, an exploration of identity, and a celebration of alternative sexualities. Ultimately, Rice offered a new model of a soulful vampire that continues to haunt contemporary literature and media.

Interview with the Vampire was adapted to film in 1994 by director Neil Jordan, with Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as Louis, and Kirsten Dunst as Claudia. The film version was nominated for two Academy Awards.

Stacey Abbott

See also: Rice, Anne; Vampires; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond.

Further Reading

Benefiel, C.R. 2004. “Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” Journal of Popular Culture 38 (2): 261–273.

Tomc, S. 1997. “Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 95–113. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wood, Martin J. 1999. “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature.” In The Blood Is the Life, edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, 59–78. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

THE INVISIBLE MAN

The Invisible Man, published in 1897 by H. G. Wells, is a novel that explores the moral and social consequences of scientific progress through a tale of a scientist who renders himself invisible. The story begins as a mysterious man, wrapped from head to toe, takes a room in the West Sussex village of Iping. The man’s strange and solitary behavior attracts the curiosity of the villagers. In a dispute over money, the stranger throws off his clothing to reveal he is entirely invisible. After causing a panic, the Invisible Man takes shelter in the home of a university friend, Kemp, and reveals himself as Griffin, a young physics student who has discovered how to render living tissue invisible. Griffin had experimented on himself to ensure he would have full credit for his discovery. His desperate escape from London, however, has left him without money, clothing, or access to the equipment he needs to become visible again, driving him insane. Rather than assist in Griffin’s declared “Reign of Terror,” Kemp alerts the police. After a struggle, Griffin is overwhelmed by a mob and killed, his body again becoming visible in death.

As a moral tale, Wells’s novel dramatizes the Ring of Gyges episode from Plato’s Republic, which questions whether or not morality is really the product of the fear of being caught. In addition, Wells draws much symbolism from who can and cannot “see” Griffin; Wells uses visibility in a similarly symbolic way in the 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind.”

The initial horror of the Invisible Man comes from his coverings, which mark him as a man-machine hybrid. Later, when Griffin has shed his disguise, it is not his otherness that is unsettling, but his ability to move unseen into private spaces and homes. Not only a tale of scientific overreach, The Invisible Man also demonstrates how society rejects the abnormal: Griffin’s inability or unwillingness to find help pushes him from marginal figure to antagonist.

As with Wells’s other “scientific romances,” scientific pursuit holds an occult power over the scientist figure, in which the abstractions of scientific research are somehow more “real,” Also typical for Wells, however, the Invisible Man’s extraordinary nature must contend with everyday life. Wells pits the conflict of the Invisible Man against the villagers of Iping in terms of the antagonism of town and country, of cosmopolitan progress versus tradition and superstition.

The story has since been adapted numerous times, notably in a 1933 film by director James Whale. The Invisible Man is an equally engaging investigation into experimentation on the body and society’s resistance to scientific pursuit.

Miles Link

See also: Gothic Hero/Villain; Mad Scientist; The Uncanny; Wells, H. G.; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.

Further Reading

Beiderwell, Bruce. 1983. “The Grotesque in Wells’s The Invisible Man.” Extrapolation 24 (4): 301–310.

The Invisible Man. 2014. Directed by James Whale. Los Angeles: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, DVD.

MacLean, Steven. 2009. The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

IRVING, WASHINGTON (1783–1859)

Born April 3, 1783, in Manhattan, New York, to Scottish-English parents, Washington Irving was a writer of short stories as well as an essayist, historian, and biographer, who became one of the first American authors to achieve international notoriety and commercial success for his work. Named after General George Washington, the revolutionary hero (and, later, first president of the United States), who had negotiated the British ceasefire the same week in which young Irving was born, Washington Irving is most famous for his 1819–1820 publication The Sketch Book, written under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, in which his best-known stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) first appeared.

Irving’s career as a writer began in the Morning Chronicle, in which he wrote scathing social and cultural commentaries under a pseudonym (a habit he would maintain throughout his fictional works), before he founded Salmagundi, a literary magazine, in 1807, which also satirized New York cultural life. After the success of his first book, A History of New York (1809), Irving edited Analectic Magazine and began writing biographies. From 1819 to 1820, Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was published in installments, and with its great success Irving lobbied hard for stronger legal practices to protect his lucrative copyright on both sides of the Atlantic.

Though he was and is famed more for his fictional histories and biographies of well-known historical figures than his horror fiction, Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a romantically Gothic tale of the headless Hessian horseman who haunts the eponymous town of Sleepy Hollow, has long been preserved in America’s cultural imagination. Noted for its Gothic imagery and for its representation of local superstitions, myths, ghost stories, and the dreamy quality of pastoral life in upstate New York, “Sleepy Hollow” is lent a haunting gravitas by Irving’s earlier experiences in the real-life town of Sleepy Hollow near Tarrytown, New York, where Irving recuperated from illness as a child. The story has provided the basis for one of director Tim Burton’s most beautifully realized Gothic films, Sleepy Hollow (1999), as well as Fox TV’s supernatural drama of the same title.

Other short stories published in The Sketch Book included “Rip Van Winkle,” a Gothic pastoral folk tale cum ghost story set in the haunting Catskill Mountains, and “The Spectre Bridegroom,” a Gothic drama in which a slain bridegroom returns to fulfill a promise to his bride-to-be, set in a German castle near the Rhine. Tales of a Traveller, published in 1824 (which includes the supernatural horror story “The Devil and Tom Walker”), was also published under Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon pseudonym. Later in his life, Irving published famed biographies on Christopher Columbus, Oliver Goldsmith, the prophet Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as other works of fiction inspired by his time in Spain, where he lived from 1842 to 1846, serving as the U.S. minister to Spain.

Irving died on November 28, 1859, at seventy-six years of age. His literary reputation and his impact on American culture is one of the greatest among his contemporaries. A little-known fact is that Irving was the first to call New York City “Gotham,” the name that later became famous in the Batman comic book universe. The surname of his fictional historian persona, Diedrich Knickerbocker, has become the colloquial name for New Yorkers. Irving is also responsible for reimagining American Christmastime in his writing, and he was the first to introduce the (false) idea that Europeans previously believed the earth to be flat, prior to European voyages of discovery. As a writer of Gothic horror, Irving’s output was minimal, but the influence of his most well-known works on the genre (particularly “Sleepy Hollow”) cannot be overstated.

Ian Kinane

See also: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

Further Reading

Burstein, Andrew. 2007. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books.

Irving, Pierre M. 1862. Life and Letters of Washington Irving, edited by Richard D. Rust. New York: G. P. Putnam.

Irving, Washington. 1969–1986. The Complete Works of Washington Irving, edited by Richard D. Rust. Wisconsin: Twayne.

Williams, Stanley T. 1935. The Life of Washington Irving. Two Volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU

The Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896 by H. G. Wells, is a novel about scientific ethics and human identity. The story is told by Edward Prendick, sole survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific. He is rescued by Montgomery, a former medical student fleeing scandal, now carrying a consignment of animals to an isolated island. On the island, Prendick discovers several menacing, strange-looking men. Prendick initially fears that Moreau is transforming humans into animals; Moreau explains, however, that his experiments shape animals into human form. The resulting “Beast People” are held in check by a strict set of laws meant to suppress their instincts, especially the tasting of blood.

One day, Moreau is accidentally killed by a half-finished creation. Without their supreme authority figure, the Beast People revolt, and Montgomery is killed as well. Prendick lives an uneasy existence with the Beast People, who revert slowly to animal instinct, until he escapes the island by boat.

Moreau echoes the tale of Circe from the Odyssey, and also John Milton’s Comus. Both of these older works depict a malevolent magician transforming lost travelers into animals. The book also draws from Jonathan Swift’s inverted critique of society in Gulliver’s Travels, especially the ending: upon his return to England, Prendick finds it difficult to distinguish human beings from animals, and, like Gulliver preferring the company of his horse, chooses to live out his days in isolation.

The novel’s primary concern is the ethics of scientific experimentation. Moreau was driven out of England following a sensationalist exposé, “The Moreau Horrors.” However, Moreau himself is untroubled by any moral objections to vivisection. Prendick is impressed by Moreau’s scientific resolve, yet repulsed by the carelessness with which Moreau discards his finished experiments. The novel asks what responsibility scientists hold for their creations.

Most importantly, Wells blurs the dividing line between humans and animals. Moreau’s laws, which recast instinct as sinful behavior, are an early form of the Freudian view that civilization is only possible by suppressing desire, or a jaded version of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract. In addition, Prendick’s conjecture that the Beast People have been hypnotized into submission suggests a critique of mass culture, drawing a parallel with the newspaper-led controversy that drove Moreau from England. The Beast People’s ritual cry, “Are we not Men?” is thus a poignant question, picked up by subsequent film adaptations (notably in 1996, and in 1932, as The Island of Lost Souls). “Moreau” has subsequently become a byword for unethical scientific practice.

Miles Link

See also: Body Horror; Mad Scientist; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wells, H. G.; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.

Further Reading

Glendening, John. 2002. “‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2): 571–597.

The Island of Lost Souls. [1932] 2011. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD.

Parrinder, Patrick. 1995. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

IT

It (whose title is sometimes capitalized as IT) is an award-winning novel by the American novelist and horror writer Stephen King. At over 1,300 pages in paperback, It is among the longest of his many works. Published in 1986, the novel centers on a battle between good and evil in a small Maine town. Though ostensibly fictional, Derry is heavily based upon the real-life environs of Bangor, Maine, where King relocated specifically to write the novel, and where he still resides. Today the Bangor “Stephen King Tour” focuses on many of the locations that either inspired or are directly included in the novel.

It depicts the conflict between the “Losers Club”—a band of misfit childhood friends—and an otherworldly evil that emerges every thirty years to terrorize Derry. This “IT” takes the form of its victim’s innermost fear, a conceit that allows King to indulge his love of pulp horror staples. “IT” manifests most frequently as a terrifying clown figure known as Pennywise, but its real nature is stranger by far and strays into the Lovecraftian territory that forms a loose metaphysical backdrop to much of King’s supernatural fiction. The children confront and defeat Pennywise, but three decades later a spate of child murders heralds the reeruption of trouble in Derry, and the adult members of the Losers Club are drawn back from each of their disparate lives to do battle once more.

The length and complexity of It means that this straightforward good-versus-evil plot is only one strand in the novel. Indeed, Pennywise the Clown is not actually named (except in a single authorial intrusion) until well past page 500. The central plot expands into a nostalgic meditation on childhood, friendship, and memory. In addition, King offers a detailed sketch of a small New England city in the mid-twentieth century, where the threat of Sputnik (the Russian satellite by which the Soviet Union gained a lead on the United States in the “space race”) and “the bomb” are balanced against the prosaic anxieties of adolescence.

It contains numerous references to King’s wider universe. Pennywise, or another of his species, appears in the final volume of The Dark Tower, while other characters are referenced in various stand-alone novels. For instance, Dick Halloran, a major character in The Shining, appears as a younger man, and one of the “losers,” Eddie Kaspbrak, is mentioned in Misery as a childhood neighbor of protagonist Paul Sheldon.

King fans often list It as a personal favorite among his works, usually second only to the equally epic apocalyptic novel The Stand (1978). Pennywise is perhaps King’s most iconic villain, and his impact is due to both the huge success of the book—the best-selling novel of 1986—and Tim Curry’s portrayal of the character in the 1990 television miniseries. Critics have also pointed to links between Pennywise and serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who performed as a party clown. The novel’s greatest influence, arguably, is in elevating the figure of the monstrous clown to the pantheon of contemporary Gothic monsters. It remains King’s grandest novel and the most comprehensive distillation of his thoughts on fear, childhood, imagination, and community, which together form the thematic spine of his writing career.

It was the winner of the 1987 British Fantasy Award for best novel and was also nominated for the Locus Award and World Fantasy Award. In 2017 the first part of a planned two-part feature film adaptation of the novel was released, directed by Andrés Muschietti and starring Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.

Neil McRobert

See also: The Dark Tower; King, Stephen; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

Further Reading

Drey, Mark. 1999. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. New York: Grove Press.

Magistrale, Tony. 1992. “Art versus Madness: It and Misery.” In Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half by Tony Magistrale, 101–133. New York: Twayne.

Magistrale, Tony. 1988. Landscape of Fear. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press.

Horror Literature
through History

An Encyclopedia of the Stories
That Speak to Our Deepest Fears

VOLUME 2

MATT CARDIN, EDITOR

J

JACKSON, SHIRLEY (1916–1965)

Best known for the 1948 short story “The Lottery” and the 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson was a prominent, albeit controversial writer during the 1950s and 1960s. Her legacy is largely as an author of horror and supernatural fiction, but Jackson’s oeuvre crossed genres, from the campus novel to children’s fiction to the domestic novel. She is considered to be the queen of Gothic literature in the twentieth century. With her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson raised four children, and the couple moved several times, most notably to North Bennington, Vermont, a town that offered inspiration for her writing. Though she died in 1965 at the relatively young age of forty-eight, she was prolific.

“The Lottery”: Picture-Perfect Town with a Sinister Secret

“The Lottery,” first published on June 26, 1948, in The New Yorker, is one of Jackson’s best-known works, establishing her as a writer of horror and the macabre. It takes place on one day—June 27—in an unnamed small American town. The town is presented as completely normal and innocuous, as the reader is introduced to different townspeople, all of whom appear to be preparing for some sort of festival or town ritual, known only as the lottery. The tone becomes increasingly sinister until it is clear what is happening: the unlucky winner of the lottery will be stoned to ensure a healthy harvest.

The story’s publication prompted a storm of readers to write letters to the editor, expressing their disapproval and outright disgust. Jackson said nearly three hundred letters arrived that summer, most of them negative, although some readers did express admiration for the story. “The Lottery” made such a lasting impression that Jackson received attention over it for the rest of her life from readers demanding answers to why she wrote it. She would eventually say that she had hoped the story would highlight the world’s inhumanity and violence. A prevalent theme is not just brutality, as seen in the ancient ritual that is still alive and well in the small town, but also the random nature of that brutality. The townspeople have largely forgotten why they even participate in the lottery; it is simply a ritual that they follow because they have always done so.

“The Lottery” has been adapted for film and television, and it remains one of Jackson’s most famous works. It is routinely anthologized and taught in high school and university literature courses, and fans celebrate “Lottery Day” every year on June 27.

Lisa Kröger

After briefly attending the University of Rochester, Jackson withdrew to take a year to write, before enrolling in Syracuse University, where she published her first short story, “Janice” (1938), and met Hyman, a relationship that proved to be instrumental in her career. Together, Hyman and Jackson founded a university literary magazine, Spectre. By the time her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948, Jackson had long been immersed in the literary world and had published several stories; her first national story was the humorous “My Life with R. H. Macy” in a 1941 issue of the New Republic. The Road Through the Wall introduced readers to a theme that would become common in Jackson’s work: an isolated community that is hostile toward or unwilling to interact with outsiders. The novel tells the story of the citizens of Pepper Street, who are all fine, upstanding citizens in their own minds, but who refuse to socialize with those who do not fit their narrow view of the world.

The same year her first novel was published, Jackson’s most infamous story, “The Lottery,” was printed in The New Yorker. Like The Road Through the Wall, the story introduces a seemingly moral community, but one that annually engages in murder to appease a long-standing tradition. The story immediately struck a chord with readers, many of whom hated the violence of the story’s climax and wrote letters to the magazine, resulting in the largest amount of mail the publisher had ever received. Though “The Lottery” was widely criticized, the story also gave Jackson literary fame, and the story was first adapted to television in 1952. It would later inspire film adaptations. Though none of her other stories received as much attention as “The Lottery,” a few did garner critical attention, including “The Summer People” (1951) and “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts” (1956), both of which appeared in Best American Short Stories in the years they were published. Her 1961 short story “Louisa, Please Come Home,” a mystery involving the disappearance of a young woman the day before her sister’s wedding, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America.

“The Lottery” established Jackson as a writer of “weird fiction,” placing her in a long line of writers of the fantasy and horror genre. Jackson, though, defied categorization, as she was just as comfortable writing about her life at home as she was a grisly tale of murder. As a mother of four children and a homemaker, Jackson had a fountain of material, which she collected into essays for Good Housekeeping and a litany of other magazines, including Woman’s Day and Woman’s Home Companion, plus two domestic novels filled with sketches of her life as a wife and mother, often with a humorous tone: Life Among the Savages was published in 1952, and Raising Demons followed in 1957. Jackson’s musings are unflinchingly honest at times, which sets them apart from the stylized and overly optimistic domestic writings of the time.

As is fitting for a Gothic writer, Jackson was greatly interested in studying witchcraft and the occult, a subject she wrote about in 1956’s The Witchcraft of Salem Village, an account of the events surrounding the Salem witch trials written for children. Jackson would go on to pen more children’s stories, including a one-act play called The Bad Children (1959), which retold the fable of Hansel and Gretel, and two more books, 9 Magic Wishes (1963) and Famous Sally (1966).

It was Jackson’s novel Hangsaman, published in 1951, that established her career as a Gothic writer. On its surface it is a campus novel, telling the story of Natalie Waite as she attends her first year at a small liberal arts college that shares more than a passing resemblance to Bennington College, where Jackson’s husband had taught. But as the novel progresses, the plot becomes darker as Natalie, a Gothic heroine, is sexually assaulted by a family friend and eventually unravels. The novels that followed all contain elements of Gothic horror. The Bird’s Nest (1954) contains a heroine who, like Natalie in Hangsaman, has a tenuous grip on reality. The book tells the story of Elizabeth, who struggles with schizophrenia and multiple personalities after being molested by her mother’s lover. The novel is a prime example of Jackson’s interest in the field of psychology, which forms a recurring motif in her works. It was adapted into the 1957 film Lizzie, directed by Hugo Haas and starring Eleanor Parker. In The Sundial (1958), Jackson explored the idea of a Gothic mansion, this one run by the Halloran family, all of whom seem to be so removed from the outside world that they cannot be trusted to understand what is reality and what is fantasy.

The character of the outsider shunning the world in a Gothic castle is one that would become a favorite of Jackson’s. In 1959, Jackson published her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House. In telling the story of Hill House, a mansion that Jackson describes as having been “born bad” (Jackson 1984, 70), Jackson enters into a long tradition of haunted house tales, following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. The novel inspired two films, 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and considered a masterpiece in its own right, and the lesser 1999 film of the same title, directed by Jan de Bont. Hill House, a haunted house with its writing on the wall (in blood) and mysterious noises, is most likely the prototype for many haunted houses to come, from the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining to the Navidson family’s new home in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

Though not a haunted house novel, Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which was named one of the “Ten Best Novels” of the year by Time magazine, continued her development of the Gothic. Like many of Jackson’s other novels, this one tells the story of a heroine who has become an outsider to society. Unlike a weaker or more innocent character such as Hangsaman’s Natalie or The Haunting of Hill House’s Eleanor, Merricat Blackwood maintains more control over her isolation in Blackwood Manor, and also, more significantly, over her older sister Constance. Merricat is protective of her sister, defending her against the antagonistic townspeople and a greedy relative, and making a home for the two of them, even as their family home is crumbling around them. The novel spawned several adaptations for the stage, the first in 1966 and another in 2010, as a musical for the Yale Repertory Theatre. Film adaptations have been rumored, though as of 2016, none have come to fruition.

The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle garnered more critical praise for Jackson than any of her other novels. Despite failing health, she continued to be a prolific writer, participating in conferences and lecturing at universities until her death on August 8, 1965, of heart failure.

Given Jackson’s quite varied authorial career, many critics find it difficult to categorize her as merely a “horror” writer, out of concern that the title does not accurately represent the breadth of her canon. Jackson does manage to instill a sense of horror in her readers, particularly as she shows them the violence that can lie just beneath the surface of everyday life. Her characters are often on the verge of a mental collapse, and her stories have a profound psychological depth for readers to plumb. Her landscapes tend to be Gothic in nature (i.e., large mansions with murderous pasts), and her heroines are almost always escaping a hostile outside world. Perhaps due to her success in the Gothic and horror fiction, Jackson’s legacy has been relegated to that genre, though late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century critics began to show a renewed interest in her work.

In 1988, Judy Oppenheimer published the first biography of Jackson, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Many readers and critics questioned some of its claims that Jackson suffered from mental disease and possible childhood sexual abuse. Oppenheimer also makes the claim that Jackson’s study into the supernatural and occult went beyond a scholar’s interest, and that she believed in the existence of the supernatural. Many critics, however, take issue with this stance, asserting that Jackson probably held no such notion and citing the fact the characters in Jackson’s works who experience the supernatural are often struggling with differentiating the real world from the inner world of imagination. Some have argued that the question of whether or not Jackson herself believed in the supernatural overshadows her authorial legacy, though this is beginning to change. Jackson’s literary achievements continue into the twenty-first century, with her estate releasing previously unpublished works, including “Paranoia” (2013) and “The Man in the Woods” (2014), both of which appeared in The New Yorker. These stories, along with more of Jackson’s previously unseen works, were collected and published in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (2015), edited by two of Jackson’s adult children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt.

In some ways, the memory of Jackson herself has nearly eclipsed her writing, as readers are just as intrigued by Shirley Jackson the person as they are by Shirley Jackson the author. On June 27 (the same day the events of “The Lottery” take place), the town of North Bennington celebrates Shirley Jackson as one of their most illustrious citizens. Novelist Susan Scott Merrell wrote Jackson as a character in her 2015 psychological thriller Shirley: A Novel, which tells the tale of the disappearance of a young college student who attends the same university where Jackson’s husband teaches. The novel takes true events from Jackson’s life and the real disappearance of Paula Weldon (which also inspired Jackson’s Hangsaman and “The Missing Girl”) and interweaves them with a fictional mystery. In 2016, a new biography of Shirley Jackson, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, written by Ruth Franklin, was published, demonstrating that Jackson still captivates audiences even half a century after her death. In a further example of her enduring influence, the Shirley Jackson Award was established in 2007 to be given annually in recognition of superior achievement in long and short fiction in the genres of thriller (particularly psychological thrillers, as Jackson herself would have preferred), horror, and dark fantasy. The first Shirley Jackson Awards were presented at the 2007 Readercon conference in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Lisa Kröger

See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Shirley Jackson Awards; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Anderson, Melanie R., and Lisa Kröger, eds. 2016. Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences. New York: Routledge.

Franklin, Ruth. 2016. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright.

Friedman, Lenemaja. 1975. Shirley Jackson: A Biography. Boston: Twayne.

Hall, Joan Wylie. 1993. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. 2003. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Jackson, Shirley. [1959] 1984. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin Books.

Jackson, Shirley. 2015. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. New York: Random House.

Miller, Laura. 2006. Introduction to The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, ix–xxii. New York: Penguin. http://lauramiller.typepad.com/lauramiller/shirley-jacksons-the-haunting-of-hill-house-an-introduction.html.

Murphy, Bernice M., ed. 2005. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Oppenheimer, Judy. 1988. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam.

JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916)

Henry James was an expatriate American writer who spent most of his adult life living in England and on the European continent. He was a prolific author of novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and travel writing, and was best known in his fiction writing for his sharp and incisive portraits of the psychological lives of his characters. James’s vast output includes eighteen stories, most written before the turn of the twentieth century, which his biographer, Leon Edel, collected as The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1948). Charles L. Elkins, writing in Supernatural Fiction Writers, speculates that James may have been drawn to the tale of the supernatural because ghost stories were a very popular type of fiction in the Victorian era and James wanted to be successful financially as well as critically. His most famous ghost story is an undisputed classic of the form, the short novel The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Although James’s ghost stories are not traditional by most genre standards, some feature genuine ghostly presences. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), a woman who is set on marrying the widower of her dead sister rummages through a trunk of clothes that her sister forbade anyone but her daughter to have, and is found dead beside it, her face and brow bearing “the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands.” “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891) literalizes the idea of the sins of the parents being visited upon the children when a mother is dismayed to see the ghost of a lover she once jilted pursuing her daughter, presumably to inflict misery upon her. In “The Real Right Thing” (1899), a journalist intent on writing the biography of a deceased writer with the cooperation of his widow changes his mind when the writer’s ghost appears to them both to dissuade them.

In a number of James’s stories, the ghosts and hauntings are more ambiguous. “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) concerns an elderly man, Captain Diamond, who is convinced that he sees the ghost of his dead daughter in the house where he disowned her for a past indiscretion. When his daughter later reveals to the narrator that she is alive and has been maintaining the charade of her death to punish her father, she is convinced that she sees his ghost in the house after he dies, although this may just be an expression of her own guilty feelings. In “Owen Wingrave” (1892), a young man who refuses to follow his family’s tradition of entering military service agrees to sleep in a room supposedly haunted by the ghost of a colonel ancestor who killed his own son in it in a fit of rage. When the room is entered the next day the young man is found dead. The protagonist of “The Jolly Corner” (1908) returns to his boyhood home in New York as part of his quest to discover how his life might have turned out had he not left thirty years before, and encounters what appears to be the alternate identity that he might have had. The Turn of the Screw has long been regarded a masterpiece of ambiguous supernaturalism. Its heroine, a newly hired governess at a country estate, is convinced that the two children she is supervising have fallen under the malignant influence of the ghosts of her employer’s ex-valet and her predecessor, although it is never clear whether the spectral figures she sees are real or projections of her own emotionally overwrought mind. The story was adapted memorably for the screen in 1961 as The Innocents.

Like the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, with whom James was friends, his ghost stories differ little from his more mainstream writing as regards the development of their characters and the insights provided for their motivations and behaviors. They are important examples of how the tale of the supernatural is just one of many possible approaches to fiction in a literary writer’s repertoire.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; The Turn of the Screw; Unreliable Narrator; Wharton, Edith; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

Further Reading

Edel, Leon. 1970. “Introduction.” In Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, v–xiv. New York: Taplinger.

Elkins, Charles. 1982. “Henry James.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume I: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 337–344. New York: Scribners.

James, Henry. 1996. “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” In American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 103–120. New York: Penguin.

Lustig, T. J. 1994. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tuttle, Lisa. 1988. “Henry James.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by Richard Bleiler, 298–301. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

JAMES, M. R. (1862–1936)

Montague Rhodes “Monty” James was the youngest son of an evangelical Anglican divine (clergy). As indicated by his memoir’s title, Eton and King’s (1926), he attended Eton College, then King’s College at Cambridge University, and worked at those two institutions for most of his life as a medievalist, biblical scholar, translator, museum director, and administrator. However, James’s contemporary reputation rests not on a prolific academic output but on his occasional pastime as writer of about three dozen ghost stories, which some critics see as the apogee of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English ghost story tradition. He published relatively few of these stories in periodicals, and some, such as “After Dark in the Playing Fields” (1924) and “Rats” (1929), appeared in small Eton magazines.

James’s stories were often honed as oral tales to rapt fireside academic audiences on Christmas Eve nights or read at meetings of various literary societies. They often maintain informal, laconic, and understated tones appropriate to their original telling, glaze over plot details, and exhibit a flair for the minutiae of Edwardian academics’ lives. For example, “The Mezzotint” (1904) includes a side gag about academics golfing.

Many of James’s stories made their first print appearances in four thin collections of five to eight stories: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). A darkly humorous tale to scare Boy Scouts, Wailing Well (1928) first appeared as a chapbook. The nearly comprehensive The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931) appeared in his lifetime. S. T. Joshi’s two-volume The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (2005–2006) rounds up remaining early and fugitive stories as well as James’s limited but provocative theoretical writings on the form of the ghost story, mostly from prefaces to his own work or others’ collections.

James is best remembered for his first two collections, especially Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The enthusiasm of James’s illustrator friend James McBryde spurred James to assemble the collection. However, McBryde’s untimely death came after he produced only two illustrations each for “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” (1895) and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904). James refused to let any other illustrator finish the work. McBryde’s detailed rendering from a photograph of the interior of Saint Bertrand de Comminges Cathedral, the location of Canon Alberic’s haunted scrapbook, became the frontispiece for the collection’s first edition. McBryde models his drawing of the story’s academic protagonist on James himself, and that character, Dennistoun, is mentioned again by the narrator of “The Mezzotint” and establishes the type for subsequent James protagonists. Another of McBryde’s illustrations, the sheet-wrapped specter attacking in “Oh, Whistle,” is iconic and graces many subsequent covers of James’s work. As a tribute to his friend, James also oversaw the publication of The Story of a Troll-Hunt (1904), a fantasy story written and drawn by McBryde and based on his and James’s trip with a third friend to Jutland. Another James editorial project was the recovery and publication of often anonymous ghost stories from his favorite writer of the genre, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, in Madame Cowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923).

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”

This story, which takes its title from a song by Robert Burns, first appeared in 1903 in a reading by M. R. James before a Christmas gathering in King’s College, Cambridge, before its inclusion in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary the following year. It has been widely anthologized and was adapted for television three times in Britain: as a reasonably faithful short film (1968), a dramatic reading (1986), and a loosely reworked metaphor for dementia (2010).

Professor Parkins, a resolute rationalist, notes someone following him at a distance the moment he uncovers a bronze whistle in the ruins of a Templar church, and he assumes this is merely another guest at his hotel. When he discovers inscriptions on both sides of the whistle, he ignores the Latin puzzle in the first, but feels sufficiently confident in his translation of the second—“Who is this who is coming?”—to set the whistle to his lips, bringing a gust of shrieking wind round the hotel, which bursts into the room and blows out the candles (James 2005, 88). Thereafter, dreams of pursuit along the beach join puzzling activity on the empty bed adjacent to his own, and sightings of a waving figure at his window, until he encounters a hideous “face of crumpled linen” (100).

James cleverly combines traditional motifs—the sheeted ghost, Gothic ruins, folk belief in whistling for the wind, and a skeptical observer—with an abbreviated form of the accumulated tension and inexorable weight of history that he had learned from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, then adds elements specific to his own interests, such as Latin tags, medieval artifacts, and an ironic detachment bordering on black humor. The result is as seamless as myth and as vivid as nightmare.

Jim Rockhill

Source: James, M. R. 2005. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. New York: Penguin Classics.

James appeared to hold some contempt for the occult detective fiction of contemporaries William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, but his work has overlays of detective fiction. He admired Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, referenced The Strand in “A School Story” (1911), and wrote an introduction (1926) to Le Fanu’s sensation novel Uncle Silas (1864). One might connect the Holmes cases’ emphases on clues and physical objects and use of them for titles to James’s practice. The vast majority of James’s stories are titled after objects and places, the sources of the haunting. The haunted art of “The Mezzotint” is the most self-reflexive example, a motif James returns to in “The Haunted Dolls’ House” (1923). Scholars dispute the interpretation of James’s title “The Malice of Inanimate Objects” (1933), but it aptly summarizes his oeuvre. More direct influences from detective fiction are present. Despite his contempt for Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838), James’s “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1904) owes much to the cryptography of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843). Other stories like “The Rose Garden” (1911) and “Two Doctors” (1919) are highly elliptical and rely on the reader to make inferences from their sparse details.

Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2017) contrasts two categories of horror that many James stories straddle. James’s playful, understated ghost stories might seem inimical to the cosmic bombast often associated with Weird Tales writing. As Joshi points out, James slyly criticizes weird writers in print, and in letters rails against H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and others. But Lovecraft admires James, and not just for their shared disinterest in plots (Joshi 1990, 141–42). Lovecraft singles out the grotesque, bestial, and tactile qualities of James’s ghosts, which can suggest weird writers’ fascination with viscera, sinister evolutions, and the nonhuman. One might think of the burned giant spiders and the witch’s black-haired skeleton revealed in the immolation of “The Ash-Tree” (1904) or the dried, cobwebbed baldness of the apparition in “The Tractate Middoth” (1911). As Joshi points out, many of James’s tales operate on a strident binary between the academic, reserved, bourgeois qualities of his English male protagonists and the bestial violence of his sometimes feminine specters. In “Count Magnus” (1904), an overinquisitive English academic foolishly thrice wishes to gaze upon a dead Satanist Swedish nobleman and finds himself pursued back to England and to a grisly end by two mysterious cloaked figures, the revenant count and his nonhuman familiar. For Lovecraft and China Miéville, this story is the apotheosis of James’s synthesis of the ghost story’s typical religious and folkloric overtones, as well as indirect style, with the weird tale’s characteristic madness and inexplicable otherness.

Robert Macfarlane intimately associates the mode of the eerie with James, both as a technique of slow-mounting dread and as a fascination with landscapes and what lies beneath: brutal histories of struggles for property and more overt supernatural intrusions. Macfarlane’s central example is James’s “A View from a Hill” (1925) as haunted binoculars reveal the ghosts of people and architecture of an English landscape. James’s post–World War I stories largely surrendered his occasional prior interest in French and Scandinavian settings, and James’s fiction turned to an English setting eerie with hidden landscapes and threatening yet never fully apprehensible history, such as “A Warning to the Curious” (1925). As Macfarlane traces it, this mode of James’s inflects contemporary trends in music, poetry, and painting. Most notably, one can see its role in the filmic subgenre of folk horror, which had a heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–1975), an annual television film series of James adaptations. This tradition has lately been revived in the films of Ben Wheatley, especially A Field in England (2013), and revivals of A Ghost Story for Christmas.

The most comprehensive collection of television film adaptations of James is the British Film Institute’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (2013), which includes twenty-one different adaptations of James’s stories along with adaptations of a few other ghost story writers, including Dickens and occasional James-imitator Ramsey Campbell. Many were broadcast on the BBC at Christmas. These adaptations range from eleven to fifty-two minutes in length and were made from 1968 to 2010. About half dramatize James’s narratives; the other half are single actors performing partially dramatized readings, including three done by Christopher Lee playing M. R. James himself. Both visual and audio adaptations of James proliferate far beyond that single British Film Institute (BFI) collection. One volunteer-based, public domain source of audio adaptations of James is the website LibriVox, which hosts recordings of James’s first three story collections as well as his only novel, the surreal children’s fantasy The Five Jars (1922).

Bob Hodges

See also: Campbell, Ramsey; “Casting the Runes”; The Haunted House or Castle; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Occult Detectives; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Occult Fiction; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

Further Reading

Briggs, Julia. 1977. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber.

Ghost Stories for Christmas: Expanded 6 Disc Collection. 2013. DVD. London: BFI.

Joshi, S. T. 2005–2006. Introductions to The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James. 2 vols. New York: Penguin.

Joshi, S. T. [1990] 2003. The Weird Tale. Maryland: Wildside Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Macfarlane, Robert. 2015. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, April 10. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane.

Miéville, China. 2011. “M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?” Weird Fiction Review, November 29. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville. Originally published in Collapse IV (May 2008): 105–126.

Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press.

THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS

The Jewel of Seven Stars is Bram Stoker’s best-known novel after Dracula, and the only other of his works to have been adapted for the cinema. It was released in two very different versions in 1903 and 1912, the latter being significantly shorter, with a conventional romantic ending and a central, introspective chapter excised.

The novel opens in Edwardian London, where Abel Trelawny, a British Egyptologist, lies unconscious after having been mysteriously attacked during the night. The narrator, Malcolm Ross, is enamored of Margaret, Trelawny’s daughter, and joins the beleaguered household in their nightly vigils. Ross learns through Corbeck, another Egyptologist, that Trelawny has plundered the grave goods of the female pharaoh Tera, transporting her mummy, its detached seven-fingered hand, a mysterious ruby—the jewel of the title—a sealed coffer, and some ritually significant lamps to London. The attacks appear to have been perpetrated supernaturally by Tera’s mummified polydactyl cat, who acts as a sort of guardian both to the severed hand and the jewel. Having transported the whole assemblage to a cave in Cornwall, Trelawny attempts to revive the remarkably preserved mummy of Tera. In the first edition, a violent storm breaks into the chamber, disrupting what appears to be a successful revival of the body, and Ross, the sole survivor, is left to describe the horror that characterizes the fixed faces of his dead companions who have, clearly, witnessed something unspeakable. In the second edition, the mummy is destroyed without having been revived, nobody dies, and Ross and Margaret marry, the bride wearing Tera’s robe and jewelry.

The Jewel of Seven Stars is, in many ways, a quite conventional Gothic work. It has an ambivalent supernatural content, and there is a suggestion of the promethean overreacher in the characterization of Trelawny. The novel is, further, saturated with doppelgängers—Margaret resembles Tera; her polydactyl cat may be confused with its mummified counterpart; the dead are at times mistaken for the living. As in Dracula, there is a central group of professional, educated gentlemen, accompanied by an appendant and resourceful woman, to balance the supernatural revenant—though here they appear to be easing, rather than opposing, the undead’s access to British soil. The settings, both in urban London and rural Cornwall, are claustrophobic and sublime in their literally shadowed obscurity.

Film Adaptations of The Jewel of Seven Stars

1970

“The Curse of the Mummy”—The final episode of the popular British television anthology series Mystery and Imagination.

1971

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb—The last entry in the popular series of mummy movies from Britain’s Hammer Films that had started in 1959 with The Mummy.

1980

The Awakening—A big-budget production starring Charlton Heston, intended as a “serious” mummy film but emerging as a critical and commercial flop.

1998

Bram Stoker’s The Mummy—A garish, low-budget production that was hastily made and released to cash in on the imminent reboot of Universal Studios’ classic mummy series with 1999’s big-budget The Mummy.

Matt Cardin

While The Jewel of Seven Stars superficially resembles Egyptological romances such as Conan Doyle’s “Lot no. 249” (1892), or Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), it is nonetheless an unusually thoughtful work. Tera’s resurrection is rendered through the language of science rather than occultism, and science is implicitly tested by the uncanny. “Powers—Old and New,” the cancelled chapter, likewise contemplates the existence of rival gods, thereby engendering a cosmological debate that the stridently Protestant author might well have deemed inappropriate for a second, popular edition. The Egyptological content of the novel is, incidentally, systematic and relatively accurate, being derived largely from the writings of the British Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. Notable film adaptations include Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), which was the last entry in the Hammer Films mummy series, and The Awakening (1980), a big-budget (and slow, and ponderous, and critically reviled) production starring Charlton Heston.

William Hughes

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Mummies; Stoker, Bram; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950.

Further Reading

Bridges, Meilee D. 2008. “Tales from the Crypt: Bram Stoker and the Curse of the Egyptian Mummy.” Victorians Institute Journal 36, 137–165.

Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. New York: Palgrave.

Stoker, Bram. [1903] 1996. The Jewel of Seven Stars. Annotated and edited by Clive Leatherdale. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, UK: Desert Island Books.

JOHN SILENCE: PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINARY

John Silence: Physician Extraordinary by Algernon Blackwood was one of the earliest and most influential books in the development of the occult detective genre. It was published in 1908 as a collection of five original stories. The character of Silence followed in the footsteps of Bram Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius, and Heskith Pritchard’s Flaxman Low.

The stories were originally intended by Blackwood to be independent examinations of different occult topics, but the publisher, Eveleigh Nash, requested him to tie them together with a single character. Because Silence was added secondarily, he sometimes has only a nominal role. The publisher excluded a sixth story, “A Victim of Higher Space,” from the collection because he felt it was weaker than the others, but it was published in The Occult Review for December 1914 and has been added to recent reprints of the collection. It is far shorter than the others and lacks their mood and atmosphere.

The Psychic Doctor

In the opening paragraphs of the first John Silence story, “A Psychical Invasion,” Blackwood paints a picture of the eponymous detective that is at once endearing and mysterious. After describing Silence as independently wealthy and inclined toward philanthropy—to the point of accepting only “unremunerative cases”—Blackwood begins to establish the doctor’s mysterious credentials:

But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the “Psychic Doctor.”

In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,—for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,—but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments. (Blackwood 1909, 3–4)

Matt Cardin

Source: Blackwood, Algernon. 1909. John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. Boston: John W. Luce & Company.

Silence is an independently wealthy physician who only takes on cases that personally interest him, such as a haunting that causes a writer to lose his sense of humor in “A Psychical Invasion.” As in “Green Tea” by Le Fanu, it involves a patient made vulnerable to a haunting by ingesting a drug. It was inspired by a haunted house Blackwood knew of in Putney. Other cases involve a fire elemental from ancient Egypt in “Nemesis of Fire,” inspired by the home of an Egyptologist he knew, and a case of lycanthropy in “Camp of the Dog,” set on a Swedish island where he had once camped with a group. Silence makes only nominal appearances in “Ancient Sorceries,” in which he passively listens to a patient’s tale of witchcraft and cats in a remote French village, and in “Secret Worship,” in which he appears at the end to save someone from the spectral replay of a devil-worshipping cult in a southern German village.

The individual stories reflect Blackwood’s interests both as an occultist and as an outdoorsman. A member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an important occult and metaphysical organization at the turn of the twentieth century that numbered several prominent authors among its members, he believed in the supernatural and understood and treated his subject matter seriously. He also had a lifelong love of nature, which shows in his writings. The first five Silence stories were all set in locations Blackwood had visited, and they display his strength at creating atmosphere, a strength that also informed other, later works such as “The Wendigo” and “The Willows.”

The book was heavily promoted on its release, and its popularity established Blackwood’s name and reputation as a writer. It also paved the way for such later characters and series as William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, and on television, Kolchak the Night Stalker and The X-Files.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Carmilla; The Devil Rides Out; Dracula; “Green Tea”; Hodgson, William Hope; Occult Detectives; Quinn, Seabury; “The Willows.”

Further Reading

Ashley, Mike. 2001. Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Carroll & Graf.

Blackwood, Algernon. 1997. The Complete John Silence Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Fonseca, Tony. 2007. “The Psychic.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 409–439. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Joshi, S. T. 1990. “Algernon Blackwood: The Expansion of Consciousness.” In The Weird Tale, 87–132. Austin: University of Texas Press.

JOSHI, S. T. (1958–)

Sunand Tryambak Joshi is a leading American scholar, critic, and editor of horror fiction, in particular of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Joshi was born in India and immigrated to the United States in 1963. Considered to be the greatest living authority on the genre, Joshi has written multiple critical surveys, published many collections of horror fiction both classic and contemporary, and edited multiple academic journals.

The first phase of Joshi’s career was devoted to researching and explicating Lovecraft’s work: he made comprehensive and landmark contributions in textual editing, literary criticism, biography, and bibliography. The capstone of this work was the authoritative two-volume biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), for which he won the World Fantasy Award, and the publication of three volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction under the prestigious Penguin imprint beginning in 1999.

Joshi’s work is characterized not merely by critical acumen but also by diligence and thoroughness. He seems not merely to study but to envelop an author—researching and consulting all primary and secondary sources, reading the entire body of the author’s work, and understanding the author’s intellectual milieu. He often seeks to apprehend how an author’s worldview is reflected in his or her fiction.

After writing several collections of comprehensive essay-reviews on the main writers in the genre, Joshi produced the only truly comprehensive survey of horror fiction yet published. In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), Joshi evaluates both the famous and the obscure, from antiquity to the present, in 800 pages over two volumes. He concludes that the vast majority of horror fiction, like the vast majority of any genre fiction, is junk. Along the way Joshi does find a few gems amid the dross, and boosts such lesser lights as L. P. Hartley and Charles Beaumont. He also singles out a more thoughtful stream of contemporary authors—Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Thomas Ligotti—as contributors of effective work with significant depth and artistic finish. Some reviews of the book contended Joshi, who is an expert polemicist like his favorite, H. L. Mencken, was overly harsh in his criticisms, particularly of modern authors.

Joshi has edited numerous collections of horror fiction, many as editor of Dover Publications’ supernatural fiction line. He has been the editor of many literary journals devoted to horror, most recently The Lovecraft Annual: New Scholarship on H. P. Lovecraft (2007–present) and Studies in the Fantastic (2008–present). He continues to resurrect neglected horror tales and elevate individual authors and the genre as a whole.

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Aickman, Robert; Beaumont, Charles; Campbell, Ramsey; Hartley, L. P.; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Klein, T. E. D.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; World Fantasy Award; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Criticism; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2014. 200 Books by S. T. Joshi: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2012. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2016. S. T. Joshi’s Web Site. Accessed July 4, 2016. http://stjoshi.org.

JOYCE, GRAHAM (1954–2014)

Graham William Joyce was a British author of speculative fiction that combined elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His novels and short stories relied upon an ambiguous perspective in which he allowed readers to decide for themselves whether something truly supernatural was taking place or the seemingly supernatural events were just manifestations of a character’s mental breakdown, angst, delusion, hysteria, or alcohol- or drug-induced hallucination. Joyce was of the opinion that there was little difference between what his characters believed and what was real.

The son of a coal miner, Joyce grew up in Keresley, an English coal-mining town near Coventry that was destroyed during the Blitz in World War II. His grandmother—the seventh child of a seventh child, fictionalized in Joyce’s The Facts of Life (2002), and the inspiration for Old Liz in his novel Dark Sister (1992)—had visions and uttered accurate prophecies laden with classic or modernized symbols. Joyce claimed that he also had uncanny experiences that inspired him when writing his novels.

After working at an odd assemblage of jobs during his twenties and early thirties, he turned from poetry (for which he won awards) to fiction. His first novel attracted some attention but was never published. In 1988, he married, quit his job with the National Association of Youth Clubs, and moved to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Crete, an experience that he fictionalized in The House of Lost Dreams (1993). During this year abroad, he completed Dreamside, which was published in England in 1991.

He believed stories require a strong sense of place because environment demands a certain response from readers. His novels alternated between being set in the English midlands, a region he felt was not represented in fiction very often, and exotic locales such as Jerusalem, Rome, Greece, and the south of France. Smoking Poppy (2001), about an electrician who travels to Thailand to rescue his daughter, is written with a thick regional accent.

His books were critically acclaimed in the United Kingdom, where he won four British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award for best novel between 1993 and 2003, but his work was initially deemed too British for American audiences. Eventually he found a publisher in the United States, where Requiem, his fourth novel, was chosen as his American debut in 1996. His novels explored such varied topics as lucid dreaming, spiritualism, mysticism, witchcraft, guilt’s power to twist the psyche, coming of age, the corrupting power of secrets in families, the perception of reality, demons—both personal and literal—ghosts, and fairies.

He was awarded a PhD from Nottingham Trent University, where he taught creative writing from 1996 onward. He published fourteen novels, four books for young adults, a nonfiction football memoir, and more than two dozen short stories. His short fiction appears in three collections, the last of which, 25 Years in the Word Mines, brought together the best of his previously published stories and appeared around the time of his death from cancer in 2014.

Bev Vincent

See also: Dark Fantasy; Devils and Demons; Dreams and Nightmares; Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; Witches and Witchcraft; World Fantasy Award; Part One, Horror through History, Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural.

Further Reading

“Ghost Writing” (interview with Graham Joyce). 2009. Locus 62, no. 4 (April): 6–7, 60–61.

“Graham Joyce.” 2014. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Joyce, Graham 1954–.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. 2nd ed. vol. 1. Edited by Richard Bleiler, 503–508. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003.

K

KAFKA, FRANZ (1883–1924)

Franz Kafka was a Czech author of fantastic literature and one of the most important modernist writers of the early twentieth century. During his brief lifetime (Kafka died from complications of tuberculosis at the age of forty), he published only a few dozen stories, but these include classics such as “A Report to an Academy” (1917), about a captured ape who learns to imitate human behavior, and “In the Penal Colony” (1919), in which an elaborate torture device that inscribes the body with a record of its crimes is used for public executions. These tales established two of Kafka’s abiding themes: the mutability of identity and the cruel power of fate—themes that come together powerfully in the greatest of his tales, “The Metamorphosis” (1915).

Gregor Samsa’s Metamorphosis

The opening lines of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” are among the most famous in all of world literature. Like the rest of the story, they are strange, unsettling, and utterly unforgettable. For sensitive readers, they act as a kind of chute, channel, or doorway that ushers them for a time into the unfortunate life space of Gregor Samsa, whose existence, like his bodily form, is unaccountably transformed one morning into an absurd and surreal nightmare:

When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect. He was lying on his back—which was hard, like a carapace—and when he raised his head a little he saw his curved brown belly, segmented by rigid arches atop which the blanket, already slipping, was just barely managing to cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared to the rest of him, waved helplessly before his eyes.

“What in the world has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper human room, if admittedly rather too small, lay peacefully between the four familiar walls.

Matt Cardin

Source: Kafka, Franz. [1915] 2016. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. Edited by Mark M. Anderson. Norton Critical Editions. New York and London: Norton.

This novella chronicles the pathetic experience of Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into “some sort of monstrous insect” (Kafka 2016, 3). The transformation is narrated matter-of-factly, and no explanation is offered save for allegorical ones: Samsa, a meek man who has submerged his identity in routines of drudgery geared to support his lazy and ungrateful family, goes from being a metaphorical to a literal insect. At first horrified and repelled by his new appearance, his family gradually accommodate themselves to the change, and Gregor, locked in his room, alternates between bouts of morose self-pity and tentative explorations of his new insectile identity. Like Gogol’s absurdist fictions of bizarre transformation, “The Metamorphosis” sustains a tone at once humorous and menacing, sharply satirizing the social mores of the lower middle class while capturing the claustrophobic environment of the Samsa household as it degenerates into a nest of lurking secrets and festering resentments.

When Kafka died, he left behind a cache of manuscripts, with instructions to his friend and executor, Max Brod, to destroy them. In one of the most consequential and humane decisions in literary history, Brod ignored the author’s orders and released many of the unpublished works, beginning in 1925 with the novel The Trial. This novel focuses on a bank clerk named Josef K. who is subjected to a systematic, nightmarish prosecution for crimes that are never specified, by an authority whose jurisdiction and motives are never clearly articulated. This theme of paranoiac entrapment in inscrutable bureaucratic intrigues is even more powerfully conveyed by Kafka’s novel The Castle (1926), wherein the protagonist, known simply as K., attempts to gain access to the faceless agents who inhabit the eponymous structure, which governs a small village in which he takes up residence. These two novels, when published and translated, secured for Kafka an international reputation as one of the most important satirists of modern experience, with its aimless anonymity, its subversion of the search for transcendent meaning, and its subordination of individual autonomy in abstract systems of management and control. The term “Kafkaesque” has been coined to describe the characteristic atmosphere of his fictions: bleak, darkly comic, full of a pervading sense of alienation and despair.

Kafka’s influence on the genres of the fantastic during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been immense yet somewhat amorphous. An identifiable strain of Kafkaesque surreality runs through such mainstream authors as Dino Buzzati and José Saramago, yet locating a similar tradition within genre fantasy and horror is more difficult. Isolated works such as Christopher Fowler’s The Bureau of Lost Souls (1989) and China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) have struck chords of macabre absurdism reminiscent of The Castle and The Trial, and arguably the creepy sense of alienation and sinister conspiracy that informs the best short fiction of Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell has roots in Kafka’s chilly dreamscapes. Kafka has likewise influenced cinematic horror, as such strange and unsettling films as Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) and Patrick Bokanowski’s The Angel (1982) attest. Kafka’s own The Trial was memorably filmed by Orson Welles in 1963.

Rob Latham

See also: Aickman, Robert; Body Horror; Buzzati, Dino; Campbell, Ramsey; The Grotesque; Miéville, China; Psychological Horror; Surrealism; Transformation and Metamorphosis; The Uncanny; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.

Further Reading

Gross, Ruth V., ed. 1990. Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Kafka, Franz. [1915] 2016. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. Edited by Mark M. Anderson. Norton Critical Editions. New York and London: Norton.

Pawel, Ernst. 1984. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ternes, Hans. 1985. “The Fantastic in the Work of Franz Kafka.” In The Scope of the Fantastic: Theory, Technique, Major Authors, edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pierce, 221–228. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

KEENE, BRIAN (1967–)

Brian Keene is a popular American author of horror in both novel and comic book mediums. He is noted as one of the most celebrated writers in the pulp tradition and is often credited with assisting in the rise of popular interest in zombies with his 2003 novel The Rising. He was born in 1967 in North Carolina and currently lives in Pennsylvania.

Keene won his first Bram Stoker Award for Jobs in Hell, an email newsletter in the late 1990s and early 2000s that published articles, commentary, and market news of the horror genre. After joining the horror world with his nonfiction work, Keene entered the horror fiction scene with the publication of his first novel, The Rising. Featuring a zombie apocalypse in which a particle accelerator experiment allows dead bodies to be possessed by demons, it won a Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. The Rising follows a diverse set of characters trying to survive in a nightmarish world that is a strange blend of classic zombie stories, cosmic horror, the occult, and science fiction. Keene expanded this fictional universe with subsequent sequels and short stories.

Keene’s other work includes the Earthworm Gods series, set in a world ravaged by floods, strange creatures, and giant monstrous worms. The series is often compared to H. P. Lovecraft for its cosmic horror, though it maintains Keene’s twenty-first-century writing style, which is distinct from Lovecraft’s deliberately archaic style.

Keene also writes in other mediums, such as comic books. Representative titles include Dead of Night: Devil Slayer, Doom Patrol, and a twenty-five-issue run of his own original title, The Last Zombie.

Mark Athitakis describes Keene’s work as being a product of the milieu established by Richard Matheson and Stephen King. His work is also often inspired by Lovecraft. Andrea Johnson approvingly notes that Keene writes “fiction that smacks you in the face” (Johnson 2015). An often-used setting for Keene is a postapocalyptic earth, where everyday people must find a way to survive harsh and brutal locales filled with monsters. Keene commonly explores the theme of faith in his writings, be it in the form of characters who worship strange and monstrous creatures or the author’s requirement that his own readers have faith that his characters will survive and complete their goals.

Keene remains an active participant of the horror genre with his novels, stories, essays and blog posts, weekly podcasts, and Internet presence. He has won multiple Stokers and was given the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award in 2014.

Chun H. Lee

See also: Bram Stoker Award; King, Stephen; Lovecraft, H. P.; Matheson, Richard; Zombies; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Comics.

Further Reading

Athitakis, Mark. 2004. “Horror Books: The Old Horror and the New Dark Fantasy.” New York Times. October 31. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/books/review/horror-books-the-old-horror-and-the-new-dark-fantasy.html?_r=0.

“Brian Keene.” 2009. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

The Horror Show with Brian Keene. Accessed August 22, 2016. http://www.thehorrorshowwithbriankeene.com.

Johnson, Andrea. 2015. “Interview with Brian Keene.” Apex Magazine. February 3. http://www.apex-magazine.com/interview-with-brian-keene.

KETCHUM, JACK (1946–)

Jack Ketchum is the pseudonym for Dallas Mayr, an American writer who has been given the title “the scariest guy in America” by Stephen King. Ketchum is a man who has held numerous titles, including actor, singer, and lumber salesman. He also worked at Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where he was responsible for acquiring Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Ketchum himself is a prolific writer who has written more than twenty novels and novellas, five of which have been turned into movies.

In the 1980s, Ketchum’s fiction contributed to the splatterpunk movement in the horror genre, characterized by extreme violence and visceral scenes of unflinching horror. Off Season, published in 1980 by Ballantine, established his reputation as one of the originators of extreme horror, as it tells the story of a group of tourists who encounter a family of cannibals in the woods. The novel also establishes a common theme in Ketchum’s works: breaking down the ideas of civilization and savagery by examining the kind of circumstances in which normally peaceable people can turn to violence. Though the novel sold over 250,000 copies, it was also widely panned when readers were outraged at the gruesome detail in which Ketchum described the depravity of his characters. The publisher initially requested that Ketchum trim some of the excessive gore from his book; eventually, Ballantine retreated altogether, refusing any more printings after the first run, despite strong sales for the first-time novelist. His second novel, Hide and Seek, which was published in 1984, is a more restrained book, though his career had not yet recovered from Off Season. He continued to write, producing Cover (1987) and She Wakes (1989), a slight departure from true horror, focusing more on the supernatural. Ketchum returned to his original affinity for excessive gore and detailed, sometimes sexual violence with one of his more infamous novels, The Girl Next Door (1989), which portrays in brutal detail the torture and eventual murder of a teenage girl. Joyride (1994) and Stranglehold (1995) followed before Ketchum would begin to receive critical acclaim for his writing.

Ketchum’s 1994 story “The Box” won him his first Bram Stoker Award for short fiction. The following years would be filled with award nominations. Right to Life (1999), a novella published by Cemetery Dance, was nominated for another Bram Stoker Award, this time for Best Long Fiction, as was Gone (2000, nominated for Best Short Fiction) and The Lost (2001, for Best Novel). He would win the Bram Stoker again—twice—in 2003 for Peaceable Kingdom, which won Best Collection, and Closing Time, which won Best Long Fiction. Ketchum’s other novels include Red (1995), Ladies’ Night (1997), The Crossings (2003), and Old Flames (2008); he also wrote Masks (1999), with Edward Lee, and Triage (2001), a collection of three novellas, written with Edward Lee and Richard Laymon. Ketchum’s short fiction has been included in numerous collections and magazines.

Many of Ketchum’s stories and novels have been adapted into films, including The Lost (2006), The Girl Next Door (2007), Red (2008), and The Offspring (2009). In 2008, Ketchum began a collaboration with horror film director Lucky McKee, director of movies such as May and All Cheerleaders Die. McKee was the original director of Red, and he was instrumental in bringing the novel to the screen; however, after production issues, McKee withdrew and was replaced by director Trygve Allister Diesen. McKee and Ketchum continued their collaboration, though, writing several books together: The Woman (2010), I’m Not Sam (2012), and The Secret Lives of Souls: A Novel (2016). I’m Not Sam was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella. McKee directed the film version of The Woman, which caused a controversy when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. The story itself is a brutal one. The Woman tells the story of a seemingly average suburban family that finds a feral woman who has been living in the woods. When they try to civilize her, the line between savage and savior becomes unclear. Like many of Ketchum’s works, its violence is unflinching, particularly in its scenes depicting rape and sexual torture; as such, the film drew attention when a theatergoer walked out during a screening, vocally protesting what he considered gratuitous cruelty and misogyny. The rant went viral when a video was posted on YouTube. Even with the negative press, The Woman still did well on the festival circuit, winning the Grand Prize and the Audience Award at the Festival Européen du Film Fantastique de Strasbourg. Ketchum’s short story “The Box” was adapted for the horror anthology XX (2016), a collection of short horror films all directed by women, with female leads. “The Box” is directed by Jovanka Vuckovic. Ketchum can be seen in several of his films as an actor in small roles.

Ketchum was the 2011 Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award and lifetime membership status from the Horror Writer’s Association. He has collected some of his life stories and successes in his memoir, Book of Souls. Many of his books, including the original, fully detailed version of Off Season, have been republished, reintroducing readers to the man who has been called the “godfather of splatterpunk.”

Lisa Kröger

See also: Bram Stoker Award; The Girl Next Door; Shirley Jackson Awards; Splatterpunk.

Further Reading

Boden, John. 2012. “Digging in the Dirt: A Conversation with Jack Ketchum.” Shock Totem 5.

Castleberry, Gary. “The Scariest Man in America: An Interview with Jack Ketchum.” Living Dead 4: 62–64.

Hall, Tina. 2013. “Jack Ketchum.” The Damned Book of Interviews. Hertford, NC: Crossroad Press. Kindle edition.

Hatfull, Jonathan. 2013. “Jack Ketchum on Human Monsters and Writing Horror.” SciFiNow, October 16. http://www.scifinow.co.uk/interviews/jack-ketchum-on-human-monsters-and-writing-horror.

Kelleghan, Fiona. 2003. “Ketchum, Jack 1946–.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler. 2nd ed., vol. 2, 517–523. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Ketchum, Jack. 2011. Book of Souls. Hertford, NC: Crossroad Press. Kindle edition.

KIERNAN, CAITLÍN R. (1964–)

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan is an Irish American author who has produced a large, influential, and celebrated body of speculative fiction, most of it in a weird or dark fantastic vein. Kiernan has written in a wide variety of forms and genres, having published ten novels and more than two hundred works of short fiction in addition to scripting the comic book series The Dreaming (1996–2000, a series that spun off from Neil Gaiman’s seminal Sandman books) and Alabaster (2013–2016, a series that follows Dancy Flammarion, a character who first appears in Kiernan’s 2003 novel Threshold). Before turning to writing fiction full time, Kiernan trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, working both in a museum and as a university lecturer. Her scientific background is reflected in her research-intensive and precisely observational approach to fiction. Her career as a professional author began with the story “Persephone” in 1995, and her first novel, Silk, was published to critical acclaim in 1998. Her more recent, and thematically interlinked, novels The Red Tree (2008) and The Drowning Girl (2012) are Kiernan’s most stylistically and structurally complex to date, and both have been optioned for development as feature films.

Kiernan’s literary influences are numerous and include such varied figures as William Faulkner, Peter Straub, Angela Carter, William S. Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, Arthur Machen, and Lewis Carroll. However, probably the most important in shaping her work have been H. P. Lovecraft, whose concepts of cosmic indifferentism and deep time are central themes in Kiernan’s fiction, and Shirley Jackson, whose understated modernization of the female Gothic informs Kiernan’s sympathetic and immersive approach to character.

Despite its scope and diversity, over the course of her career Kiernan’s writing has been unified by a number of shared characteristics. Inspired by the work of Swiss analytic psychologist C. G. Jung and American anomalous researcher Charles Fort, her approach fuses autobiography with fiction, coincidence with causality, randomness with pattern, and subject with object. She is known for testing the limits of genre writing and for experimenting with narrative convention. While Kiernan eschews foregrounding identity politics, viewing herself as chiefly “a writer” rather than a female writer or a queer writer, her experience as a transsexual and lesbian nevertheless deeply infuses her fiction. Kiernan often queers tropes and literary traditions associated with Gothic and horror fiction, an approach she describes as a “feminizing of the weird.” Her fiction interrogates received wisdom not just about the relationship between gender and literary genre, but about that between sexuality and life, human as well as alien. In this respect, her work is more closely related to that of earlier speculative fiction writers James Tiptree Jr. and Octavia E. Butler than to that of contemporary horror writers such as Ramsey Campbell or Thomas Ligotti, despite the importance both these latter figures have had in shaping Kiernan’s visions of the weird.

Unlike Campbell or Ligotti, who are largely content with the label “horror writer,” Kiernan has consistently rejected it, viewing it as primarily an outdated marketing category that creates distorted expectations contrary to her authorial intentions. Rather than scaring, shocking, or disturbing the reader, Kiernan’s writing is primarily concerned with empathetically portraying the alien, the outsider, and the other, and with expanding, in her words, readers’ “mental and moral horizons” (Baker 2012). It was this emphasis on imaginative identification and empathy that, early in her career, led Neil Gaiman to characterize her as “the poet and bard of the wasted and lost” (Alexander 2013), and Jeff VanderMeer to declare more recently that “more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy” (VanderMeer 2012).

Despite her rejection of the label “horror,” Kiernan’s emphasis on psychological alienation, dark eroticism, and the transgression of social, cultural, and generic boundaries, as well as her frequently harrowing use of supernatural elements, has led to her fiction’s enthusiastic reception by self-identified readers and writers of horror. This is reflected in the number of genre awards that Kiernan’s work has accumulated, including two Bram Stoker Awards, four International Horror Guild Awards, as well as two James Tiptree Jr. Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, and a Locus Award.

Sean Moreland

See also: Barker, Clive; Brite, Poppy Z.; Butler, Octavia E.; Campbell, Ramsey; The Drowning Girl; Jackson, Shirley; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Straub, Peter; VanderMeer, Jeff; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

Further Reading

Alexander, Niall. 2013. “Short Fiction Spotlight: The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories.” Tor.com, November 26. http://www.tor.com/2013/11/26/short-fiction-spotlight-the-apes-wife-and-other-stories.

Baker, Bill. 2012. “A Pale Rider Approaches: Interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan.” TMR, April 5. http://www.themortonreport.com/books/news/comics-a-pale-rider-approaches.

“Caitlin R. Kiernan.” 2015. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

Jones, Jeremy. 2010. “Finding the Language I Need: An Interview with Caitlín R. Kiernan.” Clarkesworld 45. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kiernan_interview.

Mann, James. 2002. “Caitlín R. Kiernan: Pain, Wonder, and Really Old Things.” Ink19, March 28. http://ink19.com/2002/03/magazine/interviews/caitlin-r-kiernan.

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2012. “Caitlín R. Kiernan on Weird Fiction.” Weird Fiction Review, March 12. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/interview-caitlin-r-kiernan-on-weird-fiction.

An Interview with Caitlín R. Kiernan

October 2016

In this interview Kiernan talks about her experiences as an author whose career was born at the dawn of the Internet age, and who has therefore had a front-row seat to, and a personal stake in, the dramatic changes that have rocked the publishing field since then. She also talks about some of her primary literary influences—specifically, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter, and Harlan Ellison—and she discusses how her lifelong interests in religion, psychology, and the weird and paranormal have fueled her fiction. She also offers a rich list of recommended horror reading, even as she explains why she has consistently rejected the label of “horror author” for herself.

Matt Cardin: Your career as a published author was launched at a highly significant cultural inflection point, right at the beginning of the Internet era and the end of the twentieth century. Here in the second decade of the twenty-first century, what are some of the significant transformations in the literary environment that strike you as particularly momentous, whether on the publishing end or the purely literary end (as in, evolutionary changes in what’s written or how it is written)? Especially when it comes to horror fiction, dark fantasy, and the like, how have things changed? Specifically, how have they changed for you?

Caitlín R. Kiernan: I’m really not the person to ask about how technology has changed publishing on a wide scale. I have too little contact with the wider world of publishing to be able to answer that question. Generally speaking, I choose not to have that sort of contact. But it’s true that the emergence of the Internet at the beginning of my career had an enormous impact on the way things played out for me. I was online beginning in 1994, networking and promoting my writing, and in October 1995 I became one of the very first authors with a website, which I designed and built myself and shared with Billy Martin (aka “Poppy Z. Brite”). By 2001, I had a daily blog, which, fifteen years later, I’m still keeping, and it has been a very important promotional tool. In 2005, I started Sirenia Digest, which has been enormously important to my staying afloat financially, has given me a fantastic venue for my short fiction, and never would have worked as a print publication. In 2011, I used Kickstarter to raise $4,000 to fund a book trailer to support The Drowning Girl. And now I’m using Patreon to keep the bills paid while I write my next novel. So, yes, significant and momentous stuff.

I have a pretty classic love-hate relationship with the Internet, with computers in general, with the way they’ve changed the world and the way they’ve changed writing. I pine for fountain pens and manual typewriters, but since 1992—when I was twenty-eight years old—I’ve composed almost every word I’ve written on Apple computers. Indeed, the way I write, the evolution of my style, my voice, is largely facilitated by MS Word, and also the way I’m obsessed with sentence-level prose and getting a story or novel perfect in the first draft—I couldn’t do that, not really, on a typewriter. This is the sort of thing I’m loathe to admit, but it’s true.

MC: You have generally rejected the label of horror author even though you and your work have remained consistently associated with the field bearing that name. With the 1980s and 1990s horror publishing boom receding ever more fully and definitively in history’s rear view mirror, and with genre boundaries growing ever more porous, has your position on this changed at all? Or does it have little to do with the current state of publishing categories and genre outlines at any given moment?

CRK: No, it hasn’t changed, not at all. If anything, I believe more firmly than ever that the issue of genre horror has very little relevance to my writing. The primary goal of my work as a writer has never been about instilling horror or writing scary stories, and I think that’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s actually familiar with my work. From the beginning, I saw that getting pegged as a horror writer would not only be inaccurate, but it would be extremely limiting. I got pegged as a horror writer, regardless. I know that’s how most people think of me. Never mind all the science fiction and fantasy and noir and what have you that I’ve published—my first two short fiction sales were SF—I still got pegged as a horror writer, and it happened largely because my publishers needed a way to market me and because readers are very open to the categories that publishers create to sell them things. But to try and accurately characterize the bulk of what I’ve written as “horror,” as if I’m setting about to elicit above all else this one emotion, that’s nonsense. If you have to have a shoebox, you can call my fiction dark, or weird, or you can use Robert Aickman’s suitably vague “strange stories,” but I’m not a horror writer. To me, that conjures up images of foil-embossed, blood-spattered paperbacks and slasher films and jump scares, and that’s just not what I’ve ever been about. I’m working, and I have always worked—and I certainly hope this is true—with a much broader spectrum of human emotion and experience than fear and the evocation of horror.

MC: Your literary influences have included, among others, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison—towering figures, all. What have you found especially powerful, memorable, and moving about these authors?

CRK: I don’t know if I can put my finger on some commonality that unites the authors who have been the greatest influence on my own work. They’re a very diverse bunch. Shirley Jackson, she helped me learn how to write about insanity and longing and loss and the treachery of social mores. Angela Carter opened up fairy tales for me, and she’s one of the writers who taught me how to approach sex and informed the feminist aspects of my writing. Lovecraft nurtured my fascination with deep time and the insignificance of humanity on a cosmic scale—as did the existentialist philosophers, the modernist authors, and a great number of science writers. Very early on, when I was just a kid, Ray Bradbury ignited my fascination with language. I was immediately in awe of his magic with words, and I think it really was like seeing a magician and becoming obsessed with figuring out how the tricks are done and wanting to go them all one better. And Harlan Ellison, when I discovered him it was pretty much a wrecking ball to my small-town Southern sensibilities, someone who shows up with a book like Deathbird Stories or a tale like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and says, hey kid, forget everything you thought you knew about writing, because—look at what I can do. That happened to me again in college with James Joyce and with the magical realists. For me, it really has been a matter of standing on the shoulders of giants. Without these people I might still have become a writer, but whatever I’d have done in the absence of their influences would have looked nothing at all like what I’m doing now, what I’ve done over the past quarter century.

MC: Before becoming a writer, you had a career as a scientist. You have also been deeply interested in and influenced by the likes of Carl Jung and Charles Fort. Some might sense a tension here. How do you make sense of the connections among these things, centered in your own self and authorial sensibility? And is there perhaps something in this linkage of hard science, depth psychology, and the paranormal or supernatural that provides an especially fertile ground for growing, and appreciating, and understanding, works of fiction centered in horror, darkness, dreams, nightmares, and the fantastic?

CRK: I come from a background rife with superstition and religion. I was raised, by turns, a Catholic and a Methodist, in a Southern Appalachian environment where ghosts were real and demons were real and where hanging a dead snake in a tree would make it rain. Also, I grew up in the seventies, a decade obsessed with everything from reincarnation to Atlantis to Bigfoot to claims that ancient aliens had built the pyramids. And I was crazy about that stuff when I was young. I was raised in an environment that was, very often, hostile to science, especially to evolutionary biology and paleontology and historical geology, and I spent years learning that I had to figure out for myself what was true. Part of that was losing my faith in Christianity and learning, mostly on my own, critical thought and the scientific method. I had a junior high school earth science teacher who was a Pentecostal minister and wouldn’t teach the parts of the textbook that he disagreed with, which was most of it. But, I think that no matter how much I have moved away from or outgrown those primitive, childish ways of seeing the world, those paradigms helped shape me. On some level, all that stuff is still there. I still get a thrill when I read claims of the paranormal, and I still feel awe at the sight of a church steeple. In fact, I think that much of what I’ve written has arisen from the frisson created by the conflict between the beliefs of my childhood and the way that I see the world as an adult. I don’t think anyone can have been deeply religious and ever be free of those emotions and fears that religion has evolved to satisfy, ever be shed of what are, essentially, religious reactions to the world around them.

As for Jung—and also Joseph Campbell, James Frazer, and Bruno Bettelheim—they helped me understand the fundamental connections between myth and the way that the human mind works, which is, for me, like the Rosetta Stone or a source code for understanding all fantastic fiction, including science fiction and dark fiction. All writers should study human psychology and anthropology, just as surely as they should study the work of other authors—and especially if you want to understand primal emotions like fear, awe, terror, dread, and so forth. I found Jung’s approach especially useful in grappling with the slippery mess that is the human psyche. Dreams figure very prominently in my fiction, and, in part, that’s because Jung and Freud taught me that dreams cut the crap and get to the heart of the matter. They’re the way we tell ourselves the truths our conscious minds are trying to avoid. Which is, of course, the object of dark and weird fiction, to entice us to look at things we’d rather not.

MC: In addition to the authors already named, what are some additional authors and works that you would recommend to those who are looking to explore the horror wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important and profound both for this genre and for literature as a whole, and why?

CRK: I’d start with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Nothing more important or more amazing has been published since House of Leaves was published sixteen years ago. Also, if you can find the early novels of Kathe Koja—The Cipher (1991), Skin (1993), Strange Angels (1994)—beautiful and brilliant and sadly out of print. Same for T. E .D. Klein’s The Ceremonies (1984) and Dark Gods (1985), brilliant and sadly out of print. Almost everything by Ramsey Campbell, but especially The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and Ancient Images (1989). Thomas Ligotti, obviously. Peter Straub, obviously, particularly Ghost Story (1979). Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984), Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), and Clive Barker’s short fiction. More recently, I’ll point to Jeff VanderMeer, everything from City of Saints and Madmen (2004) to The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014). He’s not a “horror writer,” either, but he’s doing a lot of the same things I’m doing, and often doing it better. Same for Michael Cisco, who’s published a series of embarrassingly brilliant, surreal novels, beginning with The Divinity Student (1999). Gemma Files (Experimental Film, 2015) and Livia Llewellyn (Furnace, 2016), those are two names devotees of macabre fiction should be watching.

KING, STEPHEN (1947–)

Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror fiction. The most popular and influential horror author of the twentieth century, he has sold upwards of 350 million books and ranks high on the list of best-selling authors of all time, regardless of genre. King is the winner of numerous prizes, including multiple Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2003 he was awarded the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, a decision that was met with both applause and derision from the critical establishment. While he is predominantly considered a horror author, King’s work frequently crosses generic boundaries, including traces of science fiction, fantasy, the thriller, and the Western, as well as several nonfiction reflections on genre and the writer’s craft.

King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He has spent most of his life in Maine and has set the great majority of his books there. He wrote avidly from a young age and sold his first story to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. This story, “The Glass Elevator,” is collected, along with much unpublished material, juvenilia, and errata, in the University of Maine Library.

King’s career as a novelist began with the publication of Carrie in 1974. This short novel focuses on the suffering of the titular character at the hands of her high school peers and maniacally religious mother. A particularly traumatic episode at the beginning of the novel heralds the emergence of Carrie’s latent telekinetic abilities. Another grand act of adolescent cruelty prompts Carrie to release the full extent of her powers, bringing an apocalyptic end to the school and town that have tormented her. Carrie is noteworthy for the prominence and range of its female voices. The bulk of the novel is seen through a female gaze, belonging to either Carrie, her mother, or Carrie’s popular but benevolent high school classmate Susan Snell. King has been criticized throughout his career for his inability to write women, so it is interesting to note that he entered the published market with such a distinctly female-centric novel. In Carrie, men are largely peripheral and are shown to be almost entirely baffled by or actively hostile to the women in their lives. King’s own inexperience in writing women nearly resulted in his discarding Carrie after only a few chapters. His wife, Tabitha, rescued the pages from the trash and encouraged him to continue. He did, and the paperback rights for the novel were bought for $400,000.

Carrie was followed by ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977), both of which are now regarded as key texts in the birth of contemporary horror fiction. ’Salem’s Lot established the recurrent King conceit of great evil being visited upon a small New England town, while The Shining has attained “classic” status. It is King’s fourth novel, however, that best expresses the scale of his early ambition.

The Stand (1978) is often considered King’s magnum opus, and fans frequently credit it as their favorite among his novels. A sprawling, postapocalyptic fantasy, The Stand allows King the space to elaborate on the character building and textured back story that are hallmarks of his work. The genre-melding impulse is already evident, with the science fiction of a pandemic flu apocalypse giving way to supernatural fantasy in the novel’s second half. The Stand is a big book in both length and theme, and it is key to the 1980s vogue for expansive horror-fantasy “epics,” such as Robert McCammon’s Swan Song (1987) and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld (1987). Its influence is also evident in such recent epics as Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) and Joe Hill’s The Fireman (2016).

The Stand introduces the recurrent antagonist Randall Flagg, who is an embodiment of unspecified evil, and who appears in a number of King novels, including The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), Hearts in Atlantis (1999), and the eight-volume Dark Tower series (1982–2004). Often going by other names (but usually with the initials R. F.), Flagg is part of King’s multiverse. This intertextual network centers on the eponymous “Dark Tower,” a construct that links the various worlds presented in King’s fiction. Some novels are more obviously included within this shared universe. The Talisman (1984), It (1986), Insomnia (1994), and Hearts in Atlantis are closely related to the world of The Dark Tower and its mythology. Flagg is not the only recurrent character; Father Donald Callahan reappears in the latter books of The Dark Tower, having been presumed dead at the end of ’Salem’s Lot, while other minor connections link much of King’s oeuvre.

This connective mythology illustrates King’s debt to the work of the iconic early twentieth-century American horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, King’s multiverse alludes to trans-dimensional entities, largely organized under the leadership of the pan-dimensional antagonist “The Crimson King.” Randall Flagg is one such being, as is Pennywise the Clown, the antagonist of It, who, in a fashion typical of Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial monstrosities, predates humankind’s appearance on earth, and whose true physical form cannot be perceived by human cognition.

The general influence of Lovecraft is clearly evident in such things, but King has also dabbled more directly in the Lovecraftian world in short fiction such as “Jerusalem’s Lot” (1978), “Crouch End” (1980), and “N” (2008). In Danse Macabre, King’s nonfiction treatise on the history of horror, he describes his discovery of his father’s collection of Lovecraftian pulps as “my first encounter with serious fantasy-horror” (King 1981, 102). Throughout the book he reiterates the tremendous impact that Lovecraft has had on twentieth-century horror, including his own.

However, King’s style would seem to fit uneasily with Lovecraft’s extravagant cosmic themes. King’s fiction is concerned with the banal and the prosaic: the mundane conversations and petty angst of modern American small-town life. It is this realist backdrop that accentuates the inevitable supernatural disruption in his novels and stories. He cites the direct influence of nonhorror authors such as Frank Norris, but his most obvious antecedents are Richard Matheson and Shirley Jackson, both of whom worked in horror. King has repeatedly credited Matheson as the author who most influenced his own writing, while Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) has a substantial presence in King’s early work. The rain of stones that falls upon Carrie White’s house is lifted almost wholly from an episode in Jackson’s novel, while Hill House itself is the bedrock for the recurrent King motif of “the bad place.” The Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, as well as numerous other examples, are versions of “the bad place,” where the residue of past evils exerts its potency upon the present. Other essential themes in King’s fiction are memory, sexual abuse, and the strength (and evils) of community; each appears in some guise across the breadth of his work.

More persistent still is his focus on childhood and creativity. Children play an integral part in King’s horror. In his short story “Children of the Corn”—published in his short fiction collection Night Shift (1978)—two adults stumble across an isolated town populated entirely by a cult of murderous children. The story has entered into modern popular culture as an early example of the now familiar trope of the “scary child.” It is an anomaly in King’s oeuvre, however, as his fiction more commonly emphasizes the romance, loyalty, and quiet heroism of childhood. This is foremost in It and the novella The Body (1982), better known through its adaptation into the film Stand by Me (1986). These stories render childhood in nostalgic hues. As the protagonist of The Body says: “I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” (King 1982, 505).

Most of all, King is interested in the imaginative capacity and resilience of children. Children are able to accept and confront the horrors of King’s fiction because their imaginations have not yet atrophied. As Heidi Strengell points out: “Adults without imagination are the worst of his monsters” (Strengell 2005, 14). They are opposed by children and by adults who retain their childhood capacities for romance. Such adult characters are almost without exception represented as writers.

This focus on writers forms a distinct trope of its own in King’s work, as a great number of his protagonists are authors. Through them he indulges in commentary on both the craft and the business of writing, often in defense of genre and accessibility. In ’Salem’s Lot, King’s first author protagonist, Ben Mears, describes literary analysis as an “intellectual game of capture-the-flag” (King 1975, 171). Mears dreams about selling a story to Playboy but laments that “they only do authors if their books are big on campus” (22). This antiacademic stance has waned in King’s later work, but his early novels’ staunch defense of the popular suggests an insecurity about his own literary status—something he has consistently denied. Nonetheless, the issue reaches a climax in the publication of Misery (1987) and The Dark Half (1989). These novels portray authors for whom writing accrues very real, very scary consequence. In The Dark Half, the protagonist, Thad Beaumont, is tormented by the corporeal manifestation of his pseudonym, George Stark, whom he has recently killed off.

The Dark Half seems to be a clear extension of King’s revelation and termination of his own pseudonym. For years King had written under the name of Richard Bachman, producing tight, linear thrillers that avoid the grand canvases of King’s typical work. These four short novels are collected in The Bachman Books (1985). However, when one of the novels, Rage, was found in the locker of a Columbine High School shooter, King withdrew it from publication. All subsequent editions of The Bachman Books omit Rage.

King has continued to be a best seller, and a huge proportion of his fiction has been adapted to film. Though few filmmakers are able to convey the psychological interiority of King’s fiction, a few exceptional films have been made from his work. Notable examples include The Shining (1980), Stand by Me (1986), The Green Mile (1999), and The Mist (2007). Of all King adaptations, perhaps the best known and most loved is The Shawshank Redemption (1994), directed by Frank Darabont, who also adapted the screenplay from King’s novel (and who wrote and directed the adaptations of The Green Mile and The Mist as well). There is a bit of irony in the fact that Shawshank is credited as one of the greatest films ever made, since its source material is a minor novella from a relatively obscure King collection, Different Seasons (1982).

In 1999 King suffered a severe accident when he was hit by a car while walking in rural Maine. He suffered extensive and profound injuries, and his retirement was debated. But in the end he went only one year without releasing a novel, and then returned with Dreamcatcher in 2001. By his own admission, this novel is a failure, marred by his dependence on painkillers. In 2002 he released Black House, a sequel to The Talisman (1984), both of which he wrote in collaboration with fellow horror author Peter Straub.

Following Black House, King finally completed his prolonged Dark Tower series, and he has not slowed down in the years since. Though his more recent novels are less confined to the horror genre, they retain a fascination with the macabre and the dark potential of society. Under the Dome (2009) is a particular instance of this, depicting a town cut off from the outside world by a strange, transparent dome. It feels like a return to King’s roots, filled with eccentric characters, a conflict between the everyman and the powerful, and a richly drawn community. When King also returned to the world of The Shining in its long-gestated sequel, Doctor Sleep (2013), it almost seemed as if he had exhausted his creative resources. However, he subsequently completed an entirely new trilogy of crime thrillers featuring detective Bill Hodges. The final installment, End of Watch (2016), marries the streamlined thrills of the Bachman books with King’s own brand of supernatural horror. Tonally, it is something King has not attempted before, and it shows that although he is now in his fifth decade as an author, he is far from done. He has also found new life in collaboration with his sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, both of whom have emerged as professional authors. Hill, in particular, has catapulted into the foreground of contemporary horror, and his novel N0S4A2 intersects with his father’s work, both in theme and in direct reference to some of King’s most iconic characters.

In light of King’s many accomplishments, it is reasonable to speculate that there may never be another author who taps into the public consciousness in quite the same way that he has done. At the height of his popularity, he was a pop-culture icon. Though he may no longer reign quite so high in the best-seller hierarchy, his name still connotes excellence in the genre. The longevity of his career also gives his work added importance, as he was writing horror and mapping collective anxieties throughout some of the most tumultuous decades of American social life.

Neil McRobert

See also: Barker, Clive; Cthulhu Mythos; The Dark Tower; Hill, Joe; It; Jackson, Shirley; Lovecraftian Horror; Matheson, Richard; Misery; Night Shift; The Shining; Straub, Peter; Vampires.

Further Reading

Beahm, George, ed. 2015. The Stephen King Companion: Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror. New York: Thomas Dunn Books.

Gatta, John. 2000. “Stephen King.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement 5, edited by Jay Parini. Scribner Writers Series. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Hill, Joe. 2013. N0S4A2. New York: HarperCollins.

Indick, Ben P. 1982. “King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 153–167. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller. Rpt. in Children’s Literature Review, vol. 194, 2015, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.

King, Stephen. 1975. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday.

King, Stephen. 1982. Different Seasons. New York: Viking.

King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner.

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

Magistrale, Tony. 1988. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University.

Sears, John. 2011. Stephen King’s Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Strengell, Heidi. 2005. Dissecting Stephen King: From Gothic to Literary Naturalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller. 1988. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill.

THE KING IN YELLOW

The King in Yellow (1895) is a story collection by Robert W. Chambers. It contains a time-slip romance, a group of poems, several mainstream stories, and, most importantly, four interconnected stories of supernatural horror set against a common mythological backdrop. It holds an important niche in the genre following Edgar Allan Poe and predating the modern era. The four interconnected stories revolve around a fictitious play titled The King in Yellow, which drives its readers to a state of illness and possibly insanity. It leaves its readers in a dazed state, speaking of such things as Hastur, Hali, Alar, the Pallid Mask, Carcosa, and the Mystery of the Hyades, terms that are never explained but serve to unify the stories. This common background anticipates Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but Lovecraft discovered the book late, after creating his mythos. The word “yellow” alludes to the “Yellow Nineties” and to contemporary French Decadent literature, as does the character name “Wilde.”

Chambers’s oblique descriptions of the title play in The King in Yellow generate a powerful aura of sinister mystery. The narrator of “The Repairer of Reputations,” for example, describes his experience of reading the play like this:

I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. (Chambers 1902, 6–7)

Matt Cardin

Source: Chambers, Robert W. 1902. The King in Yellow. New York: Harper & Brothers.

“The Repairer of Reputations” is set in a future (1920) that may be a product of the narrator’s imagination. The play provides him and his cohort, Wilde, with a plan to take over the United States. “The Mask” involves a chemical solution that turns living tissue to stone. The play impacts the relationship of the sculptor narrator with his model. His sculpture, “The Fates,” also appears in the previous story. In “In the Court of the Dragon,” the play opens the narrator’s mind to a different and deadly plane of existence. In “The Yellow Sign,” an artist and his model find the eponymous sign from the play, read the play, and suffer the consequences at the hands of a living corpse.

The unrelated fantasy “The Demoiselle D’Ys” is a haunting romance involving a modern man and a medieval woman. It has a human character named Hastur.

Chambers borrowed many mysterious terms from two stories by Ambrose Bierce to embellish his mythology. In Bierce’s “Haita the Shepherd,” Hastur is a benign god of shepherds. Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” quotes the fictional author Hali and also contains references to Aldebaran, the Hyades, and Alar. Chambers repurposed Bierce’s terms, making Hali a lake and Carcosa a city in the sky, and leaving the meaning of many terms, such as Hastur and Alar, unexplained.

Lovecraft alluded to these names in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930). They were later employed by August Derleth, who reimagined Hastur as an evil entity.

Thorns (1967) by Robert Silverberg alludes to The King in Yellow, and James Blish in “More Light” (1970) attempts to write out the actual play. The first season of the HBO television series True Detective (2014) alludes to the book and created a surge in its popularity.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

Further Reading

Chambers, Robert W. 2000. The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W, Chambers, edited by S. T. Joshi. Hayward, CA: Chaosium.

Joshi, S. T. 2000. Introduction to “The Yellow Sign” and Other Stories by Robert W. Chambers, edited by S. T. Joshi, xi–xviii. Hayward, CA: Chaosium.

Punter, David. 1980. “Later American Gothic.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 268–290. London: Longman.

Weinstein, Lee. 1985. “Robert W. Chambers.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 739–745. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865–1936)

Rudyard Joseph Kipling was a popular and important English writer (he won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first English-language writer to do so) who has often been condemned for his espousal of imperialist and colonialist attitudes, though in his presentation of these he was by no means uncritical. Horror figures often and almost ubiquitously in Kipling’s work, and even the tales in such well-known juvenile works as The Jungle Book (1894) and the Just So Stories (1902) have their horrific elements: the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi battles two deadly cobras, the feral child Mowgli is abducted and must fight deadly animals, and were it not for his nose stretching, the inquisitive elephant child (in “How the Elephant Got His Trunk,” a.k.a. “The Elephant’s Child”) would have ended as food for the crocodile. Kipling’s best known work for adults is probably “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), and in it Peachey Carnehan describes being crucified between two pine trees, “as Peachey’s hand will show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn’t die. He hung there and screamed, and they took him down the next day, and said it was a miracle he wasn’t dead” (Kipling 1888, 102–103). (Carnehan has also been carrying about with him the “dried, withered head” [103] of his one-time friend Daniel Dravot.)

The horrors of untreatable and lethal sicknesses and diseases are likewise present in many of Kipling’s stories, particularly those set in India, a country with whose people and beliefs Kipling was familiar: “now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously—the midday sun always excepted” (Kipling 1889, 20) states “Thrown Away” (1888), a tale of a callow suicide and the lies told following his passing. A lethal and terrible heat likewise figures in “The City of Dreadful Night” (1885), which concludes by recognizing that “the city was of Death as well as Night, after all” (Kipling 1891, 59). An energetic little boy is killed by fever in “The Story of Muhammad Din” (1886), and epidemics and the supernatural figure in “By Word of Mouth” (1887), in which the ghost of a deceased wife promises a meeting with her physician husband.

“The Mark of the Beast”: British Beasts in India

“The Mark of the Beast” (1890) is perhaps Kipling’s best-known horror story. On New Year’s Eve in Dharamsala, India, a group of English colonials get incredibly drunk, and Fleete, hitherto an amiable and inoffensive man, behaves abominably in the Temple of Hanuman, grinding his cigar into the image’s forehead and calling it the “Mark of the Beast.” A Silver Man—a disciple of Hanuman, a man so leprous that he is silver—lays his head against Fleete, leaving marks that blacken, and Fleete thereafter descends into bestial madness: he eats raw meat, grovels in the dirt, scares horses, and must be restrained from attacking others. The English doctor thinks it is hydrophobia (rabies), but Strickland, a police officer who knows much of India, captures the Silver Man with the narrator’s assistance and tortures him until he releases Fleete, whose malady disappears. The doctor is astonished, and Fleete remembers nothing of his ordeal.

This is one of Kipling’s more ambiguous stories. The title itself exemplifies this ambivalence, referring both to Fleete’s desecration and the marks caused by the leper. But there is yet another level, for the “beasts” are the colonials, and the story depicts their religious comeuppance as well as a quasi-awakening to this by the narrator. Before Fleete’s actions, he says he is fond of Hanuman, for all gods and priests have good points. Then he discovers that the Indian faiths and their magic and curses are real and devastating, and perhaps even more powerful than the British characters’ Christianity: only by descending to a lower ethical level and actively torturing the Silver Man can the narrator and Strickland restore the uneasy status quo. In the end, the narrator and his fellow colonials are as beasts.

Richard Bleiler

The living dead are encountered in the longer and more explicitly horrific “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” (1885): the feverish hero, out riding, becomes trapped in a crater inhabited by people who were declared dead from cholera but recovered in time to escape being burned; they live in grave-like burrows and survive on crows and such meat as they can scavenge, and their leader is the murderous Brahmin Gunga Dass, who takes it upon himself “to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit” (1888, 52). The dead likewise walk and assist in battle in “The Lost Legion” (The Strand, May 1893), though the narrator worries that the English victory against the Afghanis is so neat that the dead regiment “is in danger of being forgotten” (Kipling [1888] 1893). One forgets the dead at one’s peril in Kipling’s work, however, for they remain active in human affairs, and their ways are not always sympathetic.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Haggard, H. Rider; “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw”; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; “They.”

Further Reading

Bauer, Helen Pike. 1994. Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1888. The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales. Allahabad, India: A. H. Wheeler.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1889. Plain Tales from the Hills. New York: John W. Lovell Company.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1891. Life’s Handicap. London: Macmillan.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1893. Many Inventions. London: Macmillan.

Kipling, Rudyard. 2008. Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy. New York: Pegasus Books.

Mallett, Phillip. 2003. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ricketts, Harry. 2000. Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf.

KIRK, RUSSELL (1918–1994)

Best known in his lifetime as one of the chief voices of American political conservatism, Russell Amos Kirk was also the author of superb ghost stories, many with strong religious elements, which Kirk himself described as exercises in “moral imagination.” While he is often compared to M. R. James, he probably has more in common with the British fantasists and Christian writers C. S. Lewis or Charles Williams. Kirk’s conservatism is part and parcel of his fondness for the supernatural. He was as resistant to change as H. P. Lovecraft; it is no surprise that one of his books is entitled Enemies of Permanent Things.

Kirk, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, took his religion seriously. Indeed, his most famous story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” (1976; a winner of the World Fantasy Award) is explicable only in Catholic terms. The time slip, which enables the hobo protagonist to free himself of his earthly purgatory by performing a redemptive act in the past, is a miracle of divine grace.

In a sequel, “The Watchers at the Strait Gate” (1980), the hobo’s ghost returns to help a priest into the hereafter. Typically, Kirk’s ghost characters continue to play an active role after death. Something similar happens in “Saviourgate” (1976), in which the ghost of a man killed battling a spook in “Sorworth Place” turns up in a phantom street in the British city of York.

Kirk, born in Michigan, spent most of his life there, but he also had strong ties to northern Britain; he studied at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland after World War II, and he frequently used Scottish settings. Otherwise, his stories tend to be set in bleak, backwater districts in rural Michigan, which often contain nasty forces that are best left alone, as in “Behind the Stumps” (1950), where an obnoxious census-taker comes to a bad end through his persistence. Of course dangerous survivals are to be discovered in Scotland too, as the burglar protagonist of “Balgrummo’s Hell” (1967) discovers when he tries to steal valuable paintings from a decaying manor in which a man has been suspended in a timeless hell for fifty years.

Kirk’s first novel, The Old House of Fear (1961), partakes of Gothic conventions that date all the way back to Ann Radcliffe, but as in Radcliffe’s novels, the seeming-supernatural is explained away, even if the sense of terror remains. Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979) combines threads from his other fiction and shares many of the characters. It features Manfred Arcane, world traveler and adventurer, plus two ghosts and others arrayed against an evil cult in a castle in Scotland. This time the magic, sorcery, and glimpses of the twilit hereafter are quite real.

Kirk wrote a total of twenty-two ghost stories over a long career. He excelled in eerie details and shadowy settings, but his main interest was to depict good and evil in conflict in a dark world of the spirit.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding”; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural.

Further Reading

Birzer, Bradley J. 2015. Russell Kirk: American Conservative. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Herron, Don. 1985. “Russell Kirk: Ghost Master of Mecosta.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction 1, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

Person, James E., Jr. 1999. Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind. Lanham, MD: Madison Books.

KLEIN, T. E. D. (1947–)

Theodore Eibon Donald “Ted” Klein is an American writer and editor who came to prominence during the horror fiction boom of the 1970s and 1980s. His work has been praised for its extension of the themes and approaches of classic horror fiction, in particular the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, into the modern horror tale of the late twentieth century.

Klein had published several short stories in the early 1970s when, in 1972, his tale “The Events at Poroth Farm” appeared in an issue of the small press magazine From Beyond the Dark Gateway. It is the story of Jeremy Freirs, a young academic who has removed himself to a remote farm in New Jersey to study the classic Gothic fiction that he will be teaching that fall, and who gradually becomes aware that he is under siege by horrors that his immersion in those works has invoked. The novella is richly atmospheric and memorable for its grounding of horrors with a cosmic scope in the mundane reality of its rural setting. In 1984 Klein used it as the foundation for his novel The Ceremonies, in which Jeremy’s experiences are revealed to be part of a greater scheme being engineered by a cosmic entity named the Old One to bring about the destruction of the world. S. T. Joshi, in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writer, called the novel “a conscious adaptation of Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’” that provided “a kind of elaboration or clarification of the hints that Machen left perhaps too vague” (Joshi 1988, 330). The Ceremonies was awarded the British Fantasy Award for best novel in 1985.

Klein’s first short-fiction collection, Dark Gods (1986), featured four novellas similar in their concerns and ambitions to “The Events at Poroth Farm.” “Petey” (1979) is a semi-satirical tale in which guests indulging in banal small talk at a house party in Connecticut are unaware of the imminent threat posed to them by a monstrous creature raised as a pet by the house’s former owner. “Black Man with a Horn,” whose narrator is modeled on H. P. Lovecraft’s friend and colleague Frank Belknap Long, is a Cthulhu Mythos tale about a writer who has lived in the shadow of a more famous writer friend only to discover that he is doomed to suffer a horrific fate typical of those experienced by victims in his friend’s horror fiction. In “Children of the Kingdom,” an ancient race of eldritch beings that supposedly died out eons ago emerges to menace the residents of New York City during the chaos of the city’s blackout of 1977. The protagonist of “Nadelman’s God” is a man who is horrified to discover that a nihilistic poem invoking a malignant god that he wrote in his disillusioned youth is being used as a blueprint by a zealous fan to create a monstrous servant for that god. The story won the World Fantasy Award in 1986.

In 1981 Klein was tapped to serve as editor of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, a position he held until 1985. During his tenure with the magazine, Klein published the work of many writers whose careers are synonymous with the post–Stephen King horror boom. Klein himself wrote a series of pseudonymous columns for the magazine under the title “Dr. Van Helsing’s Handy Guide to Ghost Stories,” and his work as an editor informed his nonfiction guide for writing horror fiction, Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit (1988). Klein edited the true crime magazine CrimeBeat between 1991 and 1993. In 1993 he also wrote the screenplay for Dario Argento’s film Trauma. Klein’s second collection, Reassuring Tales (2006), brought together most of his previously uncollected short stories. His second novel, the urban horror story Nighttown, was announced shortly after the publication of The Ceremonies but has yet to be published.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: The Ceremonies; Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Gods; Lovecraftian Horror; Machen, Arthur; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 1988. “T(heodore) E(ibon) D(onald) Klein.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 329–330. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. “T. E. D. Klein: Urban Horror.” In The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction, 95–114. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Mariconda, Stephen J. 1986. “The Hints and Portents of T. E. D. Klein.” Studies in Weird Fiction 1 (Summer): 19–28.

Price, Robert M. “T. E. D. Klein.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 68–85. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

Winter, Douglas E. 1985. “T. E. D. Klein.” In Faces of Fear, 122–135. New York: Berkley.

KNEALE, NIGEL (1922–2006)

Nigel Kneale was the professional name used by Thomas Nigel Kneale, a British writer of fantasy and science fiction. He is best known for his work in television and movies, especially for the four films featuring his scientist Bernard Quatermass.

Kneale’s first book and sole collection of short fiction, Tomato Cain (1949), collected twenty-nine stories, several of which veer into horror and the macabre. The book’s most reprinted story, “The Pond,” concerns an eccentric who stuffs and dresses frogs for fantasy dioramas, and the just deserts served him on his last visit to the nearby pond. Three stories feature ghosts: “Minuke,” about a destructive poltergeist; “Peg,” about a fourteen-year-old ghost killed during the London Blitz who pines for contact with the living; and “The Patter of Little Feet,” in which a man is haunted by the ghost of the child his dead wife wanted but could never have. “Jeremy in the Wind” and “Oh Mirror, Mirror” both are dramatic monologues, the one spoken by a scarecrow-toting serial killer, and the other by a domineering aunt who persuades her niece to believe that she is repulsively ugly. “Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty” is a modern retelling of a classic fairy tale, while “The Tarroo-Ushtey” and “The Calculation of M’Bambwe” are contemporary folktales that hinge on the clash of science and superstition, a common theme in Kneale’s work.

The streamlined prose and tightly focused scenarios of Kneale’s short fiction anticipate his work as a screenwriter. His television play The Quatermass Experiment (1953) introduced the eponymous series scientist, a foe of bureaucrats and politicians who is sensitive to Earth’s vulnerability to hostile invasion in the nascent space age. The three Quatermass television plays, written for the BBC—The Quatermass Experiment (a.k.a. The Creeping Unknown), Quatermass II (a.k.a. Enemy from Space), and Quatermass and the Pit (a.k.a. Five Million Years to Earth)—were later adapted as feature films, as was the novel Quatermass (a.k.a. The Quatermass Conclusion). All explored the horrific implications of their alien invasion theme, the most compelling being Quatermass and the Pit, in which it is revealed that an alien race influenced human evolution millions of years ago and encoded our species with divisive aggressions that continue to express themselves in contemporary times.

Kneale also adapted George Orwell’s 1984 and Susan Hill’s ghost novel The Woman in Black as television plays in 1954 and 1989, respectively. His television play The Creature (1955) was filmed by Hammer Studios as The Abominable Snowman (1957) from his screenplay. Hammer also filmed his adaptation of Norah Lofts’s novel The Devil’s Own (1960) as The Witches (1966). His other memorable adaptations include the television play The Stone Tape (1972) and the screenplays for First Men in the Moon (with Jan Read, 1964), Look Back in Anger (1958), and The Entertainer, the latter two both adapted from plays by John Osborne and filmed by Tony Richardson. Kneale was awarded the Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for Lifetime Achievement in 2001, and the Karl Edward Wagner Award of the British Fantasy Society in 2005.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Bram Stoker Award; The Woman in Black; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.

Further Reading

Murray, Andy. 2006. Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. Manchester, UK: Headpress.

Rolinson, Dave, and Karen Devlin. 2008. “A New Wilderness: Memory and Language in the Television Science Fiction of Nigel Kneale.” Science Fiction Film and Television 1, no. 1 (Spring): 45–65.

Westfahl, Gary. 1998. “Kneale, (Thomas) Nigel.” In St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

KOJA, KATHE (1960–)

Kathe Koja is an American writer, playwright, director, and producer known for her highly original, intense stream-of-consciousness prose and memorably grotesque horror fiction, often set in grimy urban postindustrial landscapes and imbued with a punk/Goth subcultural sensibility. She has been associated with the “splatterpunk” school of horror fiction, and also with the New Weird.

Koja was born in Detroit, Michigan, and lives there to this day with her husband Rick Lieder, an illustrator whose work has been featured on many of her print and e-book covers. The Cipher (1991), Koja’s first novel, whose first edition featured a cover by Marshall Arisman, launched the Dell Abyss contemporary horror line in February 1991 and won that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. It also won a Locus Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for Philip K. Dick and Nebula awards, while Koja’s third novel, Skin (1993), was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

Koja’s début novel narrates the story of Nicholas and Nakota, mired in an unhappy relationship, who discover a strange hole that grotesquely transforms everything that enters it, including human flesh. This was followed by Bad Brains (1992), Skin, Strange Angels (1994), and Kink (1996), all featuring tormented artistic outsiders who get pulled into bizarre and often harmful relationships with themselves and each other. Koja also compiled sixteen of her short stories in Extremities (1998), which had previously been published in magazines and collections such as Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dark Voices, Omni, and A Whisper of Blood. She has also collaborated with science fiction author Barry Malzberg on a number of short fictions. In the early 2000s she produced several fictions for young adults, including Straydog (2002), Buddha Boy (2003), The Blue Mirror (2004), Talk (2005), Going Under (2006), Kissing the Bee (2007), and Headlong (2008). She has also published a trilogy—Under the Poppy (2010), The Mercury Waltz (2014), The Bastards’ Paradise (2015)—and a novel about Christopher Marlowe. In addition to her authorial work, she founded the immersive ensemble nerve, along with Loudermilk Productions, to create and perform works of her own devising as well as private commissions.

Koja’s extraordinary, sensuous style has repeatedly been described as a distinctive “voice” and, as Paula Guran remarks, can only be presented accurately by providing a sample (Guran 1998). Here, for example, is a passage from Skin, in which welder Tess Bajac first encounters the avant-garde performance artist troupe for which she will eventually create kinetic sculptures, including dancer Bibi Bloss, who becomes Tess’s lover:

Sandrine changing the tape and now the music began, a spare rhythm, simple drum beat slow but somehow unsettling, a moment’s close listening to discern why: deliberately uneven, it ran ¾ then skipped, a stuttering but no pattern even in that. Bibi in front, the others scattered triangular around her, all four heads down, arms hanging bonelessly loose. Tess saw a muscle moving in Bibi’s thigh, was she consciously keeping time and how could she, there was no time to keep. And a keening, for a startled moment she thought it was coming from the tape but no, it was them, all three of the women in the same painful note, only Paul silent and then it was Bibi moving forward, still keening, still bent and now crouching, half her body frozen like a stroke patient, like a corpse, the other women swaying silent on their feet, arms like wind-cracked branches and Paul crablike, mouth open in Kabuki grimace as he crept sideways to Bibi, still in her terrible stasis, still keening like the warning of disaster unavoidable and then as Paul’s outstretched arm reached the barest periphery of her skin, the flat landscape of her belly, she struck him, not in pantomime, not with an actor’s false violence but truly hit him hard, Tess wincing instinctively at the dull meaty sound. (Koja 1993, 23)

Koja’s work is notable for its exploration of love and obsession, as well as pain and loss in relationships, often with strongly feminist themes of women becoming especially powerful due to their suffering or monstrosity. In her story “The Neglected Garden” (1991), for example, Anne, who is being dumped by her former lover Richard, refuses to leave their house, impales herself with wire tethering her to the backyard fence, and begins an appalling transformation into a creature with flowers sprouting around her and in her mouth, and spiderwebs in her ear, even as she is somehow rotting, yet “lush with growth” (Koja 1998, 18). Richard’s increasingly abusive attempts to get rid of her finally culminate in his spraying her with pesticide, which only transforms her further into a terrifying monster with blackened eyes, lips, and snake-like tongue, which chases after him with a smile. In another funhouse mirror of family and relationship, “Teratisms,” first published in A Whisper of Blood (1991), Koja presents incestuous siblings Randle and Mitch, burdened with the care of monstrous younger brother Alex, who seems to be constantly covered in gore and who vomits out baby fingers in a fast-food restaurant.

Aalya Ahmad

See also: Body Horror; Bram Stoker Award; The Grotesque; New Weird; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

Further Reading

Arnzen, Michael A. 1995. “Behold the Funhole: Post-Structuralist Theory and Kathe Koja’s The Ciper.” Paradoxa 1, no. 3: 342–351.

Guran, Paula. 1998. “Kathe Koja: Transcendence and Transformation.” Omni Online, January. http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/archives/koja.html.

Hantke, Steffen. 1995. “Deconstructing Horror: Commodities in the Fiction of Jonathan Carroll and Kathe Koja.” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 3: 41–57.

Hantke, Steffen. 2003. “Kathe Koja.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 541–550. New York: Thomson/Gale.

Koja, Kathe. 1993. Skin. New York: Dell Abyss.

Koja, Kathe. 1998. Extremities: Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

KOONTZ, DEAN (1945–)

Dean Koontz is arguably the most famous horror writer who does not want to be regarded as a horror writer. And indeed, despite the fact that he was widely identified as one of the driving forces behind the horror publishing boom of the 1980s, much of his fiction has defied typical horror genre expectations and stereotypes. Often, his stories are profoundly spiritual or uplifting. They frequently deal with tales of love and friendship defeating the evil forces of chaos and destruction. His protagonists are highly sympathetic heroes who are not two-dimensional, cardboard cutout supermen (or superwomen), but who are instead characters possessing great depth, for whom the reader has great empathy.

Born in Everett, Pennsylvania, and raised in Bedford, Pennsylvania, Koontz was a single child in a family with an abusive alcoholic father. Koontz said in an interview about this period of his life: “As a lonely child growing up in poverty, in the shadow of a violent and alcoholic father who repeatedly threatened to kill my mother and me . . . I found relief from fear and privation only in books” (Koontz 1997, 33). He attended Shippensburg University, part of the University of Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and later taught English at Mechanicsburg High School in Pennsylvania. After publishing his first novel, Star Quest, as part of a paperback “Ace Double” in 1968, Koontz went on to write prolifically in a variety of fiction styles ranging from fantasy, science fiction, and suspense to, of course, horror. Discussing his versatility as a popular writer, Koontz claims, “I’ve not only written SF and horror but psychological suspense like Shattered [1973] . . . and caper novels like Blood Risk [1973], Surrounded [1974], and The Wall of Masks [1975] as ‘Brian Coffey.’ And international intrigue as in The Key to Midnight [1979] as ‘Leigh Nichols’” (Munster 1988, 5). Koontz, in fact, published under a variety of pseudonyms early in his literary career, including “David Axton,” “Deanna Dwyer,” “K. R. Dwyer,” “John Hill,” “Anthony North,” “Richard Paige,” “Owen West,” and “Aaron Wolfe.”

Today, Koontz may perhaps be more precisely defined as a writer of best-selling thrillers that contain elements or motifs of horror and terror within a larger narrative structure that also features a number of other popular genre tropes, such as romance, mystery, and action and adventure. Regarding his ability to work across genre boundaries, Koontz has said that “there’s an infinite way to combine genres, and some are bound to please more than others. The fun for me is the challenge of it, finding new forms of fiction, new ways of telling stories, unexpected juxtapositions of mood and material” (Morrish 1999, 3). A perfect example of Koontz’s use of “unexpected juxtapositions” can be found in his 1996 novel Ticktock (1996), which can be characterized as a wacky cross between screwball comedy and horror.

Addressing the limitations of the horror genre in an article entitled “Genre in Crisis,” Koontz stated: “When a form of writing has become as inbred and self-consuming as the horror genre in the 1980s, frankness is not well received by its practitioners . . . in a spirit of boosterism that has . . . arisen from a sub-conscious awareness of the current lack of quality in the genre” (Greenberg, Gorman, and Munster 1994, 207). Koontz attempted to address that perceived lack of quality by reinventing stale genre fiction in novels such as 1988’s Lightning. In her definitive Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, Katherine Ramsland quotes Koontz as saying, “Lightning was a bear of a novel to write because I was developing an idea that had never been used before—time travel from the past instead of from the future—plus a very unusual mix of genres” (Greenberg, Gorman, and Munster 1994, 334).

Transcendentalism of one sort or another also is an important concept in Koontz’s fiction, whether it is seventeen-year-old Slim Mackenzie of Twilight Eyes (1987), who is able to see behind the façade of evil people the goblins that reside within, or Odd Thomas (appearing in a popular series beginning with the 2003 novel of the same title), a twenty-year-old small-town fry cook who is able to see the spirits of dead people and attempts to help them move on. Koontz’s abused past as a child in a dysfunctional home also helped provide background material for such classic suspense novels as Intensity (1996), a story about twenty-six-year-old Chyna Shepherd, who is terrorized by a sociopathic madman named Edgler Vess.

Perhaps the best summation of Koontz’s efforts as a horror writer can be found in Joan G. Kotker’s study, Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion (1996), in which she argues that talking about Koontz’s work as horror is inaccurate, unless the discussion “emphasizes that in most of Koontz’s work, horror is based on the inhumanity of one human being to another rather than on stock supernatural devices” (Kotker 1996, 14). Kotker goes on to add that the reason Koontz’s fiction affects his readers so profoundly is because “there is nothing comforting about Dean Koontz’s descriptions of the horrors that we can and do inflict on each other” (Kotker 1996, 14).

Yet many of Koontz’s heroes possess profound levels of compassion and understanding for those who suffer because of their own travails. Travis Cornell and his golden retriever Einstein (a genetically engineered dog that serves as an important protagonist) in the classic thriller Watchers (1987) are effective examples of these types of characters, as is the genetically challenged Christopher Snow from Fear Nothing (1998) and Seize the Night (1999). Often, Koontz’s message to his readers is that courage and perseverance, along with love and the ability to overcome intense suffering, can triumph over the most despicable of human or inhuman behavior. Because of this foundational strain of indefatigable optimism, horror itself, for Koontz, becomes something that strengthens human will rather than destroying it.

Many film adaptations of Koontz’s novels have been produced, including Odd Thomas (2013), Phantoms (novel 1983, movie 1998), and Demon Seed (novel 1973, movie 1977). In 1996 he received the World Horror Convention’s Grandmaster Award.

Gary Hoppenstand

See also: Phantoms; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years.

Further Reading

Greenberg, Martin H., Ed Gorman, and Bill Munster, eds. 1994. The Dean Koontz Companion. New York: Berkley Books, 1994.

Koontz, Dean. 1997. “Koontz on Koontz.” In Mystery Scene 59, edited by Ed Gorman, 30–33. Cedar Rapids, IA.

Kotker, Joan G. 1996. Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Morrish, Bob. 1999. “Dean Koontz.” In Speaking of Murder, Volume II, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Berkley Prime Crime.

Munster, Bill. 1988. “Interview with Dean Koontz.” In Sudden Fear: The Horror and Dark Suspense Fiction of Dean R. Koontz, 5–31. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

KUTTNER, HENRY (1915–1958)

Henry Kuttner was an American writer best known for his contributions to Astounding Science-Fiction and other Golden Age science fiction magazines, many of which he collaborated on with his wife, C. L. Moore, under his own name and a score of pseudonyms, notably Lewis Padgett. For the first decade of his career he wrote mostly weird fiction and contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of stories by diverse hands extrapolated from the myth patterns elaborated in H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror.

Kuttner’s first professional fiction sale, “The Graveyard Rats,” appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The story of an unscrupulous New England gravedigger who gets his horrifying comeuppance when he plunders a grave for jewelry interred with a corpse, it showed the influence of Lovecraft, whom Kuttner had been introduced to as a correspondent by Robert Bloch. “The Secret of Kralitz,” published in the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales, was Kuttner’s first tale to explicitly reference elements from Lovecraft’s fiction. “It Walks by Night” (1936) and “The Eater of Souls” (1937) were also imitative of Lovecraft, and indeed, much of Kuttner’s early weird fiction was derivative of writers whose work he admired.

Over the next three years, under his own name and the pseudonym Paul Hammond, Kuttner wrote nearly a dozen stories for Weird Tales and Strange Stories that evoked the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft’s fiction, his most accomplished being “The Salem Horror,” a variation on the theme of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” that appeared in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales. Kuttner’s other contributions to Weird Tales included “I, the Vampire” (1937), one of the first sympathetic vampire stories, and four stories—beginning with “Thunder in the Dawn” (1938)—that featured Elak of Atlantis, a sword-and-sorcery hero derivative of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror, and companions to two similar tales, “Cursed Be the City” and “The Citadel of Darkness,” featuring the supernatural adventures of swordsman Prince Raynor, that appeared in Strange Stories in 1939. Two of Kuttner’s best-known Weird Tales stories were collaborations: “The Black Kiss” (1937), written with Robert Bloch, about a sea creature who seduces a man through his dreams in order to exchange bodies with him, and “Quest of the Starstone” (1937), written with C. L. Moore and bringing together Moore’s science-fantasy hero Northwest Smith and her fantasy heroine Jirel of Joiry.

At the same time that he wrote for Weird Tales and Strange Stories, Kuttner placed more than a dozen stories in Thrilling Mystery, Terror Tales, and other so-called “shudder pulps,” which featured modern Gothic stories with rationalized horrors. Formulaic by nature and often preposterous in their plots, Kuttner’s contributions to these magazines showed some elements of originality, as in “A Skull Has No Ears,” published in the July 1941 issue of Thrilling Mystery, which tangentially referenced the Lovecraft mythos, and “Hunger in the Dark,” published in the March 1941 issue of Terror Tales, which left ambiguous whether its seeming supernatural horrors could be logically explained.

Some of Kuttner’s best short weird fiction was published in Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), the magazine of “logical fantasy” fiction created as a companion to Astounding Science-Fiction, where Kuttner placed nine stories. “Threshold,” published in the December 1940 issue, and “The Devil We Know,” published in the August 1941 issue, were clever variations on the traditional deal-with-the-devil story in which deal-makers who think they have outwitted the devil are themselves outwitted. In “Compliments of the Author,” published in the October 1942 issue, a vengeful sorcerer’s familiar relentlessly stalks the killer of its master, systematically neutralizing the limited safeguards against death that a grimoire filched from the sorcerer has given him. The wit and sophistication of Kuttner’s work for Unknown spread into his other writing at the time, including “Masquerade,” a comic vampire tale published in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales that was adapted memorably for the television program Boris Karloff’s Thriller in 1961, and “Housing Problem” (1944), an amusing fantasy about a household’s fairy infestation that was purchased for Unknown Worlds but published in the publisher’s slick magazine Charm after the pulp suspended publication.

Several stories that Kuttner placed in science fiction magazines are ostensibly weird tales, including “The Touching Point,” published in the April 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories, a story of magical transformations dressed up as a tale of extradimensional adventure, and “The Tree of Life,” published in the September 1941 issue of Astonishing Stories, which features a man-eating plant. In “Call Him Demon,” published in the fall 1946 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, the children in a family discover that a beloved uncle is actually an extraterrestrial in disguise who feeds upon human beings. With C. L. Moore, Kuttner also wrote several short novels redolent of the lost world fantasies of A. Merritt, among them Earth’s Last Citadel (1943), The Dark World (1946), and The Valley of the Flame (1946).

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Bloch, Robert; Cthulhu Mythos; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

D’Ammassa, Don. 1996. “Henry Kuttner: Man of Many Voices.” In Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 122–125. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan, and Robert Morrish. 2001. “Introduction.” In Masters of the Weird Tale: Henry Kuttner, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press.

Moskowitz, Sam. 1967. “Henry Kuttner.” In Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, 319–333. New York: Ballantine.

Ramsey, Shawn. 1990. “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Fiction: An Overview.” In The Horror of It All, edited by Robert M. Price, 120–124. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont. Originally published in Crypt of Cthulhu 51 (1987).

Roberts, Garyn G. 2013. “Henry Kuttner: Often-Overlooked Pillar of the Weird Tale and the Pulpwood Magazine.” In Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, 109–127. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press.

KWAIDAN: STORIES AND STUDIES OF
STRANGE THINGS

The title of this 1904 collection is an archaic Japanese word (sometimes rendered “kaidan”) meaning “ghost story” or “weird tale.” It is the most famous of Lafcadio Hearn’s many books of Japanese supernatural stories. How much of it constitutes creative literature (i.e., original writing by Hearn) and how much is translation from Japanese sources is not clear. In some instances, Hearn refers to a word or line in an original Japanese text, but his beautifully rendered versions hover somewhere between translation and retelling. Certainly Hearn, in this book, did more than anyone else to introduce Japanese ghostly fiction to Western audiences, and he did so at the precise moment that Japan was rapidly modernizing. These are visions of Japan’s past. Modern Japanese horror writers use other terms to describe their work. A story is only “kaidan” if it is intended to evoke an old-fashioned atmosphere.

In the world of Japanese fantasy, malevolent spirits abound. There are, for instance, the dangerous samurai ghosts of “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi,” vanquished warriors who summon a blind minstrel to perform for them the tragic story of their own defeat. It is clear they will tear him to pieces when he is done. To protect him, a priest and his assistant paint texts from sacred sutras all over Hoichi’s body to render him invisible to the spirits. But they forget to protect his ears, which the spirits tear off. In “Mujina” the reader meets a faceless demon. In “Rokuro-Kubi” there is a whole group of ghastly beings whose heads detach from their bodies and fly around at night. In “Yuki-Onna” a beautiful snow demon has killed one man, but spares another because of his youth on the condition that he never tell what has happened. Later, he meets and marries a woman who looks much like the demon. They have children and live together for ten years. Then one night he confides the story to her, and she is revealed as the demon. She spares him again because of the children, but leaves, threatening to kill him if they ever have cause to complain about his parenting. This was apparently a folktale Hearn had heard from a farmer. “Jikiniki” tells of a corpse-eating monster, the ghost of a greedy priest being punished for his sins.

Overall, the stories represent a combination of romance and horror, and are occasionally closer to fairy tales. Instances of the latter variety include “The Dream of Akinosuke,” in which a man goes to fairyland and marries a princess, spending many years there. When his wife dies, he snaps back into the normal world, only to find that just a few moments have passed and he was dwelling in an anthill. Some other stories are sentimental or moralistic. Also in the fairy tale vein is “The Story of Aoyagi,” about a man who marries the spirit of a tree.

Kwaidan was memorably filmed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1964, although two of the four episodes are based on Hearn stories from other books.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Hearn, Lafcadio; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

Further Reading

“The Ghost Story.” 2003. In Short Story Criticism, vol. 58, edited by Janet Witalec. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Williams, Vera, 1946. Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

L

LANE, JOEL (1963–2013)

Joel Lane was one of the most accomplished writers of short horror fiction to emerge in Britain during the 1990s. Like Iain Sinclair and Nicholas Royle, he chronicled the dark underside of London life, exploring the experiences of disturbed individuals subsisting on the tattered fringes of modern society. Following in the footsteps of such brilliant urban portraitists as Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell (the latter an acknowledged influence), Lane crafted a series of elliptical, hallucinatory short stories, released in small-press outlets such as Ambit and Winter Chills, that surreally collapse psychic and physical topographies, evoking a crumbling, dreamlike Britain peopled with alienated losers, drug-addled visionaries, and other noir-esque hard cases.

Lane’s reputation rests exclusively on his stories, which have been gathered in The Earth Wire (1994), The Lost District (2006), and the World Fantasy Award–winning Where Furnaces Burn (2012). While compellingly written, his two novels, From Blue to Black (2000) and The Blue Mask (2003), generally shun fantastic elements. A committed socialist, Lane brought to his work a serious social consciousness that exposed the flaws in post–Margaret Thatcher, post-welfare-state Britain. When he died in 2013 with a number of major works unfinished or unpublished, horror fiction lost a crucial voice.

Rob Latham

See also: Body Horror; Campbell, Ramsey; Dreams and Nightmares; Etchison, Dennis; Novels Versus Short Fiction; Psychological Horror; Surrealism.

Further Reading

“Joel Lane.” 2014. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Valentine, Mark. 2013. “R.I.P. – Joel Lane, Author, Poet, Scholar.” Wormwoodiana. Retrieved from http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2013/11/rip-joel-lane-author-poet-critic.html.

LANSDALE, JOE R. (1951–)

Joe R. Lansdale is a prolific and multiple award–winning American author whose work spans several genres and numerous media. He has written Western, horror, mystery, and science fiction novels and short stories, and his work has been adapted for film and television. He has also written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites, and has edited or co-edited several anthologies. Lansdale has produced more than forty-five novels and numerous stories, which have been collected in thirty volumes. Texas born and bred, he resides in the East Texas town of Nacogdoches with his wife, Karen.

Both Lansdale’s affection for horror and his penchant for genre bending are evidenced by the fact that many of his works have been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. He has received a total of nineteen nominations and has won ten times. Among his winning works are the visceral “Night They Missed the Horror Show” (1988), the zombie apocalypse novella On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks (1989), The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance (1992), The Big Blow (2000), the short fiction collection Mad Dog Summer (2004), and the graphic novel Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo (1993). In both his horror writings and his other work, Lansdale’s unique, folksy, compelling voice unfailingly shines through. A typical Lansdale story will start out grounded in the mundane and everyday, and veer off into the unknown, as his characters suddenly find themselves under extreme duress with no hope in sight. Lansdale then proceeds to milk those extreme situations, squeezing every drop of humor, suspense, and tension out of them.

He is perhaps best known for his crime novels featuring the duo of Hap and Leonard (appearing in nine books and three novellas since 1990), and for Southern Gothics such as Freezer Burn (1999), The Bottoms (2000), A Fine Dark Line (2002), Sunset and Sawdust (2004), Leather Maiden (2008), and The Thicket (2013). These tales, which bring to mind the works of authors as diverse as Flannery O’Connor and James M. Cain, often take dark and bizarre turns, and include many elements that could be considered horrific.

Lansdale’s novella Bubba Ho-Tep (1994) is one of his most widely known horror-related works, a fact aided by the story’s adaptation to film by director Don Coscarelli (of the Phantasm horror movie franchise) in 2002. The novella features Elvis Presley (played in the movie by horror legend Bruce Campbell) and John F. Kennedy (played in the movie by Ossie Davis) as two senior citizens in a nursing home who battle a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. The movie version is considered a cult classic.

Other extraliterary adaptations of Lansdale’s work include his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” (1991), which was adapted as the first episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series in 2005; his zombie novella Christmas with the Dead (2010), which was adapted for the screen in 2012 by Lansdale’s son Keith, and which features his daughter, Kasey, in a starring role; and the crime novel Cold in July (1989), adapted as a 2014 film starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and Don Johnson. The latter movie was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2016 Lansdale’s novel Savage Season (1990) was adapted for television, serving as the basis for the first season of the Sundance original series Hap and Leonard.

Lansdale takes a practical, pragmatic view of his craft and profession. In the introduction to his miscellaneous fiction collection For a Few Stories More, titled “Livestock, Roses, and Stories,” he famously offered a “Guide to (Not Rules of) Writing,” setting forth two tenets:

1.Put your ass in a chair and write. (Okay. I lied. This one is a rule.)

2.Turn off the TV and read. All kinds of things. Not just what you want to write. (This one is also a rule.) (Lansdale 2002, 17)

Seemingly fearless in his own writing, Lansdale explores both the best and worst aspects of humanity and infuses his work with an abiding sense of the absurdity of human existence.

Hank Wagner

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Mummies; Splatterpunk.

Further Reading

Benson, Eric. 2016. “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Texas Monthly, February 2016. http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/darkness-on-the-edge-of-town.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2003. “Lansdale, Joe R. 1951–.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 603–612. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Hynes, James. 1997. “Joe R. Lansdale: Black Belt in Pulp Fiction.” Publishers Weekly, Sept. 29: 59–60.

Lansdale, Joe. 2002. For a Few Stories More. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

Williamson, Chet. 2005. “Joe R. Lansdale: Dark Master of Texas Gothic.” Weird Tales 62, no. 1: 30–35.

Interview with Joe R. Lansdale

October 2016

In this brief interview, Lansdale talks about his reasons for writing horror and for infusing horror frequently into the vast span of different genres and types of writing that he has produced. He goes on to talk about the reasons why readers are drawn to horror, and he ruminates on the long-term effects of the 1970s–1990s horror publishing boom. He also lists some of his major influences—ranging from the likes of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and he recommends a few horror authors whose work is worth seeking out.

Matt Cardin: As an author, you have been not just prolific but strikingly broad in your focus, writing in multiple genres and forms for multiple media. Yet one of the notes you continue to hit over and over is that of horror—sometimes in outright works of horror as such, and other times as a mode that you bring to bear on works that are formally classified as something else. What keeps you coming back? Why does horror play such a critical role in your writing?

Joe R. Lansdale: I grew up a great fan of horror, so it only seems natural that it has become part of my writerly DNA. Now and again I specifically try and write a story that fits comfortably into one genre, but most of my work doesn’t start out with as solid an intent. I just borrow from the things that interest me, and horror is one of them. I think of it and suspense as close cousins, and horror doesn’t always have to be grisly or shocking, it can be creepy and unsettling as well. It depends on how you define it, but it is certainly a fine tool in any writer’s tool box. As is understanding mystery and suspense. Loving and studying and writing all those genres led me eventually to whatever it is I do most of the time, which is, well, just me, but I’m very much aware of the tools available to me.

MC: Moving from the writer’s to the reader’s end of things, why do you think people are drawn to read horror? What draws you personally?

JRL: A delicious sense of the unknown. Controlled fear, something you can lay aside and go, “Wow, that’s not real, but it sure is fun when I’m reading it, but now I can continue my life, which is far less stressful.” I think it is a release system for a lot of us. I think that’s true of all stories, but horror allows a kind of vibrant release.

MC: You made it onto the map as a writer in the very middle of the big horror boom of the late twentieth century. The story of how that particular publishing phenomenon flared and then flamed out is well known to everyone. What are some of the major differences between then and now when it comes to writing and/or publishing things that may be classified as “horror”? Do you see or feel any lasting impact on your own writing or that of others? Basically, what’s different today because of what happened circa 1975 to 1995?

JRL: I don’t think the story is nearly as well known as it should be. I think in its own way it was as important to horror, as well as crime, suspense, and other genres, as the New Wave in science fiction was to literature in general. In fact, I think the boom of that era, especially from mid-seventies to mid/late-eighties, was more instrumental in how it changed fiction in general. No one has really written about it or the authors of that time in an insightful manner. It collapsed under the weight of its own popularity and bad publishing choices. I would say that the writers of short fiction were what drove the undercurrent, and of the novels, there were several writers who pushed that forward, but in that arena Stephen King almost stands by himself. What he was doing really influenced short fiction as well, but I think it was more the eighties that represented this new trend in all its blooming glory. By the end of the eighties it was pretty much dead, though a few residual works floated on the dead waters for a few years to come. The influence of that time made its way into crime and suspense fiction specifically, but writers of literary fiction eventually embraced it as well. Its impact continues, if not directly under the label of horror.

MC: In the past you have named Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Bloch as among your favorite writers and most important influences. What do you find particularly compelling about each? For someone just learning for the first time about one or all of these writers, what would you say is important to know?

JRL: They were my most important influences early on. But Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Chandler, James Cain, William Goldman, Chester Himes, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many other writers influenced me. They were engaging in a simple way that invited you in, but their styles are all very complex when you analyze them. They feel natural, but they have hidden items beneath the surface of their waters. All of those writers in one way or another are poetic, perhaps Cain less obviously so, but I would suggest his poetry is of a more subtle nature. They are all visual and for the most part character-driven. I never thought of Bradbury as particularly strong on character in the classic sense. But his stories themselves were the characters. Another thing about all of them, the obvious thing, is they are style-driven.

MC: Are there any additional authors and works that you would recommend to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important both for this genre and for literature as a whole?

JRL: One that has elements of horror, but transcends genre, is Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and to dive down into the blood and thunder of the old pulps, his They Thirst. Ramsey Campbell for creep-up-on-you nastiness. Stephen Graham Jones, who writes his own books, but many of which certainly have a lot of horror in them. I could be here all night, so on this subject, try the Jones and tip your waitress.

MC: If you had one insight or nugget or wisdom to offer readers interested in horror fiction, what would it be?

JRL: Horror never dies. It merely, as horror should, mutates.

“THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN”

Thomas Ligotti’s story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” was first published in the April 1990 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine and was reprinted in his collections Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) and The Nightmare Factory (1996). Arguably his most famous tale—and the earliest written of his published works—“Harlequin” is dedicated “To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft” (Ligotti 1994, 48).

Strongly echoing Lovecraft’s “The Festival” (1923) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), “Harlequin” follows the narrator, an anthropologist who specializes in clowns, as he investigates a midwinter festival held in Mirocaw, a strangely lifeless town in the American Midwest. Fashioning a costume that mimics the threatening aspect of some of the less gregarious clowns that roam the town’s streets, he discovers that these unnerving figures transform into giant worms every year and feast on the flesh of young local women.

While the Lovecraftian elements are explicitly indicated in the dedication, “Harlequin” also draws on a wider tradition of American horror. Descriptions of the town as made up of unlikely angles and skewed perspective recall both Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), while a poster for the state lottery calls to mind Jackson’s infamous tale of small-town horror, “The Lottery” (1948). A scene in which the narrator follows one of the drab clowns harks back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), while the depictions of mindlessly threatening townsfolk converging slowly around a horrified narrator allude both to zombie narratives and to Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975).

Ligotti often asserts in interviews that he feels human existence is little more than endless suffering and confusion. Many other stories in his Grimscribe collection, such as “The Spectacles in the Drawer” and “The Dreaming in Nortown,” attempt to literalize this, set as they are in a nightmare realm with few historical or geographical markers, a postmodern version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s timeless fairy-tale settings. By contrast, “Harlequin” is situated within a relatively realistic, contemporary world, rendering its horrific revelations particularly effective.

Dara Downey

See also: The Haunting of Hill House; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

Further Reading

Harris, Jason M. 2012. “Smiles of Oblivion: Demonic Clowns and Doomed Puppets as Fantastic Figures of Absurdity and Misanthropy in the Writings of Thomas Ligotti.” Journal of Popular Culture 45, no. 6 (December): 1249–1265.

Langan, John. 2007. “Thomas Ligotti’s Metafictional Mapping: The Allegory of ‘The Last Feast of Harlequin.’” Lovecraft Annual 1: 126–144.

Ligotti, Thomas. 1994. Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. New York: Jove.

Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. 2003. The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

“LAZARUS”

This 1906 story by the Russian expressionist and symbolist writer Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919) was first published in English in 1918, translated for an anthology by the then head of the Slavic Division of the New York Public Library, Avrahm (Abraham) Yarmolinsky. Andreyev was a successful and critically acclaimed author in Russia, although he became increasingly isolated politically after the 1905 revolution, eventually dying in poverty as an exile in Finland at the relatively young age of forty-eight.

“Lazarus” concerns the biblical figure of the same name, but rather than focusing on the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s restoration of Lazarus to life, Andreyev creates a vivid and starkly pessimistic account of the consequences of an event usually cast as miraculous. Lazarus, it transpires, has been irrevocably altered by the experience of death. After the “sinister oddities” (Andreyev 1918, 9) of Lazarus first become evident at a celebratory feast, he is cast out of his community, and rumors of the sanity-shattering effect of his gaze spread quickly to Rome. An Epicurean artist named Aurelius tries to glean Lazarus’s secrets in order to apply them to his creations, but is instead rendered unable to do anything other than ruminate on the revelation that all beauty is “a lie” (22). Lazarus is eventually summoned before Emperor Augustus, and although Augustus is, like others, irrevocably altered by the encounter, he breaks Lazarus’s gaze just in time to avoid permanent madness and despair. Lazarus returns to the Holy Land having been blinded on Augustus’s orders.

The Horror of the Void in His Eyes

Andreyev conveys the galling, life-draining power of the resurrected Lazarus’s gaze by describing it as a
horror which lay motionless in the depth of his black pupils. Lazarus looked calmly and simply with no desire to conceal anything, but also with no intention to say anything; he looked coldly, as he who is infinitely indifferent to those alive. Many carefree people came close to him without noticing him, and only later did they learn with astonishment and fear who that calm stout man was, that walked slowly by, almost touching them with his gorgeous and dazzling garments. The sun did not cease shining, when he was looking, nor did the fountain hush its murmur, and the sky overhead remained cloudless and blue. But the man under the spell of his enigmatical look heard no more the fountain and saw not the sky overhead. Sometimes, he wept bitterly, sometimes he tore his hair and in frenzy called for help; but more often it came to pass that apathetically and quietly he began to die, and so he languished many years, before everybody’s very eyes, wasted away, colorless, flabby, dull, like a tree, silently drying up in a stony soil. And of those who gazed at him, the ones who wept madly, sometimes felt again the stir of life; the others never.

Matt Cardin

Source: Andreyev, Leonid. 1918. “Lazarus.” In Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev and The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin, translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky, 9–21. Boston: The Stratford Company.

Allegorical in tone, “Lazarus” is startling in its subversive reiteration of the biblical message of hope into one of profound dread and anguish. There are distinct elements of cosmic horror conveyed in the testimony of those who have been “stricken” by the baleful gaze of Lazarus and now understand that “wrapped by void and darkness the man in despair trembled in the face of the Horror of the Infinite” (17). The celebrated social-realist writer Maxim Gorky described it as “the best . . . that has been written about death in all the world’s literature” (Jackson 1993, 131). After its initial publication in English as an example of contemporary Slavic literature, it was included by Dorothy Scarborough in her 1912 collection Famous Modern Ghost Stories, which, by placing the story in the context of work by Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, established it as a horror classic. The story was included in the 1927 issue of Weird Tales, where it proved popular with the readership, with one correspondent describing it several years later as “the greatest weird tale ever written” (“The Eyrie” 1932, 150). It has subsequently become a staple of horror anthologies and in 2009 was even co-opted into the zombie genre by its inclusion in the anthology Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead.

James Machin

See also: Weird Tales; Zombies.

Further Reading

Andreyev, Leonid. 1918. “Lazarus.” In Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev and The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin, translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky, 9–21. Boston: Stratford.

“The Eyrie.” 1932. Weird Tales 20, no. 2 (August): 148–150, 271.

Jackson, Robert Louis. 1993. Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Newcombe, Josephine M. 1973. Leonid Andreyev. New York: Frederick Ungar.

Zhenevsky, Vlad. 2013. “An Introduction to Leonid Andreyev.” Weird Fiction Review, October 30. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/10/an-introduction-to-leonid-andreyev.

LE FANU, J. SHERIDAN (1814–1873)

Few authors’ lives reflect the dark and mysterious image of the horror writer as strikingly as does the life of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu is most remembered for a number of supernatural short stories, most notably “Schalken the Painter” (1839), “Squire Toby’s Will” (1868), “Green Tea” (1869), and the influential vampire novella Carmilla (1872). He published fourteen novels that, while not in the horror genre, show the development of his talent for the subtle creation of dark and foreboding atmospheres. The most well received of these is Uncle Silas (1964). A prolific author working in multiple genres, Le Fanu had a successful career as newspaper publisher and editor that warrants some comparison to the careers of his two great contemporaries: Charles Dickens in England, and Edgar Allan Poe in America. Similarities to the latter in both life and fiction even led St. John Sweeney to dub Le Fanu “The Irish Poe” in The Journal of Irish Literature (Sweeney 1986). Like the work of both of these authors, Le Fanu’s short tales of horror and the uncanny remain today among the very first rank in the genre.

A descendant of persecuted Huguenot emigrants, Le Fanu grew up as the son of a Protestant clergyman, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, who served as Dean of Emly in Abington, County Limerick, in southern Ireland throughout most of Joseph’s childhood. Thomas Le Fanu’s mother was the sister of the celebrated Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the Sheridan connection remains a source of pride throughout the Le Fanu family. Later in life, Joseph would acquire Brinsley Sheridan’s writing desk, upon which he would compose some of his own work.

Unfortunately, Le Fanu came of age during a time of much religious and political strife between Catholics and Protestants. In his formative years, he witnessed protest violence and threats of violence brought about by religious and political power struggles, including perhaps the Limerick food riots of 1830. His brother William narrowly escaped stoning by a mob during the Tithe Wars of the early 1830s, an act of retribution against their father’s position in the Church of Ireland. Others in his family also barely escaped violent confrontations by Irish nationalists against those of the Protestant ascendancy.

Le Fanu was nevertheless captivated throughout his childhood by the rich tradition of folk legends, superstitions, and supernatural tales spread throughout rural Ireland: tales of fairies, banshees, dearg-dues, and other restless spirits. Despite religious and political tensions, the Le Fanus were still well liked by many members of the parish whom they served well, and young Joseph found plenty of opportunities for listening to Irish legends and superstitions told firsthand by the local peasantry. From them he gained both a wealth of imaginative stories and an empathy for their plight. Both would later find expression in his writing and intrigue him throughout his life.

Le Fanu gained acceptance at Trinity College in Dublin in 1832. Always a bookish boy, he had taken early to writing stories and enjoying his father’s large library and so was a proficient student despite some experience with an ineffectual childhood tutor who often took more interest in tying fishing lures than in teaching Joseph and his brother. Throughout their childhood, the Le Fanu children were educated at home and in a relaxed way that suited Joseph well, allowing him free time to be entertained by local legends and pore over his father’s collection of classics and obscure religious texts. He flourished at Trinity, becoming an active officer in the College Historical Society and a talented debater. He graduated with honors in 1837 and continued to study law until called to the bar in 1939, a career path he ultimately decided to abandon, much to the disappointment of his peers, who saw in his debate skills a promising barrister.

Between 1838 and 1840, Le Fanu published a dozen short stories in the Dublin University Magazine, his first being “The Ghost and the Bonesetter” (1838), a tale set firmly in the Irish tradition in which Le Fanu treats an old superstition with both humor and the local color of legendary Irish yarns (complete with dialect). He demonstrated yet more promise in “Schalken the Painter” (1839), a tale of the fantastic in which supernatural portent is drawn thickly, leaving readers chilled and reeling with unanswered questions. That Le Fanu’s stories were accepted so readily by a publisher encouraged him to indulge his budding talent and set him onto a new path.

By the time he was called to the bar, Le Fanu had instead flung himself into his passion for journalism, continuing to publish the short fictions that would later be collected and posthumously published as The Purcell Papers (1880). These initial stories are each presented as the manuscripts of a priest by the name of Father Francis Purcell. Le Fanu would later return to the presentation of the collected manuscript in his final collection, In a Glass Darkly (1872).

In 1841, Le Fanu purchased a newspaper of his own, The Warder, and settled into the busy life of newspaper owner and editor. In 1844, at the age of thirty and established in a career, he married Susanna Bennett. They remained happily married for fourteen years during which Le Fanu published his first two novels, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847). They had four children together, two sons and two daughters. Susanna’s death in 1858 produced a profound sadness in Le Fanu, and he began to withdraw from public life shortly thereafter, entertaining fewer guests and engaging in a burst of prolific writing that produced twelve novels in ten years between 1863 and 1873, along with myriad short stories, articles, and lyrical ballads.

Le Fanu’s copious literary output coincided with his purchase of the Dublin University Magazine in 1861, the same magazine that had published his first short stories. Over the next eight years, under Le Fanu’s supervision, the publication returned to its former prominence. The majority of his novels were serialized in the magazine, and he continued to publish short ghostly tales and mysteries in its pages.

In 1864, midway through his tenure at the Dublin University Magazine, Le Fanu published what would become his most notable novel, Uncle Silas. While Uncle Silas does not venture into the supernatural, it does threaten unspeakable horrors and presents an unrelenting atmosphere of ominous foreboding and evil threat. Silas, the ill-reputed uncle of the orphaned Maud Ruthyn, cares for her at his estate, Bartram-Haugh. Upon his death, her father wills Maud the family fortune when she comes of age; however, a codicil stipulates that if she were to die before coming of age, the fortune would then go to Silas. As expected, Maud (and the reader) begins to understand that terrible menace awaits her at Bartram-Haugh. Le Fanu’s adept building of dark suspense throughout the novel also permeates his horror tales, including the earlier “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances on Aungier Street” (1853), and with further sophistication in Carmilla.

Throughout this period, Le Fanu receded further into the shadows of Dublin. Le Fanu was known to “emerge like an apparition” at the local booksellers just at dusk to inquire “Any more ghost stories for me?” (Browne 1951, 27). Many anecdotes exist of Le Fanu’s late-night requests for books on both ghosts and demons. Fellow Dubliners began to refer to the self-isolating Le Fanu as “the Invisible Prince,” glimpsing him only at odd hours as he slipped quietly to and from his newspaper office. While remaining pleasant and welcoming to a tight circle of friends for some time, he became increasingly reclusive in later years, avoiding the public and at times even turning away his closest friends when they called at his home in Merrion Square.

Le Fanu sold the Dublin University Magazine in 1868, but did not cease writing. His late works are some of his most memorable and are marked with disturbing themes of death, guilt, and the supernatural. They also bear an eerie similarity to his personal afflictions. At least part of Le Fanu’s reputation as the Invisible Prince stems from his acquired writing habits as, plagued by recurrent nightmares, he would often awake in the night and, propped up in bed, write by candlelight into the early hours of the morning. Five of his late tales, collected as In a Glass Darkly, introduce isolated and haunted characters whose torment stems as much from their own conscience or obsession as it does from supernatural presences. In stories like “Green Tea” (1869)—published in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round—one recognizes the aged Le Fanu in the character of Mr. Jennings, a scholar obsessed with the study of the Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and his visions of the spiritual dimension: the realms beyond death.

Le Fanu’s own interest in the writings of Swedenborg (1688–1772) first appear in Uncle Silas and feature more prominently in “Green Tea,” in which the main character, the Reverend Mr. Jennings, experiences, to his horror, what happens when his “interior sight is opened” to a Swedenborgian spiritual realm. Jennings becomes tormented by a “spectral” monkey, a ghostly presence that will not leave him alone and seeks to drive him mad. For Jennings, the monkey may represent religious doubts, its form a symbol of the threat of Darwin’s scientific theory to religious thought throughout the 1860s. For Le Fanu, the spectral presence may indeed represent a more personal torment: his continued anxiety over the soul of his beloved Susanna. Her religious doubts and anxiety before her death caused Le Fanu enormous grief, and he worried whether she might have doubted her soul into hell.

The last year before his death, Le Fanu completed what would become his most well-known and long-lasting work: the vampire tale Carmilla. In writing Carmilla, Le Fanu draws upon a few prior vampire tales, including John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) as well as traditional Romanian folklore. Unflinching homoeroticism pervades the narrative of a female vampire visiting her desires upon Laura, the young female protagonist. Bram Stoker owes a debt to Carmilla, from which he borrowed not only the shockingly sexualized image of the vampire in Dracula (1897) but also the image of the vampire hunter. Stoker’s Dr. Abraham von Helsing, with some alliteration, borrows heavily from Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius and Baron Vordenburg, Le Fanu’s paternal characters who are also students of both science and the paranormal. Next to Dracula, Carmilla still ranks as one of the most influential narratives in all of vampire fiction.

Demonstrating his flair for the horror short story as early as 1838, Le Fanu developed his method and style of horror independently of Edgar Allan Poe, whose essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) is often credited with setting forth the modern short story (and horror story) methodology. Le Fanu’s inspirations sprang directly from his life: the violence and political turmoil of his childhood years, chilling Irish folklore and superstition, the pain and bereavement over the loss of his wife, his studies in Swedenborgian spiritualism, and his own recurring nightmare—as he once related to his doctor—of a huge and rotting mansion threatening to topple and crush him.

Le Fanu died at his home in Merrion Square, Dublin on February 7, 1873, having published some of his most enduring work only months before. Upon finding him in his bed, his doctor is reported to have said, “I feared this—that house fell at last” (Browne 1951, 31). Le Fanu’s talent has been praised by authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Henry James, M. R. James, and Dorothy L. Sayers. His work has been a direct influence on some of the most prestigious Irish authors to follow him, including not only Bram Stoker, but also W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. His work, although highly esteemed and influential, has not been as prominently or widely recognized within the horror genre during the last century as may be warranted. More recently, though, it appears that this neglect is beginning to lift.

Mark Wegley

See also: Carmilla; Dracula; “Green Tea”; In a Glass Darkly; James, Henry; James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; “Schalken the Painter”; Spiritualism; Stoker, Bram; The Uncanny; Vampires.

Further Reading

Browne, N. 1951. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Roy.

Crawford, Gary William. 1995. J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Harris, Sally. 2003. “Spiritual Warnings: The Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” Victorians Institute Journal 31: 9–39.

McCormack, W. J. 1980. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon.

Melada, I. 1987. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne.

Sweeney, J. 1986. “Sheridan Le Fanu: The Irish Poe.” Journal of Irish Literature 15: 3–32.

Wegley, M. 2002. “Fear Unknowable: Le Fanu’s Contribution to the Literary Fantastic.” Paradoxa 17: 32–51.

LEE, TANITH (1947–2015)

Tanith Lee was a British author of fantasy, science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. She published more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories, a great number of which contain horror elements, however they are classified.

The difficulty of categorizing Lee as an author is evident from the opening to her story “Death Dances,” published in Weird Tales in 1988. The story begins: “Death came to Idradrud at suns’ rise. She had appointments to keep.” The city of Idradrud sounds a little like India, but it is clearly the sort of imaginary city familiar from the genre of fantasy fiction. However, there are two suns in the sky, and it is unclear whether this means the story is set on another planet and may therefore have affinities with science fiction. The personification of death, for its part, locates the story in horror territory. Lee’s work always mixed genres and blurred boundaries.

Her fiction is vivid and sensual, with a style that is sometimes almost like prose poetry, as if it were written for the sheer delight of language and imagery. For example, her story “The Werewolf” (1976) does nothing particularly original with the werewolf legend, but makes it fresh by the immersive intensity of Lee’s writing. Her short fiction often shows a preoccupation with symmetry and form, very much like poetry. In the above-cited “Death Dances,” Death enters the city and, in a series of short episodes, causes various people (including a harlot, a thief, and a priestess) to die and be reborn into one another’s lives, with ironic results. In her World Fantasy Award–winning story “Elle Est Trois, (La Mort)” (1983), which draws its structure from a French rhyme that translates as “She is three, Death,” three failures, a poet, an artist, and a composer, are visited by Death in three forms: seductress, thief, and slaughterer.

Lee also sometimes deflated the overt fantastic element in her stories, as in her other World Fantasy Award winner, “The Gorgon” (1982), in which a man ignores all warnings and swims to a haunted Greek isle. The “gorgon” there may just be a deformed woman, and he feels a definite loss at the destruction of his expectation of the mythic and marvelous. The “gorgon” has figuratively, if not literally, turned him to stone. “La Vampiresse” (2000) tells of a fabulously glamorous woman, now a recluse, and of the fading of her beauty. She may or may not be a vampire. The reader is given the impression that this is a delusion, but one that is accepted with regret.

Some of Lee’s novels addressed horror themes directly. Heart Beast (1992) is about an unstoppable werewolf-like creature. Lee’s Blood Opera sequence, consisting of three novels, was commissioned by the editor of the Dell Abyss horror line, so that it could be clearly placed, commercially, in the horror category. Dark Dance (1992), the first novel in the series, introduces Rachaela, a young woman with few prospects in life who turns in desperation to her long-lost relatives, the Scarabae, who are alleged vampires, although they are not actually blood-sucking wraiths. They are very long lived, surviving for centuries and maintaining the purity of their bloodline through multigenerational incest. Rachaela comes to share their hedonistic, mad, but claustrophobic existence, and achieves a sexual awakening in the bed of Adamus, her own father and the leader of the clan. Pregnant by Adamus, she briefly escapes, but gives birth to Ruth. The relationship between mother and daughter is grim. Adamus now lusts for Ruth. Rachaela is of no more use or interest. Her purpose was merely to continue the nearly immortal Scarabae genes. At the end, Ruth “stakes” several of the family through the heart with knitting needles, burns down the family manor, and vanishes. Arguably, a story like this, about the selective breeding of long-lived people, could be classified as science fiction with its speculative genetics reminiscent of Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children (1958). However, if horror is not a plot element but an emotion that can be evoked by many different kinds of fiction, as the critic Douglas Winter has suggested, then Dark Dance is undeniably a horror novel, with its horror found in Rachaela’s slowly becoming everything she loathes and fears, that is, one of the Scarabae. In the sequel, Personal Darkness (1993), Rachaela sinks into despair, shut off from the world like most of the Scarabae, while Ruth becomes a serial killer and sexual avenger. Another of the terribly seductive Scarabae men attempts to tame Ruth, but she returns to killing and in the end must die. Meanwhile, Rachaela gives birth to a second daughter, Anna, who may be the reincarnation of Ruth. In the third volume, Darkness, I (1994), Anna meets the oldest of the Scarabae line, Cain, and becomes his lover. Anna by this point may have entirely reverted to the persona of the murderous Ruth.

Upon Lee’s death from cancer in 2015, an obituary published in The Guardian provided just one of many recognitions of her significance to the field of speculative fiction: “Along with Jane Gaskell and Angela Carter, Tanith Lee was . . . one of the most influential revisionist and feminist voices in contemporary fantasy writing. Unlike them, she was principally published and known as a voice firmly rooted in the science-fiction, fantasy and horror world” (“Tanith Lee Obituary” 2015).

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Dark Fantasy; Vampires; Weird Tales; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Cowperthwaite, David. 1993. Tanith Lee, Mistress of Delirium. Liverpool, UK: British Fantasy Society.

Haut, Mavis. 2001. The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Moran, Maureen F. 2002. “Tanith Lee.” British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers since 1960, edited by Darren Harris-Fain. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 261. Detroit, MI: Gale.

“Tanith Lee Obituary.” 2015. The Guardian, June 1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/tanith-lee.

LEE, VERNON (1856–1935)

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of Violet Paget. Born in France to expatriate parents, she was the half-sister of Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a career invalid whom she nursed for a long time until he decided to get up and get married. A pioneer of the British aesthetic movement (ca. 1850–1910), she is mostly remembered today for her supernatural stories. She never married and was widely reputed to be a lesbian, although she never confirmed or denied it; at any rate, she was able to insert into her literary accounts of sexual passion a kind of objectivity that construed erotic attraction as a dangerous fever, and evaluated its effects with a cutting sarcasm.

The novella A Phantom Lover (1886), reprinted in the landmark collection Hauntings (1890) as “Oke of Okehurst,” describes the tragic unwinding of a family curse rooted in ancestral adultery. Two of the other items in the collection, the femme fatale stories “Amour Dure” and “Dionea,” gradually release the repression exerted by their quasi-academic style to put on lurid displays of seductive power. “A Wicked Voice” is not quite a femme fatale story, because its alluring phantom is a castrato male rather than a female; calmer in consequence than its companions, it aspires—not without a telling ambiguity—to a higher degree of aesthetic purity.

The longest story in Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1907), “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” originally appeared in John Lane’s Yellow Book and exhibits a studied ironic Decadence befitting that notorious periodical. As in other works based on the same anecdote from Philostratus’s highly fanciful Life of Apollonius of Tyana, including John Keats’s “Lamia” and Théophile Gautier’s “Clarimonde,” the reality principle intrudes upon the protagonist’s fascination by a lamia (a demonic vampiric-type monster). The other supernatural tales in the volume are polished decorative fantasies contrasting sharply with the intense tales in Hauntings, but with their cynicism and license they can be seen as falling into the tradition of contes cruels (tales of brutality and cynicism).

For Maurice: Five Unlikely Tales (1927) assembled five more fanciful tales, including “Winthrop’s Adventure” (first published 1874 as “A Culture-Ghost”) and “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers” (1889), the most unrepentantly feverish of all Lee’s sexual fantasies, featuring a quixotic Don Juan. “Marsyas in Flanders” (1900) features a pagan idol mistaken for a Christian image, whose true nature cannot be suppressed by adoption. Lee’s other supernatural fiction includes one item with a significant element of horror, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” (1890), a tale of ineptly repressed sexuality.

Lee did not see her supernatural stories as important elements of her literary endeavor, and never wrote anything of that kind as substantial as Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s lurid historical novel The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903). In spite of a marked tendency to neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion), she maintained her literary productivity far better than her half-brother, and her work always retains a methodical efficiency.

Brian Stableford

See also: Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.

Further Reading

Colby, Vinetta. 2003. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Gunn, Peter. 1964. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935. London: Oxford University Press.

Pulham, Patricia. 2008. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate.

Stableford, Brian. 2001. “Haunted by the Pagan Past: An Introduction to Vernon Lee.” infinity plus, December. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/introduces/lee.htm.

“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”

Published originally in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), a pseudonymous collection of Washington Irving’s first short prose pieces (including “Rip Van Winkle”), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of Irving’s best-known works of Gothic horror. Notable particularly for its reproduction of traditional Dutch settler customs and local ghost fables, the narrative was inspired by the young Irving’s familiarity with the real town of Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York.

While much of Irving’s tale recounts in listless fashion the dreamlike qualities of life in Sleepy Hollow and the somewhat mundane rituals of the local schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, Irving’s strength as a writer of Gothic horror lies in his ability to intermittently lull the reader into comfort with his dreamy narrative style before quickly heightening suspense, marshaling local superstitions and stories of the now-famous headless horseman to tauten the atmosphere within the text.

Irving’s story trades largely in the superstitions of old housewives’ tales, and, in large part, “Sleepy Hollow” details the despairing effects a fearful imagination run wild has upon the individual. Indeed, this is a story about the irrationality of fear itself. The world of Sleepy Hollow is one in which old superstitions become in the minds of the locals fearful beliefs, and where people frequently report strange visions and ghostly encounters. It is with a fearful, ritualized pride, too, that the locals of Sleepy Hollow recount their shared fears and would-be myths of the headless horseman in particular. Fear and the collective cultural response to it is at the heart of “Sleepy Hollow.”

Moreover, Irving’s tale is quite explicit in linking this fear to America’s historical past, and to the fervor for advancement and the migration of peoples away from the old colonies that characterized early modern America. Irving neatly suggests that America’s ghost stories are tied to the old Dutch settlements precisely because the ghosts of the past (fears of the old world itself) are immobile, static reminders of early American frontier fears, against which the rationale of later modern America is defined.

Above all, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” presents a philosophical debate between illogical superstition and rational enlightenment thinking. Irving is mocking of Ichabod Crane, whom he describes as one of the “pioneers of the mind” (Irving 1994, 34), yet who is nevertheless a firm believer in the marvelous and the fantastic. In spite of his learnedness, Ichabod is of “small shrewdness and simple credulity” (Irving 1994, 39), and when his love rival, Brom Bones, dresses up as the fabled headless horseman, carrying a carved pumpkin for a head to scare off Ichabod, the credulous Ichabod is so overcome by his own illogical fears that he leaves town.

Irving’s tale is a vindication of the values of rational thinking. That Ichabod actually believes his pursuer to be a Hessian solider who has literally lost his head in battle is an indictment of his own simple credulity. The real horror at the center of this story is the fear of losing one’s head—not literally, but figuratively, like Ichabod—and the idea that irrational superstition should ever win over the values of logic and rationality—a distinctly American fear.

The story of “Sleepy Hollow” continues to appeal to popular culture and was brought to life in Tim Burton’s 1999 film adaptation starring Johnny Depp (in which the ambiguity of Brom’s deception of Ichabod in Irving’s tale is made overt). More recently, the television network Fox adapted the story into a supernatural serial thriller that has generated a new wave of interest in Irving as a Gothic writer and continues to draw many more fans to his work.

Ian Kinane

See also: Irving, Washington.

Further Reading

Aderman, Ralph M., ed. 1990. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Anderson, Donald. 2003. “Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Explicator 61, no. 4: 207–210.

Burstein, Andrew. 2007. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books.

Irving, Washington. [1820] 1994. Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories. London: Puffin.

Jones, Brian Jay. 2008. Washington Irving: An American Original. New York: Arcade.

Smith, Greg. 2001. “Supernatural Ambiguity and Possibility in Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’” Midwest Quarterly 42, no. 2: 174–182.

LEIBER, FRITZ (1910–1992)

Fritz Leiber, born in 1910 in Chicago, was one of the most multifariously talented writers of popular fantastic literature who ever lived, widely celebrated—along with Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury—as a pioneer of the modern horror genre in the United States. Over a sixty-year career, Leiber not only produced science fiction classics such as The Big Time (1958), but also pioneered the genre of sword-and-sorcery, with his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series. His best science fiction drew themes and tones from horror literature, with the 1943 novel Gather, Darkness! imagining a theocratic (religiously governed) dystopia where technoscience is disguised as sorcery, while the 1950 short story “Coming Attraction” depicts a desolate postapocalyptic future where sadomasochistic subcultures engage in startling acts of random violence, and the 1953 novel You’re All Alone explores the theme of claustrophobic entrapment in a paranoid technological mindscape. As evidence of his enormous versatility, Leiber is one of only three authors (the others being Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison) to have won lifetime achievement awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the World Fantasy Association, and the Horror Writers of America (now the Horror Writers Association) combined.

Throughout his long career, Leiber proved remarkably adaptable to changing vogues within the field, being equally at home in John W. Campbell’s pulp magazine Astounding during its 1940s Golden Age as in Michael Moorcock’s avant-garde periodical New Worlds during the New Wave movement a quarter-century later. Yet the publication that gave him his most successful platform from which to launch a new breed of horror story was undoubtedly Campbell’s Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds), which debuted in 1939. Through its mere four years of existence, Unknown made an indelible mark on the genre, sweeping away a century of Gothic cobwebs and ushering in a skeptical, streamlined depiction of uncanny presences hovering on the margins of modern life. Arguably, Leiber was the most significant originator of this trend. He consistently managed to capture the potent blend of horror, science fiction, and urban noir for which Unknown came to be celebrated.

“Smoke Ghost”: The Specter of Urban Malaise

“Smoke Ghost,” originally published in the pulp magazine Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds) and subsequently widely anthologized, pioneered the tale of modern urban horror and updates a classic horror theme—the ghostly revenant—for a contemporary setting.

As its title implies, “Smoke Ghost” recounts a ghastly haunting, but the eponymous specter is no conventional phantasm; rather, it is the veritable incarnation of big-city squalor and malaise. A grimy, shambling creature that spectrally incarnates the spirit of industrial civilization with its soot and pounding machinery, it stalks the protagonist relentlessly, first as a series of silhouettes glimpsed from his subway seat and high-rise office building, then as a demonic amalgam of all the psychological trials of urban life, and finally as a demonic idol demanding total subservience and devotion. Leiber’s smoke ghost is, in short, the embodiment of all of urban modernity’s compelling contradictions: its boundless creativity and entropic decay, its brutal dynamism and boring stasis, its exhilaration and despair. The protagonist, a representative urban everyman, is susceptible to its predatory wiles because it is, in essence, the embodiment of his own incipient dreads and smothered despairs.

The tone of the story—paranoid, borderline hysterical, nervously alert to subtle hints and lurking portents—would exert an enormous influence on future chroniclers of urban anxiety and dread. Indeed, Leiber’s work during the 1940s, which located the uncanny not in the Gothic relics of the past but in modern sites and situations, made possible the explosion of urban horror that took place during the postwar period.

Rob Latham

Leiber’s best work for Unknown included the groundbreaking stories “Smoke Ghost” (1941) and Conjure Wife (1943), which updated, for a modern urban environment, classic ghost and witch stories, respectively. During the 1940s, Leiber published a series of similar efforts—in Unknown, Weird Tales, and elsewhere—that explored specifically contemporary forms of horror, usually in an urban milieu. In “The Hound” (1942), the werewolves of medieval folklore are replaced by a monster spawned by city-dwellers’ fears and insecurities, with the title creature’s animal sounds emerging from and merging with the noise of traffic and industry. Similarly, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) updates the conventions of the vampiric femme fatale for a world of modern consumerism. Leiber continued producing such tales of urban dread throughout his career, interspersed with a wide range of other work; his best horror stories can be found in such seminal collections as Night’s Black Agents (1947), Shadows with Eyes (1962), and Night Monsters (1969). In 1977, his novel Our Lady of Darkness, about occult presences in modern-day San Francisco, served as a fitting capstone for his rich and sophisticated contribution to the field.

In 1984, the retrospective collection The Ghost Light gathered much of Leiber’s finest work, including the title story, an eerie novella of ambiguous spectral beings, and “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” (1965), a tale that drew on Leiber’s experiences as a Shakespearean actor. The book is capped by an autobiographical essay in which the author muses on his long life and career.

Rob Latham

See also: Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; Conjure Wife; Dark Fantasy; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Our Lady of Darkness; Pulp Horror; The Uncanny; Weird Tales; Witches and Witchcraft; World Fantasy Award; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Shakespearean Horrors.

Further Reading

Byfield, Bruce. 1991. Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

Goho, James. 2014. “City of Darkness: The Beginnings of Modern Urban Horror.” In Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror, 181–204. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1988. “Poetry of Darkness: The Horror Fiction of Fritz Leiber.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, 18–29. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2008. Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

LEWIS, MATTHEW GREGORY (1775–1818)

Matthew Gregory Lewis was commonly known by his contemporaries as Matthew “Monk” Lewis or simply “Monk” Lewis, a reference to his most infamous and influential novel, The Monk (1796). Lewis is best known for this scandalous first work, written when he was nineteen, during the short period he served as a member of Parliament (MP), and in part a response to Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the “explained supernatural.” Lewis’s deviation from this approach would characterize his work for the rest of his life. The Monk showcases supernatural events as truly supernatural and favors graphic depictions of violence and gore over less descriptive insinuations. His work falls into the category of horror, as defined by Radcliffe, opposed to her preferred use of terror. In his work, one can see the influence of the German schauerroman literature (or shudder-novel), as well as French Revolution violence and an unstable family life, all of which would establish the foundations of the Gothic tradition.

Lewis’s first work was not his last, though it is the work for which most students of the Gothic recognize him. He was careful to avoid another scandal in further work, but his oeuvre never strayed far from the realm of horror. A prolific writer of poetry and drama, such as his most important play, The Castle Spectre (1797), he was also a talented translator, and many of his works walked the fine line between translation, adaptation, and imitation. His poetry tended toward Gothic themes, but what contemporaries praised most was his skill at writing verse, particularly his experimental form in such poems as “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine” (first published in The Monk), appropriately called “Alonzo meter.” Lewis influenced many canonical Romantic poets, mentoring Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even Lord Byron, who sought his advice on his own work. Lewis’s anthology of poetry, Tales of Wonder (1801), included works from several poets, Scott included, as well as his own translations, original poetry, and even a parody of one of his poems. The collection Tales of Terror, published shortly thereafter, was attributed to him by his nineteenth-century biographer, an error that has only recently been rectified. The author of this second collection remains unknown, but the text is widely understood to be a parody of (or tribute to) Tales of Wonder. Today’s scholars take particular interest in approaches to sexuality, gender, and race in all of Lewis’s works, as well as their unique and playful forms.

In 1812, Lewis’s father Matthew—deputy secretary of war and a sugar plantation owner—died, leaving the writer his Jamaican property and its slaves, a charge that Lewis approached with seriousness and anxiety. While his own politics were fairly inconsistent, Lewis expressed concern for his slaves and an interest in their freedom. His last work was one of his most remarkable: Journal of a West India Proprietor (written 1815–1818 and published 1834). Lewis died at sea from yellow fever on a return trip from Jamaica. “Monk” Lewis not only penned one of the most defining texts within one of the most defining periods of the Gothic tradition, but he worked within that tradition’s forms throughout his life, inspiring writers and audiences with his craft and the power of horror.

Laura R. Kremmel

See also: The Monk; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Terror versus Horror.

Further Reading

Macdonald, D. L. 2000. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Robinson, Daniel. 2013. “Gothic Prosody: Monkish Perversity and the Poetics of Weird Form.” In Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, 155–171. Surrey: Ashgate.

Thomson, Douglass H. 2008. “Mingled Measures: Gothic Parody in Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror.” In Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 50. https://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2008/v/n50/018143ar.html.

“LIGEIA”

Edgar Allan Poe seems to have regarded the 1838 story “Ligeia” as one of his best, and to have revised it several times during its publication history. It is one of his stories about the death of a beautiful woman, a subject he claimed to be “the most poetical” in the world, and which he certainly made famous with his poem “Annabel Lee” (Poe 2003, 436).

“Ligeia” introduces a Poe narrator at his most obsessive and unreliable. The hero cannot even remember where he first met the Lady Ligeia (somewhere in Germany, perhaps), but he goes on for pages describing every aspect of her physical beauty (raven-black hair, marble complexion, high forehead, etc.), intellectual accomplishments, charms, and such. The prose is intense and fervid, not so much because Poe is overwriting but because the narrator’s state of mind is already bordering on madness. Then Ligeia sickens and dies, but not before the narrator has read aloud to her the poem “The Conqueror Worm,” which is actually by Poe, but which the story frames as Ligeia’s own composition. This poem, with its triumph of the bloody grave worm, would seem to contradict the quote from Joseph Glanvill, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, that is both presented at the head of the story and repeated within the text, to the effect that the human will has the power to overcome death: “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will” (Poe 1984, 262). (This passage has not been found among Glanville’s works and may be Poe’s invention.)

In the story’s opening lines, the first-person narrator of “Ligeia” is established as one of Poe’s overwrought, high-strung, hyperintelligent, probably unreliable individuals whose perception of events is almost certainly skewed in dark and disturbing ways:

I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. . . . And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own—a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself—what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it? And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Romance—if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.

Matt Cardin

Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 3. New York: Fred De Fau & Company. 192–193.

Having lost one wife, the hero moves to a remote part of England and, being fabulously rich, refurnishes an old abbey, decorating it fantastically, slipping into extreme decadence and aesthetic excess. In this state, now taking opium regularly, he marries the much more conventional (and blonde-haired) Lady Rowena, but soon hates her and longs for Ligeia. Rowena also sickens, and the narrator seems to sense the presence of the ghost of Ligeia in the bedchamber with the two of them. The narrator describes several suspicious red drops that appear in Rowena’s wine, and it is unclear whether he did it himself, or whether the ghost of Ligeia did it, or whether the entire episode is nothing but a hallucination. The climax comes as Rowena, already presumed dead and wrapped for the grave, seems to revive and staggers into the middle of the room, but recoils from the narrator. She falls back on the bed. The grave-wrappings come loose, and her black hair is revealed. It is Ligeia, returned—but it is unclear whether she is alive or just another beautiful corpse.

Roger Corman filmed this story in 1964 as The Tomb of Ligeia, the last and least successful of his Poe films, but the influence of the story extends far beyond that. The hero’s extreme aesthetic indulgence is more in the spirit of the “decadent” writers of the 1890s and later and it certainly influenced them. Traces of this story are visible in the works of J. K. Huysmans, M. P. Shiel, Oscar Wilde, and Clark Ashton Smith. It depicts the borderline where the pursuit of beauty and the indulgence of the senses overwhelm the senses and shade into horror.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Huysmans, J. K.; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shiel, M. P.; Smith, Clark Ashton; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Heller, Terry. 1980. “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the Pleasures of Terror.” Gothic 2, no. 2: 39–48.

Holland-Toll, Linda J. 1997. “Ligeia: The Facts of the Case.” Studies in Weird Fiction 21 (Summer): 10–16.

Jay, Gregory S. 1983. “Poe: Writing and the Unconscious.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, 144–169. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. 1993. “Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women.” In New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, edited by Kenneth Silverman, 119–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 2003. “The Philosophy of Composition.” In Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews, edited by David Galloway, 430–442. New York: Penguin.

Shi, Yaohua. 1991. “The Enigmatic Ligeia/‘Ligeia.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4: 485–496.

LIGOTTI, THOMAS (1953–)

Thomas Ligotti is an American pessimist and innovator in weird fiction. Noteworthy for avoiding traditional horror storytelling and for using language in an extremely precise and careful way, Ligotti’s horror is pointedly philosophical; that is, the menace in a Ligotti story is an idea more often than it is a monster or a villain. Specifically, the menacing idea is the notion that existence is meaningless, that reality cannot really be distinguished from nothingness. Ideas such as these are often combined and labeled “nihilism,” which means “belief in nothing.” Nihilism has no institutions, no “rules,” but is a name for a point of view that can be found anywhere, including in literature and philosophy, especially when the topic is a loss of faith in conventional values, or even in conventional ideas of what does or does not exist. This loss of faith is often called “disillusionment,” and it may be said that it is disillusionment that Ligotti imparts to the reader through his fiction.

During the 1980s Ligotti published his first stories in small press magazines such as Nyctalops, Eldritch Tales, Grimoire, Grue, Fantasy Macabre, Dark Horizons, and Crypt of Cthulhu. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was published in a limited edition by Silver Scarab Press in 1985, expanded and reissued first in England by Robinson Publishing in 1989, and then in the United States in 1990 by Carroll and Graf, which would go on to publish three further collections, Grimscribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and The Nightmare Factory (1996). Songs of a Dead Dreamer was highly praised for its originality and importance when it was published. The Nightmare Factory was the first mass market paperback of Ligotti’s work, incorporating selections from his earlier collections alongside new material, and it won both the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards for Best Fiction Collection of 1996. During this period, Ligotti also published The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994) (with an introduction by fellow horror master Michael Shea), a work that shows particularly well Ligotti’s highly self-aware approach to horror as a literary genre.

Over a period of five years, Ligotti produced a series of four works in collaboration with the English experimental band Current 93, consisting of brief, limited-edition books released along with compact discs of original music inspired by the fiction, as well as readings of the fiction. These works were In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997), I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000), This Degenerate Little Town (2001), and The Unholy City (2002).

“The Red Tower”: The Universe as a Nightmare Factory

“The Red Tower” is among the most widely reprinted of Ligotti’s stories, and it won a Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction after it was first published in his collection The Nightmare Factory in 1996. The concluding story of the book, its subject is echoed by the title of, and serves as a coda to, that collection as a whole. More an unnerving prose poem than a plot-driven narrative, it consists of an unnamed first-person narrator’s description of a three-story, ruined factory made of crumbling red brick, known as the Red Tower, that stands in an otherwise blank landscape. This factory, operating like an organism, without owners, employees, or even consumers for its products, industriously churns out a wide variety of grotesque “novelty items,” until it begins to break down and fade from existence.

This building and its hostile, empty environment, apparently resentful of the factory’s novelties, are the story’s only major characters, for the reader learns nothing of the narrator beyond that he or she is part of a select group of alienated obsessives who share their “hallucinatory accounts” of the Tower’s activities. These accounts inform the narrator’s speculation that the factory’s environs are attempting to return to a state of total vacancy. The narrator admires the factory’s defiant production of absurd artifacts, while anxiously anticipating its inevitable dissolution.

With its eschewal of traditional plot and character; development of a highly stylized, abstract, and even opaque language; and highly wrought images of disintegration and entropy, the story showcases many of the techniques and themes for which Ligotti’s name has become a sort of shorthand. Its atmosphere of decay is inextricable from its allegorical portrayal of a universe that is intrinsically hostile to creativity, consciousness, and even existence itself.

Sean Moreland

In 2002, Ligotti’s collection of stories all related to the idea of “corporate horror,” entitled My Work Is Not Yet Done, won the Stoker and International Horror Guild awards for Best Long Fiction. The following year, he published a screenplay, Crampton, written in collaboration with Brandon Trenz, and originally intended as an episode of The X-Files television program. He remained highly active in publishing during this period, releasing Sideshow and Other Stories (2003), Death Poems (2004), The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (2005), and Teatro Grottesco (2006), all published by small presses instead of mainstream, mass market ones.

There followed a publishing hiatus of eight years. In 2007, however, a filmed adaptation of Ligotti’s early story “The Frolic” was released, directed by Jacob Cooney, with a screenplay by Ligotti and Brandon Trenz.

Ligotti returned to publishing in 2014 with a collection of two stories, The Spectral Link, and the same year he was also the subject of a collection of interviews spanning twenty-five years of his career, titled Born to Fear and edited by Matt Cardin. His name and work gained additional prominence in 2014 when the first season of the HBO television series True Detective incorporated distinctively Ligottian elements into its dialogue and dark philosophical worldview, prompting an accusation of plagiarism (not leveled by Ligotti himself) that attained international media attention and brought Ligotti to the awareness of a massive mainstream audience for the first time. Ligotti’s significance has also been acknowledged by the republication of his two earliest collections in one volume by Penguin Books, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, in 2015.

Ligotti has acknowledged the influence of several philosophers on his work and his thought, most notably Romanian pessimist Emile Cioran and the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Since his stories tend to be more about ideas than about character or plot, except indirectly, the language and imagery Ligotti uses become accordingly more important, since it is the story itself that has to be frightening, rather than what the story is about.

Ligotti makes his point of view available to others by employing both new and familiar aspects of horror stories; the somewhat exaggerated nature of the dangers and fears in a conventional horror tale are used to make Ligotti’s more subtle uncertainties large enough to see clearly. In stories such as “The Sect of the Idiot,” “The Mystics of Muelenberg,” and “The Voice in the Bones,” rather than present the reader with a disillusioned character passively thinking in a single setting, simply reciting nihilistic ideas, Ligotti instead will introduce characters into situations that cause them to discover, or rediscover, the unreality and emptiness of the world and of themselves. By dramatizing this idea, turning it into a realization for characters, rather than the “message,” Ligotti is able to infuse this idea with the emotions appropriate to it. In Ligotti’s work, the discovery of unreality leads the reader to the possibility that nothing is real.

The student of horror fiction is familiar with stories revolving around sinister dolls and puppets. E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose story “The Sand-man” includes an “automaton” (robot) character, was one of the most important writers to deal extensively with dolls. The most famous section of the classic English anthology horror film “Dead of Night” (1945) involves a ventriloquist dummy come to life, as does an episode of the original Twilight Zone, “The Dummy” (1962). So does the Anthony Hopkins film Magic (1978). Dolls or dummies occur again and again in Ligotti’s fiction, serving as important images of a kind of falseness in life. The idea that there is really no difference between a human being and a manikin is addressed in “Dream of a Manikin,” for example; the narrator at one point is unable to determine whether or not the figures he sees are people impersonating dolls, or simply dolls. The dolls invite the narrator to become one of them, to “die into” them, but this death is more like the disappearance of the idea of life itself, a loss even greater than the loss of an individual life. As is typical in Ligotti’s work, the question of reality is not treated separately from the question of life itself; if reality is unreal, then life is unreal, and death therefore is the truer reality.

Ligotti’s stories seldom involve action or violence, although My Work Is Not Yet Done marries an element of supernatural violence to the meditations on emptiness. Heroes and villains are also typically absent from his work; the cosmos, or life itself, is the villain in Ligotti’s fiction, with no hero to vanquish them. Instead, Ligotti’s main characters are often dreamers. Actual dreams have an important place in Ligotti’s work, but the figure of the dreamer is more than just a character who dreams a dream. A dreamer is, in a way, a reality-impaired person; someone who is less solidly connected to what is supposed to be real. The dreamer may or may not have a job, but usually that job will be a meaningless and solitary occupation. He will be isolated, either in real solitude, or so alienated from other people that he might as well be alone even in a crowd. Since the dreamer is only superficially participating in everyday life, which is all of reality for most people, the dreamer seems to be less real. The point of view of the dreamer, someone who does not see reality as real, is extensively explored in Ligotti’s fiction. Sometimes the dreamer is someone who despises reality as a crude illusion, but more often Ligotti’s dreamers are people who seem unable to manage to believe in reality, or in themselves.

Seen from this point of view, reality often seems absurd, which means that it seems pointless and silly. The point of view of the dreamer is ironic, that is, the dreamer does not fully believe in reality, but understands that the people around him do. This gives rise to sardonic humor, which means a kind of humor that is painful. Even though they find life to be empty and meaningless, Ligotti’s characters do not want to die and will cling to their dream of life even though they cannot find any meaning in living. In the middle of his 2014 story “Metaphysica Morum,” there is a long letter written in the style of American phantasmagoric author William S. Burroughs, which combines broad humor with the absurd contrast between the tone of the letter and the tone of the rest of the story. Ligotti’s fiction often creates effects in this way, using aspects of style or tone alongside more familiar ways of creating effects using characters and situations. This passage resembles others in earlier stories that involve Hoffmann-like dream characters, unreal persons who are darkly sarcastic avatars of unreality, or agents of it.

Much of Ligotti’s early work appeared in publications devoted in whole or in part to literary works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, so that, for a time, Ligotti was regarded as a “Lovecraftian” writer. Stories such as “Nethescurial” and “The Prodigy of Dreams” are experiments in a more overtly Lovecraftian vein, both involving the creation of godlike otherworldly entities—Nethescurial itself, and Cynothoglys, respectively. Ligotti also invented his own dream city, “Vastarien,” in the story of the same name. However, Ligotti’s connection to Lovecraft actually redefined for many what “Lovecraftian” meant, as he did not simply ape the more obvious aspects of Lovecraft’s work in his own, but instead adopted Lovecraft’s own point of view. Lovecraft, a strict materialist, felt that existence was fundamentally meaningless, that tradition and stability were the greatest goods a society could possess, and that one should adopt a detached attitude toward reality. Ligotti extends this perspective and makes it less calm and more painful. He is a Lovecraftian in the sense that he writes horror fiction in order to express a philosophy of horror.

A part of Ligotti’s appeal may be the consistency of his thinking and the reality of his commitment to the nihilism of his writing. In addition to his literary work, Ligotti has also written a philosophical book, The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010), advocating that humanity bring itself to an end as a species by ceasing to reproduce. This idea is sometimes called “antinatalism,” meaning “against birth.”

Ligotti’s story “The Red Tower” is a reflection on the sources of his own fiction. The story has no character other than a nameless narrator, really only a voice saying “I.” There is no plot, but only a description of a mysterious red tower, which is continually producing horrific things. This tower does not seem to be inhabited, at least not in any normal sense. There is no reason why it should exist or create horrible things. In a way, the red tower is the imagination of the horror writer. One of the things that makes Ligotti’s work is so distinctive, and one of his innovations in the writing of horror stories, is this kind of self-awareness. Many of Ligotti’s stories “know” that they are stories; since he is usually writing about the unreality of what we think of as real, it is not inconsistent to write also about the reality of his stories. If reality is a fiction, then fiction and reality are not so different from each other. In other pieces like “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror” and “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” Ligotti transforms the discussion of horror fiction into horror stories, and so cancels the distance that would normally “protect” the reader from what he or she is reading. In this way, Ligotti is able to extend the work of the classic horror writers who influenced him—including Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, and Algernon Blackwood—by introducing aspects of modern literary self-awareness, drawn from writers whose work is not normally considered horror fiction, such as Thomas Bernhard, William S. Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, or Bruno Schulz. Ligotti has himself gone on to influence a new generation of horror writers, makers of music, television, and film, who look to him for inspiration and guidance.

Michael Cisco

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; International Horror Guild Award; “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Shea, Michael; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Calia, Michael. 2015. “A Master of Horror Blows Up.” Wall Street Journal—Eastern Edition, September 25. D3.

Cardin, Matt, ed. 2014. Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. “Thomas Ligotti: The Escape from Life.” In The Modern Weird Tale, 243–257. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Ligotti, Thomas. 2010. The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. 2003. The Thomas Ligotti Reader. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.

Tompkins, Stephen. 2006. “The Nemesis of Mimesis: Thomas Ligotti, Worlds Elsewhere, and the Darkness Ten Times.” Studies in Modern Horror 4: 1–28.

Interview with Thomas Ligotti

October 2016

Ligotti here talks about the use of dolls, dummies, puppets, and manikins in both his own writing and that of other horror writers. He does the same for the use of dreams and nightmares as well. He also talks about the differences between short-form horror fiction and novel-length horror fiction, the changing status and permanent importance of H. P. Lovecraft to the field, and the central purpose of horror literature.

Matt Cardin: One of the most characteristic elements of your stories is the frequent presence of dolls, dummies, scarecrows, manikins, puppets, and other artificial representations of the human form, used to uncanny, unnerving, and horrific effect. These are always tied into an extremely dark view of reality, and of the place of conscious life within it. Dolls and dummies also have a venerable history in horror literature at large, stretching back centuries. Why is this so? What is it about these effigies of human beings (and sometimes other life forms) that makes them such a powerful presence in horror fiction? And why do you personally find them so useful and expressive of your authorial calling?

Thomas Ligotti: It’s probably not possible to offer a definitive explanation to the question, “Why is there a potential for alarm in all approximations of the human figure?” I use the word “potential” because such representations have seldom been intended to alarm in such a way that violates their nature as representations. Only our perception that a violation of this kind might occur, or has in fact occurred, instills in us a sense that something which should not be in fact is. This is the essence of the uncanny, and the uncanny is always alarming. One might argue that all horror fiction is based on some uncanny phenomenon. To some degree this is true, as in the case of people who are bitten by zombies and afterward themselves become zombies. There is a moment of the uncanny when one form of being turns into an entirely different form. Subsequently, though, the new form is normalized into a monster and bears no resemblance to what it once was. Monsters aren’t uncanny. They’re simply a threat to humans. Ghosts aren’t uncanny. They’re not even by nature alarming. And monster trucks driven by vengeful ghosts definitely aren’t uncanny. The harm posed by these unusual things and many others featured in horror stories is a strictly physical harm to human bodies. The harm of the uncanny is psychological, that is, the wreckage of some metaphysical viewpoint deeply ingrained in us. It’s a threat to how we believe the world should be and violates the categories, so often proven false, of our conception of existence in general and of our existence as persons in particular.

Cartesian dualism is a classic attempt to wrestle with our anxiety about what we are and how we work. Perhaps, as Descartes wrote, we really are because we think, but that doesn’t mean we are the way we think we are. When dolls or puppets or manikins behave as we do, declaring their possession of a mind and a will like our own, there is a confusion of categories and an uncanny horror arises from this confusion. How can these lifeless things, these purely physical things of parts, also present themselves as being things that are whole, things that have a reality we thought belonged only to us? We feel there is something deranged about this, something fundamentally wrong. But is it deranged, is it wrong, because of the way these purely physical things of parts behave—and they always behave menacingly—or because they behave with the same appearance of mind and will as we seem to do? Two things can’t be one. Things of parts can’t amount to anything whole, anything real, and, above all, anything “human.”

MC: Another typical trope in your work is the use of dreams and nightmares. These, too, are also staples of the Gothic and horrific literary traditions. Both for you individually and for the tradition in general, why?

TL: To play off my response to the previous questions, dreams and nightmares are the principal locus of uncanny experience, and looking back on what I’ve written it’s the effect of the uncanny that is dominant in my stories. I didn’t deliberately intend this to be the case. I don’t think it’s possible to do that. One simply has to be the kind of person who feels, as I indicated above, that there is something fundamentally wrong about being alive and aware in this world. When I contemplate how the whole melange of organic existence evolved, I can’t help being overwhelmed by a sense of the weird and grotesque oddity of it all. Some people find the slide from bacteria to conscious beings to be something marvelous and enchanting. I don’t. I’m not saying that those who don’t share my perception of existence are wrongheaded. Quite obviously they possess a different sensibility from my own and find it easier to accept what I view as a maddening showcase of whimsical biology and pointless experience that trails off into nonexistence. I’m just saying that given the accidents of my personal evolution, I can’t see the big picture of life as anything but a sequence of scenarios that add up to one great uncanny nightmare.

MC: With the exception of My Work Is Not Yet Done and The Conspiracy against the Human Race, you have published exclusively short-form work. Many people have noted that short stories and novellas seem an especially suitable vehicle for horror fiction, and that the mass birth of the horror novel in the late twentieth century represented a kind of combined literary and publishing experiment. Are there any long-form works of horror that you, as a reader, personally like and recommend, or do you find yourself drawn exclusively to the traditional short forms?

TL: It’s not only horror novels that are perceived as freaks in the history of genre fiction. Excellent arguments have been made by better brains than mine that the novel itself was an artistic aberration in the march of literature. With the advent of modernism at the latest, writers have been attempting to do something different, something more expressive and faithful to human experience, than telling—or, even worse, “showing”—a lengthy story for the purpose of edification and entertainment. There’s nothing inherently evil about a long work of fiction, but there’s no argument that this form is for the most part rigidly conventionalized in subject matter as well as form, and everything else is relegated to minor, miniaturist, or cult status. Jorge Luis Borges once said that he could imagine a world without novels but not without tales. Admittedly, massive, mass-market page-turners make more people happy than any other literary form. How can anyone honestly say that this is a puke-making or terrible phenomenon? When it comes down to it, everyone reads for entertainment or they don’t read at all. As for horror fiction as such, it’s a fact that the classics of this genre and the works cherished by its most avid aficionados exist almost exclusively in short form.

MC: After decades of occupying a strange hybrid status as pulp author, respected literary author, cult author, and underground pop culture icon all at once, Lovecraft has now exploded onto the scene in an even stranger status. He is at once a canonized American writer and a controversial, polarizing, lightning rod–type figure who is both lauded and reviled. He is also, for you, as for so many other horror writers, a chief and cherished influence. What do you think readers need to know about him right now?

TL: Despite all attempts to derogate or trivialize them, Lovecraft’s works will resonate down the ages for their brave and expansive view of the universe and a unique vision that hardly exists elsewhere in literature. The last thing on the mind of Lovecraft was the highly perishable effort to convey what it was like to live at a particular time and in a particular place in world history. His ambition went far beyond documenting the contemporaneous or an engagement in mere wordsmithing for art’s sake. While superb work has been done in the field of illuminating Lovecraft’s writing for a specialized audience, my hope has always been that the literary elites might better appreciate the mind behind the monsters, thereby enabling them to express a wider view of the human experiment.

MC: What is the point, purpose, or value of horror literature?

TL: To entertain and disillusion its readers at the same time.

MC: What do readers of horror literature need to know?

TL: If you read a lot of horror literature because you like to be scared, then you’re probably a normal, healthy person. If you read horror literature to fulfill some deeply personal predisposition, be assured there is probably something odd and unwholesome about you. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s not all right to be that way.

LINK, KELLY (1969–)

Kelly Link is an author best known for her Fabulations, which are stories that draw from the treasury of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but that are not readily identifiable as belonging to any of those sole genres specifically. Another way of thinking about her work, and of Fabulation in general, is to consider its disregard for genre divisions even as it demonstrates a reverence for genre traditions. In Link’s hands Fabulation is neither parody nor pastiche (even if it sometimes incorporates these approaches), but a creatively and intellectually sincere engagement with the variety of motifs most broadly associated with speculative fiction. Additionally, it is important to note that her work is not defined by genre, but instead works in conversation with it. Her work differs significantly, then, from that of traditional genre writers in that it is more experimental at both a formal and a philosophical level.

Put another way, Link’s work challenges genre readers precisely because it uses familiar tropes—ghosts, zombies, witches—in unfamiliar ways and with unfamiliar tones. Her stories engage, in some cases overtly, the storytelling tradition in all its diverse forms. Sometimes this means that plot and characters are secondary concerns. Often, her stories inhabit an indeterminate narrative state that eschews pat resolutions and closure. Her work is characterized by an ambiguity that resists interpretation. And yet, there is great, sometimes bleak, humor in her stories. Part of what makes Link so readable is that the heaviness often associated with experimental fiction is largely absent. There is always a sense of playfulness, of fun, running throughout her work that, sometimes ironically, intensifies its narrative.

Her work has been widely praised by critics outside the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. For example, her 2016 fiction collection Get in Trouble was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her work has been included in such mainstream anthologies as The Best American Short Stories series (which usually adheres to traditionally realist fiction). At the same time, she has enjoyed much success within her home fields, having garnered Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards, as well as the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the World Fantasy Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award.

To date Link has published four short story collections: Stranger Things Happen (2001), Magic for Beginners (2014), Pretty Monsters (2010; includes stories from the previous two collections along with new material), and Get in Trouble. Standout titles of individual stories that represent Link’s nuanced complexity and breadth while incorporating elements of horror include “Water off a Black Dog’s Back” and “The Specialist’s Hat” in Stranger Things Happen; “Magic for Beginners,” “Stone Animals,” and “Catskin” in Magic for Beginners; and “The Summer People” and “Two Houses” in Pretty Monsters. Link has also been an active and prolific editor, overseeing, with husband Gavin Grant, Small Beer Press and the fiction zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She has also edited the anthologies Trampoline (2003) and, with Grant, Monstrous Affections (2014).

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Monsters; New Weird; Shirley Jackson Awards; Vampires; World Fantasy Award; Zombies.

Further Reading

Baker, James Ireland. 2005. “Maverick Fabulist: Kelly Link, Rising Star, Goes Her Own Way.” Publishers Weekly, July 22. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20050725/20526-maverick-fabulist.html.

“Horror Stories Are Love Stories: Helen Oyemi interviews Kelly Link.” 2015. Los Angeles Review of Books, May 26. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/horror-stories-are-love-stories.

“Kelly Link.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

“THE LISTENERS”

Written in 1912 and published that year by Constable and Company in The Listeners and Other Poems, “The Listeners” is perhaps Walter de la Mare’s most recognizable work for either adults or children in any form, noted particularly for its simple metric rhythm, its atmospheric setting, and its darkly romantic imagery.

“The Listeners” recounts in brief the arrival of an unnamed traveler to a moonlit house late one night, and his unsuccessful attempts to gain admittance. The poem’s stark central image is that of the eponymous, silent listeners, a large group of (it is implied) phantoms who are thronging the halls of the house, and who remain steadfastly still and silent in response to the traveler’s calls.

The horror underlining de la Mare’s poem is that of the uncanny, otherworldly nature of the silent listeners, and the mysterious relationship between the traveler and those who dwell within the house. Indeed, “The Listeners” poses many questions that de la Mare deliberately leaves unresolved, thereby heightening the numerous mysteries at the heart of the poem. The subtle threat running throughout the poem, and that (along with its decidedly supernatural elements) accounts for the reader’s increasing sense of discomfort, is the primal fear felt in the face of the unfathomable actions of the phantom listeners, who represent a collective predatory threat to the lone figure of the traveler.

Moreover, “The Listeners” compounds this sense of dread with the further existential fear of resolute silence, as de la Mare’s pointed refusal to answer the many questions his narrative implicitly raises echoes in kind the silence that meets the traveler’s repeated question: “Is there anybody there?” Like the traveler, the reader, too, encounters a void, an existential emptiness that de la Mare refuses to fill.

Finally, “The Listeners” captures the quiet menace of unexplained occurrences or incidences and suggests that the most threatening thing of all to the human mind is the unanswered (or unanswerable) question, to which we necessarily demand a meaningful response. The poem presents several questions, such as who the traveler is and where he has traveled to/from; what his relationship is to the people in the house; who the listeners are and why they won’t answer him; what “word” he has kept, and to whom. De la Mare leaves the answers to these questions very much open, and the strength of “The Listeners” as a work of supernatural horror lies in the discomfort the reader feels at the poem’s thorough lack of resolution.

Ian Kinane

“The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champ’d the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

“Is there anybody there?” he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Lean’d over and look’d into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplex’d and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirr’d and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

“Tell them I came, and no one answer’d,

That I kept my word,” he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone. (De la Mare 1916, 13)

Source: De La Mare, Walter. 1916. “The Listeners.” In The Poetry Review of America. William Stanley Braithwaite and Joseph Lebowich, editors. Vol. 1 (May). Cambridge, MA: Poetry Review Company.

See also: de la Mare, Walter; “Out of the Deep”; The Return.

Further Reading

Avery, Gillian, and Julia Briggs. 1989. Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Works of Iona and Peter Opie. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentinck, A. 1991. “De la Mare’s ‘The Listeners.’” Explicator 50, no. 1 (Fall): 33–35.

de la Mare, Walter. [1912] 2010. The Listeners, and Other Poems. Charleston: Nabu Press.

Duffin, Henry Charles. 1949. Walter de la Mare: A Study of his Poetry. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

Pierson, Robert M. 1964. “The Meter of ‘The Listeners.’” English Studies 45, no. 5 (October): 373–381.

Reid, Forrest. 1929. Walter de la Mare: A Critical Study. New York: Holt.

LONG, FRANK BELKNAP (1901–1994)

Frank Belknap Long was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who was best known as a friend and disciple of groundbreaking weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. He was the first writer to build on the mythology Lovecraft was elaborating in his stories and that would eventually serve as the foundation for the shared fictional universe referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lovecraft made Long’s acquaintance in 1921 after reading his Edgar Allan Poe pastiche “The Eye Above the Mantel” in United Amateur, a magazine to which Lovecraft himself contributed. Several years later he recommended Long’s fiction to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who published Long’s first professional sale, “The Desert Lich,” in the magazine’s November 1924 issue. The themes of Long’s stories were typical of early Weird Tales fare: native curses in “Death Waters” (1924), giant sea monsters in “The Ocean Leech” (1925), and ancient sorceries in “The Black Druid (1930) and “A Visitor from Egypt” (1930). One of his most reprinted Weird Tales stories, “Second Night Out” (aka “The Dead Black Thing,” 1933), nods to F. Marion Crawford’s classic tale “The Upper Berth” in its account of a monster that regularly manifests aboard a ship at a particular nautical crossing. Another Weird Tales sale, “The Man with a Thousand Legs” (1927), incorporated significant science fiction elements, and, in fact, Long went on to write more science fiction than supernatural fiction over the course of his career.

Long first referenced elements from Lovecraft’s fiction in his tale “The Dog-Eared God” (1926). His story “The Space Eaters” (1928), which features characters based on Lovecraft and himself attempting to survive an invasion by the titular otherworldly monsters, which are modeled on horrors in Lovecraft’s own stories, is now regarded the first tale of the Cthulhu Mythos not written by Lovecraft himself. Although Lovecraft gave his blessing to the story and eventually referenced it in his own work, Long’s failure to evoke a sense of horror commensurate with the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft’s fiction showed, from the outset, the challenge that contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos other than Lovecraft faced when trying to work with the same thematic materials. “The Hounds of Tindalos” (1929), another tale that evoked Long and Lovecraft’s friendship in a plot involving ravening monsters from beyond space and time, would become the title tale of Long’s first short-fiction collection, published in 1946. The Horror from the Hills (1931) was a collaboration of sorts between Long and Lovecraft, insofar as this tale of the monstrous entity Chaugnar Faugn’s incursion into our world incorporated a chapter that was actually Lovecraft’s transcription of one of his dreams.

“The Hounds of Tindalos”: A Cthulhu Mythos Classic

“The Hounds of Tindalos” was first published in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. It is Frank Belknap Long’s best-known tale, and it became a part of the shared universe of Lovecraftian horror stories by diverse hands known today as the Cthulhu Mythos when H. P. Lovecraft, Long’s friend and mentor, referenced the monsters named in its title two years later in his tale “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

In Long’s story, the main character, Halpin, is a writer of occult fiction who seeks to transcend the limits of known space and time under the influence of a mind-expanding drug. Describing his visions while under the drug’s influence to an assistant named Frank, Chalmers travels back in time before the origins of organic life, where he finds another type of time that is curved and angular. When malignant beings of angular time that he refers to as the Hounds of Tindalos “scent” him, they begin their pursuit. Chalmers attempts to thwart the beings by plastering the architectural angles in his apartment into curves, since entities in angular time cannot enter curved time—but a freak earthquake shakes the plaster loose, with horrifying results.

The story features characters modeled on Lovecraft himself (Chalmers) and other members of the Lovecraft circle—a narrative quirk that, as much as the evocation of monstrous entities beyond space and time, was to become a trademark of Cthulhu Mythos fiction. It served as the title story for Long’s first short-fiction collection, published by Arkham House in 1946, and August Derleth included it in the seminal 1969 anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Over the years numerous horror writers including Brian Lumley, Thomas Monteleone, and John Ajvide Lindqvist have paid tribute to Long’s story by referencing it in their own work.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

Long was one of the few writers for Weird Tales who also wrote for Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), the magazine of logical fantasy fiction that was a sister publication to Golden Age science fiction magazine Astounding Science-Fiction. His contributions show greater sophistication than much of his work for Weird Tales, especially “Fisherman’s Luck” (1940) and “Step into My Garden” (1942), which deploy elements of classical mythology, and “Johnny on the Spot” (1939), which presents a literal assignation with death in the style of a hardboiled crime story.

By the 1940s Long had shifted to writing science fiction almost entirely and eventually placed stories in nearly every major science fiction magazine, including Astounding, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Startling Stories. He also wrote for a variety of comic books, most notably Adventures into the Unknown. In the 1950s and 1960s he served in an editorial capacity on a number of magazines, among them Satellite Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. He also wrote nine modern Gothic romance novels, all but one under the pseudonym Lyda Belknap Long. Long was a published poet for nearly as long as he was a fiction writer, and his collections of verse include A Man from Genoa and Other Poems (1926), The Goblin Tower (1928), and In Mayan Splendor (1977). Collections of his weird tales and science fiction include The Rim of Unknown (1972), Night Fear (1979), and The Early Long (1975), which includes a lengthy autobiographical introduction.

Although Long wrote weird fiction sporadically through the 1980s, he is remembered today almost exclusively for his early stories for Weird Tales and his association with H. P. Lovecraft, whom he defended in Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975) against what he thought was an inaccurate representation of his friend and mentor in L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975).

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Daniels, Les. 1985. “Frank Belknap Long.” Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by Everett F. Bleiler, 869–874. New York: Scribner’s.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1998. “Frank Belknap Long.” The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

Long, Frank Belknap. 1975. Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night Side. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Long, Frank Belknap. 1975. “Introduction.” The Early Long. New York: Doubleday.

“LOT NO. 249”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1892. The short story combines Doyle’s enthusiasm for the supernatural with his interest in crime and detection. “Lot No. 249” is a tale of murder and mystery. Doyle sets his tale in Oxford, where Abercrombie Smith, a medical student, discovers that another student, Edward Bellingham, has become enamored with Egyptology, going so far as to have a mummy, Lot No. 249 at an auction, in his room. Several students are mysteriously attacked, and Smith eventually discovers that Bellingham has brought the mummy to life and is controlling him. Smith eventually confronts Bellingham and forces him to destroy the mummy and all objects connected with it.

Conan Doyle structures his story as a standard mystery. An intelligent man, in this case medical student Abercrombie Smith, comes across a series of unusual, unexplained events that suggest danger to the community. As the mysterious events grow more threatening, the protagonist must first uncover the true nature of the events, then who is behind them, and finally eliminate the threat by destroying or capturing the source of the evil. This is a typical plot structure of both mystery and horror narratives, and in “Lot No. 249” Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, sets an amateur detective in the world of the fantastic.

“Lot No. 249,” although one of Conan Doyle’s lesser known works, is important for several reasons. First, it is an example of the interest in the fantastic that was a significant part of Victorian and Edwardian English culture. Conan Doyle was one of the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1893 and published works on Spiritualism, telepathy, reincarnation, and the existence of fairies. He, like many others at the turn of the century, was fascinated by ancient Egypt, and the nineteenth century enthusiasm for Egyptian art, architecture, science, and spirituality led to what has been called Egyptomania, which was only heightened with Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923. “Lot No. 249” dramatizes the juxtaposition of modern realism (in Abercrombie Smith’s medical science) with the actuality of the supernatural (a mummy brought back to life).

Conan Doyle’s story is important for another reason: it was the first English story to depict a mummy being brought back to life by a modern man using ancient Egyptian texts. Previous tales of mummies being brought back to life had used galvanism, or electricity, as the rejuvenating force. But here, and in his other, more famous mummy tale, “The Ring of Thoth” (1890), Conan Doyle provided a groundwork narrative that served as a source for the film mummies that followed in the twentieth century.

“Lot No. 249” has been adapted more than once for other media, including a 1967 BBC television production and the opening segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990).

Jim Holte

See also: Mummies; Occult Detectives.

Further Reading

Booth, Martin. 2000. The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Bulfin, Ailise. 2011. “The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 54, no. 4: 411–443.

Curl, James Stevens. 1994. Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival, a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press.

Pascal, Janet B. 2000. Arthur Conan Doyle Beyond Baker Street. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

LOVECRAFT, H. P. (1890–1937)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author whose innovative approach to horror fiction ushered in a new era of the genre, and whose work is distinguished by exceptional artistry and philosophical depth. Writing in the early twentieth century, Lovecraft blended radical developments in science—physics, astronomy, biology, geology, anthropology, and psychology—into his tales, relocating the center of horror from outmoded superstition to human confrontation with an indifferent, unknowable, and chaotic cosmos.

The Long Shadow of H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s influence on popular culture has been enormous, and actually preceded his canonization as a top-tier American literary author. The website www.hplovecraft.com features an extensive catalog of Lovecraft’s influence on movies, television, games, music, art, comics, and more. So does the book H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture by Don G. Smith (McFarland, 2006).

The following is a highly selective sampling of Lovecraft’s ubiquitous presence in pop culture.

Movies directly based on Lovecraft’s stories:

•The Haunted Palace (1963) (From The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

•Die, Monster, Die! (1965) (From “The Colour out of Space”)

•The Crimson Cult (1968) (From “The Dreams in the Witch House”)

•The Dunwich Horror (1970)

•Re-Animator (1985) (From Herbert West—Reanimator)

•From Beyond (1986)

•The Curse (1987) (From “The Colour out of Space”)

•The Unnamable (1988)

•The Resurrected (1992) (From The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

•Dagon (2001)

Movies featuring a distinct Lovecraftian influence or direct Lovecraftian references:

•Alien (1979)

•The Evil Dead (1982)

•John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

•Ghostbusters (1984)

•Army of Darkness (1993)

•In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

•Hellboy (2004)

•The Mist (2007)

•The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Lovecraftian television

•Night Gallery: “Cool Air” (1971), “Pickman’s Model” (1972), “Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture” (1971)

•The Real Ghostbusters: “Collect Call of Cthulhu” (1987), “Russian About” (1990)

•Babylon 5: Multiple elements inspired by Lovecraft

Lovecraftian music:

•Black Sabbath: “Behind the Wall of Sleep” (1970)

•Metallica: “The Call of Ktulu” (1984), “The Thing That Should Not Be” (1986)

Lovecraftian games:

•The Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)

•Dungeons & Dragons (incorporates many Lovecraftian monsters and concepts)

•Digital games:

oAlone in the Dark (1992)

oCall of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2005)

oEternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002)

oThe Lurking Horror (1987)

oSilent Hill (1999)

Matt Cardin

Lovecraft was born and spent much of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. His childhood was marked by tragedy: his father went mad, and his family lost their house and fortune. Lovecraft emerged from a period of seclusion in 1914 when he became a leading light in various amateur press associations. In this milieu he met his wife, and they lived in New York City for several years before splitting up. He returned to Providence and spent the last decade of his life creating his greatest stories, dying from cancer at forty-seven years old.

In Lovecraft’s cosmology, the human race can no longer claim a privileged place in the universe; indeed, it can no longer claim a privileged place on the earth. Aliens came here millions of years ago, erected magnificent civilizations, and departed long before humanity arrived. These races, which occasionally still manifest themselves, are superior to humans—physically, intellectually, and aesthetically. Humanity is at best the inconsequential and accidental by-product of life-forms completely beyond its comprehension. Lovecraft is thus at the forefront of cosmic horror, where conventional notions are destabilized by transdimensional ruptures, by otherworldly intrusions, and by shadowy threats to the fundamental fabric of reality.

The notion of alien races was first used by Lovecraft in “The Nameless City” (1921) and most extensively treated in his last major tale, “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–1935). From the beginning, however, Lovecraft created a recurring set of unknown entities, geographical settings, and arcane books (e.g., the Necronomicon, a blend of grimore, demonology, and scripture regarding the extraterrestrial Old Ones, transcribed ca. 700 CE by Abdul Alhazred). This apparatus was collectively labeled the “Cthulhu Mythos” by Arkham House publisher August Derleth, but Lovecraft did not wish to segregate tales employing this pseudo-mythology from his other works.

Lovecraft’s framework was not programmatic or rigid; it was, instead, a flexible aesthetic construct, adaptable to the author’s developing vision and varying narrative requirements. He considered his strange entities (e.g., Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, etc.) to be symbolic rather than representative. Lovecraft created what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos because he needed a more powerful and aesthetically refined set of symbols than found in traditional superstition. Taken to task by a colleague about his use of a personal myth-cycle, Lovecraft defended himself this way:

I really agree that Yog-Sothoth is basically . . . unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached really serious literature as yet. But I consider the use of actual folk myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in employing the former one is forced to retain many blatant puerilities & contradictions of experience which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothoery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given embodiment & crystallization. (Selected Letters 3.293)

The impetus for Lovecraft’s “symbolic phantasy” was his imaginative enchantment with the natural world. In a letter he explained how he tried to effect or embody his artistic impulses by using
as many as possible of the elements which have, under earlier mental and emotional conditions, given man a symbolic feeling of the unreal, the ethereal, & the mystical—choosing those least attacked by realistic mental and emotional conditions of the present. Darkness—sunset—dreams—mists—fever—madness—the tomb—the hills—the sea—the sky—the wind—all these, & many other things have seemed to me to retain a certain imaginative potency despite our actual scientific analyses of them. Accordingly I have tried to weave them into a kind of shadowy phantasmagoria which may have the same sort of vague coherence as a cycle of traditional myth or legend. . . . [A]n artificial mythology can become subtler & more plausible than a natural one, because it can recognize & adapt itself to the information and moods of the present. (Selected Letters 4.70ff)

In his early years as an author, Lovecraft experimented with Dunsanian fantasy (e.g., “The White Ship,” 1919), ethereal stories of fantastic, dreamlike worlds in the vein of those produced by one of his literary idols, the Irish writer Lord Dunsany (1878–1957). These works are sometimes termed the “Dreamlands” stories. (Like his other work, these stories never saw print during his lifetime beyond amateur journals, pulp magazines, and a few private press editions.) By 1926, however, he had established his unique and characteristic blend of literary realism and the weird. Literary realism uses detailed observation of everyday life with almost forensic levels of detail and precision to produce a sense of reality. But in Lovecraft, the generally accepted “sense of reality” is shown to mask something that is incoherent and inimical to sanity.

Above Dunsany, Lovecraft’s primary fictional influence is Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s emphases on psychological terror using first person narration, on the cultivation of weird atmosphere, and on a high level of artistic finish all are amplified by Lovecraft. The literary stream than runs from Poe through Charles Baudelaire to the Symbolists, and ultimately to the Surrealists, is likewise manifest. Following the lead of the Decadents (notably J. K. Huysmans), Lovecraft carefully employed bursts of linguistic energy bordering on delirium. We find, too, an intense interest in dreams and what the Surrealists called hasard, roughly equivalent to “chance,” but with connotations of disorder and the irrational.

Lovecraft saw horror fiction as his especial domain; his letters and essays reflect refinement of an aesthetic of the “weird” over his literary career (1918–1937). Its most notable exposition is the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (written 1925–1926, published 1927), a survey from ancient times. Lovecraft declares: “Atmosphere is the all-important thing [in horror fiction], for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation” (Lovecraft 2012, 28). In all Lovecraft’s stories, a characteristic atmosphere seems to flow from the very first sentence, as if a switch had been thrown. He typically employs the first-person voice of a refined, sensible, and slightly imperious narrator, modulating his tone to a hyperbolic and sometimes surreal rhetoric when describing his horrors. Lovecraft’s skill as a poet is reflected in the metrical and rhetorical adroitness of his prose. (Fungi from Yuggoth, 1929–1930, a cycle of thirty-six sonnets, is a poetic achievement worthy of his best fiction.) He also developed a distinctive set of cosmic imagery—largely revolving around the concepts of chaos and asymmetry—to suggest the utterly nonhuman.

While Lovecraft emphasized the importance of atmosphere over plot in horror fiction, his tales show great skill in construction. The stories often nested narratives and documents, requiring the reader to participate in (as he writes in “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928) the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge” that reveals “terrifying vistas of reality” (Lovecraft 2002, 139). Lovecraft was also ingenious in foreshadowing, weaving explicative narrative content—including key phrases that become significant only in retrospect—into the prolegomena of his tales to clear the way for the creation of atmosphere. This technique, derived from detective fiction, makes his work endlessly re-readable. The remarkable merging of real and unreal gains force by Lovecraft’s use of autobiographical materials—numerous aspects of the stories are transmuted from events, locales, and persons he knew.

“The Colour out of Space” (1927), Lovecraft’s most accomplished tale, mesmerizingly recounts how intergalactic life-forms of an indeterminate nature came in a “meteorite” and spread gray death. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), local legends veneer extraterrestrials possessing “prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill” (Lovecraft 2002, 267) that transport their victims’ conscious brains to an interstellar outpost on Pluto. “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) identifies the spells of witchcraft with equations of non-Euclidean geometry that breach other dimensions. Always lurking at the edge of Lovecraft’s indifferent universe is the threat that natural law may not hold, as hinted at by quantum mechanics: thus his concept of ultimate chaos, “wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth” (Lovecraft 2004, 329).

Lovecraft joins Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in using detailed New England local color—history, folkways, landscape, and architecture—as a foundation for supernatural incursions. Lovecraft had a specialist’s knowledge of colonial history, and this is reflected throughout his fiction. In “The Shunned House” (1924), for example, descriptions of a sinister Providence residence are embellished with the convincing annals of its doomed inhabitants.

Many New Englanders in the early twentieth century viewed immigrants who came to work in industrialized cities as a threat to tradition, and Lovecraft was no exception. His upbringing created a fear of “foreigners” impervious to the rationality he showed in other areas of thought. The terrors of “Dagon” (1918), “The Lurking Fear” (1922), and other tales may be seen as veiled projections of fears regarding an overthrow of nineteenth-century culture through immigration. This theme, inflamed by the carnage of World War I and the paranoia of the Red Scare, grows in stories such as “He” (1925), “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), and the brilliant prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920) to the scope of apocalyptic narrative.

But Lovecraft’s racism is best understood in the context of his anthrophobia. In his most radically modern and innovative stories, the horror of “aliens” is supplanted by the horror of the self, the horror of being human. In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1920) it is revealed that even a scion of an aristocratic English family is not immune from the savagery of human descent, as the protagonist discovers his great-great-great-grandmother was a Congo ape. Likewise, “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), and others cunningly cultivate sympathy with an ostensibly reasonable narrator who is revealed at the end to be monstrous.

Subsequent writers have been inspired by Lovecraft in varied ways. One way manifested prior to Lovecraft’s death: contributors to Weird Tales began to festoon their horror stories with his alien beings, geographical settings, and arcane books, and also to invent their own. There soon developed a “fan fiction” subculture of pastiche, which generates hundreds of “Mythos” works each year. But Lovecraft’s significant influence (in approach and in technique, rather than in embellishment) has been upon horror writers who offer their own unique talent: Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, and others.

Thanks to a group of scholars led by S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft has ascended from the literary slums of the pulp magazines to the pantheon of American literature. He also has become something of a cult figure and pop culture phenomenon. Lovecraft the man has been featured as a character in fictional works, and his imaginary worlds have been employed in every aspect of modern-day media, from movies to comics to television to video games.

Steven J. Mariconda

See also: Arkham House; At the Mountains of Madness; “The Call of Cthulhu”; Campbell, Ramsey; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; “The Colour out of Space”; Cthulhu Mythos; Dreams and Nightmares; “The Dunwich Horror”; Huysmans, J. K.; Joshi, S. T.; Klein, T. E. D.; “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraftian Horror; The Mind Parasites; “The Music of Erich Zann”; The Numinous; “Pickman’s Model”; Poe, Edgar Allan; “The Rats in the Walls”; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2010. “Terror Eternal: The Enduring Popularity of H. P. Lovecraft.” Publishers Weekly, July 12. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/43793-terror-eternal-the-enduring-popularity-of-h-p-lovecraft.html.

Eil, Philip. 2015. “The Unlikely Reanimation of H. P. Lovecraft.” The Atlantic, August 20. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/hp-lovecraft-125/401471.

H. P. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. 2009. Directed by Frank Woodward. Los Angeles: Cinevolve Studios. DVD.

Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2010. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz, eds. 1991. An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2004. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Loucks, Donovan K. 2016. The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, June 12. http://www.hplovecraft.com.

Lovecraft, H. P. 1965–1976. Selected Letters (five volumes). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Lovecraft, H. P. 2002. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin.

Lovecraft, H. P. 2004. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR

Lovecraftian horror is a subgenre categorized by a personal narrative chronicling a foreboding sense of what writer H. P. Lovecraft termed “outsideness”—detailing encounters with unknown external forces intruding upon the world of humans. These forces may be alien, ultra-cosmic, or other-dimensional. And while they might operate in a manner suggesting that they are inimical to humanity, they are more correctly indifferent to human emotions and aspirations. More than merely unknown, they are unknowable, as the hapless narrator discovers by degree.

In 1927, Lovecraft expounded on his nascent vision, writing, “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. . . . when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold” (Joshi 2008, 16).

Although there existed precursors to the worldview exemplified in Lovecraftian horror fiction—principally selected stories by Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, and A. Merritt—it was Lovecraft who gathered together the thin threads of disparate ideas and sensibilities to weave together a tapestry that placed humans not at the apex of the known universe, but at the bottom of a cosmic food chain in which they were less than insects in the eyes of higher intelligences. Posthumously, a portion of Lovecraft’s fiction has been categorized as belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos—a term not his own—despite scant evidence that the writer had any such fixed formal concept in mind.

One of the unique innovations of Lovecraftian horror posits that, while there may exist supernatural monsters such as vampires or ghosts, the true monsters are of cosmic origin—seemingly godlike and remote beings such as Cthulhu (one of Lovecraft’s most famous fictional creations), with which humans are intellectually and emotionally unprepared to cope. Futility is a running theme, as well as the realization that ultimate reality lies beyond the senses of ordinary mortals and cannot possibly be comprehended by the human brain; otherwise, madness would result. Lovecraftian protagonists were therefore helpless in the face of cosmic forces beyond their comprehension. In these works, happy endings are out of the question, although temporary and ultimately inconsequential victories might be achieved, as in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” which represents a mere holding back of the inevitable crushing defeat and unavoidable fall of humanity.

The type of stories H. P. Lovecraft and his adherents concocted were a direct response to the contrived formulaic horror fiction in which an intrepid investigator into the supernatural might overcome any manner of mundane monster, no matter how horrific, through ingenuity and the appropriate occult tools. Not so in Lovecraftian horror fiction, which is antiheroic and nihilistic in the extreme, and which postulates a vision of the supernatural that is cosmic in scope and truly alien in nature.

Will Murray

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; “The Dunwich Horror”; Hodgson, William Hope; Lovecraft, H. P.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2008. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books.

Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. 2014. The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Liveright.

LUMLEY, BRIAN (1937–)

Brian Lumley is an author of horror fiction who began his career by adding to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and proceeded to find his own voice and write a large body of work, often mixing horror with fantasy and science fiction. Other influences include classic tales by Robert W. Chambers, Robert E. Howard, and William Hope Hodgson. Lumley’s stories have been characterized by some critics as Lovecraft stories turned into action-adventure. His protagonists do not swoon or faint, but fight back. His writing style has been described as “masculine,” and his stories generally feature strong male protagonists who can think as well as fight. By all accounts, Lumley is a writer who enjoys storytelling for its own sake and tries to appeal to readers who like good stories with no hidden meanings. His efforts have won him many enthusiastic readers, as well as many prestigious awards.

Lumley was born in 1937 in Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom. The son of a coal miner, he was nonetheless raised in a home with books on the shelves, including two large anthologies of horror stories that he read as a child. He apprenticed as a woodcutting machinist, but was drafted and became a member of the Royal Military Police. He remained in the army for two decades while writing horror fiction as a hobby.

He discovered Lovecraft’s stories as a teenager, and he corresponded with Lovecraft’s protégé August Derleth, who encouraged him to write. Eventually Derleth became the first to publish Lumley’s work; Lumley’s earliest published stories appeared in the Arkham Collector, a horror and fantasy magazine edited by Derleth and published by Arkham House, the publishing house that Derleth and another Lovecraft protégé, Donald Wandrei, founded to preserve Lovecraft’s work. These early Lumley stories were soon collected in Lumley’s first book, The Caller of the Black (1971), which was likewise published by Arkham House. The stories were not pastiches of Lovecraft’s style, but rather they employed the Cthulhu Mythos as a background. His first sale, “The Cyprus Shell” (1968), was inspired by Lovecraft’s horror of the sea. His first two novels, Beneath the Moors and The Burrowers Beneath, both appeared in 1974.

Lumley went on to become an extremely prolific writer, creating several series of novels. The “Titus Crow” series (beginning with 1974’s The Burrowers Beneath) is about the eponymous occult detective, who fights against wizards and occult magic by employing spells from such forbidden Cthulhu Mythos tomes such as the Necronomicon, Cultes de Goules, and De Vermis Mysteriis (all imaginary books of dark magical lore invented by Lovecraft and those who joined him in creating a horror mythos composed of interlinked stories). Crow was originally inspired by Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with other occult detectives such as Hodgson’s Carnacki and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin probably serving as additional inspirations. Lumley’s Titus Crow stories are often narrated by a Watson-like figure named Henri-Laurent de Marigny, a descendant of Étienne-Laurent de Marigny, a character from Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1934).

The “Dreamscape” series, beginning with Hero of Dreams (1986), follows protagonist David Hero, who is transported to the world of Lovecraft’s “dreamland” stories. These novels are not horror but lighthearted sword and sorcery adventure. Hero and his sidekick Eldin have been compared to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, but, according to Lumley, they were actually inspired by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s series of “Road” film comedies from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Lumley’s “Psychomech” series (from 1984) blends horror with science fiction. It involves an injured British soldier, a wealthy German industrialist, and a means of transferring minds. His most successful series, titled “Necroscope” (from 1986), features Harry Keogh, a “necroscope” (one who can speak with the dead) whose mission is to fight and destroy vampires from another planet. These stories combine horror, science fiction, and espionage. A spin-off series, “Vampire World,” follows Keogh’s twin sons, beginning with Blood Brothers (1993). A second spin-off, the “E-Branch trilogy,” begins with Invaders (1999). A more recent entry is the collection Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates and other Tales from the Lost Years (2010). The original Necroscope novel has been optioned for a film.

Many volumes of Lumley’s short stories have been published, including A Coven of Vampires (1998), The Whisperer and Other Voices (2000), Beneath the Moors and Darker Places (2002), Brian Lumley’s Freaks (2004), The Taint and Other Novellas (2007), No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (2012), and Tales of the Primal Land (2015).

Lumley won the British Fantasy Award in 1989 for “Fruiting Bodies,” a tale inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.” He won the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master award (1998), Fear magazine’s Best Established Author (1990) award, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (2010), and the World Fantasy Convention’s Life Achievement Award (2010). His short story “Necros” was filmed as an episode of the Showtime series The Hunger (1997).

Robert Weinberg has described Lumley as “an author of astonishing skills” and “a gentleman of equally amazing talents” (Lumley and Wiater 2002, 21). Approaching his eighth decade, Lumley shows no signs of putting these talents to rest. He has developed a wide and devoted audience, and he continues to write.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Occult Detectives.

Further Reading

“Brian Lumley.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Joshi, S. T. 2004. The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lumley, Brian, and Stanley Wiater, eds. 2002. The Brian Lumley Companion, 747–751. New York: Tor.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Brian Lumley.” In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural, 75–80. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD

The Lurker at the Threshold is a short novel of approximately 50,000 words published by Arkham House in 1945. It is attributed to H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and is the first of more than a dozen “posthumous collaborations” published over the next thirty years in which Derleth took fragments or ideas found in Lovecraft’s papers and wrote pastiches of Lovecraft’s fiction based on them. The three fragments Derleth drew on for this novel amounted to approximately 1,200 words of text by Lovecraft.

The novel is divided into three parts. In the first part, Ambrose Dewart moves into a house on the outskirts of the Massachusetts town of Arkham abandoned by his ancestor Alijah Billington a century before. There he finds papers that mention accusations of sorcery aimed at several generations of Billingtons and references to strange noises, sights, and disappearances, all related to a circle of stones and a stone tower raised in the woods behind the house. Another document abjures whoever lives on the property not “to invite Him Who lurks at the threshold.” From a decorative rose window in the house Ambrose sees glimpses of an alien world, and on the night of a new disappearance he discovers that he may have sleepwalked out to the tower. The second part of the novel is the narrative of Ambrose’s cousin, Stephen Bates, whom Ambrose has summoned to the house. Stephen finds Ambrose acting peculiar, as though under the influence of another personality, and in time sees Ambrose performing a ritual on top of the tower invoking the name “Yog Sothoth.” Bates’s narrative ends with Ambrose informing him that he has hired a handyman by the name of Quamis, clearly a descendant or avatar of the Wampanaug Indian Misquamacus who taught sorcery to Dewart’s ancestors. The novel’s third part is the narrative of Winfield Phillips who, with his employer Seneca Lapham, a professor of anthropology at Miskatonic University, helps to piece together the mystery of Dewart’s apparent possession by the spirit of his ancestor and to thwart Dewart’s efforts to bring the monstrous entity Yog-Sothoth across the threshold into our world.

The Lurker at the Threshold was Derleth’s most significant effort to present ideas in Lovecraft’s fiction in terms of what he was defining as the Cthulhu Mythos, the name he gave to the myth pattern linking Lovecraft’s stories and the stories of others writing in homage to Lovecraft and his fiction. Much mythos fiction written in its wake would follow its pattern of cataloguing otherworldly monsters and books of occult lore, giving characters names that resonate with those of Lovecraft’s, and having “evil” monsters and their human servants defeated by the forces of good.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2015. The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Price, Robert M. 1982. “The Lovecraft-Derleth Connection.” Lovecraft Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall): 18–24.

Price, Robert M. 1991. “The Shadow over Dunwich: A Neglected Subplot in Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold.” Crypt of Cthulhu 10, no. 2: 5–7.

Tierney, Richard L. 1987. “The Derleth Mythos.” In Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 65–68. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

M

MACHEN, ARTHUR (1863–1947)

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author whose work has exerted a dramatic influence on the horror and fantasy genres. Often referred to as a “lost” writer, he nevertheless wrote works such as “The Great God Pan” and The Three Impostors that have resonated through ensuing horror fiction, and Machen’s influence in that respect is evident throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was regularly cited as an important benchmark by the coterie of writers associated with Weird Tales, particularly by H. P. Lovecraft. More recently, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, T. E. D. Klein, Mark Samuels, and numerous other horror writers have acknowledged Machen as having a profound impact on their writing and understanding of the genre. King, Klein, and Samuels have all written explicit homages to Machen. In the wider literary world, Machen has received plaudits from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller, among many others. Film directors John Carpenter—who named a character Machen in The Fog (1980)—and Guillermo del Toro have also cited Machen as an important influence on their work, as especially evident in the latter’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Del Toro also provided the foreword for a Penguin Classics edition of Machen’s work, The White People and Other Weird Stories (2012).

Machen was born in Caerleon, a small town in south Wales on the river Usk. The isolated, wild countryside in which he grew up was to remain a persistent influence on his writing, and the fact that Caerleon was formerly a major Roman settlement shaped his childhood imagination. He was the son of a Church of England vicar, who at the time of Machen’s birth was in the process of impoverishing his family through his construction of an extravagant new rectory, which became the home in which Machen was raised. Not having the finances necessary to attend university, Machen instead made an unenthusiastic attempt to enroll in medical school, before deciding to relocate permanently to London with the intention of becoming a “man of letters.” He initially experienced only grinding poverty. After various engagements as a tutor, cataloguer, and translator, and the publication of a medieval pastiche, The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), Machen’s short stories began appearing in periodicals (then a burgeoning market), bringing him to the notice of Oscar Wilde, among others.

One of Machen’s “society” stories, “A Double Return” (1890), angered the readership of the St James’s Gazette to the extent that its editor declined to accept any more submissions from Machen. “The Lost Club” (1890), with its clear debt to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club (1878), marked the beginning of an influence that became one of the prevailing features of Machen’s output for the first half of the 1890s. Machen gained wide and fleeting attention from the reading public with his two books published for John Lane, an imprint very much associated with the controversial new “Decadent” movement: The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895). These exercises in weird horror were to be his most commercially successful achievements as an author, and they remain his most widely read works. Critical reaction to Machen’s uniquely potent blend of Stevenson, Poe, scientific horror, and pagan mystery was mixed and often negative. While H. G. Wells complained that Machen had “determined to be weird [and] horrible” (Wells 1896, 48), the art critic Harry Quilter less soberly accused Machen of being an agent of dangerous moral corruption. Machen was disparaged for being at once too graphic in his descriptions of hideous bodily degeneration and horrific tortures, and remiss in keeping the central mysteries of his stories nebulous and unresolved. However, this latter aspect of his writing has become increasingly valorized over the years, to the point where it is now regarded as one of his definitive stylistic achievements.

1863

Arthur Machen is born in Caerleon, South Wales.

1894

The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light is published.

1895

The Three Impostors is published.

1895–1900

Machen writes “The White People,” The Hill of Dreams, and Ornaments in Jade. None are published until after the turn of the century.

1900–1910

Following the death of his first wife, Amy, in 1899, a devastated Machen becomes involved in the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society. He will later become staunchly self-identified as a high church Anglican.

1903

Machen marries Dorothy Purefoy Hudleston.

1914

Machen’s “The Bowmen” is published in the Evening News in September, giving rise to the legend—widely believed as fact—of the “Angels of Mons.”

1916

The Terror is published.

1920s

Much of Machen’s work is reprinted in Weird Tales, gaining him an enthusiastic American audience.

1926 and 1929

Machen has new supernatural fiction published in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s The Ghost Book and Shudders.

1933

The Green Round is published.

1939

The Children of the Pool is published.

1947

Machen dies shortly after Dorothy.

Matt Cardin

The scandal surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 resulted in “unhealthy” literature such as Machen’s becoming too controversial for publishers and readers alike. While the immediate effect of the trial on Machen’s career can be gauged by the fact that Machen referred to it henceforth as “the disaster,” a series of legacies from a Scottish branch of his family meant Machen felt no financial pressure to calibrate his writing to the new public mood. It was during this period (the second half of the 1890s) that he wrote what was to become one of his most celebrated contributions to the horror genre, “The White People,” although it was not published until 1904. Intent on changing course from Stevensonian horror, a seam he considered by then exhausted, he also produced what are regarded as his most unambiguously Decadent texts: The Hill of Dreams, a novel, and Ornaments in Jade, an anthology of prose poems. At odds with the post-Wilde trial reticence of the closing years of the 1890s, both works did not see print until years after they were written, The Hill of Dreams in 1907 and Ornaments in Jade in 1924.

After the death of his first wife, Amy Hogg, a distraught Machen temporarily abandoned writing fiction altogether. He also had a brief dalliance with the occult society the Order of the Golden Dawn, which attracted a variety of notable fin-de-siècle personalities including W. B. Yeats and the notorious Aleister Crowley. Machen’s temporary embroilment in the fractious internal politics of the group, characterized by claims of supernatural persecutions, resulted in or was contemporaneous with an episode that some have characterized as a nervous breakdown of sorts: the still-grieving Machen felt as though various extraordinary scenes from The Three Impostors were now being played out before him, with, for example, Yeats assuming the role of the novel’s “Young Man with Spectacles,” psychically threatened by Crowley’s “Dr. Lipsius.”

During a happier subsequent period as a “strolling player,” or rather a repertory actor in the Benson Company, often playing various Shakespearean supporting characters, he met Dorothy Purefoy Hudleston, who became his second wife. Settled back in London with a young family, Machen found work as a journalist, an occupation that offered him financial stability, but that he bitterly resented. With his signature Inverness cape and pipe he became something of a Fleet Street character, regaling younger colleagues with an apparently endless repertoire of anecdotes in his sonorous Welsh accent. He was frequently assigned to more outré stories commensurate with his interests. It was during this period that he saw his second period of fleeting notoriety and success. Throughout the First World War, he produced morale-boosting pieces for the Evening News, including in September 1914 one with the simple title of “The Bowmen.” It is presented as an account of a supernatural episode experienced by a retreating army unit, saved from extermination at the hands of the Germans by the appearance of ghostly Agincourt bowmen. The tale was taken by some readers at face value, and exaggerated and distorted versions of it spread across the country until it was popularly regarded as fact. Appalled, Machen made every effort to correct the misunderstanding, but the (by then) “Angels of Mons” legend clearly resonated intensely with the national mood, and gained such traction that it is still occasionally discussed as a genuine mystery to this day.

Most of Machen’s output during the Great War could be fairly classed as propaganda, and his nonfiction War and the Christian Faith (1918) is explicitly so. A notable exception is perhaps the wartime serial The Terror (1916), the story of a revolt of the animal kingdom in response to the imbalance to the natural order of things created by the unprecedented scale of the human conflict. Rarely singled out for critical praise, it is nevertheless a well-executed and exciting shocker, and the horrific set-pieces suggest that Machen could have become a very capable thriller writer should he have been so inclined. The Terror is also noteworthy as an antecedent to, and possible inspiration for, Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds,” the source material for Hitchcock’s celebrated film.

During the 1920s, and while he was still working as a journalist, Machen’s work experienced something of a renaissance in America. A number of American writers and critics, most notably Vincent Starrett, were recovering Machen’s earlier fiction from obscurity and positioning him as a great forgotten writer of the fin-de-siècle. Machen saw some immediate material benefit from their enthusiasm through revenue generated from U.S. reprints of his work. He was also at this time being enthusiastically discussed in the pages of Weird Tales—which reprinted “The Bowmen” in 1928—as a master of the form. Although it does not appear that Machen directly engaged with or was much aware of this pulp milieu, there is evidence that he read and thought highly of Lovecraft’s discussion of his work in Lovecraft’s influential survey Supernatural Horror in Literature. In 1916, Machen had, coincidentally, favorably reviewed Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry anthology The Star-Treader and Other Poems.

Although Machen’s output between the wars was prodigious in terms of his journalism, nonfiction, and memoirs, he only occasionally turned his hand to supernatural fiction. Much of his work in the genre at this time was the result of commissions from Lady Cynthia Asquith for the various highly regarded anthologies she edited and contributed to in that period. Collections such as The Ghost Book (1926) and Shudders (1929) saw Machen rubbing shoulders with the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, and L. P. Hartley, as well as fellow supernatural fiction specialists such as Algernon Blackwood. Some of this work was later anthologized in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (1936).

Two more substantial late efforts are The Green Round (1933) and The Children of the Pool (1936). The latter is a collection of original short stories that includes “The Bright Boy,” noteworthy for its use of the trope of a malevolent, aged dwarf masquerading as a child. Once again, Machen anticipates du Maurier, this time her similar conceit in Don’t Look Now (1971), and also the 2009 horror film Orphan. Associated with his interest in fairy lore (evident in his “The Novel of the Black Seal”), the association of child-like figures with malignant supernatural forces became increasingly oblique in his later writing. Examples include the cruel children in “Out of the Earth” (1915) who have wizened, repulsive faces, and the strange childlike entity persecuting the protagonist of The Green Round. M. John Harrison’s short story “The Incalling” (1983) and also his novel The Course of the Heart (1992) offer clear debts to Machen in this respect, acknowledged by the author.

Machen’s final—arguably underrated—novel The Green Round is usually dismissed as demonstrative of an aging writer’s failing powers. It is composed in the same journalistic, anecdotal style that distinguishes much of his later fiction and is off-putting to some commentators. The story ostensibly relates the convalescence of Hillyer, a reclusive scholar who at the age of fifty-five has developed a nervous condition, in the picturesque Welsh seaside town of Porth. He is baffled when the other residents at the hotel at which he resides turn against him, and rumors spread of his complicity in a local murder, based on his alleged association with a small, evil-looking dwarf. Hillyer returns to London plagued by poltergeist-like disruptions, and the novel’s potent atmosphere of disorienting paranoia intensifies. Although this is an accurate enough sketch in terms of plot fundamentals, it is perhaps misleading since in its execution Machen often interrupts the narrative with essayistic digressions on a range of matters including alchemy, religion, the nature of reality, and sanity and insanity.

Written, like The Green Round, when Machen was in his seventies, “N” was the only original contribution to The Cosy Room and Other Stories. This short story is a distillation of many ideas he had previously explored, but they are perhaps more perfectly expressed in this tale than in any other. Once again, the narrative is presented indirectly, anecdotally; it is an assembly of first-, second- and third-hand testimony regarding a recurring vision experienced by disparate visitors to a certain region of Stoke Newington in London. It is left up to the reader to piece together these strange fragments, tantalizing pieces of an unsolvable puzzle.

Apart from the works of specific horror interest mentioned above, Machen left a considerable wider legacy of both fiction and nonfiction, and three volumes of memoirs. Throughout the six- or seven-decade span of his writing career, Machen revisited certain tropes with something approaching monomania, although he steadily refined his treatment of the same material, moving generally away from horror toward something far more ambiguous and oblique. Ultimately, his central preoccupation was with what he considered to be the eternal mystery at the heart of all things. Despite his brief flirtation with the fin-de-siècle occult scene, and contrary to an erroneous assertion in his Times obituary of a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, Machen remained a lifelong high church Anglican. Machen’s profound religiosity informed much of his fiction, especially its visionary aspects and his insistence on the existence of a numinous “reality” inaccessible to human consciousness, but indistinctly refracted through symbol and ritual. He regretted that in his early horror fiction of the 1890s he only managed to render this mystery as something evil, rather than awe-inspiring.

Although much of his later life was marked by periods of impoverishment and financial uncertainty, his dotage was eased considerably by the securement of a civil list pension, petitioned for by a number of other writers including George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Walter de la Mare. His eightieth birthday celebration was attended by, among other notables, W. W. Jacobs and Algernon Blackwood.

James Machin

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; The Ceremonies; du Maurier, Daphne; “The Great God Pan”; Lovecraft, H. P.; “The Novel of the Black Seal”; The Numinous; Samuels, Mark; “The White People.”

Further Reading

Arizuno, Lee. 2012. “Leave the Capitol: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen.” The Quietus, October 31. http://thequietus.com/articles/08758-leave-the-capitol-the-weird-tales-of-arthur-machen.

Gawsworth, John. 2013. The Life of Arthur Machen. Leyburn: Tartarus.

Goldstone, Adrian, and Wesley Sweetser. 1965. A Bibliography of Arthur Machen. Austin: University of Texas.

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Reynolds, Aidan, and William Charlton. 1988. Arthur Machen. Oxford: Caermaen.

Valentine, Mark. 1995. Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Works. Bridgend: Seren.

Wells, H. G. 1896. Review of “The Three Impostors” by Arthur Machen. Saturday Review 81, no. 2098 (January 11): 48–49. In The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, vol. LXXXI. London.

“MACKINTOSH WILLY”

Written in 1977, British author Ramsey Campbell’s short story “Mackintosh Willy” first appeared in Charles L. Grant’s anthology Shadows 2 in 1979, before publication in the collections Dark Companions (1982), Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987), and Alone with the Horrors (1993). It won a World Fantasy Award in 1980, has been translated into multiple languages, and is one of the author’s most anthologized works.

The shambling, mumbling drunk dubbed Mackintosh Willy presents a vague threat to the neighborhood children, but most simply shun him when not teasing each other about the local bogeyman—most, if not all, because someone hated the tramp enough to destroy his eyes as he lay dead in a park shelter. As the years go by, something with a metallic glint to its eyes forms in the shadows of that shelter, increasing in strength and malevolence as it draws its prey to a reckoning.

If the trash-strewn park shelter beside a pool was far from welcoming, its walls not only defaced by graffiti but offering little protection from the rain, its occupancy by a belligerent drunkard made it a place shunned by children and subject to dares by adolescents, even after the derelict’s death. Years afterward, the same fear that drove someone to screw bottle caps into the corpse’s eyes continued to lend its aura to his former residence, imbuing it with sonic, visual, and tactile evidence of his vengeful, waiting presence.

Throughout the story, a fluid and constant tension blurs the lines between innocence and guilt, reality and imagination, which Campbell deftly channels through the eyes of a narrator suffering through the petty rituals that circumscribe how those growing through childhood into adolescence allow themselves to deal with fear, friendship, loyalty, responsibility, and the attractions of the opposite sex. He builds the narrow “loophole for a natural explanation” recommended by M. R. James (James 2001, 486) directly into the uncertainty and wariness of ridicule natural to children interacting with each other and adults. Thus, the words of strange import overheard in and around the shelter might be fragments of sounds from the radio, the fair, or other outside forces; that heavy sodden body might have been rubbish after all; and it could have been the wind that drove those glittering bottle caps forward like glaring eyes. Meanwhile, the doomed friend has no choice but to face his nemesis, driven not only by misdirection from the ghost, but the goading and embarrassment visited upon him by his friends.

Imagination and guilt play out simultaneously during a necking scene within the shelter, when the narrator takes delight in his girlfriend’s sudden fear of the place by indulging his own dread, leading to a statement—“I was eager to let my imagination flourish, for it was better than reading a ghost story”—which casts light on a passage at the beginning: “One has to call one’s fears something, if only to gain the illusion of control. Still, sometimes I wonder how much of his monstrousness we created. Wondering helps me not to ponder my responsibility for what happened” (Campbell 1982, 233, 224). The protagonist certainly did not create the ghost, as the graphically violent graffiti and the increasingly shallow, limping tracks in the drying concrete leading from the shelter had appeared prior to this scene; but it is possible he believes himself responsible for assisting in its further incarnation, given his girlfriend’s escalating terror within and the widening of Willy’s activity outside the shelter afterward.

Some of the elements in the story reveal Campbell to be cognizant of the tradition in which he was working, while reshaping it to fit his own concerns. The pair of gleaming bottle caps illuminating Willy’s eyes are reminiscent of the “two small circular reflections, as it seemed to me of a reddish light” that signal the first appearance of the demonic monkey in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” ([1869] 2002, 77). Similarly, the blurred voice that sounds as if it is emerging through interference on the radio is not dissimilar to “those soft husky mutterings one hears between items on the radio” in H. R. Wakefield’s “Old Man’s Beard” ([1929] 1996, 14), and the final image of the protagonist fearing to cover his eyes for fear of straying into the pool echoes the peril of the child running toward the river in terror of the ghosts in Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge” (1928). In Campbell these occur in a recognizable location in his native Liverpool and are surrounded by a network of finely graded premonitions and disclosures, which strengthens the reality of the gritty urban setting and characters while infusing the whole with a creeping sense of unease. Campbell manages this through dialogue that is precise, yet natural and prose that, to quote from his story “The Trick” (1976), shows him “relishing each separate word” (1982, 153) while never calling attention away from the tale itself.

Jim Rockhill

See also: Campbell, Ramsey; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Wakefield, H. R.; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Campbell, Ramsey. 1982. Dark Companions. Glasgow: Fontana.

Campbell, Ramsey, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. 1995. The Core of Ramsey Campbell: A Bibliography and Reader’s Guide. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

James, M. R. [1924] 2001. “Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. In A Pleasing Terror, 486–490. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. [1869] 2002. “Green Tea.” In The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861–70, 65–88. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.

Sullivan, Jack. 1982. “No Light Ahead.” Whispers 4, no. 3/4: 34–41.

Wakefield, H. R. [1929] 1996. “Old Man’s Beard.” In Old Man’s Beard, 3–20. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.

MAD SCIENTIST

The figure of the “mad scientist” is one of the most recognizable archetypes in horror literature and film, highlighting a connection between specialized knowledge and sinister acts of godlike creation and Promethean arrogance. While the legendary Faust and other medieval alchemists are the likely historical sources of this icon, its modern incarnation owes everything to the figure of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s celebrated 1818 Gothic novel. Frankenstein established the basic lineaments of the mad scientist, which subsequent texts would deploy and develop: a Promethean artificer whose intellectual ambitions scorn traditional morality and challenge the prerogatives of God himself. In mad scientist narratives, science fiction shades into horror: Victor’s bold commitment to unfettered experimentation makes him capable of both wondrous accomplishment—the creation of an artificial person endowed with superhuman strength and intelligence—and blinkered amorality.

During the nineteenth century, most major writers of fantastic literature essayed some version of this myth. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), a secretive botanist turns his own child into a kind of poisonous plant; in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a mild-mannered chemist invents a potion that unleashes his demonic id (the monstrous, rapacious underside of the psyche as characterized in Freudian psychology); in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the eponymous vivisector (that is, someone who performs surgical experiments on living animals) creates a race of twisted human-animal hybrids. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wells’s novel points up the ethical limitations of experimental science: Moreau’s brilliance can mold a beast into a human semblance, but it cannot endow the result with virtue or a functioning conscience—thus suggesting a fundamental ambivalence regarding the processes and products of scientific inquiry.

During the twentieth century, the figure of the mad scientist flourished in the pulp magazines, in stories such as H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922), an overt echo of Frankenstein in which the title character revivifies a corpse, and Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), wherein a crazed inventor accelerates evolution with catastrophic results. The archetype found its most enduring representation, however, in the cinema, especially in the many adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein that followed in the wake of James Whale’s 1931 classic. These stories bequeathed to contemporary popular culture an enduring myth of science as an epochal threat to humanity and a source of moral corruption. In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), mad science even leads to the extermination of the human race in a global spasm of thermonuclear violence.

The mad scientist has now become something of a cliché in the genre, parodied and pastiched in scores of stories, films, comic books, and video games. The most culturally visible mad scientist of recent years is probably Sir John Hammond, creator of the out-of-control dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park film series (1993–2015), yet another avatar of Frankenstein.

Rob Latham

See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Shelley, Mary; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wells, H. G.

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Haynes, Roslynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kirby, David A. 2011. Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Skal, David J. 1998. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. New York: Norton.

MALPERTUIS

Malpertuis is a novel by Belgian writer Jean Ray (1887–1964), first published in French in 1943. The first English translation appeared in 1998. Malpertuis is an example of a latter-day Gothic romance, employing frame narratives (i.e., stories within stories), set in and around a sinister old house filled with dark secrets, and centered on a doomed love affair. These story elements are employed without any regard for conventional realism, creating a dreamlike narrative that resembles the works of Hoffmann or Horace Walpole’s short stories.

Jean-Jacques Grandsire is the young protagonist of the main story. According to the terms of a will left behind by a mysterious ancestor, Quentin Cassave, it is necessary for Grandsire to take up residence in Cassave’s ancient mansion, named Malpertuis, in order to claim his inheritance. The mansion is home to a number of other beneficiaries and retainers as well, including a beautiful woman named Euryale. The house has an otherworldly atmosphere, and the others who live there are, for the most part, highly eccentric or even mad. One man, Lampernisse, is preoccupied with ensuring that the lights never go out. There are three sisters, a servant who can spit fire, and a beautiful young man with an enchanting singing voice, among others.

In time, Grandsire will determine the truth—that Quentin Cassave retrieved what remained of the gods and mythological figures of ancient Greece and brought them back to Belgium with him. They live cooped up in Malptertuis, disguised as more or less ordinary people. Lampernisse is Prometheus. The three sisters, including one with whom Grandsire has a brief affair, are the Furies. The old man named Eisengott is Zeus himself, and hence able to retain a greater degree of independence from Malpertuis. Grandsire’s unknown mother may have been a supernatural being as well. Euryale is the only character to appear under her true name; a sister of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, she never looks directly at Grandsire.

The other dimensions of the story recount Cassave’s discovery and capture of the gods on an island in the Mediterranean. In general, characters are able to tell only part of their stories before the novel switches to a new narrator or writer, so that the reader seems to piece together the overall story from fragmentary evidence.

The novel touches on many of Ray’s favorite themes, including the reenchantment of urban settings and the subversion of bourgeois ideas of reality, the operation in human life of impersonal destiny, secret identities, and the parallels between hermetic magic and art. Like much of Ray’s other work, Malpertuis favors the grotesque over the terrible. Ray’s preference for the bizarre reflects an ambiguity in desire, which is at once frightened by and attracted to what is out of the ordinary. The figure of the Gorgon, altered here in that it is being seen by her, rather than seeing her, that turns one to stone, might be taken to reflect Ray’s idea of the supernatural best.

Belgian director Harry Kuemel created a Flemish-language film adaptation of the novel, also called Malpertuis, in 1971. The film stars Orson Welles as Cassave, called “Cassavius” in the film. The novel was adapted for film by Jean Ferry, a French screenwriter who worked with internationally respected directors including Henri-Georges Clouzot and Louis Malle.

Michael Cisco

See also: Frame Story; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Ray, Jean; Walpole; Horace.

Further Reading

Monteiro, António. 2011. “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray.” Weird Fiction Review, November 21. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/ghosts-fear-and-parallel-worlds-the-supernatural-fiction-of-jean-ray.

Thompson, David. 2002. “Auteur of Darkness.” Sight & Sound 12, no. 8: 16–18.

THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA

Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815), a Polish nobleman, lived an itinerant life combining adventure and scholarship before he committed suicide by (according to some accounts) shooting himself in the head with a silver bullet. The publication history of his one surviving novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, is a complex one. The original French manuscript is incomplete and some of the text has only survived in its translation into Potocki’s native Polish. It is possible that Potocki began work on it in the 1790s and only completed it in the year of his death, although various extracts had already been published in Russia and France before then. After the first complete Polish translation was made in 1847, the novel eventually saw print in French in 1989, before Penguin published Ian Maclean’s English translation in 1995.

Potocki claimed that The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was principally inspired by Ann Radcliffe’s seminal works in the Gothic genre. However, Potocki’s mind seems to have been too mercurial to follow Radcliffe’s template in any ordinary or straightforward fashion. Instead, he presents the reader with a dizzyingly complicated arrangement of tales within tales, all themselves bookended with an overriding frame story. The resulting Russian-doll structure results in characters being introduced within a story, who then relate a further story, in which yet another character begins relating his or her own story, and so on. The reader quickly becomes hopelessly yet joyously lost in the maze-like palimpsest of narratives.

At the outset of the novel, the ostensible romantic hero, Alphonse Van Worden, a soldier lost in the wild Andalusian countryside, is apparently seduced by two Muslim sisters before waking to find himself lying beside the gyrating corpses of two executed bandits. Realizing he has been tricked by their malevolent spirits, he flees, but then finds himself similarly ensnared in another of their illusions. Potocki reboots the narrative several times in this manner, disorienting not only Van Worden, but also the reader, who struggles to keep up with the constant elision of reality and fantasy. This destabilizing effect is maintained throughout the novel, which is by turns ludic and terrifying, erotic and grotesque, but usually maintains a distinctly sardonic undercurrent. Populating the novel are demons, bandits, knights, kabbalists, princesses, scholars, soldiers, and inquisitors. The Wandering Jew stalks its pages, appearing in several stories as well as relating his own.

The tortured (and often torturous) hazing and repeated disorientation of Van Worden, and some of the other protagonists, in the face of horrors and wonders of consistently unresolved ontological status (including hallucinations, dreams, antagonistic human manipulation and misdirection, and the genuinely supernatural) goes somewhat beyond Radcliffe’s rather more straightforward “explained supernatural.” Thematically The Manuscript Found in Saragossa explicitly engages with the Occidental encounter with the Orient, where Spain, with its imbrication of Christian and Islamic cultures, represents a sort of liminal imaginative space between these two mutually fascinated and suspicious cultures. It has been suggested that the novel’s complexity is the result of it being arranged according to an occult schema, possibly relating to the tarot deck. However, Potocki’s frequent articulation of rationalist, enlightenment discourse within the novel and the often satirical tone of his treatment of, for example, the Spanish inquisition and kabbalism, at least complicates the notion of the author as a committed occultist.

Admirers of the novel include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino, the latter of whom regarded Potocki’s work as an anticipation of Poe and used an excerpt to open his posthumously published 1998 anthology of nineteenth-century Fantastic Tales. The 1965 Polish film adaptation The Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Has, is much admired by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. It successfully captures the quicksilver, expansive spirit of this unique novel, albeit in a necessarily truncated form.

James Machin

See also: Frame Story; Radcliffe, Ann; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Calvino, Italo. 2001. Fantastic Tales. London: Penguin.

Lachman, Gary. 2000. “The Mystical Count.” Fortean Times 140 (November). http://web.archive.org/web/20020811153132/http://forteantimes.com/articles/140_potocki.shtml.

Maclean, Ian. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. London: Penguin.

MARTIN, GEORGE R. R. (1948–)

George R. R. Martin is best known to contemporary audiences as the author of the ongoing fantasy series of novels Song of Ice and Fire and the massively popular television show Game of Thrones based on the same. He began his professional career in 1971 as a writer of science fiction short stories, but he quickly established himself as an author of great flexibility, moving seemingly without effort between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and with great understanding of how these genres differ from, overlap with, and complement each other. Aside from the five novels in his Song of Ice and Fire series (with more projected at the time of this writing), Martin has authored or co-authored six novels and edited or co-edited nearly three dozen science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies. His work has won him both critical acclaim and (mostly) commercial success, including four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Fevre Dream (1982) is Martin’s sole pure horror novel. An intensely readable and marvelously realized story of vampires and their human pawns and partners traversing the Mississippi River on ornate steamboats, the novel owes as much to its horror trappings as it does to the American historical novel. The Armageddon Rag, a thriller with supernatural underpinnings that seem forced at best, was published the following year. In his introduction to Martin’s short story retrospective Dreamsongs Volume I, Gardner Dozois points to the commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag as the reason Martin abandoned the horror genre to focus on scripting and producing for television, including the relaunch of a new Twilight Zone (1985–1987) series and the more successful Beauty and the Beast (1987–1990). To that point Martin’s published horror in short form included “Meathouse Man” (1976), Sandkings (1979), and “Nightflyers” (1980/1981). But Martin never completely left the horror field, and he continued to produce stories of high quality, such as “The Monkey Treatment” (1983), “The Pear-Shaped Man” (1987), and Skin Trade (1988).

Martin’s horror fiction is distinguished by his ability to effectively blend genres together to achieve a maximum of narrative effect. “Meathouse Man,” for example, relates through a mix of pre-cyberpunk imagery and body horror the story of a disaffected young male who is both sexually and socially frustrated, while “Nightflyers” reconceives the traditional haunted house story aboard a spaceship. Sandkings, too, belongs to this category of story. More traditional, yet no less powerful, stories like “The Pear-Shaped Man, wherein a female artist becomes obsessed with the odd loner who lives in the basement of her apartment complex, and “The Monkey Treatment,” in which an obese man seeks a new treatment for his eating disorder and discovers that the cure is far worse than the ailment, demonstrate Martin’s mastery of genre convention. The graphic novella Skin Trade shows the influence of splatterpunk, but remains distinctly Martin-ish in its telling of urban werewolves who are hunted by something far worse, and whose lead character, a middle-aged and out-of-shape reporter cum werewolf, undermines popular genre clichés.

As of this writing, George R. R. Martin’s energies seem focused on completing Song of Ice and Fire and on further developing the Game of Thrones franchise, and one can hardly fault him given its enormous commercial success. While elements of horror can be found throughout the cycle—the Night King and his White Walkers, for example—it seems readers will have to wait for a more focused example of the horror fiction that Martin has proven so capable of producing.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Body Horror; Sandkings; Vampires.

Further Reading

“Author George R. R. Martin ‘Playing for Keeps.’” 2011. Weekend All Things Considered. NPR, July 17. http://info.nhpr.org/author-george-rr-martin-playing-keeps.

“George R. R. Martin.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Levy, Michael. 1996. “George R. R. Martin: Dreamer of Fantastic Worlds.” Publishers Weekly, 243: 70–71.

McMullen, E. C., Jr. 2003. “George R. R. Martin.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 667–672. New York: Thomson/Gale.

“THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH”

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” was first published in the May 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine under the title “The Masque of the Red Death: A Fantasy.” Allegorical in nature, the story is at once a deft rendering in Gothic horror fiction and a specimen of Poe’s comic art in the short story. Fearing what they view as a contagion, Prince Prospero and his followers seclude themselves in his palace, imagining that they can thus escape blood and time, twin strongholds in life. The tale dramatizes their folly, concluding with death’s overtaking the group in the form of a masked reveler who turns out not to be masked at all, but the actual personification of the plague they had feared. Poe’s use of the term “masque” derives in part from an early form of English drama in which each performer represented a psychological or moral state, and although the characters in Poe’s tale are revelers, they periodically register unease, betraying an awareness that they sense a futility in trying to control human realities of the body and of time, symbolized by the “Red Death,” designating blood, and a striking clock, designating time’s not standing still.

The chambers in Prospero’s weird palace are decorated with colors that some readers think represent the stages in life from youth to old age. The red and black chamber, with its dual colors representing life and death, reveals that no delusion of the revelers will allow escape from reality. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), from which in part Poe’s tale derives, the Prospero character must return to real life from his paradise island, and even there an unsettling reality intrudes in the person of Caliban. In “Masque” no such reprieve is offered: all the would-be escapees from life’s realities die, showing the futility of their endeavor.

Reading “Masque” is in part analogous to viewing the inside of a human head, with the characters in the tale representing the delusions of those who try to evade blood, time, and death—life’s absolutes. Some also perceive comic undercurrents in the tale, particularly with “Masque” being viewed as a comic takeoff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837 and 1842), which Poe reviewed, there implying that Hawthorne had plagiarized from him.

The story was adapted, rather loosely, by screenwriters Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell for an installment in director Roger Corman’s popular series of Edgar Allan Poe movies starring Vincent Price. Although the movie takes great liberties with Poe’s story and also incorporates aspects of another Poe story, “Hop-Frog” (1849), it is an enjoyable production that remains somewhat true to the spirit of “The Masque of the Red Death.” It was remade in 1989, with Corman producing and Larry Brand directing.

Benjamin F. Fisher

See also: Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Poe, Edgar Allan; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Shakespearean Horrors.

In Poe’s story, the masked revelers are appalled, and Prospero is enraged, when someone appears among them who has had the audacity to dress as if afflicted by the Red Death, with his face and clothes sprinkled with blood. However, the story’s apocalyptic climax reveals that this is not, in fact, a costume. The revelers are seized with awe as the figure makes its way through the colored rooms. Prospero makes pursuit. And then:

He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. (Poe 1984, 490)

Matt Cardin

Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 4. New York: Frank F. Lovell Book Co., Publishers. 14–15.

Further Reading

Fisher, Benjamin F. 2002. “Poe and the Gothic Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 72–91. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Regan, Robert. 1983. “Hawthorne’s ‘Plagiary’; Poe’s Duplicity.” In The Naiad Voice: Essays on Poe’s Satiric Hoaxing, edited by Dennis W. Eddings, 73–87. Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press. Originally published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1970, 25: 281–298.

Roppolo, Joseph. 1963. “Meaning and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’” Tulane Studies in English 13: 59–69.

MATHESON, RICHARD (1926–2013)

Richard Burton Matheson was an American author of horror and science fiction whose work helped to shape the speculative fiction genres in the twentieth century. In the view of many critics and readers, Matheson captured the postmodern angst and existential predicaments that came to dominate the common person in the mid-to-late twentieth century better than his peers. Much of this was due to his anxieties and execution, where the hallmarks of his oeuvre included the intrusion of the extraordinary into daily life, a strong feeling (especially in his earlier output) of mistrust, and an all-inclusive desire to recognize the spiritual side of humankind (mostly in later works). Couple these characteristics with his footprint in mass media by way of an impressive career in film and television—in addition to his output in short fiction, novels, and song lyrics—and his import becomes clear upon even a cursory examination of his output.

He was born February 20, 1926, in Allendale, New Jersey, and was of Norwegian descent. Early on he found comfort in writing as a way to deal with the harsh realities of his alcoholic family life. After an honorable discharge from the Army during World War II, he obtained a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He wrote his first novels while submitting to short story and pulp markets; a breakthrough happened with the publication of his dystopian vampire work, I Am Legend (1954).

Matheson’s follow-up book was another masterwork—The Shrinking Man (1956). In this novel, bleak notions about science, spiritualism, and humanity’s place in the universe—themes that Matheson would revisit in later works—bubbled up, with astonishing results. Making his way to Los Angeles, he was given the chance (at his insistence as a gambit to establish himself in film) to adapt the book into script format (The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), thus demonstrating an additional ability: working in another medium. He was ahead of his peers in this respect, with the notable exception of his remarkable friend Charles Beaumont (The Intruder, 1959), and it was then that he and Beaumont were tapped by Rod Serling, by way of The Martian Chronicles (1950) author Ray Bradbury’s intervention, to write for The Twilight Zone. During this time, he was part of a collective of creators and friends—known later as “The Southern California Writer’s Group,” but internally simply referred to as “The Group”—which included not only Matheson and Beaumont, but also William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run, 1967), George Clayton Johnson (Ocean’s 11, 1959), John Tomerlin (Challenge the Wind, 1967), and by extension Bradbury, Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1959), and many others. By now, Matheson—in addition to being a successful novelist and writer for the screen—had also become a devoted husband and father.

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”: Monster on the Wing

Published in 1961, Matheson’s short horror story “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” has become recognized as a classic. The basic plot is widely known in popular culture: On a nighttime passenger flight, a man named Arthur Jeffrey Wilson, who has a history of mental disturbance, believes he sees a man (or monster) outside the cabin inflicting damage to the wing of the airplane. When he alerts the other passengers, he is dismissed as either mistaken or having a mental breakdown. In the story’s climax, Wilson attempts to kill the man by shooting out the window, nearly causing a catastrophe. The story ends with the damaged plane on the ground and Wilson being carted away on a stretcher by people who think he was trying to commit suicide.

Both the story and Matheson’s eventual self-adapted episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963, starring William Shatner as Wilson, were groundbreaking. The unconventional themes—an everyman protagonist fragmented by paranoia, dovetailing with the use of the unreliable narrator technique; modern technology (air travel) as a menace; the focus on mental illness and its aftermath from a social lens—would eventually become hallmarks of Matheson’s very personal approach to the modern horror story, and many of these treatments subsequently came into common usage. The story itself, especially in its Twilight Zone incarnation, has become iconic, to the point where parodies of it have appeared on everything from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live.

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was given another adaptation in 1983 as the fourth and final segment in the Twilight Zone anthology movie, with John Lithgow replacing Shatner as the protagonist. Once again, Matheson adapted the script from his own story, this time removing the mental illness angle and making the protagonist (now named John Valentine) suffer instead from a morbid fear of flying.

Jason V Brock

Later, director Roger Corman would demonstrate similar vision as Serling by employing both Beaumont and Matheson to write his Poe series of films—House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and others. To this end, Matheson’s personal demons—paranoia, fear of insanity, dread of unintended scientific repercussions, the dangers of modernity—began to be addressed directly in his output. As his career accelerated, he turned away from short fiction to write more for film and television. Though working frequently for the likes of directors such as Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, 1966–1971) and a young Steven Spielberg (Duel, 1971), he continued to produce novels. Several of his standout books center on the ideas and thematic possibilities of the importance of the magical and the transcendent power of love. His output began to touch on themes and concepts that his friends’ work did not.

Stylistically, a general lack of nostalgia (at least in his short work; a few of his novels have touched upon this emotion at length), yet cautious optimism and hope that there is more to the plight of humans, is another one of the things that separates Matheson’s writing from his contemporaries in the genres he explored: Western, horror, science fiction, mainstream literary, and forays into nonfiction. In spite of Matheson’s relatively modest literary output—he was never a consistent “best seller” or excessively prolific—he was nonetheless unusually important, even in his peer cohort. The reason for this most likely stems from Matheson’s treatment of his personal concerns, which, at their core, strike at the root of human failing, technophobia, and anomie in ways that none of his colleagues ever managed, including his eminent, aforementioned equals, such as Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, and even the esteemed Ray Bradbury. Surrounded by family, Matheson passed away peacefully in his home on June 23, 2013.

Jason V Brock

See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Nolan, William F.; Vampires.

Further Reading

Brock, Jason V. 2014. Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2002. “The Matheson Zone.” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 24 (June 17): 31–35. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20020617/28779-the-matheson-zone.html.

Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Wiater, Stanley, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, eds. 2009. The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. New York: Citadel Press Books.

MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1782–1824)

Charles Robert Maturin was a writer of Gothic novels and plays, most famously Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). A Protestant clergyman, he was born and lived most of his life in Dublin. He was an eccentric, a dandy, and a charismatic preacher.

Maturin was born in Dublin on September 25, 1782, into a line of Protestant clergymen, descendants of Huguenots who fled France to escape Catholic persecution. As a young man Maturin attended Trinity College. He then took religious orders and, following his ordination, became a curate in Dublin. He lived with his parents, and in 1803 married singer and society beauty Henrietta Kingsbury.

Maturin began to write out of his own interest and self-published his first books. Not wishing to harm his chances of advancement in the priesthood, Maturin wrote his first three novels under a pseudonym. They were not well received, but they attracted the notice of Sir Walter Scott, and Maturin and he struck up a correspondence. Scott was very supportive of Maturin’s career and recommended his work to Lord Byron, who admired it.

A combination of factors—his Calvinism, the fact that he had offended a bishop, concern over the impiety of his fiction—meant Maturin was barred from clerical advancement. As he had to support his parents as well as his family, and his wages as a curate were small, he was forced to take on other jobs.

Then, in 1816, Maturin’s tragic play, Bertram, was an unexpected success on the London stage. Maturin was suddenly famous, and the play earned him about £1,000, a sum that enabled him to give up the teaching he was doing on top of his priestly duties and devote more time to writing. Despite its popularity, Bertram was critically decried in Britain, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge blasting it in his Biographia Literaria (1817), describing the opening of its fourth act “as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind” (Coleridge 2014, 398). However—and seemingly unsuspected by Maturin—internationally the play was not just popularly successful but critically acclaimed. It was performed in America, translated into French, used as the basis for operas in both France and Italy, and praised by the likes of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Further plays failed, however, so Maturin turned back to novel writing and, in 1820, published the work for which he is best known, Melmoth the Wanderer. Two other novels followed, but none of the three (Melmoth included) sold well or received many positive notices at the time.

Scott often, in his letters to Maturin, advised the Irishman to tone down his productions and introduce greater realism. Much about Maturin’s aesthetic sense can be deduced from looking at the differences between his and Scott’s approaches to writing as a career. Scott was developing a new tradition, a sober, plausible, and modern “historical romance,” a mode designed to appeal to contemporary readers. Maturin’s aim, by contrast, was to radicalize, to make more lurid and disturbing, the Gothic romance. Maturin was the archetype of the contrary horror writer who, out of step with public taste and frustrated by critical responses to his or her work, pushes more and more against the boundaries of decency. He aimed in his work at the intense, the sublime, the violent, the grotesque, and the comic, interweaving these moods to disconcerting effect.

Maturin died in penury and obscurity on October 20, 1824. In the 1890s, his literary reputation in Britain was revived, and Melmoth, which was translated into French in 1821, had a major influence on the Decadent and Surrealist movements.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Byron, Lord; Frame Story; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. [1817] 2014. Biographia Literaria. Edited by Adam Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin, vii–xxix. London: Penguin.

MAUPASSANT, GUY DE (1850–1893)

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a French naturalist writer known for his virtuosic short stories, written between 1875 and 1891, including the remarkable “Le Horla” (1887), an early example of weird fiction that H. P. Lovecraft, in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), claims is “perhaps without a peer in its particular department” (Lovecraft 2012, 52). Indeed, Maupassant’s horror tales, which often consist of hallucinatory encounters with the numinous that decenter the self as a privileged site for differentiating between the real and the unreal, have had an immeasurable impact on writers of weird fiction and cosmic horror similarly interested in subverting the rational.

A student of Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant is perhaps best known for the rollicking “Boule de suif” (Ball of Fat, 1880), published in Emile Zola’s Soirées de Médan (Evenings at Médan), which brought him success as an author, and for the conte cruel (cynical tale of cruelty) “La Parure” (The Necklace, 1884), whose “twist” ending plays a cautionary role. Both stories explore French life in the nineteenth century with a spirit of playful mischievousness. Yet, as indicated by Arnold Kellett in the introduction to The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1989), there exists a “dark side” to the author’s oeuvre, including some thirty tales that investigate the sometimes quiet, sometimes cosmic horrors of the weird and the unknown. Most of these stories are collected in Kellett’s volume, which is the best introduction to Maupassant’s horror fiction, where the reader can observe the ways in which Maupassant was inspired by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism, the nineteenth-century French pioneer of neurology Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures on hypnotism, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Gothic stories, and the French writer Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre works.

Maupassant’s horror tales, such as “Lui?” (tr. as The Terror; 1883), “La Nuit” (tr. as The Nightmare, 1887), and “Qui sait?” (Who Knows? 1890), straddle the line between the supernatural and realism, thereby allowing horror and terror to coexist in an atmosphere of uneasiness, often culminating in the narrator experiencing hallucinations, obsessions, and madness. Maupassant was fond of the frame story, frequently characterizing his narrators as persons of credible sanity whose encounters with the outré (the strange and unusual)—including doppelgängers, animate objects, and the undead—and whose subsequent devolutions into states of frenzy are rendered both believable and disturbing. Maupassant, who fought in the Franco-Prussian War, was equally interested in the notion of inhumanity, and he explored the horrors of war with a somber lucidity in stories such as “La Folle” (The Mad Woman, 1882), “Deux amis” (Two Friends, 1883), and “Le Père Milon” (Father Milon, 1883).

Maupassant lived a life of debauchery and, in his twenties, contracted syphilis, leading to the gradual dissolution of his physical and mental health. In 1892 he made a botched attempt at suicide and spent the remaining year of his life in an asylum, where he died at the young age of forty-two.

Sean Matharoo

See also: Doubles, Dopplegängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; “The Horla”; The Numinous; Psychological Horror; Terror versus Horror.

Further Reading

Álvaro, L. C. 2005. “Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant’s Fantastical Short Stories—a Neurological Approach.” Journal of the History of Neurosciences 14 (2): 100–115.

Lerner, Michael G. 1975. Maupassant. New York: George Braziller.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Marvin, Frederic R. 1915. “Maupassant and Poe.” In ‘A Hideous Bit of Morbidity’: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 148–152. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

MCCAMMON, ROBERT R. (1952–)

Robert Rick McCammon is an American writer of horror and historical crime fiction who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s as a writer of best-selling paperback original novels. His work is distinguished by its optimistic portrayals of characters who draw on their greatest virtues as human beings to triumph over challenges, both supernatural and otherwise.

McCammon took a degree in journalism from the University of Alabama and was writing advertising copy for newspapers in Birmingham when his first novel, Baal, was published in 1978. The story of a child born of a rape committed by a demonic being who eventually grows into an antichrist-like figure with powers that threaten the world, it was the first of several novels in which McCammon tackled themes common in the then burgeoning horror market. Bethany’s Sin (1980), which garnered comparisons to Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973), is a small-town horror novel in which a family discovers that the Connecticut town they have recently moved to is home to a fertility cult possessed by the spirits of bloodthirsty Amazons unleashed during an archaeological excavation. The Night Boat (1980) was somewhat ahead of the horror genre’s early twenty-first-century zombie craze with its account of a Nazi U-boat crew cursed by a voodoo priest to immortal existence as flesh-eating zombies. They Thirst (1981) proved to be McCammon’s breakout novel: set in Los Angeles where an apocalyptic vampire invasion is gradually unfolding, its large cast of characters and epic scale showed him attempting more ambitious plots.

Mine: Mind of a Human Monster

A suspense thriller published by Pocket Books in 1990, Mine marked a career turning point for McCammon, who up to then had been known primarily for writing supernatural horror. The two principal characters are Mary Terrell, a.k.a. Mary Terror, a former member of the Storm Front Brigade (a radical offshoot of the Weather Underground), and Laura Clayborne, an Atlanta suburbanite who is about to give birth to her first child. Since a shootout with the police in 1972 that resulted in the capture and disbanding of the Storm Front—and that caused her to lose her own unborn child—Mary has kept a low profile, living hand-to-mouth and frequently moving to hide her whereabouts. When she meets Laura, her long-simmering obsession with having a child boils over. Masquerading as a nurse, she steals Laura’s infant son, David, and flees in the hope that, if she can track down Jack Gardiner (a.k.a. Lord Jack), the Storm Front’s former leader, they will be able to reunite the brigade’s surviving members.

Mine is a powerful character study in which McCammon compares and contrasts his two main characters. The psychotic Mary is frightening in the intensity of her desire to live in a past that the world has moved on from and in her pathological obsession to have a child. Although her actions represent a break with sanity, she is not completely unsympathetic, especially when she begins to show a sensitive, maternal side under David’s influence. Although Laura seems to be living a life that is the complete opposite of Mary’s—aloof, privileged, tradition-bound—the kidnapping of her child sets her on a more determined course of action as she pursues Mary across the country, becoming more ruthless and obsessive herself. Mine received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 1990.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

McCammon’s next two novels were published as hardcovers. In Mystery Walk (1983), the struggle between human good and supernatural evil that serves as the foundation for many of his stories plays out in the relationship between two young men gifted with supernatural powers, one of whom uses his to heal the afflicted while the other uses his to further the campaign of his father, an evangelical Christian zealot. The premise of McCammon’s Southern Gothic novel Usher’s Passing (1984) is that the doomed family in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a historically real American family that has made its fortune as arms merchants. Rix Usher, a contemporary descendant, repudiates his family’s legacy, but finds that family obligations and his personal destiny as inheritor of a family business founded on a legacy of horrors are nearly impossible to escape.

Swan Song (1987) was another paperback original and the first of McCammon’s novels to make the New York Times best-seller list. It is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has devastated the planet and left the survivors, some of whom are endowed with supernatural powers, to reestablish civilization and resist the ironically named “Friend,” a shape-shifting monster trying to divide humanity against itself. McCammon’s next novel, Stinger (1988), has been likened to a science fiction B-movie with its account of a small Texas town whose feuding residents pull together to assist a benign extraterrestrial who is fleeing the titular intergalactic bounty hunter. Stinger anticipates McCammon’s The Border (2015), in which people from different, and often diametrically opposed, walks of life band together to assist a young man with an otherworldly pedigree who is the only possible salvation for an earth being decimated by opposing extraterrestrial armies that use it as their battleground. McCammon followed Stinger with The Wolf’s Hour (1989), which gives a novel twist to the traditional werewolf theme: Michael Gallatin, the novel’s werewolf, is a hero who fights for the Allied forces against the Nazis in World War II. Gallatin also serves as the protagonist in a handful of stories collected as The Hunter from the Woods (2015) and can be viewed as a prototype for Trevor Lawson, the benevolent vampire gunslinger in McCammon’s period novels I Travel By Night (2013) and Last Train from Perdition (2016), both set in the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War.

McCammon shifted to writing nonsupernatural suspense fiction with Mine (1990), a novel about the dark side of America’s counterculture in the 1960s, in which a former member of a radical underground front kidnaps the child of a privileged upper middle-class mother, setting off a cross-country chase that virtually radicalizes the mother in her determination to retrieve her child. Boy’s Life (1991) is a Bradburyesque evocation of its main character’s childhood in a small Southern town, one in which youthful imagination colors recollections of even the most dramatic events, infusing them with a fantastical quality. Like Swan Song and Mine, the novel won the Bram Stoker Award given by the Horror Writers Association for best novel. Gone South (1992) is yet another nonsupernatural novel concerning a fugitive on the run from bounty hunters whose pursuit through the Louisiana bayous bring him into contact with grotesques redolent of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor.

Ten years separate the publication of Gone South and Speaks the Nightbird (2002), during which McCammon, who was in disagreement with editors on the new direction he was taking in his work, unofficially retired from writing. Speaks the Nightbird is the first novel in a series that now includes The Queen of Bedlam (2007), Mister Slaughter (2010), The Providence Rider (2012), The River of Souls (2014), and Freedom of the Mask (2016), featuring Matthew Corbett, a “problem solver” (i.e., private detective) in prerevolutionary America whose adventures often verge on the macabre and occasionally suggest the supernatural through the superstitions and folk beliefs of their period characters. In this second act of his career, McCammon has alternated novels in his nonsupernatural series with supernatural fiction, including The Five (2011), in which a rock band’s stalking by an assassin proves to be supernaturally motivated. McCammon is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Blue World (1989), several of whose stories have been adapted for television, including “Nightcrawlers,” about a Vietnam veteran who brings the war home with him in the form of horrors that manifest from his dreams.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Bram Stoker Award; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Splatterpunk; Vampires; Werewolves; Zombies.

Further Reading

Bleiler, Richard, and Hunter Goatley. 2003. “Robert R. McCammon.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 705–712. New York: Scribner’s.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1998. “Robert R(ick) McCammon.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 398–399. Detroit. MI: St. James Press.

Staggs, Sam. 1991. “PW Interviews: Robert R. McCammon.” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 34 (August 2): 54–55.

Wiater, Stanley. 1990. “Robert R. McCammon.” In Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror, 145–153. New York: Avon.

MCDOWELL, MICHAEL (1950–1999)

Michael McEachern McDowell was an American screenwriter and novelist from Enterprise, Alabama. He is best known as the author of Blackwater, a six-part Southern Gothic serial novel, and for his work as a screenwriter, including two original scripts for Tim Burton and a Stephen King adaptation. King himself, in a much-quoted comment, once described McDowell as “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today” (Winter 1985, 177).

McDowell held degrees from Harvard (summa cum laude) and a PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis, where his 1978 dissertation was titled American Attitudes toward Death, 1825–1865. While attempting six novels that failed to sell, he supported himself by working as a teacher, a theater critic, and a secretary at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After seeing a trailer for The Omen while attending a showing of Barry Lyndon, he was inspired to work on a horror script of his own. He novelized his script as an exercise, resulting in his debut, The Amulet, published in 1979. He continued in the Southern Gothic vein for several subsequent novels, including Cold Moon over Babylon (1980), The Elementals (1981), and Blackwater (1983), which was published in six monthly installments. Michael E. Stamm has noted that in his Southern Gothic novels, McDowell was “noticeably influenced” by Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Southern novelist (Stamm 1988, 51).

Roughly half of McDowell’s approximately thirty novels, most published as paperback originals, appeared under his own name, while others were credited to various pseudonyms, including Mike McCray, Preston Macadam, and a pair of pen names used for his collaborations with Dennis Schuetz: Nathan Aldyne (four gay detective novels) and Axel Young. In addition to his horror novels, he wrote several historical novels, a trilogy of crime books, and a novelization for the movie Clue.

In the mid-1980s, McDowell received a phone call from the producers of the American anthology horror television series Tales from the Darkside inquiring after the rights to a story that was actually written by Michael P-Kube McDowell. He used the opportunity to send them a script and started writing for anthology television series, including Amazing Stories, Monsters, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as for two television specials. His feature film script of Beetlejuice (1988; based on a story co-written with Larry Wilson) followed, as well as scripts for High Spirits (1988), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), The Nightmare before Christmas (1993), and Thinner (1996), based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.

Following his discovery that he was HIV-positive in 1994, McDowell spent the last years of his life teaching classes on screenwriting at Boston and Tufts University. At the time of his death, he was working on treatments of a Beetlejuice sequel and a new version of The Nutcracker. After his death in 1999 from AIDS-related illness in Boston, Tabitha King, a personal friend, agreed to complete his final novel, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.

McDowell’s “Death Collection” of bizarre curios, some of which date to the sixteenth century, including pictures of women modeling burial gowns, spirit photographs, funeral cards, hair wreaths, morticians’ supplies, crime scene photos, hanging and accident photos, and an infant-sized casket, is archived at Northwestern University.

Bev Vincent

See also: Dark Fantasy; King, Stephen; Welty, Eudora.

Further Reading

Cagle, Ryan. 2016. Cold Moon over McDowell: The Life and Works of Michael McDowell. Accessed August 11, 2016. http://coldmoonovermcdowell.blogspot.com.

Stamm, Michael E. 1988. “Michael McDowell and the Haunted South.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 51–62. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Wiater, Stanley. 1988. “Horror in Print: Michael McDowell.” Fangoria 40: 54–56.

Winter, Douglas E. 1982. “From Harvard to Horror” (interview with Michael McDowell). Fantasy Newsletter 5, no. 11 (December): 23–28.

Winter, Douglas E. 1985. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books.

MCGRATH, PATRICK (1950–)

Now predominantly residing in New York, the British novelist Patrick McGrath is a writer of some standing in the field of Anglo-American letters and Gothic literature. Since his debut novel The Grotesque (1989), he has penned several critically acclaimed fictions that stage and interrogate the complexities of madness, obsession, psychiatry, and familial relationships. A number of McGrath’s novels have been read through critical lenses that are associated with Gothic studies, yet perhaps only a handful of his works—such as Spider (1990), his short story “The Smell” (1991), and his 2000 novel Martha Peake—are consistently Gothicized in their imagery, iconography, or narration. One of McGrath’s most exquisite skills as a writer lies in the tendency of his crafted prose to transform sustained and slow-burning terror into moments of devastating horror or revelation. His greatest influences are from the Gothic tradition, Edgar Allan Poe in particular, but he is also an avid reader of the haunting tales of Joseph Conrad, the passionate love affairs of D. H. Lawrence, and the aesthetically intense prose of John Hawkes.

A landmark critical study, Sue Zlosnik’s monograph Patrick McGrath (2011), makes the standout scholarly case for considering him as primarily a writer of modern Gothic fiction. For instance, Zlosnik suggests that even McGrath’s Asylum (1996), the narrative style of which is influenced by Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 modernist novel The Good Soldier, explores fundamentally Gothic concerns and themes; the book’s “narrative voice resists a Gothic tone,” but its “concerns are undeniably Gothic” as its thematics are “shaped around a powerful symbolic structure relating to boundaries” (Zlosnik 2011, 75). Indeed, Asylum is concerned thematically with the causes, limits, and contours of madness, betrayal, institutionalism, and sexual possession. Its setting in 1959 is particularly telling. The institutional practices critiqued in Asylum draw from Victorian principles of psychiatry that were soon to be revolutionized through the transformative legislation of the Mental Health Act in the United Kingdom. Of keen interest to those academics and scholars who work on the intersections between medical practices and literature, McGrath’s father—Dr. Pat McGrath Sr.—was the last medical superintendent of Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum (as it was then known), and McGrath the writer spent a good portion of his youth growing-up in a house just outside of the asylum’s grounds. The influence that these years have upon his writing is pronounced, and his fiction has been described as neuro-Gothic because of its fusion of Gothic atmosphere with medical matters.

McGrath’s modern novels continue to impress critics, and posterity may judge his collection of three stories, Ghost Town (2005), as one of the most nuanced and moving meditations upon post-9/11 New York. The work of this millennial McGrath is more recognizably American, and in recent years he has continued to gain a global, transnational readership. For instance, his Gothic novel Martha Peake won Italy’s Premio Flaiano Prize. Both Trauma (2008) and Constance (2013), his two most recent novels as of late 2016, produce devastating conclusions and revelations. McGrath’s intensity as a writer is undiminished.

Reflecting a renewed interest in his writing, McGrath, in collaboration with the University of Stirling in Scotland, has created an archive of his professional materials, one that includes books of automatic writing, several drafts of his novels, early promotional materials, adapted screenplays—including for David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002)—and a complete set of first editions of his works. The archive’s opening in January 2016 was marked by an international symposium that both celebrated McGrath’s work and was a testament to scholars’ continuing fascination with his neuro-Gothic writings.

Matt Foley

See also: The Grotesque.

Further Reading

McGrath, Patrick. 1997. “John Hawkes’ An Irish Eye.” BOMB Magazine 61 (Fall). http://bombmagazine.org/article/5188/john-hawkes-an-irish-eye.

McGrath, Patrick. 2012. “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor.” The Economist, September/October. https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor.

McRobert, Neil. 2011. “Patrick McGrath Interviewed by Neil McRobert.” The Gothic Imagination at University of Stirling, July 13. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/patrick-mcgrath-interviewed-by-neil-mcrobert.

Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

MELMOTH THE WANDERER

In works of literary history, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820) is often said to mark the end of the high Gothic as a genre. Its author, Charles Robert Maturin, was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a writer of novels and plays. Melmoth is one of the most macabre and bizarre of all Gothic novels from the period, with frequent grotesque scenes and a very complex narrative structure.

Maturin struggled for money and, in his preface to Melmoth, claims to have resorted regretfully to the Gothic romance in an attempt to find popularity with the public at a time when the Gothic was seeing a late resurgence. But given the exuberance and relish with which Melmoth is written, it seems likely Maturin was being disingenuous. In truth, he had an affinity for the Gothic and had been writing in the vein for some years. Impoverished though he was, it is doubtful that he would ever have considered compromising his vision to meet the public taste; he wished to outdo in extremity the Gothic tales of earlier writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.

Melmoth has a complex structure consisting of nested narratives. Through manuscript and eyewitness accounts that are tortuous and labyrinthine, the novel unfolds the story of the eponymous Wanderer’s Satanic bargain. Melmoth has pledged his soul to Satan in return for unnatural longevity, and he can only save himself if he is able to find someone willing to take his place. He attempts to corrupt those in great mortal suffering, but ultimately fails to do so. As allegory the novel is opaque and confused, but this only increases its imaginative power.

Sebastian Melmoth the Wanderer

After being released in 1897 from two years of imprisonment for “gross indecency,” Oscar Wilde, Victor Maturin’s grand-nephew, exiled himself to France and took the name “Sebastian Melmoth,” after the third-century Saint Sebastian and the title character in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. He explained this choice of surname and commented on Maturin’s novel in a letter to Louis Wilkinson:

“A fantastic name,” he had called it in an earlier letter, “but I shall explain it to you some day.”

“You asked me,” he wrote later, “about ‘Melmoth.’ Of course I have not changed my name: in Paris I am as well known as in London: it wd. be childish.

“But to prevent postmen having fits—I sometimes have my letters inscribed with the name of a curious novel by my grand-uncle, Maturin: a novel that was part of the romantic revival of the early century—and though imperfect—a pioneer—: it is still read in France and Germany: Bentley republished it some years ago. I laugh at it, but it thrilled Europe—and is still played as a play in modern Spain.” (Wilkinson 1914, 138)

Matt Cardin

Source: Wilkinson, Louis. 1914. “Oscar Wilde: Some Hitherto Unpublished Letters of the Last Phase.” In The Forum, vol. 51, 130–139. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley.

In Melmoth, Maturin brings together the poetics of Gothic extremity and the comic and skeptical tradition of Enlightenment satire. The effect of this is to make of the Gothic a critical mode. Melmoth is not a novel that, as most works of the high Gothic period do, confirms the status quo, but is instead one that mockingly and perversely questions it.

In light of this, it is ironic that most contemporary reviews of the novel were critical of Maturin’s use of what they viewed as a worn-out Gothic mode. They also criticized the novel’s perceived excesses, particularly as these were felt inappropriate given Maturin’s role as a clergyman. One reviewer, John Wilson Crocker, in the Quarterly Review of January 1821, even went so far as to accuse Maturin of nonsense, lack of veracity, blasphemy, brutality, and “dark, cold-blooded, pedantic obscenity” (Crocker 1821, 311). At the same time, many critics were led to acknowledge, however grudgingly, Maturin’s eloquence and skill. The reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine of November 1820, after rebuking Maturin for “copying the worst faults of his predecessors and contemporaries, in the commonest works of fictitious writing,” claimed that “Maturin is gifted with a genius as fervently powerful as it is distinctly original” and called him “one of the most genuine masters of the dark romance” (Anonymous 1820, 161, 168).

In England Melmoth fell into obscurity after Maturin’s death in poverty in 1824. There were some attempts to revive his reputation in Ireland during the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1890s that the novel was reprinted, along with a memoir of Maturin for which Oscar Wilde and his mother, who was Maturin’s niece by marriage, provided some biographical insights. Later, when Wilde left Reading Gaol to head to Paris to die, he took on the name “Sebastian Melmoth” in melancholy tribute to his great-uncle’s creation.

But in France, where Maturin’s play Bertram (1816) had been a popular success in translation, Melmoth had a much more sympathetic reception. The novel was translated into French in 1821 and was hailed as a classic of the Romantic sublime. Honoré de Balzac praised it as one of the most important works of the Romantic Gothic, and even wrote a satire based on its central conceit. The poet Charles Baudelaire saw Maturin not as a Romantic, but as a modern whose work demonstrated the demonic perversity of modernity. The strange poetic novel The Songs of Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, contains clear allusions to Melmoth. And André Breton, founder of Surrealism, thought it the greatest of all Gothic novels. The reputation of this odd and initially overlooked novel has only continued to rise since.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Gothic Hero/Villain; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror); Surrealism.

Further Reading

Anon. 1820. “Review of Melmoth the Wanderer.” Blackwood’s Magazine VIII: 160–168. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030603925;view=1up;seq=9.

Crocker, John Wilson. 1821. “Melmoth, the Wanderer, by the Author of Bertram.” Quarterly Review XXIV: 303–311.

Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin, vii–xxix. London: Penguin.

METCALFE, JOHN (1891–1965)

William John Metcalfe was an English writer who is best known for his macabre and supernatural horror stories. His best stories often present puzzles whose only solutions lead to additional puzzles accompanied by greater narrative unease.

His father, William Charles Metcalfe, was a successful writer of sea stories who imbued his son with a love of the sea. John Metcalfe matriculated at the University of London and received a degree in philosophy, taught in Paris, worked as a schoolmaster in London, and moved to the United States in 1928 to work as a barge captain in New York while writing. His early one-act play T’Strike (1921) uses English regional dialect to good effect to discuss the sociopolitical issues of his day, but although several stories in his first collection, The Smoking Leg, and Other Stories (1925) likewise use dialect, explicit discussions of politics are largely eschewed as Metcalfe concentrates on the horrors that can erupt from bizarre situations as well as exploring potentially horrific issues involving confusions of space and time. The titular story, first published in 1925, involves a cursed ruby implanted in a sailor’s leg; it smokes and emits flames and causes ships to sink, but removing it is not an easy affair. “The Bad Lands” (1920) details two men’s conviction that a remote house in the dunes and the surrounding countryside are the epitome of concentrated evil, though others see it as merely an old farmhouse; and “The Double Admiral,” generally considered one of Metcalfe’s best tales, takes another two men, one an admiral, on a journey to see a puzzling island in the distance, but they ultimately encounter themselves, and one of the admirals dies, to be replaced by the other, his doppelgänger.

Poorly chosen relationships and personality issues that resolve themselves horrifically are the subject of Arm’s-Length (1930), which contains no overt supernaturalism, but Judas, and Other Stories (1931) again offers superior supernatural horrors: “Mortmain,” set in the same areas as “The Double Admiral,” concerns a haunting, with ghostly ships and horrible carrion moths. Religion plays a role in “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania,” in which Mr. Meldrum gradually and inexplicably becomes the Egyptian deity Thoth, and religious faith is depicted in “Time-Fuse,” in which an elderly believer in spiritualism handles hot coals until her faith is destroyed, at which point she perishes horribly. “Funeral March of a Marionette” has grown dated and contains no supernatural horrors, but the central conceit—boys substitute a body for the effigy of Guy Fawkes—remains grotesquely effective. The titular boy in Brenner’s Boy (1932) may not have been a guest in Winter’s house, for his father insists that the boy is sick and never left home, but Winter’s wife and friends saw something, even if he does not appear in photographs.

Following the Second World War, Metcalfe was unable to find an English publisher for his third collection of horrific stories, and he submitted them to August Derleth’s Arkham House, but Derleth chose to publish only the longest, The Feasting Dead (1954). It is the story of a haunting, in which Colonel Hapgood’s son Denis, for a while a guest in France, becomes oddly connected with Raoul Privache, perhaps a gardener or a servant, who follows him upon his return to England. The development, which involves psychic vampirism, possession, and utterly reprehensible human behavior, is horrible and disturbing. Additional horrific stories by Metcalfe exist in collections, but there is no comprehensive collection of Metcalfe’s work readily available.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Arkham House; Derleth, August.

Further Reading

Dalby, Richard. 1985. “John Metcalfe.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 597–602. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2005. “Metcalfe, [William] John.” In Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi, 802–803. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Metcalfe, John. 1998. Nightmare Jack and Other Stories, edited by Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, Canada: Ash-Tree Press.

Wilson, Neil. 2000. Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820–1950. Boston Spa and London: British Library.

MEYRINK, GUSTAV (1868–1932)

Born Gustav Meyer, the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink is best known for his supernatural fiction, most especially his novel The Golem (1914; first published in German as Der Golem). Other noteworthy works include Das gruene Gesicht (The Green Face) 1916), Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night) (1917), and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (The Angel of the West Window) (1927).

Meyrink’s supernatural fiction is permeated by philosophical uncertainty about religious faith. According to Meyrink, when he was twenty-four his suicide attempt was interrupted by the sudden appearance beneath his door of a pamphlet about the afterlife. He attributed to this incident the beginning of his intense interest in the occult; from that age on, he was an avid student of Western hermetic traditions and Eastern religions. He co-founded a financial company in 1889, and in 1902 he was arrested on charges that he was committing fraud by spiritualistic means. Thereafter, Meyrink was compelled to publish fiction and translations in order to make ends meet.

In general, Meyrink’s fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place. Ordinary events are treated as only superficial indications of a more profound spiritual reality that is incomprehensible to unenlightened human beings. Very often, the narrator’s experiences form not so much a coherent narrative with a clear plotline as a gathering of seemingly unrelated events that, when scanned for occult significance, reveal telling coincidences and similarities. So the reader of Meyrink’s fiction undergoes a vicarious initiation into deeper mysteries, whose reality lies beyond the confines of the story or novel. In 2012 a high-profile collection of esoteric and spiritual literature, the Ritman Library in Amsterdam, also known as the Bibliotecha Philosophica Hermetica, held an exhibition devoted to Meyrink and his works.

Michael Cisco

See also: The Golem; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Occult Fiction.

Further Reading

Irwin, Robert. 1995. “Gustav Meyrink and His Golem.” In The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Mike Mitchell, 15–20. Monroe, OR: Dedalus.

Mitchell, Mike. 2008. Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink. UK: Dedalus.

van den Berg, Erik. 2012. “Profile: Gustav Meyrink.” Ritman Library/Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, December 17. http://www.ritmanlibrary.com/2012/12/chotverdori-aschubliv.

MIÉVILLE, CHINA (1972–)

China Miéville is an award-winning British writer whose work combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, and horror. Miéville studied social anthropology at Cambridge and earned a PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. A Marxist, Miéville brings a critique of contemporary capitalism into most of his work. A prolific as well as successful writer, Miéville has produced ten novels, two novellas, three short story collections, three comic books, one illustrated children’s book, and three works of nonfiction.

Miéville sets his work in imaginary and often bleak or dystopic places. Three novels, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004), form the Bas-Lag Series and explore the imagined city of New Crobuzon, where magic and technology mix in a futuristic steampunk universe (steampunk being the popular science fiction subgenre that imagines an alternate history and/or future and/or postapocalyptic world where technological evolution has been centered in nineteenth-century industrial steam-powered technology instead of electrical and digital technology). Un Lun Dun (2008) is a young adult novel. Embassytown (2011) is a science fiction novel set on a different planet, and describes the interactions of human colonists and intelligent aliens. Miéville continued to explore imagined places in The City & The City (2009), where two cities share the same physical space, but citizens of each city are not permitted to acknowledge the existence of the other. Miéville sets a crime narrative in this world of denial and rejection that serves as a metaphor of contemporary urban life. He continued to mix narrative styles and genres in his later novels: Kraken (2010) is a mystery novel in which a preserved body of a giant squid disappears from the London Museum of Natural History, and members of the Church of Kraken Almighty, who believe that the giant squid is God, are suspected. In Railsea (2012), a young adult novel based, very loosely, on Moby Dick, the captain and crew of an undersea train hunt a gigantic mole.

Miéville calls his writing “weird fiction,” a genre of the fantastic that deliberately juxtaposes itself with the traditional high fantasy of such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis by focusing on disruptions of reality and a sense of strangeness and surrealism. He is also associated with the “new weird” movement, in which the boundaries of fantasy, science fiction, and horror are blurred in stories characterized by urban settings, body horror, subversive social criticism, and a metaphysical and/or existential sense of strangeness and unease. His manipulation of genres and creation of dark futures make him one of the most significant writers working in genre fiction today.

Miéville has received numerous awards for his work. Perdido Street Station won the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy awards. The Scar won the 2003 British Fantasy and Locus awards. Iron Council won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards. Un Lun Dun won the 2008 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. The City & The City won the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. Miéville has been a guest of honor at numerous conventions and conferences, including Eastercon (the annual convention of the British Science Fiction Association) and the Society for the Fantastic in the Arts conference. In 2015 he became a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature.

Jim Holte

See also: New Weird; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Gordon, Joan. 2003. “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville.” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3: 355–373. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm.

“Gothic Politics: A Discussion with China Miéville.” 2008. Gothic Studies 10, no. 1: 61–70.

Williams, Mark. 2010. “Weird of Globalization: Esemplastic Power in the Short Fiction of China Miéville.” Irish Journal of Gothic Studies 8 (June 14). https://irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/ijghsissue8.pdf.

THE MIND PARASITES

Often discussed as a work of science fiction, Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) strays from a stereotypical understanding of vampires as haematophagic (blood eating), but is very much a vampire story of stolen human autonomy, of psycho-emotive parasitism. Part of the vanguard of modern American vampire fiction, it sits alongside generic dominants such as the suburban mass infection in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and the solipsistic self-reflection in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976).

The central protagonist, archaeologist Professor Gilbert Austin, discovers that, in parallel with the growth of modern industrialism since the late eighteenth century, humans have been cultivated as food for Mind Parasites, “alien intelligences, whose aim is either to destroy the human race or enslave it” (Wilson 2005, 113). These intelligences are variously referred to as “energy vampires” (52), “vampire bats of the soul” (71), “Great Old Ones” (36), and “Tsathogguans” (8) (these last two overtly influenced by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos). The Mind Parasites has a horror pedigree born from a challenge to write a Lovecraftian tale issued by August Derleth, publisher and anthologist of Lovecraft’s works.

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) was not just a novelist who sometimes wrote science fiction verging into horror, but a controversial intellectual and authorial dynamo whose ideas and books about a multitude of subjects, from the occult and paranormal to crime, philosophy, psychology, sexuality, history, and more, earned him an enthusiastic following even as it exiled him for most of his career from conventionally respectable intellectual and literary society. In both The Mind Parasites and another novel, The Philosopher’s Stone (1969), he borrowed from and responded to the literary and philosophical world of H. P. Lovecraft to lay out some of his own ideas on the nature of consciousness and the enemies to humanity’s full flourishing that may lie within people’s very psyches.

Matt Cardin

Prior to The Mind Parasites, Wilson wrote about the effects of social dislocation through discussion of literary, artistic, and cultural figures ranging from Dostoyevsky to Van Gogh and Albert Camus in The Outsider (1956), first in a series of seven nonfiction texts that, over the subsequent decade, demonstrated a New Existentialist philosophical curiosity that fed into his fiction. This reflection upon disarticulation is, in The Mind Parasites, intensified by an exploitation of contemporary pre–moon landing unknowns surrounding space travel and alien antagonists, which caught popular imagination in the 1950s and 1960s.

The manipulation of humanity by unknown aliens positions horror in The Mind Parasites as holistic: what affects mind affects body, and what affects one affects all, within a narrative informed by the ideas of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl (who established the field of phenomenology, focused on investigating the first-person viewpoint of conscious experience), and also the idea of the collective unconscious as elaborated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Wilson thematically ranges across philosophy, psychology, academia, politics, and drug use, and yet his use of the human mind as a tangible space wherein terrible beasts dwell follows a straightforward overcoming-the-monster plot arc. These vampires channel humans toward a state of malleable pessimism: those who lack “the mental discipline to resist” (54) are a source of energy; those who challenge are destroyed. Unwilling to relinquish parasitic control, these aliens mount increasingly vicious attacks on the inner space of Austin and his fellow intellectual fighters, until their ultimate defeat. Wilson enhances this generic pastiche with Lovecraftian prose in which Austin apologizes for lacking erudition and resorting to conventional linguistic tropes employed in horror fiction, such as mental instability, slavery, grotesquerie, and glimpsed shadowy figures, in a bid to impress upon readers the concept that horror comes from a lack of foundation or meaning.

Jillian Wingfield

See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; I Am Legend; Interview with the Vampire; Vampires.

Further Reading

Lachman, Gary. 2016. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. New York: Tarcher.

Tredell, Nicolas. 1982. “Arrows to the Farther Shore: The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone.” The Novels of Colin Wilson, 97–116. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble.

Wilson, Colin. [1967] 2005. The Mind Parasites. Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish.

MISERY

Misery is a horror/thriller novel by the American novelist Stephen King. Published in 1987, it was the first winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. Often considered King’s most autobiographical work, the novel centers on issues of authorship and the struggle for creative autonomy.

Misery is focused on two characters: the best-selling author Paul Sheldon and his obsessive fan Annie Wilkes. At the novel’s opening, Paul has recently completed the final volume in a series of Gothic romances that has made his name, but that he regards as a barrier to creative fulfillment. Having killed off his heroine, Misery Chastaine, Paul sets off on a celebratory cross-country drive in inclement weather. He is carrying the only extant copy of his manuscript. Along the way he crashes his car and is rescued by Annie, who, upon his waking, professes herself his “number-one fan.” Her ministrations, which initially seem benign, if odd, soon turn sinister once Annie reads Paul’s manuscript. She is enraged at Misery’s death and embarks on a regime of physical and psychological torture in order to coerce Paul into resurrecting her beloved character. The bulk of the novel concerns Paul’s attempts to survive Annie’s brutality while struggling with his own authorial anxieties.

Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her portrayal of Annie in Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of the novel. The film has become famous for the “hobbling” scene, in which Annie breaks Paul’s ankles with a sledgehammer. Despite the scene’s notoriety, it is actually toned down from the original, in which Annie amputates Paul’s foot with an axe. In recent years Misery has been adapted for the theater by William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay for the film). In 2012 the play moved to Broadway, where the role of Paul was played by Bruce Willis.

Paul and Annie’s conflict is a microcosmic representation of the writing industry, where success breeds creative constraint and demanding fans reject deviation from type. Numerous critics have, therefore, associated the character of Paul with his creator. In the 1980s King was at the peak of his popularity as a horror writer. But in 1984 he had published The Eyes of the Dragon, a whimsical fantasy that stepped well outside of his usual fictional range. His fans’ hostile response to this novel is seen by some as the genesis for Misery, in which the physical entrapment within Annie’s cabin is a literal enactment of the confinement within genre boundaries that both Paul Sheldon and Stephen King experienced.

Together with The Dark Half (1989) and “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (1990), Misery forms a metafictional “trilogy” focusing on “writers and writing and that strange no-man’s land between what’s real and what’s make believe” (King 1990, 237). Despite his returning repeatedly to the figure of the writer in more recent years, Misery remains King’s most potent and sophisticated reflection on the craft.

Neil McRobert

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Frame Story; King, Stephen.

Further Reading

Berkenkamp, Lauri. 1992. “Reading, Writing and Interpreting: Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, 203–211. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

King, Stephen. 1990. Four Past Midnight. New York: Viking.

Magistrale, Anthony. 1989. “Art versus Madness in Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, 271–278. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

McRobert, Neil. 2013. “Figuring the Author in Modern Gothic Writing.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 297–308. New York: Routledge.

THE MONK

The Monk: A Romance largely shaped the course of the Gothic tradition in both the 1790s and subsequent decades, entering into conversation with its contemporaries and initiating new literary conversations. It is still considered to be one of the most shocking and graphic Gothic works. Written by the nineteen-year-old Matthew Gregory Lewis (known throughout his life as “Monk” Lewis), who claimed to have written it in ten weeks, it was published in five editions during his life, the first published anonymously in 1796. The second, published later in the same year, proudly bore his name and position as a member of Parliament (MP). Despite its popularity, it caused scandal for its graphic violence and sexual content, as well as its commentary on religion. Subsequent editions attempted to address these controversies, the fourth featuring the most evidence of self-censorship and, as a result, being the least interesting to scholars. All critical editions are based on the first edition.

The novel revolves around the young monk, Ambrosio, whose life of seclusion and asceticism fails to protect him from his own desires, incited when his faithful novice reveals him/herself to be a woman in disguise, Matilda. When she saves his life, he not only allows her to stay but to seduce him and guide him into a satanic pact to gain access to a more pure and innocent woman, Antonia. This constitutes the main plot but, like most Gothic novels of the period, it features several side plots. The second, and almost equally prominent, introduces Agnes, the sister of Antonia’s suitor, Lorenzo, and a nun within Ambrosio’s sister convent, who has been promised to religion by her family. When Ambrosio catches her with a note from her lover, Raymond (Lorenzo’s best friend), he discovers that she is pregnant and hands her over to the prioress, Mother St. Ursula, who punishes her by faking her death and entombing her alive within the catacombs.

Ambrosio’s fate at the end of The Monk is fully as “extreme” as the rest of Lewis’s novel, and serves as an appropriate capstone for a book brimming with garish extremes of wanton sin and horror. This involves a memorable appearance by Lucifer in Ambrosio’s prison cell:

A blaze of lightning flashed through the Cell; and in the next moment, borne upon sulphurous whirl-winds, Lucifer stood before him a second time. But He came not, as when at Matilda’s summons He borrowed the Seraph’s form to deceive Ambrosio. He appeared in all that ugliness, which since his fall from heaven had been his portion: His blasted limbs still bore marks of the Almighty’s thunder: A swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form: His hands and feet were armed with long Talons: Fury glared in his eyes, which might have struck the bravest heart with terror. (Lewis 1845, 124)

Then Ambrosio signs his soul over to Lucifer in exchange for being rescued from human punishment. His fate is far worse than the Inquisition could have managed:

He [the Daemon] released the sufferer. headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river’s banks . . . The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio’s wounds . . . The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eye-balls with their crooked beaks . . . six miserable days did the Villain languish. (127)

Matt Cardin

Source: Lewis, Matthew. [1796] 1845. The Monk. New York: Moore & Jackson.

It is easy to see how religion, sexuality, and gender stand out as prominent themes throughout the novel. Set in seventeenth-century Spain, Lewis’s text is safely distanced from his own time and place, but it was clearly influenced by the violence of the French Revolution, discussions of the slave trade, and attitudes toward homosexuality at the time. Further, it demonstrates the evils of Catholicism characteristic of the Gothic and features a series of both tyrannical and pure women, culminating in the shape-shifting Matilda. Ambrosio, embracing his pact with the devil, murders Antonia’s mother and fakes Antonia’s death in order to fully possess and rape her, an act that culminates in her death and his arrest by the Inquisition. When word of what Mother St. Ursula has done reaches the people of Madrid, the crowd riots and tramples her in one of the most graphic scenes in Romantic literature: an act of the people against oppression. Agnes is found clutching the corpse of her baby, and Ambrosio, facing death, allows Matilda to entice him once more to sell his soul, an act that initiates his death and ends the novel. A short list of further side plots includes folkloric figures like the wandering Jew and the bleeding nun, encounters with bandits, family tyrannies, and incest.

The Monk was both inspired by and inspired other forms of literature. Lewis drew heavily on shorter texts, many of which he translated and stitched together with his own graphic twist. He admitted to being strongly influenced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the last of which is often discussed in opposition to Lewis’s novel as examples of female and male Gothic. Whereas Radcliffe’s novels feature scenes of terror and the explained supernatural, Lewis’s supernatural is real, and it leads to the graphic scenes of horror for which he is known. Radcliffe answered Lewis’s novel with another of her own, The Italian (1797). The Monk incited a series of adaptations in the form of dramas, pantomimes, poems, and chapbooks. But growing interest in Gothic literature by women has drawn attention to the prominent rewriting of The Monk: Zofloya (1806), by Charlotte Dacre, referred to by some scholars as the “female monk” for her open idealization of the author. Zofloya features the same level of graphic gender and sexual engagement, with the added shock of its female authorship. Despite harsh criticism from reviewers such as Coleridge, Lewis’s novel also inspired canonical writers, such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. It was, unsurprisingly, praised by the Marquis de Sade, who much preferred it over Radcliffe’s work.

Twenty-first-century readers and scholars hail The Monk for its establishment of bold transgressions within institutions and identities, offering critiques of justice, religion, family, and tyranny as well as extensive explorations of morality and desire that would become trademarks of the Gothic tradition. Its use of underground and closed-off spaces creates a rich multilayered and recognizable comment on the dangers of repression and the power of the return of the repressed. It thus offers a keen illustration of claustrophobia in terms of both space and social structures. A novel preoccupied with excess, it presents a villain who is himself victimized by not only the devil and his temptations but the unrealistic expectations of the institutions that hold him in multiple layers of incarceration, making him an unsettlingly easy character with whom to sympathize. The extent to which the social structures within the text have its villains, victims, and monsters allows the Gothic to juxtapose them with the supernatural, exposing pervasive and, as such, invisible sociopolitical injustices. Unnatural repression of desire creates a master/slave relationship that causes rather than prevents damaging perversity. That Lewis offers readers the same enjoyment of excess through his prose creates a tense and uneasy bond between the reader and the novel’s characters that would be replicated in subsequent Gothic works.

A renewed consideration of Gothic texts produced during the 1790s and their influences has brought The Monk into the twenty-first-century classroom, where its intertextuality has revealed its prominent place within the Romantic literary scene. The 2013 edition of the novel through Valancourt Press includes an introduction by Stephen King, which outlines the extent to which current writers are also indebted to the vociferously transgressive moves of Lewis’s first novel and its championship of horror.

Laura R. Kremmel

See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Terror versus Horror.

Further Reading

Brewer, William D. 2004. “Transgendering in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 2: 192–207.

Lewis, Matthew Gregory. [1796] 2004. The Monk: A Romance. Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview Press.

Macdonald, D. L. 2000. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Miles, Robert. 2000. “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.” In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 41–57. Oxford: Blackwell.

“THE MONKEY’S PAW”

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a short story by W. W. Jacobs (William Wymark Jacobs, 1863–1943), first published in the September 1902 issue of Harper’s magazine and included in his collection Our Lady of the Barge that same year. Inspired by the tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp from The Arabian Nights, the story is about how people who interfere with fate do so to their sorrow. The theme is summed up in the epigram: Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.

Sergeant-Major Morris, recently returned from India, visits the White family bearing the eponymous talisman, which he claims is cursed. It can grant three wishes, but greed clouds the holder’s head. Its previous owner used his third wish to ask for death. Mr. White rescues the mummified paw from the fire after Morris attempts to destroy it. The wish for £200 to clear their debts is satisfied when their son Herbert is mangled by a machine the next day. Their second wish is for Herbert to be alive again. Herbert returns that night and, although his appearance is not described, his mother’s actions in barricading the door against him indicate what a monster he must be. Mr. White’s third wish is for Herbert to be dead again.

Although “The Monkey’s Paw” is often cited as an example of great American literature, the author was born and lived in England all his life. The story is something of a departure for Jacobs, who wrote primarily humorous and satirical stories or seafaring tales. His early works were praised by the likes of Henry James, G. K. Chesterton, and Christopher Morley.

The story has had a pervasive influence on twentieth-century fiction and film, and it has been widely anthologized, including in literature textbooks widely used in American public schools. It was performed as a one-act play in 1907, has been filmed numerous times (as early as 1933), was adapted for an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965, and provided the inspiration for works as diverse as operas, rock music lyrics, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, and episodes of the TV programs The Monkees and The Simpsons.

Bev Vincent

See also: Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power.

Further Reading

Chesterton, G. K. 1953. “W. W. Jacobs.” In A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, edited by Dorothy Collins, 28–35. New York: Sheed and Ward.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1997. “An Overview of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’” In Short Stories for Students, vol. 2, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 146–159. Detroit, MI: Gale.

MONSTERS

Horror literature and film have a long and productive history of engaging with and using monsters. Much of the early horror narratives drew from mythologies, folklore, and theological tradition, though they were limited by the moral standards of the day, so explicit detail is often vague rather than concrete. Early examples include the appearance of Satan as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806). The monster narrative as it would be recognized today draws from these mythic, religious, and folkloric influences, and synthesizes these with more modern cultural concerns. Some of the most influential and notable texts in this tradition emerged from British romanticism and, particularly, the summer at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that served as the point of origin for two highly influential monster texts. One is John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” which was published in 1819 and became one of the founding texts of modern vampire fiction, presenting the central monster as a romantic and aristocratic figure. The more famous text from 1818, and perhaps the most influential “monster” text in horror, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Shelley mixes theological and mythic narratives around the creation of humanity with new technological advances in science to create an extremely compelling new monster text. Both of these texts became extremely successful upon publication, spawning a host of theatrical adaptations throughout the 1800s.

The figure of the vampire with its mix of aristocratic hauteur, violence, and simmering eroticism became exceptionally popular throughout the nineteenth century. Key texts include James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s 1847 serial Varney the Vampire as well as Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla of 1871–1872. These texts solidified the tropes and expectations of the vampire monster, which would reach its high point with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.

Things That Should Not Be

The word “monster” comes from the Latin word monstrum, meaning a divine omen, portent, or warning, by way of the French monstre, meaning a creature afflicted with a birth defect or biological abnormality. Etymologically, therefore, a monster is a creature that exhibits some abnormality or deformation that serves as a warning or portent of something morally and/or metaphysically amiss. An understanding of this embedded meaning helps to illuminate the monstrosity of zombies (abnormally animated corpses), werewolves (abnormal hybrids of human and beast), vampires (undead bloodsuckers), Frankenstein’s monster (a loathsome, animate mass of sewn-together corpse parts), serial killers (normal-looking people concealing murderously deranged psyches), the giant insects of atomic age horror movies (tiny natural creatures enlarged to abnormal proportions and thereby made lethal), and many other such things. In all of these cases, the monster is horrifying because it is, on some level, a “thing that should not be” (as Lovecraft might have put it), an entity that inspires fear and loathing not only, and not even primarily, because of what it does, but because of what it is.

Matt Cardin

As products of the cultural anxieties of their time, monsters have been subject to much critical attention as scholars trace their various contexts and analyze how this impacts the monsters of a particular era. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culturally shocked in the aftermath of Darwin’s research on human nature and experiencing cultural change and instability at home and abroad, show a deep preoccupation with degeneration and devolution. This finds expression in a wide range of texts, including Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). To become monstrous was to lose one’s humanity. In a world where Darwinian evolution had replaced the religious as the source of human subjectivity, a person could become animal or abhuman with terrifying ease. The cultural and social upheaval of the early twentieth century further exacerbated this tendency as exemplified through the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and his so-called Cthulhu Mythos, famously first presented in Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1928.

As the twentieth century developed, historical changes forced change upon the presentation of the monster. The Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s made pop-culture icons out of both Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula, with Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931) becoming wildly popular. The performances of both Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Dracula created an enduring image of what these monsters were supposed to be, a conception that endures to the present day. The decades that followed featured new monsters as horror responded to new cultural stimuli. The age of the atomic bomb gave rise to new expressions of fear in science fiction–influenced horrors such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Seigel, 1956; based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers), Gojira (dir. Ishirô Honda, 1954; known in the West as Godzilla), and The Blob (dir. Irvin Yeaworth, 1958).

As the Cold War ended and youth culture became increasingly important to cinema audiences, a new kind of monster was made: the slasher. Beginning with controversial films such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the new monsters were murderous figures that preyed upon the young and the reckless. Notable examples in this genre include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Last House on the Left (dir. Wes Craven, 1972), and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The slasher genre drew inspiration from director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, often identified as the first slasher film, which was adapted from Robert Bloch’s 1960 novel of the same title. Both the novel and the film are centered on the character of Norman Bates, whose twisted psyche makes him a true human monster. Meanwhile, even as this new trend developed, the more traditional monster narratives that drew on religious or spiritual themes became increasingly derivative after the successes of both Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973), the former based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and the latter adapted by William Peter Blatty from his best-selling 1971 novel.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the horror monster as killer was increasingly replaced with the horror of the zombie. Thanks to the success of films such as George A. Romero’s Living Dead series (1968–2009) and novels such as Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), the figure of the zombie has increasingly been seen as a metaphor for the state of subjectivity under late capitalism, articulating a range of fears around race, the spread of disease, and the rise of consumerism. Zombies have become part of modern pop-culture, with Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic books spawning a franchise that includes video games and a high-profile television show. Despite the notion that such monster texts may be considered “lowbrow,” the zombie has become ubiquitous, suggesting that now, more than ever, there is a desire to experience new monster narratives.

Jon Greenaway

See also: Bloch, Robert; Carmilla; Cthulhu Mythos; Dracula; The Exorcist; “The Great God Pan”; The Monk; Mummies; Psychological Horror; Rosemary’s Baby; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Vathek; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft; Zombies.

Further Reading

Asma, Stephen T. 2009. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hogle, Jerrold E. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skal, David J. 1994. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Penguin Books.

MOORE, ALAN (1953–)

While he has produced short stories, novels, poetry and other, more difficult to classify literary and performance pieces, English writer, occultist, and magician Alan Moore is best known for his work in comic books and graphic novels. Moore is among the most important comics writers of the last half-century, having exerted an incalculable influence not only over that medium, but also over Anglo-American popular culture broadly since the 1980s. Moore often works in, around, and through the horror genre, and his work was crucial to the turn toward darker themes and Gothic aesthetics that spread through the world of British and American comics in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of Moore’s fictions, both sequential art and literary, contain elements of supernatural horror.

Moore’s darkly toned work with British independent comics magazines Warrior and 2000 AD led to his assignment to work on DC’s then fairly formulaic monster-focused series, Saga of the Swamp Thing. Moore scripted it from 1983 to 1987 to tremendous acclaim, contributing to a renewed popular interest in horror comics that would lead DC to create their new mature-readers imprint, Vertigo, which would publish some of the most important horror and fantasy titles of the late 1980s and 1990s, including Swamp Thing spin-off Hellblazer and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Moore’s work on Swamp Thing drew on his interest in American Gothic literature and folklore, flirting with a “monster of the month” approach while creating more complex narrative arcs. It fused classical horror tropes and monsters including werewolves and vampires with psychedelic science fictional concepts reminiscent of some of Philip K. Dick’s darker moments and anticipatory of the approach taken by the 1990s TV series The X-Files. Moore would push his interest in complexly structured and maddeningly paranoid plots far further in the Victorian Gothic series From Hell (serialized 1989–1996, collected 1999), illustrated by Eddie Campbell. Combining horror and historical metafiction, this reimagining of the Jack the Ripper murders remains among the most ambitious graphic novels ever created, and was instrumental in the surge of popular interest in neo-Victorian Gothic fiction that continues to this day. It was adapted to film by the Hughes brothers in 2001.

Among Moore’s many influences, none has been more important to his horror-focused work than H. P. Lovecraft, and Moore has contributed much to the resurgence of interest that Lovecraft’s work experienced in the twenty-first century. Moore wrote many overtly Lovecraftian stories in the 1990s, some of which are now lost, but some of which are assembled in the collection Yuggoth Cultures (2003). He contributed a story titled “The Courtyard” to D. M. Mitchell’s collection The Starry Wisdom (1994), subsequently using it as the basis for his horror comic limited series Neonomicon (2010–2011, illustrated by Jacen Burrows). Most recently, Moore has continued to draw extensively on Lovecraft’s life and writings for the limited series Providence (2015–2016, also with Burrows).

Sean Moreland

See also: Dick, Philip K.; Gaiman, Neil; Lovecraft, H. P.

Further Reading

Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Green, Matthew J. A. 2013. Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Parkin, Lance. 2013. Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore. London: Arum Press.

MORRELL, DAVID (1943–)

David Morrell is an American novelist who is perhaps best known for creating the character of John Rambo in his 1972 novel First Blood. He has also made contributions to the horror genre. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, Morrell immigrated to the United States in 1966 to attend Penn State University. While there, he was mentored by the science fiction writer Philip Klass, a.k.a. William Tenn. Under Klass’s tutelage, Morrell followed the author’s advice to exploit his own fears. Inspired by what he labeled “a waking nightmare,” in which he was pursued through a forest by an unseen stalker, Morrell crafted his famous debut, First Blood, a seminal novel in the action/adventure/thriller genre.

Since 1972, Morrell has published numerous other novels and novelizations, among them Last Reveille (1977), Testament (1975), Blood Oath (1982), and the best-selling suspense novels The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), The Fraternity of the Stone (1985), The League of Night and Fog (1987), The Fifth Profession (1990), and The Covenant of the Flame (1991). Other works include the fantasy The Hundred Year Christmas (1983) and thrillers Assumed Identity (1993), Desperate Measures (1994), Extreme Denial (1996), Double Image (1998), Burnt Sienna (2000), The Protector (2003), Creepers (2005), Scavenger (2009), The Spy Who Came for Christmas (2008), The Shimmer (2009), The Naked Edge (2010), Murder as a Fine Art (2013), and Inspector of the Dead (2015). Fireflies, a touching fictional memoir of the death from cancer of his fifteen-year-old son Matthew, was published in 1988. Since 2007, Morrell has also scripted several stories for Marvel Comics, featuring such classic heroes as Captain America, Spider-Man, and Wolverine.

Although he often explores the horrific in his novels (set pieces and themes in many of his books, especially First Blood, Testament, and Creepers, provide telling examples), only The Totem (1979) and Long Lost (2002) can be counted as pure works of horror. Inspired by Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, The Totem had two incarnations, both effective explorations of the zombie/werewolf/vampire and small town horror themes. Published in 1979, the first, slighter version earned a glowing entry in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988); a “complete and unaltered” version was published by Donald M. Grant in 1994. Long Lost is a horror novel/ghost story that was never really recognized as such. Although Morrell leads with classic revenge and chase motifs, his narrative also includes metaphorical monsters, tombs, and even a haunted house.

Morrell has written some of the most effective short horror of the last several decades. His shorter work has appeared in many major horror anthologies, including the Whispers, Shadows, Night Visions, and Masters of Darkness series. A number of these shorter works are showcased in Black Evening (1994) and Nightscape (2004). Black Evening contains stories written from 1972 through 1992, featuring the Bram Stoker Award–winning novellas “The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves” and “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity.” Nightscape includes many of Morrell’s stories written since 1992. The major difference between the two collections is that the majority of the stories in Black Evening deal with the supernatural, whereas those appearing in Nightscape tend to be more realistic, treating themes of obsession, determination, and individual identity.

Hank Wagner

See also: King, Stephen; Vampires; Werewolves.

Further Reading

“David Morrell.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Holt, Erika. 2014. “Author Spotlight: David Morrell.” Nightmare 26 (November). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-david-morrell.

MORRISON, TONI (1931–)

Toni Morrison is one of the most recognized and influential American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in her work, her concern with presenting the African American experience coexists with elements of the supernatural. In interviews, she has emphasized the importance of the relationship between the language of haunting and her explorations of race, gender, memory, and the past.

She was born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, George and Ramah, were migrants from Southern states. She studied the classics and humanities at Howard University (BA) and Cornell (MA). Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She has since published ten additional novels. A shortened list of her numerous awards and accolades includes the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the 1993 Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), and the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Morrison has influenced numerous writers, students, and readers. While she was writing her first novel, she worked at Random House, where she edited manuscripts by African American writers such as Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, and Toni Cade Bambara. She taught at Howard University, Texas Southern, Yale, and is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.

Many critics note the influence of William Faulkner’s Southern Gothic on Morrison’s fiction and have suggested possible influences from magical realist writers. While Morrison has acknowledged these precursors, she emphasizes that her work is grounded in African American culture, history, and literary tradition. In her turn, she has influenced writers such as, to name a few, Gloria Naylor, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich to use fiction (often with a supernatural component) to bring attention to elided histories of women and ethnic groups.

She is best known for her masterwork, Beloved (1987), an unflinching gaze at the horrors of slavery through a ghost story. In her collection of lectures Playing in the Dark (1992), she describes the marginalized and ghostly position of African American characters in American literature by white writers. In her fiction, characters, and sometimes narrators, speak from beyond the grave; living characters who are oppressed and marginalized become liminal presences; and specters appear in the return of the repressed to haunt individuals who have forgotten or are avoiding a traumatic past. Several of Morrison’s novels include ghosts of the past, in particular Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), and Home (2012). Her play Desdemona (2011) gives Shakespeare’s character a voice from the space between life and death as she tries to understand the trajectory of her life and her relationships by engaging issues of race and gender not present in Othello.

Morrison remains active in the literary and academic communities. Her papers are archived at Princeton University Library.

Melanie R. Anderson

See also: Beloved; Faulkner, William.

Further Reading

Denard, Carolyn C., ed. 2008. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Taylor-Guthrie, Danille K., ed. 1994. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

MORROW, W. C. (1854–1932)

William Chambers Morrow was an American writer who wrote horror and science fiction that was popular in its day and has been compared at times to that of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and other classic American horror writers. In 2009 the Library of America chose to include Morrow’s 1889 story “His Unconquerable Enemy” in its two-volume retrospective anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, effectively canonizing it.

Born in 1854 (although his birthdate was variously given), and raised and educated in Alabama, Morrow moved to California in 1879 and began writing for the San Francisco Argonaut, attracting favorable attention from Ambrose Bierce, among others, before joining the staff of William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His reputation as a horror writer exists largely because of The Ape, the Idiot & Other People (1897), a collection of fourteen stories including “His Unconquerable Enemy.” Other notable stories include “The Monster Maker” (first published as “The Surgeon’s Experiment” in 1887), “Over an Absinthe Bottle” (first published as “The Pale Dice-Thrower” in 1893), and “An Original Revenge.” The first, a work of proto–science fiction, describes a young man, determined to conclude his life, who pays a surgeon $5,000 to kill him; the surgeon has other plans, and these culminate in the discovery of a brainless apelike monster: money can make monsters out of men. The latter two are fantastic: the first is heavily ironic, involving the chance meeting of a starving man and a bank robber, and a game of dice that seems to go well for the former but has a conclusion that owes much to Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” while the latter involves a haunting carried out as revenge.

“His Unconquerable Enemy”: Revenge Horrific

“His Unconquerable Enemy” was first published in The Argonaut in 1889 as “The Rajah’s Nemesis” and has been anthologized many times since, making it Morrow’s best-known tale. The story is set in India and describes events in the earlier life of the narrator, an unnamed American doctor serving in the court of a local rajah. One of the rajah’s servants is Neranya, whose temper leads him to stab a dwarf and who is sentenced to have his arm amputated. The narrator must clean up the messy amputation, but the insanely angry Neranya attempts vengeance on his master and thus has his other arm amputated. When the rajah’s only son is found dead, Neranya is implicated and sentenced to be tortured, then killed, but after the doctor pleads for Neranya to have a quick death, the rajah changes his mind and has the doctor amputate Neranya’s legs. Thereafter, the rajah keeps the limbless man in an aerial cage in his palace, in a room in which he often sleeps. One night the doctor watches Neranya wriggle his way out of the cage, whose rails are a foot taller than he, land on the sleeping rajah, and, as his dying act, bite the man to death.

Though contemporary readers encountering “His Unconquerable Enemy” for the first time are likely to be annoyed at its cultural clichés—the rajah, for example, possesses a “sense of cruelty purely Oriental” (Morrow 2015, 95)—as well as bothered by the extremely unethical behavior of its narrator, the situations described by Morrow remain vital and increasingly horrific. Furthermore and very ironically, while the rajah’s progressive maimings of Neranya are horrible, they are also his undoing: had the rajah not been merciful but followed through with his original plan, his lineage would remain intact, as would his life.

Richard Bleiler

Source: Morrow, W. C. [1889] 2015. “His Unconquerable Enemy.” In In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe: Classic Tales of Terror 1816 to 1914, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 95–104. New York: Pegasus Books.

In his later books, Morrow largely abandoned overtly horrific narratives, but A Man: His Mark (1900), though ostensibly a romance, contains scenes of accident and medical situations that will make a modern reader cringe and shudder. Morrow was a clever writer, unafraid to experiment and explore the ideas inherent in certain situations, and it is to be regretted that he ultimately found the writing of romances to be more lucrative than the writing of horrors.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Mad Scientist; Monsters.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2004. “W. C. Morrow: Horror in San Francisco.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 13–17. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Joshi, S. T. 2005. “Morrow, W[illiam] C[hambers].” In Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Morrow, W. C. 2000. The Monster Maker and Other Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz. Seattle, WA: Midnight House.

Moskowitz, Sam. 1992. “W. C. Morrow: Forgotten Master of Horror—First Phase.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 127–173. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

“MR. ARCULARIS”

“Mr. Arcularis” is a short story by the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, novelist, and short story writer Conrad Aiken. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1931 and later collected in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken in 1960. It was also chosen by the Library of America to appear in its two-volume retrospective anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny (2009), a semi-official mark of canonization that recognizes the story as a significant work of American literature in the vein of the fantastic.

Mr. Arcularis—his last name references an arc, and his first name is never given—is sent on a voyage to England following a serious operation, the ship leaving from Boston. It is June, but the weather is unseasonably cold, and he simply cannot get warm. One of his regular dinner companions is Miss Clarice Dean, a lovely young woman with whom he begins a gentle flirtation. He is disturbed to learn that the ship is also transporting a coffin containing a corpse, for such is a bad omen for a voyage, but more disturbing is his recently developed habit of sleepwalking. He shares this news with Miss Dean, along with the disturbing dream that accompanied it, and after another episode sees the ship’s doctor for a bromide. The sleepwalking episodes begin to culminate with him awakening near the coffin with his memories slipping, and though he becomes more intimate with Miss Dean, he is perpetually cold. The operation has failed, and Mr. Arcularis has died on the operating table.

In his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, Mark Schorer states that Aiken “moves from the mundane into the mysterious, into hysteria, horror, hallucination, phobia, compulsion, dream, death, and, more often than not, back again into the mundane” (Aiken 1960, viii). Such is a reasonable assessment of the moods of “Mr. Arcularis,” for the story is an unsettling combination of explicit detail and dreamlike development. At the same time, despite Aiken’s literary skills, “Mr. Arcularis” cannot escape being pigeonholed: it is one of the works akin to Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a dying mind attempts to create a narrative that provides an explanation for its passing. Once the conclusion is reached and the surprise revealed, everything falls into place. Its elements become clearer, but it does not transcend its literary inspiration.

Aiken later adapted “Mr. Arcularis” as a play that was first produced in 1949. It was published in 1957 by Harvard University Press as Mr. Arcularis: A Play. The play proved popular as material for mid-twentieth-century television: it was produced as an episode of the CBS television drama anthology series Studio One in Hollywood in 1956. Other American television productions followed in 1959 (for ITV Play of the Week) and 1961 (for Great Ghost Tales). A made-for-television movie adaptation of the story aired in West Germany in 1967.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Dreams and Nightmares; “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.”

Further Reading

Aiken, Conrad. 1960. The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing.

Pope, John A. 1957. “Conrad Aiken Revivifies ‘Mr. Arcularis.” Harvard Crimson. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1957/3/1/conrad-aiken-revivifies-mr-arcularis-pin. Originally published in The Harvard Crimson, March 1, 1957.

Spivey, Ted R. 1997. “Fictional Descent into Hell.” In Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey, 91–105. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Tabachnick, Stephen E. 1974. “The Great Circle Voyage of Conrad Aiken’s Mr. Arcularis.” American Literature (January): 590–607.

MUMMIES

A mummy is a corpse of an animal or human preserved either intentionally or unintentionally by exposure to chemicals or extreme temperature and/or humidity. In its role as a character in horror literature, the mummy, like the vampire or zombie, is a revenant, a human being who returns from the dead. All revenants inspire fear as they represent a rupture of the natural and supernatural orders. Like the vampire and the zombie, the mummy also represents an assault on the normal rational world by an unexplained force that must be believed in, studied, and then destroyed before it destroys the modern rational world, usually represented by archaeologists, handsome young men, and beautiful women. The mummy is both ancient and foreign, and its appearance raises concerns about the power of the past, the power of the other, and the fear of incursion of the other.

Although mummification has occurred in China, Europe, and Central and South America, mummies in both fact and fiction are most often associated with Egypt, where mummification was practiced as early as 3400 BCE. Contrary to popular belief, mummification was not a process for royalty only; rather, it was used by most classes of society. Animals, especially pets, were also mummified in ancient Egypt.

Interest in mummies can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. In Europe during the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500 CE), popular belief held that mummified bodies had healing properties, and a brisk trade in medicinal mummified ashes developed. Modern interest in mummies followed Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. He included a large number of scientists and scholars with his forces, and they in turn studied and made popular throughout Europe ancient Egyptian art and artifacts. The result has been termed “Egyptomania,” an enthusiasm for all things Egyptian that swept Europe and the United States throughout the nineteenth century.

Some Notable Mummy Fictions

Literary:

1890

“The Ring of Thoth” by Arthur Conan Doyle

1894

“Lot No. 249” by Arthur Conan Doyle

1903

The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

1918

Brood of the Witch Queen by Sax Rohmer

1938

“Beetles” by Robert Bloch

1947

“The Next in Line” by Ray Bradbury

1989

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned by Anne Rice

1998

The Sleeper in the Sands by Tom Holland

Cinematic:

1932

The Mummy (the original mummy movies, from Universal Studios, launching a series)

1940

The Mummy’s Hand

1942

The Mummy’s Tomb

1944

The Mummy’s Ghost

1959

The Mummy (first in Hammer Horror series)

1964

The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb

1966

The Mummy’s Shroud

1971

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb

1999

The Mummy (Universal Studios reboot of classic series)

Matt Cardin

Two aspects of Egyptomania are important to the development of the mummy as a figure of horror. The first was the craze for mummy unwrapping, which led to the second, the development of mummy fiction. In Europe and the United States, a popular upper-class diversion was an “unwrapping party,” in which a host who had purchased a mummy would invite friends for the “unwrapping.” Writers soon turned this pastime into fiction.

One of the earliest mummy stories is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), in which an unwrapped mummy is brought back to life through galvanism (electricity). Although Poe’s story is comic, horror would follow. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote two mummy short stories, “The Ring of Thoth” (1890) and “Lot No. 249” (1894). In the former Conan Doyle introduces a magician/priest character into the narrative, thus establishing a figure that would become standard in later mummy horror stories. In the latter he creates the first monstrous mummy. Conan Doyle’s friend Bram Stoker, best known as the creator of Dracula, published an influential mummy novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), in which Margaret, who is both the daughter of an Egyptologist and a reincarnated Egyptian princess, must reattach her lost mummified hand to the mummy of her former self in order to ensure immortality. In the original novel she fails, but in the 1912 edition she succeeds and marries the narrator, after which the mummy disappears.

Fact merged with fiction in 1922 when archaeologist John Carter opened the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, popularly known as King Tut. The publicity surrounding this event, along with a now discredited story of a mummy’s curse, reignited worldwide Egyptomania. Hollywood did not wait long before cashing in on the excitement. Universal Studios released The Mummy in 1932, and the success of that film established the mummy as one of horror’s essential characters.

Universal Pictures producer Carl Laemmle, who also produced Universal’s Dracula, commissioned screenwriter John Balderston, who in a former career as a journalist had reported on the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, to create a screenplay for the film. The resulting narrative combines elements of “The Ring of Thoth,” The Jewel of Seven Stars, and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It proved both a financial and critical success, and it also established the conventions adopted by most mummy films and novels that followed its release: the discovery of a mummy’s tomb, the use of ancient scrolls to bring it to life, a curse on the tomb’s discoverers, the mummy’s revenge, the mummy’s discovery of a lost reincarnated love, the invocation of ancient wisdom to combat the mummy, and the eventual destruction of the mummy and the reimposition of Western rationality and order.

Mummy movies rapidly became a thriving subgenre in the burgeoning world of horror and monster cinema. Between 1940 and 1955 Universal released a slew of additional mummy movies: The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). In England, Hammer Films, which, like Universal, focused on the creation of horror films, released The Mummy (1959), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966), and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971). In 1999, after a hiatus of nearly half a century, Universal retuned to making mummy movies with The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, which adapted the basic elements of the 1932 film for a modern audience, and which was followed by the sequels The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), as well as the spin-off The Scorpion King (2008), which is not a horror film but rather an adventure comedy employing the conventions of the earlier films.

The mummy has also reappeared in contemporary fiction, most notably in Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989). Rice employed many of the conventions established by the mummy film tradition, but she also made major changes. Her protagonist is not the priest Imhotep, but rather the pharaoh Ramses II, who discovered the secret elixir of eternal life from a Hittite priest and passed that secret on to Cleopatra, who chose death after the suicide of Mark Antony. Ramses falls in love with an Egyptologist’s daughter, but when he discovers the mummy of Cleopatra, he attempts to bring her back to life. He succeeds, but Cleopatra is missing parts of her hands and face. The novel ends with her swearing eternal revenge on Ramses. In many ways the character of Ramses is closer to Rice’s vampire Lestat from The Vampire Chronicles (1976–) than he is to earlier fictive or film vampires, as both creatures are larger than life and caught in immortality.

Jim Holte

See also: Ancestral Curse; The Jewel of Seven Stars; Lansdale, Joe R.; “Lot No. 249”; Monsters; Quinn, Seabury; Rice, Anne; Rohmer, Sax; She; Vampires; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Curl, James Stevens. 1994. Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press.

Freeman, Richard. 2009. “The Mummy in Context.” European Journal of American Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring). https://ejas.revues.org/7566.

Frost, Brian J. 2008. The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN”

In his letters, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) wrote that of all his tales, his two favorites remained “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Music of Erich Zann.” Written in late 1921 and first published in National Amateur in March 1922, “The Music of Erich Zann” was an early favorite for others as well. It quickly became one of Lovecraft’s most popular works, republished twice in Weird Tales (May 1925; November 1934), anthologized in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931), and becoming the first Lovecraft tale printed in a literature textbook for use in schools: The Short Story (1956). More significant than its popularity is that “Zann” represents the seeds of Lovecraft’s most enduring themes. It introduces the dream narrative, the forbidden knowledge narrative, and the narrative of cosmic horror—all major themes that would establish Lovecraft’s unique contribution to horror literature in later works.

“Zann’s” narrator, a once “impoverished student of metaphysics,” provides a frame for the story by describing an experience that happened in his past, in an apartment and on a street that he can no longer find: the “Rue d’Auseil” (the name is a poor French construction loosely translatable as “street at the threshold”). The narrator emphasizes that, after an extensive search, he “cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality” (Lovecraft 2005, 15). Dislodging the setting from any verifiable external reality prefigures several of Lovecraft’s dream narratives, including the early “Celephaïs” (1922), “The Silver Key” (1926), and “The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath” (1926), in which settings become removed from physical reality and are difficult to reach or regain.

Elusive, forbidden knowledge plays an equally important role in the narrative. Curious about the “haunting” music of Erich Zann—an elderly viol player living in another apartment at the boardinghouse—the narrator slowly befriends Zann, finally convincing him to explain his unique music and his fear of allowing others to hear it. Unwilling to speak of it, Zann frantically scribbles his story in his native German, but as he is committing it to paper, the source of his horror returns. The narrator reports, “suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard,” and moments later, “A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window” (Lovecraft 2005, 20). The papers are swallowed up by the horror outside the window, all explanation (and proof) lost forever. This theme of lost documents and forbidden and obscure knowledge would become a major theme of Lovecraft’s work, most notably in the many stories referencing the dreaded Necronomicon.

The most powerful theme concerns the source of the horror itself, glimpsed by the narrator as he looks out the open window in Zann’s apartment. He relates: “I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth” (Lovecraft 2005, 22). Confronting this dark and alien infinite, the narrator bolts from the apartment. While no physical embodiment of an alien other presents itself (as in later Lovecraft tales), the horror of the cosmic void—Lovecraft’s most profound contribution to the genre—is presented starkly and memorably here.

Mark Wegley

See also: “The Colour out of Space”; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Frame Story; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Airaksinen, Timo. 1999. “Fighting Nothingness: ‘The Music of Erich Zann.’” In The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror, 7–15. New York: Peter Lang.

Burleson, Donald R. 1983. “Early Years: Beginnings and Foreshadowings (1920–1923).” In H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study: 39–96. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Burleson, D. R. 1990. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Cannon, P. 1989. H. P. Lovecraft. Boston: Twayne.

Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2001. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Ligotti, Thomas. 2003. “The Dark Beauty of Unheard of Horrors.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 78–84. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. 2005. “The Music of Erich Zann.” In H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, 15–23. New York: Library of America.

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO

Published in 1794 by Ann Radcliffe in four volumes, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance is considered by many scholars to be the greatest Gothic novel of the eighteenth century. Already an established writer at the time of The Mysteries of Udolpho’s publication, Radcliffe was paid £500 to write The Mysteries of Udolpho, making her the most well-paid novelist at the time. The Mysteries of Udolpho proved an immediate success—it had a direct influence on the Gothic novels of the 1790s and subsequent decades, and is directly referenced in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. A lengthy text that is filled with intellectual themes and a melodramatic plot, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the progenitor of female Gothic fiction (sometimes called Radcliffean Gothic) and has been an influential text on horror writers for more than two hundred years.

Set in France, The Mysteries of Udolpho focuses on the long plight of Emily St. Aubert. Emily is an only child and resides with her parents at their country estate. While the family is trying to cope with difficult economic times, Emily’s mother suddenly passes away. This event results in father and daughter deciding to travel the countryside to reflect on the natural beauty of Europe, studying the sublime landscape of the mountains and forests in order to expand their appreciation of the natural world. The two meet a young man named Valancourt, who falls in love with Emily, before returning to their estate in France. Emily’s father becomes sick and eventually dies. His sister, the superficial Madame Cheron, takes control of his estates and Emily, forcing the young girl to relocate to Italy, where Cheron marries a sinister Italian named Montoni. An authoritarian tyrant who only weds Cheron because he desires to take control of her estates, Montoni moves himself, his wife, and Emily to the castle Udolpho. There he abuses and threatens his wife and Emily until he gets what he wants: Cheron eventually passes away, yet Emily is subjected to various horrors at Udolpho until she eventually escapes Montoni with the help of friends. Emily later finds herself in the company of a French count and his family. She and her friends have an adventure at a nearby chateau that is believed to be haunted. She is soon after reunited with Valancourt, who had fallen on hard times, but marries Emily at the conclusion of the narrative.

In describing Emily’s first sight of Castle Udolpho, Radcliffe wrings every last bit of the sublime from the scene, in a descriptive passage that is arguably the most famous paragraph in the whole novel:

“There,” said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, “is Udolpho.”

Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. (Radcliffe 1794, 438)

Matt Cardin

Source: Radcliffe, Ann. June 1794. “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” The London Review. London: J. Sewell.

At the center of Radcliffe’s text is a conservative concern of balance between human emotions and eighteenth-century rational thought. Very much a young woman who has been taught to engage and explore her emotions, Emily is nonetheless prone to too much sentimentality, something her father openly discusses with his daughter on his deathbed. Emily’s singular flaw, which is persistent throughout the majority of the text, is that she never develops the rational self-control embodied by her father. She thus lacks a balance between her emotional side and her rational mind, which manifests in an unrestrained imagination that terrifies her more than it should. To be certain, Emily’s experiences throughout the text are terrifying, but her unrestrained imagination exacerbates it all, making her prone to superstitious sightings of ghosts that are not there and believing the worst even when the situation might not be as grave as she perceives. It is not until the text nears its conclusion, in the last hundred or so pages, that Emily finally develops controllable rationality when she subdues the powerful feelings that she has for Valancourt, whom she has come to believe has engaged in questionable moral behavior. By the text’s conclusion, Emily is a woman mentally balanced by the emotional aspects of sentimentality and eighteenth-century rational thought.

One unintended consequence of The Mysteries of Udolpho was the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in 1796. Although the only novel ever published by Lewis, The Monk was a direct challenge to the form of Gothic fiction envisioned by Radcliffe. Where Radcliffe made constant use of the explained supernatural throughout her novel, in accordance with her eighteenth-century beliefs against superstition, Lewis made his supernatural occurrences unquestionably real, with the use of sorcery, ghosts, and demons all present throughout. He likewise put more emphasis on his Gothic villain, the monk Ambrosio, over his pursued protagonist, a reversal of Radcliffe’s focus on Emily over Montoni. More horrifying than terrifying, The Monk likewise utilizes different effects than The Mysteries of Udolpho in order to produce fear in its reader. Within two years of the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Gothic fiction was divided into two subtypes, one represented by Radcliffe, the other by Lewis, showing the genre was open to experimentation and innovation that previously had not really been present.

The Mysteries of Udolpho stands as one of the greatest Gothic novels ever written. While it is not free from flaws within its narrative (many find the explained supernatural incredibly forced, and others have noted problems with the fourth volume involving the haunted chateau), Radcliffe’s novel has nonetheless had a lasting impact upon the horror genre. Its publication marks a high point in the history of Gothic fiction, and it continues to hold strong cultural relevancy as evident in the many works that have come to reference it in some way. While the explained supernatural has not exactly fared well in the horror genre, Radcliffe’s ability to create atmosphere, suspense, and terror set a standard that very few have been able to surpass.

Joel T. Terranova

See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; Radcliffe, Ann; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Albright, Richard S. 2005. “No Time Like the Present: The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5, no. 1: 49–75.

Russett, Margaret. 1998. “Narrative Enchantment in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” ELH 65, no. 1: 159–186.

Schillace, Brandy Lain. “‘Temporary Failure of Mind’: Déjà vu and Epilepsy in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 2: 273–287.

Whiting, Patrica. 1996. “Literal and Literary Representations of the Family in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 4: 485–501.

N

NEW WEIRD

In 2003, speculative-fiction author M. John Harrison posted a question on his “Third Alternative” message board: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything? Is it even New?” (quoted in VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2008, 317). This prompted a formative discussion about the genre that some have come to refer to as the “New Weird.” Editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The New Weird (2008) provides the best entry point into this contested field, and includes such stories as K. J. Bishop’s “The Art of Dying” (1997), Brian Evenson’s “Watson’s Boy” (2000), China Miéville’s “Jack” (2005), Steph Swainston’s “The Ride of the Gabbleratchet” (2007), and Alistair Rennie’s “The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines” (2008).

In the introduction to The New Weird, Jeff VanderMeer points to the mainstream success of Miéville’s genre-bending masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000) as the event that most clearly defined the emergence of the movement. Using the novel as a springboard, VanderMeer offers one definition of the New Weird, emphasizing gritty urban settings that distort genre conventions, an intellectual sensibility influenced by New Wave science fiction writers such as J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, a visceral corporeality (a focus on bodily reality) stemming from Clive Barker’s horror fiction from the 1980s, and an embrace of the weird that often refers to the existential politics of modern life in a subversive or transgressive mode.

The New Weird, then, may be positioned in a genealogy of weird fiction that reaches back to Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic horror, the French Surrealists’ attacks on consensus reality, the cosmic dread of the Lovecraft school, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast saga (1946–1959), and then moves through Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series (1950–1984), Harrison’s Viriconium books (1971–1985), the splatterpunk of Barker and Poppy Z. Brite, and the metaphysical horror of Thomas Ligotti and Kathe Koja. In the 1990s, magazines such as Andy Cox’s The Third Alternative and Ann VanderMeer’s The Silver Web played a significant role in publishing New Weird fiction. Other examples of the New Weird include Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (1995), Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001), Bishop’s The Etched City (2003), and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008). More recently and in the context of visual media, the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective (2014) television series, David Robert Mitchell’s pastiche film It Follows (2014), and Robert Eggers’s supernatural film The Witch (2015) have brought New Weird sensibilities into the cultural mainstream.

However, like slipstream fiction and interstitial writing (writing that falls on or between the boundaries of genres and forms), works associated with the New Weird embrace multiplicity in both form and content, and therefore challenge taxonomic categorization, leading many authors and critics, aware of the pressures of marketability, to question the validity of the term. Art-horror writer Laird Barron, for instance, instead affirms the persistence of the weird itself as a speculative mode that cuts across genres by disrupting natural laws, thereby giving rise to an atmospherics of unease.

Sean Matharoo

See also: Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Brite, Poppy Z.; Kafka, Franz; Koja, Kathe; Ligotti, Thomas; Link, Kelly; Lovecraftian Horror; Miéville, China; Surrealism; VanderMeer, Jeff.

Further Reading

Miéville, China. 2003. “Long Live the New Weird.” The Third Alternative 35: 3.

Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. 2016. The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2008. The New Weird. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications.

Walter, Damien G. 2008. “The New World of New Weird.” The Guardian, January 22. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jan/22/thenewworldofnewweird.

NEWMAN, KIM (1959–)

Kim James Newman is one of the most ingenious and media-literate authors of horror fiction to emerge during the 1980s. His earliest works were film novelizations and “sharecropper” novels set in the secondary worlds of gaming franchises, published under the pseudonym “Jack Yeovil,” along with critical studies such as the excellent survey of horror cinema, Nightmare Movies (1988; rev. ed. 2011). Newman’s knowledge of genre film, both classic and obscure, is nothing short of magisterial, and he continues to review movies for numerous venues, such as Video Watchdog.

Newman’s wide-ranging erudition in twentieth-century popular culture deeply informed his first serious works of fiction. His debut novel under his own name, The Night Mayor (1989), is a potent fusion of noir, science fiction, and horror, in which characters are trapped in virtual-reality scenarios borrowed from Hollywood movies. Newman’s second novel, Bad Dreams (1990), is a delirious dark fantasy in which a demonic vampire attempts to ensnare a young woman in his self-made dreamscape, only to be foiled by her willful, ingenious resistance. Anno Dracula (1992), Newman’s first real breakthrough, is an alternate history in which the attempted undead invasion of England chronicled in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was actually a success, with the count marrying Queen Victoria and their vampiric progeny coming to dominate the twentieth century. The novel spawned a number of sequels, all prolific with allusions to vampire literature and film: The Bloody Red Baron (1995), Dracula Cha Cha Cha (1998), and Johnny Alucard (2013). Newman’s short fiction—gathered in such collections as The Original Dr. Shade, and Other Stories (1994) and Famous Monsters (1995)—has also engaged cleverly with the literary and cinematic history of horror.

Newman’s favored form is the pastiche, involving the ironic recycling of familiar motifs and materials: his tales offer both the pleasure of recognition, as the densely textured layers of allusion register on the reader, and a sense of estrangement from the familiar genre patterns these allusions summon up. Newman’s basic impulse is not merely to borrow but to subvert: his allusions always bear a critical edge. Yet at the same time, they suggest a bond of complicity linking author and reader in an ironic nostalgia for the icons and plot structures he has so ruthlessly plundered and satirically redeployed. The joy of reading Anno Dracula, for example, lies not only in its shrewd exposure of the patriarchal and imperialist power dynamics of classic nineteenth-century vampire stories, but also in the sheer profusion of loving detail with which Newman evokes them, the sense he conveys that this popular material, while ideologically suspect, is irrepressibly imprinted on our memories and appetites. Perhaps due to his restless genre-switching and his uncanny talent for mimicry, Newman’s remarkable originality as an author has not been as widely recognized as it should be.

Rob Latham

See also: Dark Fantasy; New Weird; Vampires.

Further Reading

Hills, Matt. 2003. “Counterfictions in the Work of Kim Newman: Rewriting Gothic SF as ‘Alternate-Story Stories.’” Science Fiction Studies 30 (30): 436–455.

Latham, Rob. 2001. “VR Noir: Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 16: 95–122.

Wilkinson, Gary. 2000. “Stepping through the Silver Screen: The Fiction of Kim Newman.” Vector 210 (March/April): 15–18.

THE NIGHT LAND

The Night Land is a visionary fantasy by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. It constitutes a kind of allegorical summation of Hodgson’s metaphysical and moral ideas. Critical opinion of the work has always been sharply divided; its admirers regard it as an unparalleled masterpiece by virtue of its imaginative reach and the phantasmagorical elaboration of its imagery, while its detractors consider it to be almost unreadable because of its mock-archaic style.

In the novel’s frame narrative—set in a past sufficiently remote to justify the use of an ornate narrative style—the death of the narrator’s beloved Mirdath stimulates visions of the remote future in his grief-stricken mind. In the world of those visions, the sun’s radiation is fading away, leaving the Earth unfit for human habitation. The people who believe themselves to be the last representatives of humankind live in a huge metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt, which is supplied with power by an Electric Circle that draws energy from the dwindling Earth-Current. As well as life support, the power in question supplies the necessary defense against various monsters and enigmatic observers, seemingly waiting to inherit the Earth.

When a message is unexpectedly received from another precarious abode, whose sole surviving inhabitant, Naani, is a reincarnation of Mirdath, the narrator’s dream-self embarks upon an arduous odyssey across the phantasmagorical landscape of the dying Earth, hoping to rescue her. He reaches her, but their return journey is even more dangerous. Eventually, Naani is killed by emanations from the mysterious House of Silence, the dwelling of the giant Silent Ones, but she is miraculously resurrected by the Earth-Current in order to secure the narrator a more fortunate end in his dream than he can possibly attain in life.

Hodgson’s vision of the world’s end is derived from Lord William Thomson Kelvin’s theory that the sun’s radiation was produced by gravitational collapse and could not last for more than a few million years. Other fictional extrapolations of the theory had been produced, most notably H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but none had complicated the tragedy of the Earth’s demise with such a dramatic metamorphosis of life on its surface, explained in terms of the breakdown of dimensional barriers. No previous work had contrived to communicate such an acute sense of the utter insignificance of one species inhabiting one world in a vast, bleak, intrinsically malign and essentially incomprehensible cosmos—the sensibility that H. P. Lovecraft called “cosmic horror.” The artificiality of the novel’s prose attempts to support the cultivation of that aesthetic reaction by provoking a sense of alienation in the reader; the many descriptive terms rendered with an initial capital letter do not refer in a simple sense to aspects of the imaginary landscape, but emphasize its status as a metaphorical model of the human mind under the stress of grief and angst. The allegory is only partly decipherable, by necessity, deliberately leaving a dark margin of mystery.

Brian Stableford

See also: Frame Story; Hodgson, William Hope; The House on the Borderland.

Further Reading

Bell, Ian. 1986. “A Dream of Darkness: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land.” Studies in Weird Fiction 1 (Summer): 13–17.

Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.

Bruce, Samuel W. 1997. “William Hope Hodgson.” In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 121–131. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 178. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.

Hodgens, Richard. 1981. “The Deep World of Hodgson’s Nightland.” Trumpet 12 (Summer): 14–18, 44.

The Night Land: The Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://nightland.website.

Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

NIGHT SHIFT

Night Shift is a collection of twenty stories by Stephen King, with an introduction by John D. Macdonald (who was one of King’s writer idols) published in 1978. It was King’s first short-fiction collection, and most of its contents had first been published in Cavalier and other men’s magazines. The book showcases the many different types of fiction King attempted up to that point: Lovecraftian horror in “Jerusalem’s Lot,” an epistolary narrative about an ancient evil that overruns a small Maine town in the nineteenth century; science fiction in “I Am the Doorway,” in which an astronaut returned from space discovers that his body is turning into a conduit to an alien dimension; suspense in “The Ledge,” about a man blackmailed into undertaking a death-defying act by the husband whose wife is the man’s lover; and even mainstream fiction in “The Woman in the Room,” in which a man secretly facilitates the death of his mother, a cancer victim.

The majority of the book’s stories are examples of King’s trademark approach to horror, turning the ordinary and commonplace into objects of menace: laundry machinery is endowed with malevolent life in “The Mangler”; toy soldiers are magically animated as aggressive combatants in “Battleground”; rats infesting a decrepit mill grow to monstrous size in “Graveyard Shift”; a can of spoiled beer causes a grotesque transformation in the man who drinks it in “Gray Matter”; and childish fear of the boogeyman proves to be horrifyingly warranted in “The Boogeyman.” The stories are set for the most part in recognizable American towns, cast with everyday people who are products of their environments and peppered with recognizable references to contemporary popular culture and consumer culture that help to situate their horrors in the familiar. The vampire story “One for the Road” is a sidebar to King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Most of the book’s stories were later adapted as movies, notably “Trucks” as Maximum Overdrive (1986), which King himself directed; “Graveyard Shift” (film version 1990), and “Children of the Corn” (1984), the latter concerned with a cult of children in rural Nebraska who waylay unsuspecting travelers to sacrifice them to a monstrous entity that lives in the cornfields. The film version of Children of the Corn spawned a horror franchise that continues to this day.

In his lengthy foreword to the book, King relates his “marketable obsession” (King 2011, xix) to write horror to the reader’s taste for horror fiction, noting that “great horror is almost always allegorical” in its depictions of death, and that “the horror tales live most naturally at that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious” (King 2011, xxxviii). In his opinion, the tale of horror fiction speaks to that commingling of interest and revulsion that compels us to contemplate what King refers to “the body under the sheet,” that is, the reality of death, especially one’s own. His observations anticipate those that would shape his book-length study of horror in popular culture, Danse Macabre (1981).

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: King, Stephen; Lovecraftian Horror; Vampires.

Further Reading

Collings, Michael, and David Engbretson. 1985. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

Herron, Don. 1982. “Horror Springs in the Fiction of Stephen King.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 57–82. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller.

King, Stephen. 2011. Night Shift. New York: Anchor Books.

Reino, Joseph. 1988. “Night Shift: Harbinger of Bad News.” In Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary, 100–116. Boston: Twayne.

NOLAN, WILLIAM F. (1928–)

William Francis Nolan is an American science fiction, horror, and fantasy author. He is the creator, by his own estimation, of more than 2,000 pieces of fiction and nonfiction, and he has edited or co-edited roughly 26 anthologies in his nearly 60-year career. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and originally worked as an artist for Hallmark Cards and in the comic book industry before becoming a writer. Though married since 1970, he has been estranged from his wife for more than ten years. He is continually working on new projects and is a frequent guest of honor at industry conventions and festivals, including the World Horror Convention, the World Fantasy Convention, and smaller regional events.

In the 1950s, Nolan was an integral part of the writing ensemble known as “The Group,” which included many well-known genre writers such as Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, John Tomerlin, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson (with whom he co-wrote Logan’s Run in 1967), and others. Tomerlin, Beaumont, and Nolan were also avid auto racing fans and participated in local races themselves throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Nolan is considered a leading expert on Dashiell Hammett and pulps such as Black Mask and Western Story, and he is the world authority on the works of prolific scribe Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. In addition to writing biographies of both men, he has also written books on director John Huston, actor Steve McQueen, and racing legend Barney Oldfield. Also adept at poetry and screenwriting—with more than twenty produced scripts to his credit—he was co-writer, with Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame), of the screenplay for the classic 1976 horror film Burnt Offerings (based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Robert Marasco), as well as co-writer, with his friend Richard Matheson, of the classic American television movie Trilogy of Terror (1975), directed by Curtis. Curtis and Nolan teamed up on several other productions as well, including The Kansas City Massacre (1975), Turn of the Screw (1974), and The Norliss Tapes (1973).

Though he has written in a variety of genres, Nolan’s main output is in horror and science fiction. His style has changed over the years, and what began as a tendency toward the lush flourishes of his mentor Ray Bradbury has evolved into a leaner approach more influenced by noir, hardboiled fiction, and Ernest Hemingway. Many of his works are populated by loners, or, conversely, young female (and even alien/nonhuman) protagonists and are frequently narrated in the first person. With respect to themes, Nolan often utilizes plot-driven narratives with sparse characterizations and descriptions; many of his works focus on the juxtaposition of the uncanny and the commonplace, life given to inanimate objects, or the violent reaction of everyday people to unexpected circumstances.

Jason V Brock

See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bradbury, Ray; Matheson, Richard.

Further Reading

Brock, Jason V. 2014. Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Morton, Lisa. 2015. “Interview: William F. Nolan.” Nightmare 32 (May). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-william-f-nolan.

Nolan, William F. 2013. Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Zicree, Marc Scott. 1992. The Twilight Zone Companion, 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press.

NORTHANGER ABBEY

Although it was the first of her novels completed for publication, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey was not published until 1818, a year after her death. Northanger Abbey is a parody of both a novel of manners and the Gothic novel, an eighteenth-century literary form made popular by such works as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). These and similar novels combined ruined medieval castles or abbeys as settings, supernatural or paranormal occurrences, dark and threatening men who were often aristocrats or religious figures, a threatened young woman, and overwrought emotions often accompanied by overwrought prose. Although formulaic, Gothic novels were wildly successful and established many of the conventions of later horror fiction and film.

In Northanger Abbey Austen employs the conventions of the Gothic novel to subvert the genre. It begins with young Catherine Morland, an English teenager who is inordinately fond of reading Gothic novels, traveling to the city of Bath for a season of balls, tea in the Pump Room, and meeting eligible young gentlemen. There she is befriended by Isabella Thorpe, who shares her enthusiasm for Gothic fiction; Isabella’s brother John; Henry Tilney, the son of a general; and his sister Eleanor. At Bath she is attracted to Henry Tilney but isolated by the Thorpes, who think she is wealthier than she is and who plan for her to marry John, for whom she has little affection. Invited by the Tilneys to visit their estate at Northanger Abbey, Catherine is delighted by the anticipation of staying at a Gothic abbey, where she imagines all kinds of excitingly dreadful experiences await her. While at the Abbey she imagines it to be haunted, believes it contains secret rooms with ominous histories, and convinces herself that the general has murdered his wife. Mysteriously, General Tilney cuts short her visit and orders her to leave. All turns out well, however. Catherine learns of the Thorpes’ intentions, Henry Tilney proposes to her, and the general eventually consents to the marriage. Catherine, now older and wiser at age eighteen, realizes that life is not like a work of Gothic fiction as she prepares for her upcoming marriage.

Northanger Abbey is both a parody of the Gothic novel and a commentary on its readers. Catherine Morland is naïve and gullible. She believes everyone she meets has her best interests at heart, and more significantly, because she has immersed herself in reading Gothic novels, she believes that real life is a delightfully dreadful adventure full of danger and the supernatural. She interprets every event at the Abbey in light of her reading, and of course she is always wrong. In Northanger Abbey Austen is also satirizing the novel of manners, a form focused on matters of social class and convention, for while Catherine is in Bath in the first half of the novel, she has no clue whatsoever what is going on around her and simply follows the advice of others. Successful marriage in Northanger Abbey is the consequence of pure chance.

The novel has been adapted for stage and screen multiple times, including for PBS, the BBC, and the A&E Network. In 2014 a new version of the novel, written by best-selling crime writer Val McDermid and transforming it into a modern-day teen thriller (with the protagonist now called Cat Morland), was published as part of HarperCollins’s Austen Project, in which popular and critically respected modern-day writers were hired to rework Jane Austen’s six complete novels for modern audiences.

Jim Holte

See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Radcliffe, Ann; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Ford, Susan Allen. 2012. “A Sweet Creature’s Horrid Novels: Gothic Reading in Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions: The Jane Austin Journal On-Line 3, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol33no1/ford.html.

Gill, Linda. 2013. “Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Pennsylvania Literary Journal 5, no. 3: 36–57.

Levine, George. 1975. “Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Abbey.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3: 335–350.

Skinner, Karalyn. 2013. “‘Horrid’ Gothicism: Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Explicator 71, no. 3: 229–232.

“THE NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL”

Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” was originally published as one of the constituent tales of The Three Impostors (1895), a portmanteau work (that is, a work composed of multiple parts) consisting of several short stories connected by a frame story. In its title Machen invokes the (even then) antiquated French meaning of “novel,” implying “novelty” rather than a book-length text.

The tale is presented as the alleged testimony of Miss Lally, an educated young woman fallen into poverty, who is rescued from starvation by employment as a governess to the children of Professor Gregg, an ethnologist. Relocating from London to Professor Gregg’s home on the edges of the remote Grey Hills in Wales, Lally is puzzled and terrified by a series of anomalous incidents. Discovering Gregg’s journal, she reads of his work investigating the “reality” behind Celtic fairy lore: the persistence of prehuman hominids lurking in the isolated countryside.

In “The Novel of the Black Seal,” Machen advanced an idea that would exert a significant influence on H. P. Lovecraft (and, largely through him, on many other writers of horror and dark fantasy). He lays out the heart of the idea in what he frames as a document left by a professor who has recently disappeared after a series of strange events:

I became convinced that much of the folk-lore of the world is but an exaggerated account of events that really happened, and I was especially drawn to consider the stories of the fairies, the good folk of the Celtic races. Here, I thought I could detect the fringe of embroidery and exaggeration, the fantastic guise, the little people dressed in green and gold sporting in the flowers, and I thought I saw a distinct analogy between the name given to this race (supposed to be imaginary) and the description of their appearance and manners. Just as our remote ancestors called the dreaded beings “fair” and “good” precisely because they dreaded them, so they had dressed them up in charming forms, knowing the truth to be the very reverse. Literature, too, had gone early to work, and had lent a powerful hand in the transformation, so that the playful elves of Shakespere are already far removed from the true original, and the real horror is disguised in a form of prankish mischief. But in the older tales, the stories that used to make men cross themselves as they sat around the burning logs, we tread a different stage. (Machen 1895, 105–106)

Matt Cardin

Source: Machen, Arthur. 1895. The Three Impostors. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The story is partly informed by the Euhemerist theories of David MacRitchie (1851–1925), who argued that, through analysis of folk traditions, one could gain information about premodern peoples, including (he speculated) a race of “Turanian” pygmies. Machen used this central idea in two other magazine stories also published in 1895, “The Shining Pyramid” and “The Red Hand.” It was a theme he would return to repeatedly throughout his ensuing career, albeit in increasingly oblique ways, for example “Out of the Earth” (1915) and The Green Round (1933).

“The Novel of the Black Seal” should also be seen in the wider context of the late-Victorian preoccupation with biological and cultural atavism (a focus on the supposed barbarity and awfulness of earlier and “lower” stages of evolution), an anxiety in part precipitated by the wider acceptance of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and concerns about biological and cultural degeneration. Comparable stories from the era include Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” (1892) and John Buchan’s “No-Man’s Land” (1899), in which Buchan resituates Machen’s malevolent little people within his native Scotland. However, the peculiar potency of Machen’s use of this theme lies in his decision to keep his malignant prehuman entities “off screen,” their ensuing ambiguity provoking in the reader a sense of queasy uncertainty and dread.

“The Novel of the Black Seal” is notable for the influence it had on Robert E. Howard and, particularly, H. P. Lovecraft. It is unlikely that many of Lovecraft’s most celebrated stories would exist in any recognizable form divested of the influence of “The Novel of the Black Seal,” specifically the notions of modern survival of ancient cults and prehuman intelligences, the dizzying contemplation of deep history, and the transient contingency of modernity (the idea that human civilization is not an inevitable or invulnerable phenomenon). Several stories by Howard, including “Worms of the Earth” and “The Little People,” are essentially reworkings of Machen’s central conceit, the latter story explicitly so.

James Machin

See also: “The Great God Pan”; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; “The White People.”

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Trotter, David. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Three Imposters, by Arthur Machen, xvii–xxxi. London: Everyman.

NOVELS VERSUS SHORT FICTION

Novels and short fiction are the two major literary forms in which Gothic literature and horror fiction can be found (although horror comics and Gothic and horror poetry form two important subgenres in their own right). Both allow fear, horror, and unease to be conveyed to the reader through the use of dramatic plot twists, supernatural elements, eerie landscapes, and uncanny atmospheres. The novel, in being a longer narrative form, makes for the development of complex narrative structures and in-depth explorations of psychological mechanisms, whereas the short story, in being a condensed form, plays on dramatic plot twists, drastic ellipsis, and elisions in order to shock or surprise the reader.

Gothic literature consists mainly of novels and short stories, even though some instances of Gothic theater and poetry can be found in the works of Lord Byron (Manfred, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) or the graveyard poets (“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Night-Piece on Death”). In spite of the Gothic movement being born from the poetic tradition of dark romanticism, narrative prose was what made the genre highly popular in the late eighteenth century, as it allowed reaching out to a broader, more mainstream, and mostly feminine audience. Hundreds of Gothic novels were published over the period 1764–1820, fashioning what was known at the time as the “great Gothic craze” (Hansen 2010, 238).

Early Gothic fictions were short novels or romances, a mass-market literary form that focuses on relationships and love interests. Authors such as Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew Lewis (The Monk, 1796) adopted this narrative format, as it was popular at the end of the eighteenth century. The publication of sentimental novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; or the New Héloïse (1761) had seen a rise in the popularity of romances and had given credibility to a literature that had otherwise been held in contempt.

Gothic novels combined elements of sentimental novels with that of medieval folklore and dark romanticism: a complex love intrigue, mysterious threatening events, dilapidated castles, dark forests, supernatural creatures, and so on. The length of the novel allowed for many plot twists, and also movements and travels within the narrative, thus heightening its tension. As the genre picked up, short romances became full-fledged novels that focused on the development of characters and psychological drama. Examples of lengthy Gothic novels include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, 1860–1861; Bleak House, 1852–1853) Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891; Jude the Obscure, 1894–1895) or George Eliot (Middlemarch (1871–1872) also incorporated Gothic elements in their novels in spite of their more naturalist style.

While Gothic novels thrived in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, the short form started gaining popularity, mostly in America, where the genre would see a revival in the mid-nineteenth century. Being strongly influenced by folklore and popular tales, Gothic fiction already had the quality of short fiction, and authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne would immediately exploit this feature of the genre. Influenced by German folk tales (such as those passed along by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm) as well as early American Gothic short novels (such as Wieland and Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown), both would bring the art of Gothic tales to its pinnacle with short stories such as Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832), and Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “Berenice” (1835). In the literary essay “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Poe praises the value of short fiction over lengthy writing, claiming that short fiction is better than novels in conveying shock, surprise, and fear to the reader since it can be enjoyed in “the limit of one single sitting” (Poe 2006, 525).

Short fiction would then become a widely popular form for Gothic and horror fiction in America, especially in the subgenre of Southern Gothic fiction. Major figures of Southern Gothic literature, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Joyce Carol Oates, not only wrote many short stories but also defended their literary choice in claiming, much like Poe, that the writing of short stories is highly demanding creative art, particularly effective in creating uncanny, eerie narratives. As of today, collections of horror stories are published regularly in America and still manage to find the broad audience they were designed for in the first place.

At the same time, horror fiction in novel-length form continues to be popular, with one of the legacies of the horror publishing “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s being the creation of a unique subtype of horror novel that, in the words of horror and science fiction anthologist David Hartwell, “constitutes an avant-garde and experimental literary form which attempts to translate the horrific effects previously thought to be the nearly exclusive domain of the short forms into newly conceived long forms that maintain the proper atmosphere and effects” (Hartwell 1987, 3). The interesting relationship and significant distinctions between short works and novel-length works of horror continue to play a significant role in the evolution of horror literature as a whole.

Elsa Charléty

See also: The Brontë Sisters; Faulkner, William; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hoffmann, E. T. A; Oates, Joyce Carol; O’Connor, Flannery; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary.

Further Reading

Hansen, Christopher, ed. 2010. Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

Hartwell, David. 1987. The Dark Descent. New York: Tor.

O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Robert Fitzgerald and Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Macmillan.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 2006. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin.

Potter, Franz. 2005. The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

THE NUMINOUS

The numinous is not a genre, but an aspect of some horror fiction. The term “numinous,” which was coined by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto, generally refers to the more spiritual or existential side of the supernatural encounter. While a supernatural entity may frighten a character by threatening him or her, the reason for this terror is clear. However, even when a supernatural entity is not threatening a character personally, the very existence of a supernatural being threatens a character’s idea of what reality is. This may be owing to an intolerantly rationalistic attitude, but, in horror fiction, the numinous does not depend exclusively on a clash with any materialistic prejudice to make itself felt. The numinous experience is disturbing simply because it shows the characters there is another form of existence, and that reality as it is commonly known is only a smaller part of a much larger, invisible whole.

The numinous can be mystical. Noteworthy examples of the mystical numinous can be found in the writings of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. The numinous can also be more in keeping with scientific speculation, as was more often the case in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories of “cosmic horror.” Where Machen and Blackwood give the reader the impression that ancient spiritual mysteries continue to manifest themselves in modern reality, Lovecraft draws more on the boundlessness of relativistic space and time and on the limitations of human knowledge to create his numinous effects.

In formulating the concept of the numinous, Otto was greatly influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in whose philosophy the linguistically distinct but thematically related idea of the noumenal plays an important role. Kant identified as noumenal those things that seem to lie just beyond the limits of possible human experience, things as they are “in themselves,” as distinct from human perception and knowledge of them. The noumenal, Kant argued, cannot be experienced, but it is possible to experience the limits of human experience. With this as a deep background to Otto’s concept, the numinous experience would then be the sense of almost experiencing what is just beyond the human, and so it is very close to the aesthetic idea of the sublime.

Horror fiction that dwells more on physical threats and direct emotional consequences would not be considered numinous. Numinous horror fiction may involve physical or direct threats and pay considerable attention to character, but in general the numinous horror tale is philosophical and will often downplay physical or personal aspects of a supernatural menace in order to emphasize the danger posed to an idea of the world itself. Such stories depend less on sympathy with characters in jeopardy and more on encouragement of the reader to question his or her reality. For this reason, a numinous story will often be unsensational, set in familiar places, and involve ordinary people; the supernatural intrusion will be subtle and uncertain, and the points of view of the various characters will become correspondingly more important. However, a story like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw would not likely be considered numinous, for the considerable doubt thrown on the sanity of the governess in that story undermines the supernatural reality of the ghosts in that tale.

One significant example of a numinous story is “Cecilia de Noel,” published by English writer Mary Elizabeth Hawker in 1891. This story is composed of a number of different narratives from different narrators, who all relate tales touching on a haunting. Numinous uncertainty, more than terror, is the overall effect of the story. Another, later example is the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “And When the Sky Was Opened,” in which the main characters, a group of test pilots who have by chance stumbled across some mysterious threshold during an experimental flight in a new kind of aircraft, are edited out of existence; apparently, the cosmos wishes to preserve its secrets. This episode was based on a 1953 short story by Richard Matheson titled “Disappearing Act.”

Michael Cisco

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; Samuels, Mark; The Sublime; “The Willows.”

Further Reading

Geary, Robert F. 1992. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edward Mellon Press.

Varnado, S. L. 1987. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

O

OATES, JOYCE CAROL (1938–)

The American author Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most celebrated mainstream writers to be associated with the field of horror literature. A significant portion of her vast literary output has been cast in the Gothic mold, has deployed themes of the grotesque and uncanny, or has been self-consciously modeled on previous work in the genre.

Oates has openly acknowledged her debts to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft; indeed, she has written movingly about how their fiction, with its focus on “the interior of the soul,” links personal fears and anxieties with nightmares of cosmic dread (Oates 1996). More broadly, Oates has articulated, in a 1998 essay on “The Aesthetics of Fear,” a vision of horror literature as a cathartic mode, which, by evoking “an artful simulation” of an emotion that is “crude, inchoate, nerve-driven and ungovernable,” prepares readers to confront real-world terrors when they arise (Oates 1998, 176). Oates sees the experience of terror as central to American literature in particular, as her superb anthology American Gothic Tales (1996), which traces a lineage from Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King and Thomas Ligotti, makes clear.

Oates’s engagement with horror was evidenced in her early collection Night-Side (1977), which gathers eighteen stories—including the title tale, an evocative exploration of occult research—that treat themes of haunting, dark obsession, and morbid diablerie (sorcery aided by the devil). Many subsequent story collections—such as Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011), and The Doll Master and Other Tales of Terror (2016)—have been organized around similar topics. A number of works explicitly harken back to classics in the field: “The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” (in Haunted), for example, is a retelling of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) from the perspective of the ghosts, while “Death-Cup” (in Corn Maiden) cleverly invokes Poe’s ambiguous doppelgänger story, “William Wilson” (1839). These allusions function not as mere pastiches but rather as energetic reimaginings, in which Oates unpacks the subtexts of the originals with subtlety and a shrewd eye for psychological nuance. Oates’s short fiction has been celebrated within the field: “Fossil-Figures,” a tale of macabre vengeance, won a World Fantasy Award in 2011, while the collection in which it appeared, Corn Maiden, won a Bram Stoker Award.

Oates’s novels have flirted with Gothic elements from the very start of her career. Perhaps her most abiding theme—of thwarted, enslaving, or embittered love—has always cast a Gothic shadow: novels such as With Shuddering Fall (1964), Wonderland (1971), and Do with Me What You Will (1973) feature characters driven literally mad with unrequited passion. Her 1996 short novel First Love: A Gothic Tale turns an unsparingly brutal story of sexual abuse into a rich meditation on themes of vampirism and demonic possession (these themes are metaphorical, not literal, however). Similarly, Beasts (2003) analyzes the masochistic impulse that drives obsessive love, twisting desire into grotesque fantasies of abasement and devourment. Oates’s fascination for tales of love gone wrong has led her to write several narratives of serial killers whose transgressive desires emerge out of sexual loneliness and a perverse yearning for human connection. For example, her Stoker Award–winning novel Zombie (1995), inspired by the grisly career of Jeffrey Dahmer, features a murderer who attempts to create a slavish companion whose love cannot be retracted or revoked. Oates first essayed this controversial topic in her widely anthologized 1966 story of sorcerous seduction, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Oates’s most overt engagements with the horror genre can be found in her so-called “Gothic Saga,” which includes Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), My Heart Laid Bare (1998), and The Accursed (2013). Historical tales that self-consciously echo past masters of the field, as well as evoking and updating archaic forms, such as the sensation novel (which flourished in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s), these are rich and deeply rewarding works that weave occult elements—hauntings, psychic powers, ancestral curses—into a densely observed fabric of everyday life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the earliest installments in the series, though coinciding with the boom in horror publishing during the 1980s, did not enjoy a wide crossover audience, the more recent books have been warmly embraced within the field, with Stephen King calling The Accursed “hypnotic” in a New York Times review (King 2013).

Since the 1990s, Oates herself has cultivated intimate connections with the horror genre and has endeavored to build bridges between it and the larger literary marketplace. Indeed, she is probably the most distinguished ambassador for horror in the hallowed halls of mainstream publishing, issuing polemical manifestos for the centrality of terror to the modern imagination, and defending Lovecraft against his detractors as an author with an authentically spiritual and tragic sensibility. Though now in her sixth decade of writing, Oates shows no signs of slowing down; if anything, her Gothic preoccupations continue to provide a vital compulsion to her work.

Rob Latham

See also: Ancestral Curse; Bram Stoker Award; Dreams and Nightmares; The Grotesque; The Haunted House or Castle; Psychological Horror; World Fantasy Award; Zombies.

Further Reading

Colognes-Brooks, Gavin. 2014. “The Strange Case of Joyce Carol Oates.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow, 303–314. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

Egan, James. 1990. “Romance of a Darksome Type: Versions of the Fantastic in the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates.” Studies in Weird Fiction 7 (Spring): 12–21.

King, Stephen. 2013. “Bride of Hades: ‘The Accursed’ by Joyce Carol Oates.” New York Times, March 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/the-accursed-by-joyce-carol-oates.html?_r=0.

Milazzo, Lee. 1989. Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Oates, Joyce Carol. 1996. “The King of Weird.” New York Review of Books, October 31. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/10/31/the-king-of-weird.

Oates, Joyce Carol. 1998. “The Aesthetics of Fear.” Salmagundi 120 (Fall): 176–185.

O’BRIEN, FITZ-JAMES (1828–1862)

Born Michael O’Brien in County Cork, Ireland, he changed his name to Fitz-James upon emigration from London to New York in 1852. In New York, as a regular contributor of fiction, poetry, and humor to U.S. periodicals, he helped form a literary circle at Pfaff’s beer cellar with fellow Edgar Allan Poe admirers like his probable lover T. B. Aldrich and Fitz Hugh “Hashish Eater” Ludlow. He provides an early landmark for Irish American, supernatural, queer, and science fictions. Literary critics often bemoan his untimely death as a Union officer in the U.S. Civil War and unrealized potential for more tales or longer Hawthorne-esque romances.

O’Brien’s first collection of poetry and tales, along with friends’ reminiscences, was published in 1881. Despite the New York literati’s fond post–Civil War recollections of O’Brien’s machismo, dandyism, extravagance, and geniality, a second volume never found a publisher. Editor and anthologist Jessica Salmonson suggests this was the result of homophobia and O’Brien’s probable bisexuality. Salmonson’s 1988 two-volume edition divides O’Brien’s supernatural tales between light fantasies and the macabre. The early 1850s fantasies were largely uncollected. Several have dream or Orientalist topics, such as O’Brien’s first published tale, “An Arabian Night-Mare” (1851), in the magazine of Charles Dickens, another O’Brien idol, and “The Dragon-Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu” (1856). O’Brien’s poetry and fantasies are forgotten. His macabre tales of the late 1850s like “The Golden Ingot” (1858), “What Was It?” (1859), and “The Wondersmith” (1859) endure. Weird Tales chose to reprint many of these in the 1920s and 1930s.

The frantic narrator of “The Diamond Lens” (1858) communes with the spirit of Anton von Leeuwenhoek on microscope construction, steals a rose-diamond for a lens from a caricatured French Jew (who stole it from an enslaved Brazilian), and obsesses over a woman his new microscope reveals in a water drop. The tale remained well regarded. Science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories reprinted it twice. Another disturbed narrator presents “The Lost Room” (1858). He reflects on mnemonic associations of his boardinghouse room’s treasured objects (remembering a piano performance evoking H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”). The narrator is dispossessed of his room by the house’s caricatured Congolese waiter and a ghoulish dinner party recalling Poe’s “King Pest” (1835). The grotesque racial caricatures accompanying the tales’ sense of the weird proves a barrier for contemporary interest.

“What Was It?”: An Invisible Assault

O’Brien wrote “What Was It? A Mystery” (1859) while homeless and living with his probable lover, writer T. B. Aldrich. It was initially published alongside a translation of Théophile Gautier.

In a New York boardinghouse, opium-tranced Dr. Hammond and Harry Escott rhapsodize over Orientalist phantasmagorias and supernatural art. An invisible humanoid ghoul assaults Escott in bed, and the opium smokers study the possible cannibal for weeks before it starves. The tale is anthologized across several genres, but many reprints omit the concluding byline and editor’s note about the display of a plaster cast of the ghoul.

Escott also narrates O’Brien’s ghost tale “The Pot of Tulips” (1855). The scientific, systematic nature of Escott’s paranormal investigations may make him fiction’s first occult detective (before J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Hesselius) and fiction’s second recurring detective (after Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and before Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Harper’s detective Furbush). “What Was It?,” in one of many metatextual instances, suggests “Tulips” was written in-story by Escott, which may account for Escott’s happy, rich marriage in “Tulips” versus his being a doomed addict-renter in the later tale. “What Was It?” alludes to occult or grotesque art from Shakespeare, Jacques Callot, C. B. Brown, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Tony Johannot, Catherine Crowe, and Gustave Doré. O’Brien’s works often feature grotesque racial caricatures, here a drunken black butler.

“What Was It?” is O’Brien’s best remembered tale for its erudite steeping in prior supernatural art and wide influence. It informs invisibility in the fiction of Guy de Maupassant (“The Horla”), Ambrose Bierce (“The Damned Thing”), and H. P. Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour out of Space”). The enigmatic descriptions of the captured ghoul raise questions about Victorian notions of science and public display, monstrosity, enslavement, queer desire, and invisible economic relations.

Bob Hodges

Despite years of sparse recognition for “the Celtic Poe,” critics increasingly see him and fellow Harper’s contributor and Poe disciple H. P. Spofford as key late U.S. Romantics and a bridge in U.S. short fiction between antebellum Nathaniel Hawthorne and Poe and postbellum Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce.

Bob Hodges

See also: Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Burdine, W. H. 2015. “‘What Was It?’: The Immaterial Self & Nineteenth-Century American Panic.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 61, no. 3: 441–473.

Franklin, H. Bruce, ed. 1995. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

“The Golden Ingot.” 1952. Tales of Tomorrow television series. May 9, 1952. Horror Habit. Edited by Jolie Bergman. 2016. http://horrorhabit.blogspot.com/p/watch-it-now-tales-of-tomorrow-1959-1960.html.

Salmonson, Jessica. 1988. Introductions to The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday.

Taylor, Matthew. 2013. “Ghost-Humanism; or, Specters of Materialism.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2: 416–422.

Whitley, Edward, and Rob Weidman, eds. 2016. The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art & Literature by the Bohemians of Antebellum NY. Lehigh University. http://lehigh.edu/pfaffs.

OCCULT DETECTIVES

The occult or psychic detective is a character who specializes in identifying and dealing with paranormal phenomena and their causes. Such characters as Arthur Machen’s Mr. Dyson, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius in “Green Tea” (1869), and Bram Stoker’s Dr. Abraham van Helsing in Dracula (1897), often cited as the earliest examples, are prototypes but are neither professional investigators nor series characters. Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly has the conceit of being taken from Hesselius’s files, but he appears in just one story.

The earliest series character to combine the supernatural and detective genres is Flaxman Low (1898–1899), created by Hesketh and Kate Pritchard. He is a professional ghost-hunter called in to investigate hauntings as Sherlock Holmes is to investigate crimes.

The first such character to become well known was John Silence, created by Algernon Blackwood. The collection John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) was a best-seller. Silence, like Low, investigated occult phenomena employing logic and his broad knowledge of the paranormal.

Thomas Carnacki (1910–1912), created by William Hope Hodgson, a professional ghost-hunter like Low, used instead a scientific, or pseudoscientific, approach to deal with hauntings that were of Hodgson’s own imaginative devising, such as “Saiitii” and “Aeiirii” phenomena. Carnacki stories are still being written today by various authors.

Many other similar characters have followed through the decades. Moris Klaw (1913–1920), created by Sax Rohmer (known for his Fu Manchu stories), was different in that he solved mundane crimes using psychic means. He slept on a special pillow and used his dreams to provide the clues.

The more typical Jules de Grandin was featured in a long series of stories by Seabury Quinn that ran in Weird Tales magazine from 1925 to 1951. It was the most popular series ever to run in the magazine. De Grandin solved a variety of crimes, sometimes purely supernatural, and sometimes, as in the Carnacki stories, of a more science fictional nature.

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1926) by occultist author Dion Fortune concerned the exploits of another doctor specializing in the paranormal. Taverner was supposed to have been modeled on a real doctor, and the stories are supposed to be composites of actual case histories.

Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow series (1970–1989) combined the form with the Chthulhu Mythos.

Occult investigators have also appeared on television. Two Carnacki stories were televised respectively in 1953 and 1971. The original character Carl Kolchak, a reporter who investigates outré phenomena, appeared in two television movies and the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), which inspired The X Files (1993–2000).

The occult detective is still present in fiction, but has shifted from the Sherlock Holmes model toward a more hard-boiled detective model. Examples are Jim Butcher’s novels about detective-wizard Harry Dresden (2000–) and Mike Carey’s novels about freelance exorcist Felix Castor (2007–).

Lee Weinstein

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Dracula; “Green Tea”; Hodgson, William Hope; In a Glass Darkly; John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Quinn, Seabury; Rohmer, Sax.

Further Reading

Fonseca, Tony. 2007. “The Psychic.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 409–439. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Hendrix, Grady. 2013. “The Terrible Occult Detectives.” Tor.com, December 18. http://www.tor.com/2013/12/18/haunted-holidays-the-terrible-occult-detectives.

Jones, Stephen, ed. 1998. Dark Detectives: Adventures of the Supernatural Sleuths. Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer.

Valentine, Mark, ed. 2009. The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.

O’CONNOR, FLANNERY (1925–1964)

A noted practitioner of Southern Gothic and Southern grotesque, Mary Flannery O’Connor merged Christian demonic horror, violence, absurdity, and revelation in her harsh narrative landscapes. Her works are rife with elements of horror fiction; as Jon Lance Bacon notes, “she made extensive, strategic use of motifs from the horror genre” (Bacon 2010, 89). Indeed, some reviewers have classified O’Connor’s tales as “the very best of horror literature,” even if her fiction does not fit neatly into a standard definition (Pelfrey 1995, 5). Magistrale and Morrison’s edition on contemporary American horror fiction even places O’Connor as a formative figure of the genre.

O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. She died prematurely of complications related to lupus on August 3, 1964. For a decade before her death, O’Connor lived as a veritable cripple on her mother’s farm, Andalusia. Her illness gave her a unique worldview, which deeply affected her fiction: a literary vision of horrors distinctly Southern and grotesque. O’Connor had diverse influences from the surrealist satire and grotesquerie of the Russian author Nikolai Gogol (e.g., “Diary of a Madman”), to the dark comedy of The Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Her style was shaped by the theological philosophy of scholars like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). O’Connor is heavily anthologized, from Norton Editions of American Literature to editor David Hartwell’s classic horror anthology The Dark Descent, and she has impacted the writing of everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Anne Rice.

During her lifetime, O’Connor produced two novels and two story collections, receiving numerous awards and accolades. While earning an MFA in creative writing at Iowa State University, O’Connor published her first short story, “The Geranium” (1946). It made her an instant literary success. But O’Connor produced the bulk of her work at Andalusia, where she moved in 1951 after being diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus.

O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood (1952), attracted national attention, mixed reviews, and a spectrum of critical reactions. Some reviewers derisively compared Wise Blood—with its violence and sadism—to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. O’Connor’s novel captures the absurd, grotesque, and antireligious exploits of a destructive and murderous World War II veteran named Hazel Motes. Motes is a prodigal prophet figure who lines his shoes with glass shards and wraps his chest with barbed wire as a form of self-mortification.

After Wise Blood, O’Connor published her first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). Early critics unleashed a barrage of tongue-in-cheek associations between her writing and popular fiction with a horrific edge. A reviewer for Time magazine, for example, allied her work with the “sardonic brutality” of “the early Graham Greene” (“Such Nice People” 1955, 114). Within this collection, several stories stand out as signature examples of her craft. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is her best-known work. It is punctuated by O’Connor’s strategic use of moral horror. The character “the Grandmother” faces her “moral and emotional limits,” as is typical of horror literature (Botting 1998, 130). Another heavily anthologized short story from this collection is “Good Country People.” The piece is full of distorted dichotomies that lapse into grotesquerie through hyperbole, caricature, and absurdism. Hartwell suggests this story relies on “a non-supernatural strain of American psychological horror” (Hartwell 1987, 576). Likewise, “The Artificial Nigger” capitalizes on what Louis D. Rubin Jr. calls the “profound terror” of being lost and “confronted with the unknown” (Rubin 1958, 36). Less often anthologized due to the offensive nature of its title, this short story uses imagery of Dante’s inferno to project modernity as hell, a horrible labyrinthine purgatory of concrete and demonic corruption. The labyrinth, as Botting points out, is a common motif of horror. It generates the fear of entrapment and the dread of impending doom lurking around any corner. For O’Connor, the monsters hiding in the maze are people.

O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, came out in 1960 to a flurry of controversy catalyzed by its portrayal of murder, arson, kidnapping, and homosexual rape. The title originates in Matthew 11:12: “the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” Again O’Connor uses verbal, physical, and symbolic violence in tandem with human deformities to produce horror filled with immorality in which characters are shocked and bedeviled. The protagonist is a fated prophet named Francis Tarwater who resists his destiny with revolting and often inhuman actions. The devil assaults him. He then sets a conflagration and submits to his vocation. Tarwater resembles the character “Reverend” Powell, who is the homicidal and fraudulent religious man in Davis Gruber’s classic 1953 horror-thriller Night of the Hunter. The Misfit of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a similar permutation of this figure. Hank Wagner analyzes the Misfit as an icon of the genre, the serial killer (Wagner 2007, 483). O’Connor’s prophets exemplify this archetype, recast within her own spiritual and moral vision.

Submitted to her editor in the final months of her life, O’Connor’s last anthology of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), depicts moments of rage and redemption, violent derangements, alienation, and the wildly grotesque. This collection is darker in tenor and more spiritual.

During her career, O’Connor was the recipient of three O. Henry Awards and myriad other distinctions. Her form of grotesque comes out of a tradition of Southern humor that has evolved and twisted its aesthetic mode into nightmarish visions of reality, associated with comedic horror. She is linked to foundational Southern Gothic writers such as Faulkner and Carson McCullers through her use of violence and realism. Many horror writers consider O’Connor an influence on their fiction. Contemporary horror, thriller, and Southern Gothic writer Joe R. Lansdale credits O’Connor among his literary influences. The nightmares of O’Connor impact Joyce Carol Oates, as in her anthology Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, and Stephen King, reflected in his musings on horror in Danse Macabre. Even Cormac McCarthy alludes to her influence in his infrequent interviews.

O’Connor succumbed to kidney failure at Baldwin County Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, on August 3, 1964. Among her posthumous publications, Manners and Mysteries (1969) contains O’Connor’s selected essays and lectures. They are now an important part of scholarship on the grotesque in American literature. Recent biographies such as Brad Gooch’s Flannery (2009) and Jean Cash’s Flannery O’Connor (2002) link her personal context to her artistic output. Posthumous honors include a National Book Award, an O. Henry Award for her story “Revelation,” induction into the American Poet’s Corner in 2014, a National Endowment, and several international conferences that focus on O’Connor’s dark, nuanced writing and its literary impact.

Naomi Simone Borwein

See also: Gogol, Nikolai; “Good Country People”; The Grotesque; Lansdale, Joe R.; Psychological Horror; Oates, Joyce Carol.

Further Reading

Bacon, Jon Lance. 2010. “Gory Stories: O’Connor and American Horror.” In Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace, edited by Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo, 89–112. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Botting, Fred. 1998. “Horror.” In The Handbook of Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 123–131. London: Macmillan.

Hartwell, David G, ed. 1987. “Flannery O’Connor.” In The Dark Descent, 576–590. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.

Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison, eds. 1996. “Introduction.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, 1–7. Columbia: University of South Carolina.

Pelfrey, David. 1995. “Spooky Stories.” Santa Fe Reporter, October 25–31: 5.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. 1958. “Flannery O’Connor: A Note on Literary Fashions.” Critique II: 11–18.

“Such Nice People.” 1955. Time, June 6: 114.

Wagner, Hank. 2007. “The Serial Killer.” In Icons of Horror and Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi, 473–506. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

The American speculative fiction writer Ray Bradbury wrote a significant amount of horror fiction throughout his career, particularly early on. The October Country (1955) is a revised version of his first book, Dark Carnival (1947), and has become one of the classics of the field. Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, characterized Dark Carnival as “the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction” (King 2010, 346), alluding to the classic James Joyce collection.

While not all of the entries collected in The October Country are supernatural or horror, the book as a whole offers a treasure trove of eerie stories. The main themes, as in much of Bradbury’s fiction, are childhood and death. “Jack-in-the-Box,” for example, is about a boy raised by his fearful, psychotic mother in total isolation from the outside world. He thinks their house is the entire world, bounded only by endless forest. When she dies, he ventures out, and he thinks this is death. Death is also denied in the almost-comic “There Was an Old Woman.” Aunt Tildy refuses to believe she is dead, even when the undertakers come for her body, and as a ghost she goes to the morgue and gets it back. An overtly horrific story is “The Small Assassin,” in which a mother becomes convinced that her infant is out to kill her. It succeeds.

Other stories mix horror with macabre humor. “Skeleton” is about a man obsessed with the idea that there is a ghastly skeleton inside his body. He manages to remove it and go on as a blob-creature. In “The Man Upstairs” a boy discovers that the lodger his mother has taken in is a vampire. He kills and dissects the vampire, bringing strange organs, one by one, into the kitchen for Mom to identify. In “The Wind” an explorer discovers that the world’s winds are alive and are determined to keep their secret. In “The Scythe” a Dustbowl refugee of the 1930s finds a deserted farm and a field of wheat, and begins to harvest. He soon discovers that he has become Death and is reaping lives, including those of his own family. Perhaps the strongest of the new stories in The October Country (not appearing in Dark Carnival) is “The Next in Line,” a powerful meditation on the inevitability of death, inspired by the mummies in catacombs that Bradbury saw on a trip to Mexico.

The two stories that have probably most intrigued many younger readers are about the “weird” Elliot family. “Homecoming” concerns the one “normal” boy in a family of ghouls, vampires, and other monsters. He longs to be like them, but he does not have fangs or magical powers. In “Uncle Einar,” the apparent problem posed by a bat-winged relative is solved when a boy is able to tie a string around him and fly him like a kite.

Bradbury’s stories were revolutionary when they first began to appear in Weird Tales in the early 1940s, as they were entirely modern in their technique and told in spare prose that bordered on poetry. Bradbury had spent time reading not just pulp fiction but Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and other representatives of the high modern tradition, and the fusion of these influences with fantastic subject matter made for a unique effect, as vividly illustrated in the stories that were collected in Dark Carnival and then its altered incarnation as The October Country.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Arkham House; Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Mogen, David. 1986. “Weird Tales: The Landscape of October Country.” In Ray Bradbury. Twayne’s United Authors Series 504. Boston: Twayne.

Pierce, Hazel. 1980. “Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition.” In Ray Bradbury, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, 186–194. New York: Taplinger.

Schweitzer, Darrell, 1988. “Tales of Childhood and the Grave: Ray Bradbury’s Horror Fiction.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 29–42. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

OLIVER, REGGIE (1952–)

Reggie Oliver is an English writer, dramatist, actor, theater director, illustrator, and the biographer of his aunt, Stella Gibbons (author of Cold Comfort Farm). He is the author of stage plays, essays, a regular review column for Mark Valentine’s journal Wormwoodiana, more than 100 stories, novellas, and vignettes, The Dracula Papers: The Scholar’s Tale (2011, the first volume in a projected tetralogy), the spiritual thriller and comedy of manners Virtue in Danger (2013), and what he describes as “a sort of children’s book,” The Hauntings at Tankerton Park (2016), for which he provided all sixty illustrations. His work has been much anthologized, and it has been gathered into seven collections: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini & Other Strange Stories (2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler & Other Strange Stories (2005), Masques of Satan (2007), Madder Mysteries (2009), Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories (2011, winner of Children of the Night Award), Flowers of the Sea (2013), and Holidays from Hell (2017)]. It has also appeared in three volumes of representative selections alongside previously uncollected work: Dramas from the Depths (2010), Shadow Plays (2012), and The Sea of Blood (2015).

Like Ramsey Campbell, Oliver is unashamed of being perceived as a horror writer, though he takes issue with the common misconception that narrows the field “to mean a lot of blood and sordid sex, and physical torment” (Slatter 2015); therefore, he prefers the term J. R. R. Tolkien’s colleague Charles Williams used to describe his novels: spiritual shockers. In the “Introductory” to Masques of Satan, he states that his stories are “not divertissements . . . I have become convinced that to write ghost stories of lasting merit it is necessary to believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. . . . The protagonists of the supernatural tale at its best need to be playing for the highest stakes conceivable. . . . I write what I write, because it is the best way of saying what I want to say about what matters to me most” (Oliver 2007, x).

In other hands, this prescription might lead to a spate of predictable tracts masquerading as fiction in which a dichotomous morality invariably leads to the villain receiving his just deserts and the innocent emerging wiser but relatively unscathed. The worldview in Oliver’s fiction, reflecting the slippery slopes that lead people to act against their own best interests and the clashes life poses between individuality and egoism, belief and obsession, aspiration and achievement, love and need, professionalism and callousness, comes closest to that of Euripides, in whom the human response to a dilemma dictates whether the outcome is tragic, grotesque, or merely humbling. Oliver evinces a remarkable degree of compassion toward all but the most predatory of his characters, contrasting their delusions against the reality that threatens to overwhelm them, and revealing that all actions, and many thoughts, have consequences.

On occasion, the vindictive (“Blood Bill,” 2005) and the zealot (“Mr. Poo-Poo,” 2007) become capable of making their delusion the prevailing, destructive vision in one of Oliver’s tales; in other cases, such as “The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini” (2003), a vision invoked willingly opens vistas of abysmal and utterly hopeless terror that no amount of time or effort can erase. One of his stories about dementia (“Flowers of the Sea,” 2011) carries this phenomenon to an unforgettably poignant level that is simultaneously terrifying and heartbreaking.

Throughout his work, a person’s character is often the only decisive factor leading to the safe(r) course when a decision is necessary. Sometimes life offers the opportunity to make the correct choice between alternatives (“The Road from Damascus,” 2007), but it is filled just as often with damned if you do/damned if you don’t situations whose implications might not be perceived until long afterward (“Love at First Sight,” 2016).

In all of this, Oliver’s command of atmosphere, characterization, and incisive dialogue are critical. He has acclaimed atmosphere as “the supreme ingredient” in crafting fiction, “evoking a mood that will bring about in the reader a sense of wonder, unease and deep reflection about the underlying nature of the universe” (Schettin 2013). Through this he often evokes a dread that strikes deeper than the threat of mere physical harm. Allied to this is the actor’s knack for capturing a person’s character through his or her use of language, and the ability to make each word of dialogue count, ironically or ominously, toward the denouement. His use of language also instills many of the stories with a vein of sly humor—“Mr. Poo-Poo,” “Mmm-Delicious” (2007), “Mrs. Midnight” (2009)—which serves to sharpen the edge of unease.

Also on the subject of language, none excel and few equal the ventriloquial ease with which he captures the tone, cadence, and vocabulary of periods ranging from the present decade through the past, in stories set in the decadent underbelly of the Weimar Republic (“Singing Blood,” 2011), a late Victorian courtroom (“Miss Marchant’s Cause,” 2003), the home and psyche of the mad nineteenth-century artist Richard Dadd (“A Child’s Problem,” 2011), the Restoration stage (“The Constant Rake,” 2005), the ecclesiastical courts of sixteenth-century Italy (“The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini”), and many more, including many stories revolving around stage productions, several stories reexamining the antiquarian underpinnings of M. R. James’s ghost stories, and that grim tour de force “The Lord of the Fleas” (2012), which writer D. F. Lewis has aptly described as an “eighteenth century quilt of documents” (Lewis 2013).

Jim Rockhill

See also: Campbell, Ramsey; James, M. R.

Further Reading

Gevers, Nick. 2013. “An Interview with Reggie Oliver.” SF Site. https://www.sfsite.com/12a/ro405.htm.

Griffin, Jude. 2015. “Author Spotlight: Reggie Oliver.” Nightmare 36 (September). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-reggie-oliver.

Lewis, D. R. 2013. “Flowers of the Sea—Reggie Oliver.” Dreamcatcher—Gestalt Real-Time Reviews, November 15. https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/flowers-of-the-sea-reggie-oliver.

Oliver, Reggie. 2007. Masques of Satan: Twelve Tales and a Novella. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

Schettin, Silvia. 2013. “Reggie Oliver: The Art of the Short Story.” Fata Libelli, September 16. http://fatalibelli.com/blog/2013/09/16/reggie-oliver-the-art-of-the-short-story.

Slatter, Angela. 2015. “Horrorology Interviews: Reggie Oliver.” Horrorology, September 22. http://www.angelaslatter.com/horrorology-interviews-reggie-oliver.

ONIONS, OLIVER (1873–1961)

Oliver Onions was a prolific English author, best known for his ghost stories. Onions made his living as a writer of novels in almost every popular genre, including romance, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction. His horror fiction, however, consists of short stories, tending to focus on the theme of insanity.

“The Beckoning Fair One”: Haunting of the Artist

Paul Oleron, the protagonist of Oliver Onions’s classic story, rents a house with an eye toward completing his new novel there. But shortly after moving in, Paul finds it impossible to get any writing done, and his attitude begins to change toward his characters. Whereas Paul had previously believed that this novel would be his masterpiece, he now thinks everything about it is wrong, especially the title character, whom he has based on his girlfriend, Elsie. She grows increasingly concerned at his changing personality and erratic behavior. When Paul inquires about the house’s previous history, he is informed that it has been vacant for twelve years and that the previous tenant, an artist, died there of apparent intentional starvation. During her visits to the house, Elsie is repeatedly injured by loose boards and exposed nails—almost as though the house is trying to hurt her. Elsie and Paul become estranged, and when Paul finds it more and more difficult to leave the premises, he realizes that a presence the house is imbued with is clinging to him like a terribly jealous lover. In the end Elsie dies under mysterious circumstances—maybe murdered by Paul—and Paul is removed from the house in a terrible state, suffering from starvation.

As a ghost story, “The Beckoning Fair One” is notable for its complete absence of any ghostly manifestations. The impact of the haunting is seen entirely in Paul’s psychological and physical decline under the influence of the presence that has taken hold of him. The story’s denouement resonates strongly with the fate suffered by the house’s previous tenant, and it suggests that Oleron’s is just one in a succession of similar fates suffered by others under the house’s influence. The identity of who—or what—is haunting the house is never definitively established. “The Beckoning Fair One” has been praised by Robert Aickman, Everett F. Bleiler, and other authorities on supernatural fiction as one of the best ghost stories in the English language.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

During his lifetime, Onions published five collections of ghost stories: Back o’ the Moon (1906), Widdershins (1911), Ghosts in Daylight (1924), The Painted Face (1929), and Bells Rung Backward (1953). His Collected Ghost Stories appeared in 1935. Of these, it was his second collection, Widdershins, which contains his most highly regarded work, particularly an influential tale called “The Beckoning Fair One,” which was first published in Widdershins. This story is considered the single best treatment of Onions’s preferred theme in horror: an artist who becomes so engrossed in his own imagination that he loses touch with reality. In this case, that loss of contact is facilitated by an invisible, feminine presence that is apparently the heroine of the novel he is writing; he imagines her so vividly that she appears to take on an independent existence and begins to dominate his life entirely.

Whether or not this “Beckoning Fair One” is anything more than his hallucination is never demonstrated clearly one way or the other. The story is distinguished not only by its thoughtful approach to the theme, but by the sophistication and beauty of its prose, which establishes Onions among the most skilled stylists in the genre.

Many of Onions’s other stories likewise involve a mysterious figure who may or may not be real, and who acts as a focal point for the fantasies of an imaginative main character. In this, Onions may be said to extend a line in weird fiction that runs back through Henry James and E. T. A. Hoffmann. In his novella entitled “The Real People,” a writer’s characters take on an independent existence. In stories such as “The Rosewood Door” and “The Rope in the Rafters,” characters assume past identities, or are taken over by archaic consciousnesses; the subject is treated largely psychologically, not unlike Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return. However, Onions tended to specialize in main characters who are more aware of the suicidal or self-destructive aspects of their fantasies, but who are unable to resist them anyway. His characters often reach a point when they embrace demise rather than abandon a dream, which imparts a special mood of despair or fatalism to their tales. He adopts the figure of the doppelgänger, the fear of death by possession or replacement, in stories like “Rooum” and “The Painted Face,” although in the latter story the main character commits suicide in order to save the one she loves from an evil spirit.

Onions is best remembered for his extreme attention to plausibility in his stories. His ghosts have no conventional trappings and are represented only in highly subtle, unsensational ways, which not only make it more difficult to discern what is and what is not psychological in the story, but which also ensures that the ghostliness is not ruined by clichés. In this way, he also carries forward the legacy of writers like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who began the process of separating horror fiction from Gothic backgrounds and introducing it into contemporary settings that would have been more familiar, and more close to home, for the reading audience.

Michael Cisco

See also: Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Ashley, Mike. 1992. “Oliver Onions: The Man at the Edge.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 120–126. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

Donaldson, Norman. 1985. “Oliver Onions.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 505–512. New York: Scribner’s.

THE OTHER

The Other (1971) was the first novel by American novelist and former Hollywood actor Thomas Tryon, and it offers much in terms of horror. The narrator, thirteen-year-old Niles, is twin to his brother Holland, who seems to be one of the most destructive individuals in fiction. The novel is set in 1935 on an ancestral family farm in Connecticut, and it details the increasingly sinister and sociopathic acts of Holland, as told from Niles’s viewpoint, during a summer when their family has gathered to mourn the passing of the boys’ father, who died in a horrible accident. It is eventually revealed that the portrayal of Holland is false, and is a fantasy of Niles’s, who is the novel’s real villain.

Tryon’s authorial skill is evident throughout, from the lushness of his descriptive writing in portraying the bucolic setting to his effective creation of a believable narrator in Niles, who truly seems to be reliable through much of the story as he draws readers from one episode of horror to another. This renders the final reveal all the more shocking and unsettling.

Like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Tryon’s Harvest Home, The Other offers a picture of what initially appears to be an inviting rural life, where all is idealistic and pleasant, only to expose, gradually, the horrors that may lurk—and lurk not very deeply—beneath seemingly pleasant surfaces. Reviewer I. P. Heldman has characterized the novel as “a Jamesian nightmare of psychological tension in a brooding atmosphere of insidious terror and madness” (quoted in “Thomas Tryon” 2003). Horror scholar S. T. Joshi has asserted that both The Other and Tryon’s next novel, Harvest Home, had a significant impact on the horror genre itself: ““What The Exorcist did for the tale of supernatural horror, The Other and Harvest Home did for the non-supernatural tale of psychological horror: they legitimized it and showed that in the hands of a master it formed a genuine sub-genre of the weird tale” (Joshi 2001, 190). The Other was adapted for film in 1972 by director Robert Mulligan.

Benjamin F. Fisher

See also: Harvest Home; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Chaon, Dan. 2012. “Afterword.” In The Other by Thomas Tryon, 253–258. New York: New York Review of Books.

Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

“Thomas Tryon.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS

Fritz Leiber’s 1977 novel Our Lady of Darkness, expanded from a novella published in 1971 as “The Pale Brown Thing,” is a compelling work of contemporary urban Gothic. Winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award for best novel, it capped Leiber’s long career as a pioneer of tales of urban dread and modern occult horror.

Set in San Francisco, the novel features as protagonist an aging horror writer and bibliophile named Franz Westren, who is clearly an autobiographical projection; indeed, Westren occupies the Geary Street apartment house where Leiber himself lived during the 1970s. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Our Lady of Darkness offers a subtle evocation of the City by the Bay’s buried history of supernatural legend, deeply connected to a local tradition of the fantastic that goes back to Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith. The story centers on a (fictitious) secret book, Thibaut de Castries’s Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, which elaborates a theory of “paramental entities” (Leiber 2010, 39), hostile emanations of “all that stuff accumulating in big cities, its sheer liquid and solid mass” (22). In an eerie echo of the narrative of Leiber’s classic short story “Smoke Ghost” (1941), our hero hurries anxiously through a city growing more estranged, “searching the dark sea of roofs” for “a swift pale brown thing stalking him,” confident in its mastery of the landscape and “taking advantage of every bit of cover” (105) to stalk him relentlessly. Each feature of the skyline is a latent menace, each familiar scene transformed into an incipient wasteland of “electro-mephitic city-stuff” (81), the entropic sediment of human conglomeration rife with ghostly predators.

The culmination of a lifetime of reading in the field, Our Lady of Darkness not only draws upon influences as diverse as M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft, it weaves them into a tapestry that takes on an almost metafictional dimension in its direct and self-conscious allusions to classic works of horror fiction and the biographies of major horror writers. At the same time, Leiber develops a unique and compelling form of modern occultism, the aforementioned “megapolisomancy,” a form of secret knowledge that permits adepts to scry the city as one would a crystal ball, searching for portents and prophecies unleashed by the local concentration of paramental energies. Our Lady of Darkness is similar to Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen (1978) and Ken Eulo’s The Brownstone (1980) in depicting the contemporary city as a breeding ground for malign supernatural presences, but it is considerably more ambitious in conception and more skillful in execution.

Rob Latham

See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraftian Horror; Smith, Clark Ashton; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Leiber, Fritz. [1977] 2010. Our Lady of Darkness. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.

Pardoe, Rosemary. 2004. “Our Lady of Darkness: A Jamesian Classic?” Fantasy Commentator 11 (Summer): 151–168.

Waugh, Robert. 2004. “Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness: Lovecraft, the Compound Ghost.” Studies in Modern Horror 3: 7–17.

“OUT OF THE DEEP”

Published originally in 1923 as part of the collection The Riddle and Other Stories, Walter de la Mare’s short psychological horror story “Out of the Deep” is one of the author’s most well-known inconclusive ghost stories. In keeping with de la Mare’s usual themes of the supernatural, “Out of the Deep” is also one of the author’s foremost examples of the haunted house story.

The narrative follows Jimmie, who has returned to the house in which he was raised, following the death of his uncle. De la Mare’s flair for suspenseful atmospheric writing can be seen throughout, as Jimmie is besieged by fearful memories of his childhood that take the form of ghostly apparitions of the household’s serving staff. Unable to discern between the present reality and his ghostly memories, Jimmie dies mysteriously at the story’s climax.

Much like the protagonist, the reader undergoes several psychological turns throughout the story, and the characteristic ambiguity of de la Mare’s storytelling leaves the reader haunted by the narrative’s lack of resolve. The descriptively Gothic elements of the household setting—particularly the shadowy and adorned recesses of the room in which Jimmie sleeps—are visually representative of de la Mare’s unwillingness to cast a light upon the latent supernatural horrors that underlie the more explicit psychological horror.

Freudian psychology is, once again, not far from the heart of the narrative, and de la Mare makes it clear that it is from the recesses of the human psyche—from memory, from our childhood past—that long-buried and unrealized fears arise out of the deep and most successfully inhabit and augment our fearful imaginations.

Jimmie’s childhood fears seem to be overtly linked to the bell cord that his aunt and uncle pulled to summon the servants. Moreover, the overwhelming terror that afflicts Jimmie at the thought of summoning the household’s serving staff—compounded by the appearance of several phantoms in answer to his summons—suggests, perhaps, that a deeply ingrained classism is to be found at the center of the story.

Much like the silent crowd of phantoms that throng the seemingly empty house in de la Mare’s most famous poem, “The Listeners” (1912), Jimmie is haunted by the collective presence of others. In particular, the phantasmic presence of the servants is not only supernatural, a reversal of the natural order; it is also an inversion of the social order, in which those who should remain invisible within the household (the serving staff) become visible to its occupants. In this way, “Out of the Deep” very much details the upper class’s fears of their subordinates.

Ian Kinane

See also: de la Mare, Walter; “The Listeners”; The Return.

Further Reading

Clute, John. 1985. “Walter de la Mare.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 497–504. New York: Scribner Sons.

Crawford, Gary William. 1992. “On the Edge: The Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare.” Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 53–56. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press.

de la Mare, Walter. 1923. The Riddle, and Other Stories. London: Selwyn & Blount.

Stableford, Brian. 2005. “Walter de la Mare.” In The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

P

PALAHNIUK, CHUCK (1962–)

Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk is an American novelist and journalist. As of 2016, he has published fourteen novels, a short story collection, and several pieces of non-fiction. Though only a small portion of his work can categorically be considered “horror,” his transgressive style and bleak worldview have made him a central figure in the contemporary macabre.

Palahniuk is best known for his first novel, Fight Club (1996). The novel met with lukewarm attention upon release, but after being adapted for film by director David Fincher it has gathered a cult following. Fight Club’s cynical and at times nihilistic indictment of contemporary corporate life has cemented its status as a key text of the Generation-X literary zeitgeist. All of Palahniuk’s fiction is marked by an inclination toward the grotesque, the transgressive, and the nihilistic. Yet his contribution to the horror genre is largely concentrated within a sequence of three novels that Palahniuk has himself termed his “horror trilogy.”

Lullaby (2001) concerns the search for a poem that, when read aloud, has the power to kill. At the beginning of the novel this “culling song” has resulted in the accidental death of the protagonist’s family. The plot concerns his attempt to track down and eradicate the threat. In addition to this basic plot, which is clearly influenced by the success of urban-legend horror in films such as Ringu (1998), Lullaby also features a necrophiliac paramedic and an estate agent who specializes in haunted houses.

Diary (2002) is a more conventional piece of American Gothic. Its depiction of the sinister recesses of small-town America is clearly influenced by the work of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Diary is the story of Misty Wilmot, an aspiring artist who relocates to her husband’s isolated island community. Once there she discovers that she is part of a sinister conspiracy in which her art, and her life, are to be sacrificed for the good of the town. Though there is little of the body horror that typifies Palahniuk’s other work, Diary achieves a quiet eeriness that stands alone in his writing so far.

Of all Palahniuk’s novels, Haunted (2005) is most clearly situated in the horror genre. It has an unusual structure, comprising nearly two dozen short narratives, framed within a wider story of confinement and abuse. The protagonists have each volunteered to be part of a writing retreat under the control of the elderly Mr. Whittier. They are taken to an abandoned theater and locked inside, under the proviso that they will be released once their writing is complete. Soon, however, the group descends to barbarity, eschewing literary creation in favor of a horror story that they can make (and sell) out of their own experience. They each tell their own tales, while brutalizing themselves and each other. Cannibalism and bodily dismemberment ensues. Nothing in the violence of the framing narrative can compete with the opening tale, “Guts.” This story is infamous for making audience members faint during live readings.

A possible inspiration for this turn to outright horror is the real-life murder of Palahniuk’s father in 1999. Palahniuk was asked to contribute to the legal discussion regarding whether the murderer should receive the death sentence. Critics have seen his horror trilogy as an attempt to deal with his responsibility in deciding the fate of another human being.

Though Palahniuk has gone on to write prolifically, releasing a novel per year since 2007, he has yet to match the potency of his horror trilogy. The first two installments of another trilogy, Damned (2011) and Doomed (2013), are horror-inflected, but they prioritize satire over any darker intent. However, a return to the world of Fight Club in a graphic novel sequel (2015–2016), does suggest that Palahniuk’s violent, nihilistic sensibility may make a startling reappearance in future work.

Neil McRobert

See also: Body Horror; Frame Story; King, Stephen; Jackson, Shirley.

Further Reading

Kuhn, Cynthia, and Lance Rubin, eds. 2009. Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem. New York: Routledge.

Palahniuk, Chuck. 2004. Non Fiction. London: Vintage.

Sartain, Jeffrey, ed. 2009. Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.

PENNY DREADFUL

Penny dreadful is a name that was bestowed on penny newspapers filled with tales of adventure and horror that were published in England in the 1830s and 1840s. They were also referred to as “penny bloods” in reference to their blood-and-thunder style of storytelling. In the decades since, the term penny dreadful has become a catch-all phrase denoting publications with sensational or exploitative content.

Penny dreadfuls were made possible through the new machine manufacture of paper in the early nineteenth century and the invention of the rotary steam printing press, both of which allowed publishers to mass-produce printed publications relatively inexpensively. They were printed as pamphlets with dense, multicolumn text, usually adorned with a lurid cover engraving, and sold primarily to working-class readers as cheap entertainment. Penny dreadfuls were the successors to the Gothic bluebooks, or “shilling shockers,” themselves the successors to the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their contents were often redolent of both. Some featured self-contained stories, but most offered serial installments of longer works meant to entice readers to buy succeeding weekly or bi-weekly installments. By their nature the serial stories were written to run as long as they were popular with readers, meaning that their plots were often very loosely constructed, and they were often padded with chapters of history not essential to the story, unresolved subplots, and repetitive short lines of dialogue.

The best-known penny dreadfuls include James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire (serialized in 220 chapters between 1845 and 1847), G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846–1847), and Rymer’s The String of Pearls (possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Peckett Prest), which is the best-known version of the story of Sweeney Todd, “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” who murdered his patrons and gave their remains to his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, to be baked into meat pies for public consumption. A number of penny dreadfuls were the work of serial writers, hence their slapdash execution: The Mysteries of London was a four-series story about the seedy underbelly of street life in London begun in 1844 by G. W. M. Reynolds and finished several years later by Thomas Miller and Edward L. Blanchard.

Not all penny dreadfuls featured horror themes. The Newgate Calendar—a monthly account of imprisonments and executions in England’s Newgate Prison, first published in book form in 1774—provided fodder for the penny papers, as did The Terrific Register (1825), an anthology of exotic atrocities and gruesome crimes from around the world. Dick Turpin, the infamous highwayman executed in 1739, was the hero of a number of penny dreadfuls, among them Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, which ran for 254 installments between 1867 and 1868. Spring-Heeled Jack, a leaping bandit reputed to have preyed upon women in London in the 1830s (and whose exploits were later conflated with those of Jack the Ripper), was the main character in several penny dreadfuls. Pirates, outlaws, freebooters, revolutionaries, robbers, and cowboys all put in appearances in the penny dreadfuls, as did folk heroes such as Robin Hood and celebrities from real life, including Buffalo Bill. Some of the more popular penny dreadfuls were plagiarized from the work of Charles Dickens and other celebrity writers of the era.

W. M. Clarke, Edward Lloyd, and others founded their publishing empires on the strength of their penny dreadful sales. By the 1850s, public disapproval of the content of penny dreadfuls and its impact on the sensibilities of young readers contributed to the conversion of penny papers to more genteel publications for young boys, among them The Boy’s Own Paper, Boys of England, and The Young Gentleman’s Journal. These papers were forerunners of the nickel weeklies and dime novels published at the end of the nineteenth century, which in turn paved the way for the pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the twentieth century.

In May 2014 the Showtime cable television channel premiered Penny Dreadful, a horror series set in Victorian England with a mash-up plot featuring characters from classic nineteenth-century horror fiction, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Dracula; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Pulp Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Angelo, Michael. 1977. Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors. London: Jupiter Books.

Haining, Peter, ed. 1976. The Penny Dreadful. London: Gollancz.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

The Phantom of the Opera began as a French Gothic novel published in 1910 by the prolific journalist and mystery-adventure novelist Gaston Leroux (1868–1927). Building on Leroux’s knowledge of the real Paris Opera, begun in the 1860s under architect Charles Garnier, and fictionalizing several of that era’s headlines to provide a news-like authenticity (including the actual fall of a chandelier into the Opera audience in 1896), the novel focuses on a musician-composer-architect-builder calling himself “Erik,” supposedly one of the Opera’s original designers.

Erik sequesters himself deep in the lower cellars underneath the Opera—indeed, on the shores of the underground lake (which actually exists because swampland had to be drained before the Opera could be built)—and hides himself there, while often trying to affect what happens in the world above. He is ashamed of the skull-face he bears from birth, over which has grown only thin and parchment-yellow skin, a visage suggested to Leroux by danse macabre paintings descended from medieval times and rarely used as the phantom’s real visage in most adaptations.

The action of the novel commences after Erik witnesses a girl from the country, Christine Daae, join the opera chorus. After hearing her sing, he becomes her unseen voice teacher (and Freudian father-figure) from behind her dressing-room’s walls and falls in love with her (regarding her at times as a replacement for his mother, since Freud’s concepts were taking hold by 1910). Soon, though, Christine’s improvement starts making her a rival for major roles with the Opera’s diva, Carlotta—whom the phantom chases off the stage by cutting down the chandelier—and she welcomes visits from her childhood sweetheart, the Vicomte Raoul de Chigny, a patron of the Opera delighted to find his former love after many years.

To get closer to Christine, Erik disguises himself—except that he uses his actual skull-face—as the figure of “Red Death” (from an 1845 story by Poe) at the Opera’s gala masked ball, a real annual event from the 1870s to the present. Alarmed by his pupil drifting from him, he captures her and takes her to his underground lair, where he woos her by rehearsing Verdi’s Otello with her while wearing a black mask—adding racial, even miscegenistic overtones not present in any later adaptation—until she abruptly unmasks him and recoils at beholding Death incarnate.

Leroux’s novel became a popular subject for stage and screen adaptations soon after its publication. Some of the more significant English-language movie adaptations are as follows.

1925

The Phantom of the Opera (Universal Studios), starring Lon Chaney Sr. Chaney was the most significant horror movie actor of the silent period, and Leroux himself was involved in negotiating with Universal to get this adaptation made. The scene in which the heroine unmasks Chaney’s truly horrifying-looking Phantom is among the most memorable in early cinema.

1943

The Phantom of the Opera (Universal Studios), starring Claude Raines. A remake of the 1925 version, this version made strong use of Technicolor and sumptuous set design and costuming to generate a general air of operatic spectacle.

1962

The Phantom of the Opera (Hammer Films), starring Herbert Lom. Hammer made this one in partnership with Universal, right on the heels of Hammer’s massive success in rebooting and reimagining the classic Universal Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy horror series. Their Phantom film fell short of these others but still produced a few memorable moments.

1974

Phantom of the Paradise (20th Century Fox), starring Paul Williams. Directed by Brian De Palma, this cult movie mixes Leroux’s original Phantom plot with elements of Faust and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray to produce a fairly delirious result. It received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for its music.

1989

The Phantom of the Opera (21st Century Film Corporation), starring Robert Englund. This gory adaptation is mainly notable for featuring Englund, best known for playing the character of Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, in the title role.

2004

The Phantom of the Opera (Warner Bros. Pictures), starring Gerard Butler. Joel Schumacher directed this big-budget cinematic adaptation of the popular stage musical adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Matt Cardin

Meanwhile, Raoul joins forces with a Persian detective (who has chased Erik to Paris from the Middle East, where he used to do magic and construct torture chambers for a shah) and climbs down a labyrinth of dark passages toward the cellars to rescue Christine. There they face exotic Oriental obstacles that Erik now puts in their way, a symptom of the racist Orientalism that was quite common at the Paris Opera—and in Europe generally—at the time of the novel.

This story conflates many mythical, literary, and contemporary sources, starting with several Greek myths about Death and the Maiden, the best known of which is Pluto and Persephone (in which the god of the underworld kidnaps the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest). It also carries forward several features from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the notorious French scandal of the 1890s known as the Dreyfus Affair, on which Leroux reported and in which a Jewish officer in Paris was falsely charged with espionage and returned from imprisonment for a retrial as emaciated as a skeleton.

Leroux’s novel lost popularity after 1912 until the author himself negotiated the adaptation of it as a silent film released by Universal in 1925 and starring Lon Chaney, the premier star of silent horror pictures. That version, though it changed the novel significantly, set a standard for many that have come after it on the stage, film, and television. The most successful of these has been the stage-musical version by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Richard Stilgoe, which debuted in London in 1986 and then on Broadway during the 1987–1988 season. Since then, it has become the longest-running play in Broadway history, augmented by many touring companies and a film version that have carried it around the world.

Jerrold E. Hogle

See also: Body Horror; Dracula; Gothic Hero/Villain; Hugo, Victor; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Stoker, Bram.

Further Reading

Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and Its Progeny. New York: Palgrave.

Perry, George, and Jane Rice 1987. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. New York: Henry Holt.

Wolf, Leonard, ed. and trans. 1996. The Essential Phantom of the Opera, Including the Complete Novel by Gaston Leroux. New York: Plume/Penguin.

“THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW”

Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” was originally published in Quartette, the Christmas Annual of the Civil and Military Gazette for 1885, and later collected in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales (1888). It was Kipling’s first supernatural story, and on one level, it is a traditional ghost story, the tale of a wrongdoer haunted and done in by those he wronged. In the judgment of Kipling scholar Louis Cornell, “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” but more than that, the story is actual superior to those two because of its deployment of traditional Gothic elements in a recognizable contemporary setting.

The story is presented as the deathbed narrative of Theobald Jack Pansay, an Englishman resident in Simla, India. While en route from Gravesend to Bombay, Pansay had an affair with Agnes Keith-Wessington, the wife of an officer, destroying her marriage. Although Pansay attempted to break off his relations, she followed him to Simla, over the course of the next year repeatedly letting him know from her ’rickshaw that she was there for him. A thoroughgoing cad, Pansay disregarded her and pursued others, becoming engaged to Kitty Mannering. Mrs. Keith-Wessington dies, but to his horror, Pansay finds himself haunted by her as well as her four liveried servants and the ’rickshaw from which she used to speak to him, although there is incontrovertible evidence that all (including the servants) are dead and that the ’rickshaw has been destroyed. Nobody else can see the ghosts, but Pansay’s behavior attracts attention among the English colonials. The local doctor, Heathlegh, attempts to treat Pansay for hallucinations, but the ’rickshaw is present when the treatment concludes, and when the history of his treatment of Mrs. Keith-Wessington emerges, Pansay finds his engagement concluded. Pansay realizes that his days in India are numbered, and though he cannot understand why he must face punishment in this world rather than the next, he has conversations with Mrs. Wessington and accepts his fate before dying.

Certainly Pansay deserves what happens to him, for he is as unpleasant a character as Kipling ever created. Adding depth to the story is the depiction of the world of the English colonials residing in India: theirs is a closed society in which a transgression leads inevitably to ostracism. At the same time, Heathlegh’s solution offers readers a different perspective, one that is rational and rejects the supernatural: that Pansay merely suffered from a mental problem, in which the haunting is a manifestation of his conscience. Finally, there is the pathos of Mrs. Keith-Wessington: hers is not a vengeful ghost, merely one who wants the love that has been denied to her when she was alive, and in attempting to get her due, she emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic specter.

In his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), Kipling said “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” was one of the first things that he wrote under the clear influence of his “Personal Daemon,” a creative force that he experienced as being external to him, and that he described as guiding him in his authorial career.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; “They.”

Further Reading

Cornell, Louis L. 1966. Kipling in India. New York: Macmillan.

Dillingham, William B. 2005. Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

PHANTOMS

The prolific American writer Dean Koontz has published numerous types of novels and has disputed being identified as a horror fiction writer. Though elements of horror do frequently appear in his stories, he is more correctly identified as a novelist of thrillers. He states in an afterword to a 2001 paperback reprint of his 1983 novel Phantoms, “Writing Phantoms was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life,” because this novel (which has sold more than 60 million copies worldwide) “earned for me the label of ‘horror writer,’ which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed” (Koontz 2001, 432).

Nevertheless, Phantoms is generally regarded as a first-rate horror story, perhaps one of the finest in the genre. It narrates the story of two sisters—Lisa and Jenny Paige—who travel to Jenny’s hometown of Snowfield, California, there to find the ski resort town to be entirely deserted. Jenny is a physician and Lisa is her fourteen-year-old sister. When they arrive at Jenny’s home, they discover the corpse of Jenny’s housekeeper lying on the floor, looking as if “she died in the middle of a scream” (15). Investigating the town, they discover more hideous corpses, some of them mutilated in sadistic fashion. They are able to contact the county authorities in Santa Mira, Sheriff Bryce Hammond and Lt. Talbert Whitman, who arrive in Snowfield to lead the investigation there. The most important clue they discover is the name “Timothy Flyte” written by one of the victims. Flyte, it appears, is a destitute British academic who once published a book entitled The Ancient Enemy, which recounts the mysterious mass disappearances of communities and populations through history.

Assisted by the Biological Investigations Unit of the American military, the group discovers that the “Ancient Enemy” is a massive creature able to shape parts of itself into any form or “phantom” that it desires. Growing in mass and size with each killing, this intelligent amoeba-like creature kills many of the investigators, including Flyte himself, who is brought to Snowfield at the creature’s insistence in order to write its biography. A scientific solution is eventually discovered that defeats the monster via a bacteria solution that consumes its amorphous petroleum-like cell structure. A thought-provoking subplot also appears in the story about Fletcher Kale, a sociopath, who becomes a type of apostle of the Ancient Enemy, which presents itself to him as the Devil. The novel concludes with the possibility of Kale being infected by the Ancient Enemy before its destruction, thus leaving a dark, open-ended resolution to the story.

In an essay comparing and contrasting the central evil in Phantoms with that in two of Koontz’s other novels, Whispers and Darkfall, Michael A. Morrison characterizes Phantoms as “the monster tale as police procedural” and notes that it focuses crucially on the mindset of the human protagonists as they confront something beyond their ken: “They are men and women of reason: systematic, scientific, rational. And much of Phantoms examines the responses of such people to the presence of an unknown” (Morrison 1998, 128–129). D. W. Taylor points out that the novel also engages not just its protagonists but its readers in a confrontation with this presence, and even turns this back upon the reader themselves: “[B]y the end of Phantoms, the hoary concept of a predestined evil from Hell has been turned upon the reader like a mirror, who suddenly finds himself staring rather uncomfortably into his own inexplicable, evil image” (Taylor 1998, 108).

Phantoms was released as a film in 1998, directed by Joe Chappelle and starring Peter O’Toole. Koontz wrote the screenplay based on his novel.

Gary Hoppenstand

See also: Koontz, Dean.

Further Reading

Koontz, Dean. [1983] 2001. Phantoms. New York: Berkley.

Lehti, Steven J. 1997. “Dean R. Koontz’s Phantoms.” Cinefantasique 29, no. 4/5 (October): 16–21.

Morrison, Michael A. 1998. “The Three Faces of Evil: The Monsters of Whispers, Phantoms, and Darkfall.” In Discovering Dean Koontz: Essays on America’s Bestselling Writer of Suspense and Horror Fiction, edited by Bill Munster, 120–143. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Taylor, D. W. 1998. “Mainstream Horror in Whispers and Phantoms.” In Discovering Dean Koontz: Essays on America’s Bestselling Writer of Suspense and Horror Fiction, edited by Bill Munster, 97–111. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

“PICKMAN’S MODEL”

“Pickman’s Model” is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft that was first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It is among Lovecraft’s most reprinted stories and it has been adapted numerous times for extraliterary media, notably by screenwriter Alvin Sapinsley for the December 1, 1971, episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Set in Boston, the story is a narrated as a monologue in the first person by a man named Thurber to his friend Eliot. Thurber refuses to travel with his friend via the city’s subway system and by way of explanation he recounts his relationship with Richard Upton Pickman, a recently disappeared artist of the macabre who is shunned by the artistic establishment. It’s less the horrific subject matter of Pickman’s work—which frequently features dog-faced ghouls feeding—than its graphic realism that so distresses the art world.

Thurber relates how his admiration of Pickman’s work compelled him to accept the artist’s invitation one evening to visit his studio in Boston’s North End, where Pickman points out that many of the houses are connected by a network of subterranean tunnels that date to the earliest years of New England’s settling. Thurber is disturbed by several of Pickman’s recent canvases hanging in the studio, including the painting “Subway Accident,” which depicts the ghoul creatures emerging from train tunnels to attack a crowd on a platform, and “The Lesson,” which appears to feature elder ghouls teaching a young human changeling how to feed on a corpse. When sounds are heard in the nearby room where the house’s boarded-up tunnel entrance is located, Pickman investigates, fires several shots, and then returns to hastily conclude his meeting with Thurber. In his excitement, Thurber accidentally snatches a photo affixed to a corner of one of Pickman’s works in progress. When he looks at it later, expecting to see an image that Pickman is using for background detail, he discovers the truth about why Pickman’s painted monsters appear so realistic.

Lovecraft’s description of Pickman’s paintings demonstrates the power of written fiction to generate effects that would be difficult to capture with literal visual representations, for Pickman’s paintings of ghouls, which Lovecraft describes as “beyond the power of words to classify,” are obviously meant to exude a kind of primal horror that would be difficult, if not impossible, for an actual painting to achieve.

There’s no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify.

. . . The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground—for Pickman’s morbid art was preëminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations—well, don’t ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding—I won’t say on what. They were sometimes shewn in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey—or rather, their treasure-trove. And what damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shewn leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas shewed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs. (Lovecraft 2013, 93)

Matt Cardin

Source: Lovecraft, H. P. 2013. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. New York: Penguin.

Although not regarded as one of Lovecraft’s tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, “Pickman’s Model” can be appreciated in the same context as one of his efforts to depict an otherworldly race of beings that exists parallel to the human race, and largely unseen. References in the story suggest that the race of ghouls dates back at least to the Salem witch trials and the earliest years of New England history. Lovecraft lards the story with historic and geographic details that depict the ghoul culture as inextricable from the culture of those on whom they feed: the blue-blood stock of New England. The story has inspired a number of homages by other writers, including Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below” (1939) and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Daughter of Hounds (2006) and “Pickman’s Other Model (1929).”

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Arkham House; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Anderson, James. 2002. “Pickman’s Model: H. P. Lovecraft’s Model of Terror.” In A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Scott Connors, 195–205. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

Lovecraft, Howard P. [1927] 1999. “Pickman’s Model.” In More Annotated Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon. New York: Dell.

Sederholm, Carl. 2006. “What Screams Are Made of: Representing Cosmic Fear in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 4 (Winter): 335–349.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, a supernatural tale of moral degeneration and hidden guilt. It began as a story told to his friends, but Philadelphia publisher J. M. Stoddart, on a visit to London, requested him to write it out for his magazine. It was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine for July 1890, where its thinly veiled homoeroticism stirred up controversy. Wilde extensively revised it before its book publication in 1891, toning down the homoeroticism and adding six chapters and a preface with the French Aestheticist argument that books are neither moral nor immoral but exist for their own sake.

Youthful Dorian Gray meets the hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton as he sits for a portrait. During the sitting Dorian wishes aloud to remain young while the portrait ages. He soon discovers his wish has been magically granted, but that it also reflects his evil deeds. Wotton gives him a yellow book, which helps to entice him into a corrupt, hedonistic lifestyle. The portrait, his symbolic conscience, gradually changes, reflecting his moral descent. Ashamed, he locks it in an unused upstairs room. Finally, he destroys the hated portrait with a knife, destroying himself in the process.

The book bears many similarities to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both involve moral decay, the separation of the good and evil aspects of human nature, and the self-destruction of the protagonist. Hyde’s activities and Dorian’s are largely left to the imagination.

Other major influences on it were Wilde’s mother’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress by J. W. Meinhold with its double portrait of the good and evil versions of Sidonia; and Melmoth the Wanderer by Wilde’s great-uncle, Charles Maturin, which has a hidden painting of a character who bargained with the devil to live 150 years. Other possible influences are Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and “William Wilson.” The name Dorian alludes to the ancient Greek Dorian tribe, noted for homosexuality in their military. Dorian’s character is partially based on Wilde himself and on his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The enticing yellow book is presumably the French Decadent novel A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans.

Critics attacked the magazine version, calling it immoral, unclean, and poisonous. It was used as evidence by the prosecution when Wilde was later tried for indecency. The book version received slightly less vehement criticism. An uncensored, annotated edition was published by Belknap Press in 2011.

The story has been adapted to ballet and opera and has been filmed many times between 1918 and 2009. Albert Lewin’s version (1945), the most notable, won Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as a retro Hugo. To this day, it is often said of youthful-appearing people that they “must have a portrait hidden in the attic.”

Lee Weinstein

See also: Huysmans, J. K.; Melmoth the Wanderer; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Further Reading

Beckson, Karl E. 1998. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press.

Belford, Barbara. 2000. Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. New York: Random House.

Gomel, Elana. 2004. “Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author.” Narrative 12, no. 1: 74–92.

Wilde, Oscar. [1890] 2011. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

POE, EDGAR ALLAN (1809–1849)

Edgar Allan Poe did not invent Gothic fiction, or supernatural fiction, or horror fiction, but he was certainly a significant heir of Gothic tradition, which he fashioned to his own purposes, thus refreshing literary Gothicism. Horror is indeed a signal feature in much of his work, but it is not horror for mere horror’s sake. Critics taxed him for creating too much “German” (for which, read “Gothic” or “horror”) substance, notably in his fiction. In the “Preface” to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), his first collection of his tales, most of which had been originally published in magazines or newspapers, he stated: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul,” adding that he composed those tales with that principle uppermost in mind (Poe 1984, 129). That this principle is evident in many of his poems, tales, and, certainly, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Poe’s only completed novel, is unmistakable.

Poe’s biography is often thought to be sensational. Actually, his life was not extraordinary. He was no legendary drunkard as malicious gossip portrayed him; no drug addict, contrary to another misconception; and no debaucher—of young women, black cats, or ravens. If author Poe was pursued by any demon, that demon was poverty. His literary income for twenty-plus years’ authorship was roughly ten thousand dollars, poverty level even in his day. Far too often, Poe’s personal life has been presented as the basis for his creative writings, but that interpretation is also inaccurate.

“The Black Cat”: A Sophisticated Rendering
of Madness

First published in 1843, this popular story draws on the legend that cats, black cats in particular, understand human circumstances. The cat in Poe’s tale, accidentally walled up alive, howls when its master, who has murdered his wife and wants to conceal her body behind a wall in the cellar, unwittingly disturbs the wall, thus prompting the cat’s reaction, which leads to the opening of the wall, thus revealing the wife’s decomposing corpse.

The cat’s owner is a typical Poe first-person narrator who relates horrifying circumstances in what seems like a wholly rational manner. He has perpetrated a violent crime and is tortured by guilt, to the point where he reveals what he has done. The tale is rife with gory details of the narrator’s physical abuse and murder of cats, but the reader may well wonder whether the image of a hanged cat that appears to the overwrought man’s senses is a genuine image or a delusion of the murderer’s imagination.

“The Black Cat” is one of Poe’s excellent Gothic tales, which may be read with equal validity as a straight horror story or a sophisticated rendering of human emotion driven to madness, as readers from Poe’s day to the present have recognized. Moreover, the role of the wife offers tantalizing ambiguities, notably, whether she is an innocent or, given the bond between her and the black cat, a witch, with the cat her familiar. Particulars connected with the narrator’s supposed murders of the first cat and his wife furnish horror via violence, as well as providing the narrator’s hallucinations about pain and death. These scenarios foreshadow his execution by hanging, which is associated with the horrors of strangling or the violence of the neck being broken.

Benjamin F. Fisher

Born January 19, 1809, as Edgar Poe, to actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, he was the second of their three children. His siblings were William Henry Leonard Poe (1807–1831), usually known as Henry, and Rosalie Poe (1810–1874), adopted by the Mackenzies of Richmond, Virginia, so typically known as Rosalie Mackenzie Poe. David Poe Jr. deserted his family in 1811, and no documentary evidence has been discovered that details the rest of his life. Elizabeth died from tuberculosis later that year. Edgar became the foster child of John and Frances Allan, a childless couple of Richmond, so he came to sign his name as Edgar A. Poe, as if Allan were genuinely part of his name. John Allan, an immigrant from Scotland and a successful businessman, was a no-nonsense guardian. Frances Valentine Allan was far more sympathetic to their ward.

Edgar’s early life with the Allans was fairly pleasant. He received a good education in English and American schools. He then attended the University of Virginia (February–December 1826), but Allan’s scant financial support led to Poe’s accumulating high gambling debts and his withdrawal, despite his academic credibility. Poe quarreled with Allan, went to Boston, where he enlisted in the Army as “Edgar A. Perry,” and published his first book, Tamerlane and other Poems “by a Bostonian” (1827). Poe’s ambitions for authorship displeased the more practical-minded Allan.

Poe desired to be a poet akin to Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and other British Romantic poets. He published two more slim books of verse, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems (1831). He had also enrolled at West Point Military Academy, but tired of the regimen, got himself court martialed, and went to Baltimore, where he lived with his widowed, invalid grandmother, Elizabeth C. Poe, her daughter, Maria Poe Clemm, and Mrs. Clemm’s daughter, Virginia, and Henry Poe (who died in August 1831). Henry, too, had literary ambitions, but his endeavors in authorship have sometimes been confused with Edgar’s, given the practices of authorial anonymity then prevalent.

Poe’s poems reveal undeniable links to Gothicism, for example, in the fearful or emotionally unsettled speakers in Tamerlane, “The Lake. To—,” or “Spirits of the Dead,” among early pieces, where weird, claustrophobic settings increase psychological unease. More intense psychological fears enhance later poems, for example, “The Raven” (1845), “The Conqueror Worm” (1843), and “Ulalume” (1847). The speakers are prey to anxieties, which seem mysterious, but which in “The Raven” prove to be grief for Lenore, who, in delightful ambiguity, may be literally dead or representative of a feminism “dead,” that is, absent from the speaker’s life. Likewise, Ulalume is no longer part of the speaker’s normal life, but memories of her haunt him, much as a more literal ghost might torment its victim.

Poe’s poems reveal his abilities to achieve exquisite mingling of sound with sense. Implications of scene and emotion closing in to overwhelm the speaker with claustrophobic, destructive feelings in “The Lake. To—,” for example, are plausibly combined. The lyrical effects in “The Raven,” “The Conqueror Worm,” or “Ulalume” create a “music” that coalesces deftly with the decreasing rationality of the speaker, who ultimately succumbs to hypnotic effects of rhythms couching negative influences or what he imagines are negative influences.

Poe’s early years in Baltimore, 1831–1833, still remain shadowy. Realizing, perhaps, that he was unlikely to achieve financial security from publishing verse, he began to write short stories or, as he preferred, “tales,” emulating popular Gothic tales in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and like periodicals. Poe entered five tales in a contest sponsored in late 1831 by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier; none won the prize, but all were published, unsigned, during 1832. In another prize competition for the best poem and the best tale, sponsored in 1833 by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Poe’s tale “MS. Found in a Bottle” and his poem “The Coliseum” were chosen first in each category. The judges, though, didn’t want to award both prizes to a single author, so the poetry prize went to John Hill Hewitt. He was connected with the Visiter, so Poe took umbrage.

Thanks to the kindness of John Pendleton Kennedy, an established Baltimore author who was a judge in the Visiter contest, Poe was hired by Thomas W. White, who established a new monthly magazine in Richmond, Virginia, the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe was managing editor for the magazine, though White had the final word on content. Although Poe published revised versions of some of his poems and tales, along with new pieces, in the Messenger during 1835–1836, he actually gained national fame for his reviews, which were accurate, if often stringent.

Poe rapidly perceived how much Gothic horror literature had become trite, featuring too many protagonists haunted by vague angst, in grim, often crumbling ancient castles as backdrops, and seemingly supernatural, too incredible horrors, multiplying to cause unease—all expressed in high-flown language. Alternatively, diabolic physical tortures and pain were inflicted on helpless victims of temperamental tyrants. Poe’s literary artistry repeatedly transformed such clichéd settings, characters, and language into artistic symbolic representations of troubled human psychology.

In the early 1830s Poe’s awareness of potential weaknesses in horror fiction also led him onto another path. Like many young people, he reacted against what he perceived as extremes and weaknesses—here, those in popular horror fiction—by confronting them with humor. He toyed with the idea of creating a book, “Tales of the Folio Club,” featuring a group of pretentious authors, all caricatures of well-known writers of the times, who would meet monthly, enjoy ample drink and food, then proceed to read to each other an original tale, which the group would then criticize. The tales debated and the critical methods, too, would be discussed within a comic framework. The person whose tale was designated the worst had to host the next gathering. After several successive such penalties occurred to the same club member, he would decide to expose the pretentiousness and weaknesses in the club members and their productions, fleeing to a publisher to make public such folderol.

Thus Poe composed tales that parodied and satirized the themes and techniques of some much admired contemporary authors. Unfortunately, since no publisher would accept Poe’s book because of financial uncertainties about its success with the reading public, Poe published the tales individually, thereby causing a confusion about his own aims and intentions that persists to the present.

Such tales as “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), or “The Black Cat” (1843), to cite but a few, exemplify Poe’s artistic, convincing portrayals of disintegrating minds. Although the surfaces in such tales may be horrific, they are the more terrifying because they are plausible. The narrators in the first two named tales and Prospero and his followers in the third represent destructive emotional forces that wreak horrors on the minds and perhaps the bodies of such characters.

Although he learned much about what would constitute best-selling horror fiction from models in Blackwood’s and others of a similar nature, which were popular reading in his day and, in the case of Blackwood’s in particular, which published horror fiction as a staple, Poe collected his stories, revised, into two volumes dated 1840 (actually published in late 1839). The book’s title, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, has continued to create confusion among critics, and clear distinctions between “grotesque” and “arabesque” have never been established.

Poe twice ventured beyond the tale as his venue. First, heeding the advice of James Kirke Paulding, an older, established author, Poe turned to writing a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which appeared in book form in 1838, though early chapters appeared in the Messenger in early 1837, during which time Poe left the magazine. Poe’s second experiment in novel writing, The Journal of Julius Rodman, was serialized and left uncompleted in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (January–June 1840). Poe had become editor of that magazine, though he also aspired to launch a literary magazine of his own, but those attempts failed. Poe and Burton ultimately clashed, so Poe accepted the offer of George R. Graham to edit Graham’s Magazine, there publishing some of his most notable work, which included “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

After unsuccessfully enlisting Graham to join his magazine project, Poe in 1843 went to New York City, where he would eventually publish the extended version of Pym and where he engaged in journalistic work, ultimately to become editor, then editor and proprietor of the Broadway Journal, a weekly literary periodical, during 1845–1846. Again Poe published revised versions of his stories and poems, along with perceptive reviews.

After he abandoned the Broadway Journal, Poe no longer had means of responding to antagonists (such antipathies caused chiefly by his often caustic reviews of some publisher’s darling’s book), and he became targeted by those who disliked him. Virginia Poe, who had long been suffering from tuberculosis, died in January 1847. In the wake of his devastation, Poe apparently sought understanding and compassion from other women, which has also led to many prurient speculations about his nature. Homeward bound from a successful visit to his onetime home, Richmond, where he had gone to lecture on poetry and politics, Poe was discovered in very poor physical condition in Baltimore in early October 1849. He was hospitalized, remained incoherent, died on October 7, 1849, and was buried in Westminster Presbyterian graveyard. In 1876, a memorial service was held, during which Poe’s remains were moved to a new grave, replete with an imposing monument, in the front of the graveyard.

Because of a scurrilous, inaccurate biographical sketch of Poe by Rufus W. Griswold, then considered a prominent author and editor, Poe’s reputation has repeatedly been called into question. There are persisting notions that Poe was diabolic and that he modeled all his literary protagonists on his own emotionally disordered self. The real reason for Poe’s continuing fascination for readers is, however, that the weird, frightening characters and situations in his fiction and poems evince a “terror of the soul,” which, in the “Preface” to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he himself called the mainstay of his creative endeavors.

Benjamin F. Fisher

See also: “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “Ligeia”; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Fisher, Benjamin F. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 2008. The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. Edited by John Ward Ostrom. Revised, corrected, and expanded by Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye. New York: Gordian Press.

Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. 1987. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Wagenknecht, Edward. 1963. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press.

POSSESSION AND EXORCISM

Exorcism is the religious or spiritual practice of casting out demons from those who are under a state of possession from demonic or satanic spiritual forces. While possession and exorcism appear in many cultures and religious traditions, in the popular imagination they are most commonly part of Christian religious traditions. They are also extremely popular subjects for horror fiction and film, where they are commonly represented as being generally Catholic phenomena.

Within the Catholic Church, a distinction is drawn between “prayers of deliverance,” which can be offered by anyone, and formal exorcism, which can only be performed by a priest during baptism or with the permission of a bishop. The Catholic rite for a “Major Exorcism” is given in Section Eleven of the Rituale Romanum. The exorcism is performed through the recitation of prayers listed in the rite, invoking the name of Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit; and it may, though not necessarily, involve the use of religious symbols and sacraments such as communion wafers, relics, crucifixes, and holy water. The authority and power of the exorcism comes from the invocation of the Trinity, and the efficacy of the exorcism is dependent upon the faith of the practitioner and the legitimacy of the authorizing body that allows it to take place.

The manifestation of demonic possession has been variable throughout history, but signs listed in the Roman Ritual include, but are not limited to, speaking foreign or ancient languages of which the possessed has no prior knowledge; supernatural strength; knowledge of hidden things that the possessed has no way of obtaining; an aversion to anything holy; and profuse blasphemous language. With clergy often criticized for mistaking undiagnosed mental illness for possession, recorded cases of episcopal approval for exorcism rites have become increasingly rare, although modern media attention (particularly in the aftermath of key horror texts such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist) has often led to spikes in requests for exorcisms among established churches. Those under possession are often not held accountable for their actions, and thus the exorcism rite is understood not as a punishment but as an act designed to restore their individual subjectivity.

Representations of possession and exorcism in Gothic and horror literature and film tend to focus upon the process by which an individual can fall under demonic influence, the manifestation of the various demonic powers, and, although not always, the final restoration of normality and the “saving” of the possessed individual. Beginning with the satanic encounters in early horror texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), as well as Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century (1806), possession has been a regular occurring theme throughout horror history. By the late nineteenth century, concerns around evolution and degeneration led to possession being represented as a loss of humanity, frequently shown in animalistic terms. Notable examples include Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890). The ambiguity of possession in the era of increasing secularity is another repeated concern, reaching its high point with Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). The early twentieth century saw a decline in the possession narrative, although the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft was often concerned with the annihilation of the subject after an encounter with a powerful spiritual reality. The possession narrative reemerged in the 1960s with Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan (1962) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), the latter of which became a critical and commercial success.

Film has also been an extremely fruitful area for possession and exorcism narratives, several of which have become well-regarded horror classics. Key texts from horror cinema in this area include Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968) and the highly influential The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin 1973), as well as Sam Rami’s Evil Dead franchise (1981–2013). Postmillennial horror has featured a resurgence in possession and exorcism narratives—The Exorcism of Emily Rose (dir. Scott Derrickson, 2005) as well as The Last Exorcism (dir. Daniel Stamm, 2010) being high-profile examples. These films, which are relatively inexpensive to produce, generally generate high returns, despite an increasingly lukewarm critical response. This suggests that even in an era of ostensible secularity, the possession narrative and the fears that it taps into still continue to resonate with horror fans.

Jon Greenaway

See also: Devils and Demons; The Exorcist; “The Great God Pan”; The Monk; Rosemary’s Baby; Russell, Ray; “Thrawn Janet”; The Turn of the Screw; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Cardin, Matt. 2007. “The Angel and the Demon.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi, 31–64. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

Mäyrä, Frans Ilkka. 1999. Demonic Texts and Textual Demons: The Demonic Tradition, the Self, and Popular Fiction. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press. http://people.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/Demon_2005/Demon.pdf.

Schober, Adrian. 2004. Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film. New York: Macmillan.

THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF
A JUSTIFIED SINNER

James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner can validly be considered a work ahead of its time. It is arguably the first psychological horror novel in literature, and certainly its ambiguities, which allow for either psychological or supernatural readings or both, is more to the taste of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than the nineteenth.

In the late seventeenth century, George Colwan, a Scottish laird, marries an appalling religious bigot. This new wife is so offended by the merrymaking at the wedding that she refuses to come to his bed, and, very likely, he rapes her. A son born of this union, also called George, grows up to be personable and fun-loving, like his father. A year later Mrs. Colwan gives birth to another son, Robert Wringhim, apparently fathered by her hypocritical religious mentor. Young Robert becomes a fanatical believer in extreme Calvinism, convinced that he is predestined to go to heaven, regardless of what acts he may perform on Earth. The logical extension of this is that anything he does is God’s work, including murder, starting with his half-brother, George. He attempts to push George to his death off Arthur’s Seat, a height above Edinburgh, but is deterred by an apparition, which can be explained as a mirage.

Later, George is murdered, but witnesses clearly see someone else leaving the scene of the crime. However, the novel is told as a frame narrative with different points of view, and the “Editor’s Narrative” now switches to Robert’s “Confession,” which presents the reader with a very different version of events. Robert has encountered a doppelgänger of himself called Gil-Martin, who urges him on to further crimes. While Robert believes that Gil-Martin is really the Russian czar Peter the Great traveling incognito, a better interpretation is that Gil-Martin is the Devil who leads him to destruction by telling him exactly what he wants to hear. It is clear that Robert’s mind is disintegrating, but the question remains as to whether he is truly in the company of the Devil. Gil-Martin can assume any identity, and it is possible, but not certain, that he killed George.

More crimes ensue. Robert has large gaps in his memory. Gil-Martin may be a projection of Robert’s, but this is never made clear, even after Robert comes to fear Gil-Martin, tries to flee, and ultimately commits suicide, at which point the “Editor’s Narrative” resumes. The text analyzes itself and fails to come to a conclusion. The editor even inquires of the novel’s author, Mr. Hogg, who, in an amusing in-joke, is too busy with a deal in sheep to show much interest.

The sheep joke fits because James Hogg was known as “The Ettrick Shepherd.” He really had been a shepherd before he became a poet, and as a rustic bard he was acceptable to the Scottish literary establishment. But when he moved on to books like Justified Sinner, he was rejected, and the work fell into obscurity before being rediscovered and appreciated in the twentieth century. Today it is recognized as a precursor of such classic double and doppelgänger tales as Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like these and other such tales, Hogg’s novel explores the question of human identity and possible duality, and it offers acute insight into the fears and anxieties surrounding Calvinism and predestination.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Frame Story; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Further Reading

Carey, John. 1959. Introduction to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ix–xvi. New York: Grove Press.

Jackson, Richard D. 2001. “The Devil, the Doppelgänger, and the Confessions of James Hogg and Thomas De Quincey.” Studies in Hogg and His World 12: 90–103.

Smith, Nelson C. 1985. “James Hogg.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 177–183. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror that focuses on the inner psychological states and experiences of characters to generate horror, fear, and dread. Horror in general, as an artistic genre or mode, consists of prose fiction (or poetry, drama, or film) that elicits emotions of intense fear, revulsion, and dread. Horror is a subgenre of the fantastic, and it may be almost infinitely subdivided, with the major subdivisions including what might be called killer horror (centering on violent and murderous people as villains), monster horror, paranormal/supernatural horror, extreme horror (emphasizing gore and bodily destruction), and psychological horror. Unlike killer and monster horror, psychological horror does not rely on a physical, external threat to produce fear. Unlike paranormal/supernatural horror, it does not posit, or at least does not focus solely upon, the existence of a paranormal or supernatural universe as the chief source of dread. Unlike extreme horror, psychological horror emphasizes inner rather than external conflicts and brutality to produce the central emotions of fear and dread. Significantly, the boundaries between such subgenres are fluid, and many horror narratives move between genres.

Although first recognized as a subgenre of horror in film studies in the mid-twentieth century, psychological horror has a long literary history. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), with its depiction of a nightmarish walk through the forest outside colonial Salem Village, Massachusetts, can be read as an early example, since it winds up to an ambiguous conclusion in which the title character may have witnessed an actual satanic gathering in the woods or may have simply had a dream or vision that left him forever suspicious of and alienated from his family and fellow villagers. Likewise, many of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, such as “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), generate and rely on psychological horror. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) are excellent examples of the genre with their depictions of progressive psychological deterioration narrated in the first person. More recent examples of psychological horror fiction include L. Ron Hubbard’s Fear (1940), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), and Stephen King’s Misery (1987) and The Shining (1977), all of which dramatize the terror of growing psychosis and attendant violence.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”: The Blurring of Sanity and Insanity

Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) reads on the one hand as a gruesome horror-supernatural story but on the other as a realistic, if terrifying, psychological fiction in which sanity and insanity blur. It is one of his most popular tales, and it has been anthologized countless times.

Attempting justification for murdering an old man for whom he has served as caretaker, the story’s first-person narrator states that the latter’s eye appalled him, so he murdered the old man to negate the repellent eye, carefully dismembered the corpse, and buried the parts under the floor. The narrative proceeds detail by detail, as if such careful, seemingly rational explanation of the circumstances will demonstrate the narrator’s sanity. Such obsession as he reveals concerning his opinion about the old man’s eye initially indicates that this account is rational, only to lead to a conclusion in which the narrator’s guilty conscience causes him to imagine that his crime is perfect, so that he feels emboldened to invite the police to search his home. But he has begun to hear a strange noise, which to him seems to be the beating of the old man’s heart, and ultimately this sound drives him into frenzy; he tells his visitors to tear up the floor boards, exposing the truth he tried to conceal. What the narrator hears may be the sound made by an insect, colloquially called “the Lesser Death-Watch,” though no precise origin has been established. But more important than any specific source is the fact that the imagined sound drives the narrator to his undoing, thereby ironically undercutting all of his careful planning.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” remains as popular today as it was with its original readers. It has been adapted many times for radio, television, and film.

Benjamin F. Fisher

Film has provided a welcoming medium for horror, and psychological horror has played an essential part in film history. Sometimes this has been linked to literary sources; adaptations of Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Haunting of Hill House (filmed as The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, 1963), and The Shining (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980) are considered film classics. Cinema began to explore psychological horror very early, especially in the case of German Expressionism (1919–1933), which created a striking visual style by exteriorizing characters’ often dark inner states by means of exaggerated and surreal lighting and set design. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which is set in an asylum, and Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which follows a murdering pedophile through Berlin, use composition and lighting to reflect inner disorientation and fear. Also often cited as early examples of cinematic psychological horror are The Black Cat (1934), Cat People (1942), and White Zombie (1932), the latter of which, despite its title, is more a psychological film than monster movie.

Given the fluid boundaries between horror subgenres, a number of horror narratives can be read or viewed from a variety of critical perspectives that unite psychological horror with something else. For example, both Jack Finney’s classic horror/science fiction novel The Body Snatchers (1955) and its several film adaptations as Invasion of the Body Snatchers—as in Dan Siegel’s 1956 version, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version, and Abel Ferrara’s 1993 version—are as much psychological studies of disorientation in the face of an almost inconceivable and unbearable event—the sinister replacement of one’s friends, acquaintances, and loved ones by alien duplicates (“pod people,” as they are commonly referred to in popular culture)—as they are science fiction invasion narratives. Both Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and its superlative 1991 film adaptation by director Jonathan Demme stand more as studies in madness, inhering in the almost transcendent and magisterial insanity of the genius, psychologist, and serial killer Hannibal Lecter, than they do as killer thrillers.

Jim Holte

See also: Bloch, Robert; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Fear; Harris, Thomas; The Haunting of Hill House; “Ligeia”; Misery; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; “Young Goodman Brown.”

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Hoppenstand, Gary. 2001. “Horror Fiction.” In The Guide to United States Popular Culture, edited by Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, 406–408. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Massé, Michelle A. 2015. “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 307–320. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Spratford, Becky Siegel, and Tammy Hennigh Clausen. 2004. “Psychological Horror.” In Horror Readers’ Advisory: The Librarian’s Guide to Vampires, Killer Tomatoes, and Haunted Houses, 90–97. Chicago: American Library Association.

Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum.

PULP HORROR

The term “pulp horror” refers to a brand of horror fiction chiefly but not exclusively limited to twentieth-century popular magazines printed on cheap paper and catering to lower- and middle-class readers. Pulp horror is marked by an adherence to formula writing and stereotypical characters and themes at the expense of originality.

Horror fiction had been comparatively rare in the general-interest pulp magazines of the twentieth century until the advent of Weird Tales in 1923. Titles such as Argosy were formulated to appeal to a broad audience, and individual issues typically contained general fiction and the commonly accepted popular genres, such as mystery, Western, and romance. Horror was considered “off-trail,” an editorial term denoting a story out of the mainstream of acceptability, and only the most compelling horror stories by reputable authors found their way into print.

For its first decade, Weird Tales had the field virtually to itself, and its readers were largely content with the traditional subgenres of supernatural fiction—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and like monsters. It set the standard for magazine horror fiction in its day, and although it claimed to have no editorial taboos, in reality its contents hewed to common and comfortable horror conventions, with the contributions by H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and very few others representing notable exceptions.

The first wave of Hollywood horror talkies in 1931–1932 directly inspired a parallel trend in pulp detection fiction. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and other now-classic films demonstrated that the general public was open to horror stories. This led to a wave of “menace” tales appearing in pulp magazines such as Detective-Dragnet and Dime Mystery Magazine, in which detective protagonists battled ghoulish fiends, the classic Prohibition-era gangster antagonist having become passé.

In 1933, menace detective fiction evolved into the mystery-terror story, becoming a distinct subgenre unto itself. In the fall of that year, Popular Publications reformulated Dime Mystery Magazine as a vehicle for horror-themed suspense stories with a specific mystery—but not deductive—slant.

Publisher Harry Steeger cited the horrific Grand Guignol Theater in Paris as the inspiration for this unique new brand of pulp story, but Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade were equally influential. Editor Rogers Terrill described the rigid formula writers were required to follow slavishly: “Our stories usually concern a young man and a young woman in love, either married or sweethearts, and terror menaces both of them. The emotional effect of terror felt for someone else is far stronger than fear for oneself. Where a terrible menace threatens a man and woman in love, they will fight like hell for each other. . . . We want an eerie, uncanny type of menace, which may seem supernatural as the story progresses, but which can be logically explained at the end—or it may be definitely supernatural” (Lenninger 1935, 16).

Dime Mystery’s rising circulation proved Steeger correct. The title was followed by Terror Tales (1934) and Horror Stories (1935), in which the new mystery-terror formula was relentlessly codified by writers such as Norvell W. Page, Frederick C. Davis, Wyatt Blassingame, Hugh B. Cave, Arthur J. Burks, Paul Ernst, and John H. Knox. “Weird Menace” became the operative term for these super-specialized stories wherein lay protagonists—as distinct from official or semiofficial crime solvers—confront and defeat seemingly supernatural situations and survive, if not triumph. One conceit of the formula avoided admitting that any actual supernatural agency was at work. The ghouls, fiends, vampires, and other depraved monsters were usually revealed as diabolical frauds, giving the stories a climactic twist in the direction of normalcy triumphant. A sprinkling of supernatural denouements were offered to create an element of uncertainty. The editorial need to push the boundaries of taboo situations inevitably led to excesses in the areas of sex and sadism, as typical Weird Menace titles such as “Death’s Loving Arms,” “Girls for the Devil’s Abattoir,” and “Daughter of Dark Desire” suggest, resulting in censorship pressures that culminated with the banning of such magazines in 1940 and their extinction in 1941.

With variations, the Weird Menace formula has been periodically revived. The so-called “Men’s Sweat” magazines of the 1950s and 1960s flirted with it without success. Readers preferred Nazi torturers and naturalistic wildlife encounters instead of the faux-supernatural horror element. However, Weird Menace continues to thrive in Hollywood, as exemplified by the cycles of Scream, Saw, and Nightmare on Elm Street film franchises, in which hapless teenage protagonists endlessly reenact the grisly Ten Little Indians formula of classic mystery fiction, but with horrific trappings.

Will Murray

See also: Lovecraft, H. P.; Occult Detectives; Penny Dreadful; Smith, Clark Ashton; Splatterpunk; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Jones, Robert Kenneth. 1978. The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s. New York: New American Library.

Lenninger, August. 1935. “Six of a Chain.” Writer’s Digest, January. Cincinnati, Ohio.

Q

QUINN, SEABURY (1889–1969)

Born in the nation’s capital during America’s Gilded Age, and infamous today as the creator of the supernatural sleuth Jules de Grandin, Seabury Grandin Quinn was more than a prolific pulpsmith. He also led a varied career as a soldier during World War I, processed secret documents for military intelligence during World War II, acted as legal consultant to various chemical and mortuary concerns, and contributed extensively to the funeral trade through his skills in teaching, writing, and editing.

Quinn’s first professional fiction sale, “The Stone Image,” appeared in the May 1, 1919, issue of The Thrill Book followed by a prodigious amount of fiction throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, with 146 tales in Weird Tales alone. Although his output slowed with the impact of the paper shortage on magazine publication during World War II, he continued to write for a variety of markets, contributing to Robert A. W. Lowndes’s Magazine of Horror in 1965.

Conventional wisdom denigrates Quinn for earning more money as a writer for Weird Tales than H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith combined by cranking out one formulaic tale after another, mindful only of word-count and the obligatory nude scene; but even the fastidious Lovecraft acknowledged in a 1936 letter to fellow fantasist Catherine L. Moore that Quinn was one of several “brilliant figures” while lamenting his “literary ruin” through the “effect of commerce on the writer” (Lovecraft 1976, 327).

It is true that works like the ambitious de Grandin novel The Devil’s Bride (1932) fail to gel and have more than their share of faults despite episodes of great imagination and the high quality of some of their intercalated narratives. Nonetheless, two collections with overlapping contents, Is the Devil a Gentleman? (1970) and Night Creatures (2003), demonstrate just how brilliant Quinn could be in top form. The former contains four stories that are not shared with its 2003 counterpart, and these are quite interesting in idea. However, they are not developed with particular finesse. For instance, in spite of the enthusiasm Quinn and Virgil Finlay expressed for “The Globe of Memories” (1937) while Finlay was creating its Weird Tales cover art, the stilted antique dialogue compromises the shifts between medieval Italy and contemporary New York it is meant to reinforce. Night Creatures more consistently represents Quinn at his best. That he treated lycanthropy with rare sympathy and an unusual variety of approaches is evinced by the first of its six unshared stories, the simultaneously moving and unnerving “The Phantom Farmhouse” (1923)—filmed as part of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1971—and the contrast it presents with the malevolent lycanthrope engaged in a battle of wits with the doughty Jules de Grandin in “The Thing in the Fog” (1933) a decade later. “Mortmain” (1940) revolves around issues the author would have encountered under less perilous circumstances while offering advice about mortuary law. Sympathy for the victims of social injustice appears repeatedly in his work and manifests here in two quite different stories from 1941, “There Are Such Things” and “Two Shall Be Born.” Particularly impressive among the less familiar stories is “The Golden Spider” (1940), a supernatural tour de force in a medieval French setting reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne, with mythic undertones and a measure of sweetness that brings it closer to the fairy tale. If, when compared to the rest of these, “The Gentle Werewolf” (1940) is enjoyable but unremarkable in its convoluted plot and its transplantation of common fairytale motifs to a thirteenth-century Asian setting, the other four among the shared stories show Quinn adept at weaving plot and character into a setting that seems natural to both. “Glamour” (1939) is a superior specimen of the type of rural supernaturalism best known today from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and the work of Quinn’s friend Manly Wade Wellman. “Uncanonized” (1939) tells the love story of a suicide turned werewolf, with an odd ecclesiastical twist again worthy of Averoigne. “Is the Devil a Gentleman?” (1942) revolves around the moral dilemma of accepting supernatural aid from dubious forces or submitting to persecution and death from the superstitions of colonial New England. Another paradox faces attendees at the “Masked Ball” (1947), who discover that the dead fear the living at least as intensely as the living fear them.

It is this yoking of the conventional with surprising ethical or mythical twists that makes Quinn’s best work a continued pleasure to read, so that even a novella as sentimental as the 1938 Christmas trilogy Roads entertains precisely because the legend he creates to account for the figure of Santa Claus through the unusual mixture of Norse mythology with court intrigue and the life of Christ from infancy to crucifixion is handled with such conviction.

The ninety-three case studies of Jules de Grandin present an interesting, if not always entirely successful, succession of crime stories and supernatural adventures, while also offering a fascinating view of American society during the years in which they were written. The predominant setting, Harrisonville and its environs, encompasses aspects of the idyllic small town and the bright, cold city of the hard-boiled school; the dark, superstitious forests of the Old World and a wide assortment of immigrant peoples and supernatural forces from every portion of Europe and Asia. As a result the tone of the tales is not as uniform as Quinn’s detractors claim. Tales such as “The Devil People” (1929) have a gritty, hard-boiled quality. Others, such as “The House of Three Corpses” (1939), mix elements of traditional and hard-boiled detection with a strong dose of humor. “Ancient Fires” (1926) has a dreamlike quality, as does “Pledged to the Dead” (1937).

Many of the tales are also interesting ethically. In “The Isle of Missing Ships” (1926) and “Stealthy Death” (1930) hypocritical missionaries preying on the wealth and women of the foreign peoples they have been sent to assist precipitate horrendous events off the coast of Malaysia and present-day Harrisonville. The history behind the murders in the latter tale is even more horrible than the murders themselves. In “The Devil’s Rosary” (1929), not only is the protagonist to blame for the assassinations launched against his family, but de Grandin sympathizes with the “villains” sufficiently to return their lost treasure to them and set the latest would-be assassin free. Sometimes Quinn repeats situations to explore a theme from more than one perspective, as when he deals sympathetically with the supplantation of personality in “Ancient Fires” and “A Gamble in Souls” (1933), but handles it with horror in “Trespassing Souls” (1929) and “The Brain-Thief” (1930), often revealing what is happening not only from the victims’ viewpoint, but from the miscreant’s viewpoint as well. The creation of de Grandin allowed Quinn to rail against the puritans, hypocrites, bigots, bullies, and snobs in a world in which he was outwardly comfortable, defending the rights of the individual regardless of their social status, race, or sins. Flying against convention, de Grandin has no more concern about burying a black woman in a white cemetery or an unshriven strumpet whose body had been the altar for the Black Mass in consecrated ground than he has in slitting the throat of a man who treated him treacherously or spilling down the stairs to his death an old man he knows will otherwise get away with murder.

Another remarkable feature of de Grandin’s adventures is Quinn’s talent for creating tableaux described with such care that they live in the memory long afterward. They are too numerous to list here, but the girl enwrapped and enraptured by the deadly embrace of a titanic snake in “The Tenants of Broussac” (1926), the butchering of the shipwrecked survivors in “The Isle of Missing Ships” (1926), the mummy standing silently in the room of death with its lips and staff smeared with blood in “The Grinning Mummy” (1926), the flight from death by supernatural winds along the Himalayas in “The Devil’s Rosary” (1929), the ghost jeering through the nursery skylight in “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” (1943), Amelie awaiting her lover beside her lonely tomb in “Pledged to the Dead” (1937), the statue’s final appearance in the courtyard in “Stoneman’s Memorial” (1942), and the mummy tracking its prey by sound alone in “The Man in Crescent Terrace” (1946) are all worthy examples that give the lie to any notion that the de Grandin corpus, let alone Quinn’s work as a whole, is uniformly bland or carelessly written.

Jim Rockhill

See also: Mummies; Occult Detectives; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Hoppenstand, Gary. 2013. “Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin: The Supernatural Sleuth in Weird Tales.” In Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, 166–178. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. 1976. Selected Letters, Vol. V: 1934–1937. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Quinn, Seabury. 1966. “By Way of Explanation.” In The Phantom Fighter. Sauk City, WI: Mycroft & Moran. Reprinted in The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 1 by Seabury Quinn, xxi. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

Quinn, Seabury, Jr. 2001. “My Father and I.” In The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 2 by Seabury Quinn, v. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

Ruber, Peter, and Joseph Wrzos. 2003. “Introduction.” In Night Creatures by Seabury Quinn, ix–xiii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

Weinberg, Robert W. 2001. “My Life with Jules de Grandin.” In The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 1 by Seabury Quinn, ix–xi. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

QUIROGA, HORACIO (1878–1937)

Horacio Quiroga was a Uruguayan author who pioneered a breed of magical realism that would flower in Latin American fiction in the late twentieth century. An avid reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was drawn to literature that explored humanity’s dark unconscious, a landscape that took form for him in the tropical rainforests of Argentina, where he briefly operated a failing plantation. His Jungle Tales (1918), crafted in imitation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), featured a magical world of human-animal communication, a realm of dreamy fantasy whose obverse, darker side were the stories gathered in Tales of Love, Madness, and Death (1917). Deeply indebted to Poe, these were strikingly brutal and hallucinatory explorations of psychic extremity and graphic physical horror. “The Feather Pillow,” for example, relates the tale of a vampiric parasite inhabiting the eponymous object, which slowly drains the life from a beautiful young woman, while “The Decapitated Chicken” is a conte cruel (a tale of cynicism and cruelty) in which a degenerate family is riven by an act of grisly violence.

This latter story was included, along with numerous others from the author’s brief but prolific career, in a retrospective volume of English translations, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (1976). Not included in this collection is the 1927 tale “The Vampire,” a pioneering work about the predatory nature of cinema and its seeming ability to revivify the dead, which has spawned a minor tradition of what might be called “celluloid horror” stories (as in, for example, the works gathered in David J. Schow’s 1988 anthology Silver Scream). The best compilation of Quiroga’s horror-inflected tales is the Spanish-language collection Cunetos de Horror, published in 2012 by Ediciones Traspiés in Grenada, Spain.

Quiroga’s two novels, History of a Troubled Love (1908) and Past Love (1929), while less overtly fantastic, explore themes of obsessive desire in a way that continued his fascination with morbid psychology, but it is his short fiction that has contributed most to the genre. Grim and pitiless, yet with a streak of macabre irony, his horror stories illuminate a world devoid of beauty and hope, yet whose denizens, driven by perverse obsessions, refuse to recognize that they are damned. Along with fellow modernist Kafka, he contributed to the development of an absurdist strain of modern horror fiction, counterpoised, in its matter-of-fact grotesquery, with the more extravagant cosmic horrors of the Lovecraft school. A haunted and sickly man, Quiroga committed suicide in 1937.

Rob Latham

See also: Body Horror; The Grotesque; de Maupassant, Guy; Kafka, Franz; Lovecraftian Horror; Poe, Edgar Allan; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Flores, Angel. 1955. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” Hispania 38 (2): 187–192.

Rueda, Jose A. B. 2004. “Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937).” In Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Darrell B. Lockhart, 158–163. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Wong-Rusell, Michael E. 1996. “Science and the Uncanny in the Fiction of Horacio Quiroga.” PhD Dissertation, Boston University.

R

RADCLIFFE, ANN (1764–1823)

The best paid novelist of the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe was a literary celebrity during her lifetime whose Gothic novels were incredibly popular with the British reading public. Born in 1764, the year the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was published, Radcliffe was a reclusive middle-class writer who published a series of Gothic novels at the end of the eighteenth century during the height of the genre’s popularity. Within an eight-year period, Radcliffe produced five Gothic novels, the last three of which proved incredibly successful in terms of commercial and aesthetic value; her works are The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). A historical romance, Gaston de Blondeville (1826), was published posthumously. Since her death in 1823, Radcliffe has continued to influence writers in the horror genre with many of them referencing her works within their own.

Radcliffe’s biography has long been a challenge for literary historians. Much of her early life is unknown and she lived a private life during her years as a respected writer. Unlike other popular authors of the period, like Horace Walpole, only a single letter of correspondence, discovered in 2014, to her mother-in-law survives. The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti even attempted to write a book-length biography of Radcliffe but was forced to abandon her plans when it became evident that the historical sources simply do not exist. Radcliffe’s place in the history of horror fiction, however, is an accepted fact despite the lack of biographical details. After Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic novel slowly but surely took hold on the British reading public’s imagination. By 1777, the second Gothic novel, The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, was published, each following year seeing the publication of more Gothic novels until the trend finally began to slow down in the early years of the nineteenth century. Radcliffe was among the many literate middle- and working-class individuals who saw fit to write in the form presented by Gothic fiction with her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne appearing in 1789 and A Sicilian Romance a year later. Neither novel is an outstanding work on its own, both owing much to the earlier works by Walpole and Reeve as they are more imitative than anything else. It was the publication of her third novel in 1791, The Romance of the Forest, that not only demonstrated her complex growth as a writer but her mastery of Gothic fiction and subsequently earned her the adoration of the reading public.

An Ann Radcliffe Chronology

1764

Ann Radcliffe is born—the same year the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, is published.

1789

Radcliffe publishes her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne.

1790

Radcliffe publishes A Sicilian Romance.

1791

Radcliffe publishes The Romance of the Forest.

1794

Radcliffe publishes The Mysteries of Udolpho. It will become one of the most influential and highly regarded examples of the Gothic novel.

1797

Radcliffe publishes The Italian.

1823

Radcliffe dies at the age of fifty-eight.

1826

Radcliffe’s historical romance Gaston de Blondeville is published. So is her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” containing her ideas on terror and horror in Gothic fiction, which will become enduringly relevant.

2014

Radcliffe’s sole surviving letter of correspondence, to her mother-in-law, is discovered.

Matt Cardin

Following the success of The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe was advanced £500, an unheard-of sum for a novelist at the time, for her next novel, which would subsequently become her magnum opus, The Mysteries of Udolpho. The immediate success of The Mysteries of Udolpho established Radcliffe as a household name among middle- and upper-class families, making her perhaps the most influential figure in Gothic fiction for decades. Two years after the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, a young member of Parliament named Matthew Lewis published his own Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), a work that seemingly countered many of the themes and motifs presented by Radcliffe’s brand of Gothic fiction. Radcliffe’s response to Lewis was her final novel published during her lifetime, The Italian, a work she was paid £800 for, that took issue with the more masculine style of Gothic fiction found in The Monk. After The Italian, Radcliffe quietly disappeared from public life and died in 1823 at the age of 58. In 1826, an essay by Radcliffe, entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” was posthumously published, in which she states her ideas on the function of terror and horror in Gothic fiction, a distinction that has continued to be relevant ever since.

Radcliffe’s contributions to Gothic fiction are immense. Many of her works, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, utilize major eighteenth-century philosophical ideas such as the sublime and sensibility that illustrate a strong intellectual complexity that is lacking in other Gothic texts of the period. Her focus on the picturesque and description add depth to a genre already dependent on aesthetics and the imagination. Her own brand of Gothic fiction, sometimes called female Gothic (in direct opposition to the male Gothic best represented by Lewis) or Radcliffean Gothic, tends to focus on a young female protagonist who is normally pursued by a man of power, the use of terror over horror, the explained supernatural (true supernatural occurrences do not exist in Radcliffean Gothic—what is perceived to be supernatural is always logically explained by the conclusion of the text), and an integration of the aforementioned eighteenth-century concepts like sensibility and the sublime.

Radcliffe had an immediate influence on Gothic fiction during her literary career, influencing many of her contemporaries, like Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom, and Regina Maria Roche, to fashion Radcliffean Gothic novels of their own. Later writers of the horror genre have been greatly influenced by her as well. For example, Edgar Allan Poe references Radcliffe and her work in several works of his own, most notably his “The Oval Portrait” (1842). Charlotte and Emily Brontë are among other nineteenth-century writers who are clearly inspired by Radcliffe, and the aforementioned Christina Rossetti found Radcliffe’s biography a topic worthy of study. Strong parallels with Radcliffe and modern writers like Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Susan Hill can also be found, once again demonstrating Radcliffe’s lasting legacy on the horror genre.

Joel T. Terranova

See also: The Brontë Sisters; The Castle of Otranto; Hill, Susan; Jackson, Shirley; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Poe, Edgar Allan; Rice, Anne; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Durant, David. 1982. “Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, no. 3: 519–530.

Michasiw, Kim Ian. 1994. “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6, no. 4: 327–346.

Norton, Rictor. 1999. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

Rogers, Deborah D. 1996. Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Townshend, Dale. 2014. Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism, and the Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE RATS

The Rats was the first novel by British horror writer James Herbert. It was published in the United Kingdom in 1974 by New English Library a few months before they also published Stephen King’s first book, Carrie. The novel tells the story of a horde of large, savage, mutant rats invading London’s docklands and killing people, an incursion investigated by a secondary school teacher named Harris. Herbert was inspired by a passage in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in which Dracula’s servant Renfield dreams of thousands of rats with red eyes. He was also inspired by his own impoverished upbringing in rat-infested slums in East London.

The Rats established the signature style and themes that would form the hallmark of Herbert’s future works: sparse and direct prose, explicit depictions of sex and violence, the vision of an empty metropolis, and a heavily political subtext. The book opens with the rats eating a former salesman who was drummed out of his job due to his homosexuality and is now drinking himself to death in abandoned buildings. As London is overrun, the disenfranchised—the homeless, the addicted, the poor, and the young—suffer at the rats’ hands (or paws) while the government does nothing. Herbert has both main political parties, Labour and Conservative, blaming each other for the living conditions of the poor that allowed the mutant rats to breed, and it is not Foskins, the pompous and ineffective undersecretary of state, who saves the day, but the ordinary, working-class Harris.

Through this working-class focus, Herbert’s novel democratized British horror by depicting characters who were not aristocrats or intellectuals as they were in other British horror staples such as the novels of Dennis Wheatley and the films produced by Hammer Studios. His protagonists were ordinary working people with the courage to act. Moreover, his emphasis on the explicit depiction of violence, while it alienated many people—famously, high-street book chain WH Smith initially refused to sell the book—effectively opened horror up to a new proletarian readership and ushered in a new era of British horror literature.

The Rats was loosely adapted as the 1982 Canadian horror movie Deadly Eyes, which was poorly received, and which Herbert himself repudiated.

Simon Brown

See also: Herbert, James.

Further Reading

Cabell, James. 2013. James Herbert—The Authorised True Story 1943–2013. London: John Blake.

Jones, Stephen. 1992. James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Spark, Alasdair. 1993. “Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 147–160. London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press.

“THE RATS IN THE WALLS”

Written in August or September of 1923 and published in Weird Tales for March 1924, “The Rats in the Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft must have seemed, given the rather poor content of the early Weird Tales, an absolute miracle, probably the strongest American horror story since Poe. It was one of Lovecraft’s early triumphs, and it remains one of his most widely read and anthologized works.

The story in fact bears a visible relationship to Poe: like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Rats in the Walls” concerns the dissolution of the “house”—in both an architectural and a genealogical sense—of an ancient and now extinct family, whose final representative comes to a bad end. In this case, the last of the de la Poers, whose only son has died from injuries suffered during World War I, restores and moves into Exham Priory in England, the family seat from which an ancestor fled centuries before under very mysterious circumstances. He finds himself haunted by spectral rats, which seem to be streaming by the thousands inside the walls, downward, into depths below the lowest cellars.

This is not merely a job for the exterminator, because apparently only he and his pet cats can hear the rats; but it is not a case of delusion, either, because further investigations, in the company of scientific men and Captain Norrys, his late son’s war comrade, reveal hidden grottos and caves filled with thousands of human and animal bones, plus blasphemous altars and ultimately, it is implied, a pathway to the Earth’s center where Nyarlathotep, “the mad, faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute players.” Generations of de la Poers had indulged in unspeakable cultic practices, including human (and subhuman) sacrifice and cannibalism. As the last de la Poer penetrates the abyss, he reverts to atavistic type, his mind sliding back through the centuries, gibbering first in Elizabethan English, then older languages all the way back to a bestial gurgle. Even then he does not make it all the way to the throne of Nyarlathotep, because he is overtaken in the dark by his colleagues, having apparently killed and partially devoured Captain Norrys, although he insists that he is innocent and the rats did it.

This is a story of a man overwhelmed by accursed hereditary “influences.” His attempt to live as a modern, moral person fails precisely because of who he actually is and what his ancestors have done. His reversion to the monstrous is brought on by uncovering what was best left hidden. A parallel to “The Fall of the House of Usher” recurs. In the Poe story the fissure in the wall that the narrator observes clearly symbolizes the unsoundness of Roderick Usher’s mind, so that when the house literally falls to pieces, so does he, psychologically. Lovecraft’s character, too, as he descends lower and lower through caves and tunnels, is delving into his own mind, the contents of which predate not only his own individual existence, but humanity itself. Barton Levi St. Armand’s The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft contains a cogent analysis of this story in terms of dream imagery and Jungian archetypes.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Ancestral Curse; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan.

Further Reading

Lévy, Maurice. 1988. “The Depths of Horror.” In Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, translated by S. T. Joshi, 63–72. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. 1999. “The Rats in the Walls.” In The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 89–108. Annotations by S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin Books.

Monteleone, Paul. 1995. “‘The Rats in the Walls’: A Study in Pessimism.” Lovecraft Studies 32 (Spring): 18–26.

St. Armand, Barton Levi. 1977. The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press.

RAY, JEAN (1887–1964)

Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym of Belgian writer Raymundus Joannes de Kremer. His fiction combines elements of the Gothic and modernist fiction; his stories involve both sensational and philosophical elements, laid out with a self-awareness in the story itself that bridges the gap between the more straightforward textual qualities of Gothic fiction—the reliance on frame narratives, the use of letters and other documentation alongside or instead of direct narration—and the formal experimentation of surrealist and modernist writers. His stories are characterized by a rapid switching between wonder and horror; they are often whimsical even as they are terrible. Destiny, Faustian bargains, and demonic presences, who are associated with madness as much as they are with malice or temptation, are his preferred themes.

“The Shadowy Street”: A Netherworld of Living Darkness

Also translated as “The Tenebrous Alley” (original title: “La Ruelle Tenebreuse”), Jean Ray’s short story “The Shadowy Street” first appeared in his second collection, Le Croisiere des Ombres (1932), and was first published in English in his 1956 collection Ghouls in My Grave. It is generally regarded as one of Ray’s best stories, and it shows him using the narrative strategy of multiplying accounts. The narrator finds two letters, in two different languages, written by two different persons, both of which independently describe certain related curious events in Hamburg. The first letter, written in German by a woman named Frida, relates how the city seems to have become haunted by a terrifying darkness, deeper than night. Dozens of people vanish without a trace, even from within the supposed safety of their homes. On one occasion, she describes how her sister fought off an invisible assailant, not unlike Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla,” wounding it with a sword. Her story breaks off abruptly. The second letter, in French, was penned by a schoolteacher living in Hamburg. He has found a street that no one else can see, Saint Beregonne’s Lane, which seems to lead out of this world. Like certain localities in the stories of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, the lane seems to select who will be able to find it. The far end of the lane is a netherworld of malevolent, living darkness, shadowing the city, occupied by shades who venture forth into the real Hamburg by night to wreak havoc. The schoolteacher finally burns down that part of the city, trying to close off the aperture. The narrator investigates further, but succeeds, as is not unusual in Ray’s stories, only in deepening the mystery.

Michael Cisco

Ray was born in the Belgian town of Ghent, also known as Gand; his father was an official in maritime affairs and his mother ran a girls’ school. Ray did not complete college, worked in low-level city clerical jobs, got involved in writing, and worked for a time as an editor on local periodicals. He married in 1912.

Ray’s first book was a collection of grotesque and fantastic short stories called Les Contes du Whisky, or “Whisky Stories,” published in 1925. These tales reflected Ray’s lasting interest in England and America, his penchant for wildly unusual ideas, and his love of Hoffmann-esque experts, mad scientists, and other ominous officials.

Charged with participation in a scheme of embezzlement in 1926, Ray was found guilty, and in 1927 he was sent to prison. It was as a prisoner that he wrote two of his best known works, “The Shadowy Street” and “The Mainz Psalter.” Although he had been sentenced to a six-year term, Ray was released in 1929. From this point forward, the exact details of his life are hard to pin down. Since Ray deliberately obscured or even falsified many of the facts of his life, it is not certain whether he really did engage in smuggling, rum running, or piracy, as he sometimes claimed. It is clear that he earned his living as a sailor for a time.

Financial troubles and a lack of opportunities made him a very prolific writer. Jean Ray was only one of many pen names, John Flanders being the one he preferred when writing in Flemish, which is one of the two languages commonly spoken in Belgium. Ray had been asked to translate a series of German-language stories about a fictional detective named Harry Dickson, the “American Sherlock Holmes.” Ray didn’t think the stories were that good, and he began writing his own, expanding the adventures of Harry Dickson by hundreds of new tales.

It is not clear what Ray did during World War II, but after the war’s end he published six books in rapid succession: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l’Inidicible Peur (1943), Malpertuis (1943), Les Cercles de l’Epouvante (1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944), and Le Livre des Fantomes (1947). The first English edition of his work was Ghouls in My Grave, published in 1965.

In 1955, French author Raymond Queneau helped to bring Malpertuis back into print in France; this helped Ray avoid disappearing from public view. In 1959, he met with Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker known for Hiroshima Mon Amour and L’Année Derniere á Marienbad. Resnais was interested in building a film around Harry Dickson. While the film never happened, it is likely that this encounter was responsible for the involvement of Resnais’s screenwriter, Jean Ferry, in creating the screenplay for Harry Kuemel’s 1971 film adaptation of Malpertuis. There was also a film adaptation of La Cité de l’Inidicible Peur by Jean-Pierre Mocky in 1964.

Michael Cisco

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Malpertuis; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Monteiro, António. 2011. “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray.” Weird Fiction Review, November 21. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/ghosts-fear-and-parallel-worlds-the-supernatural-fiction-of-jean-ray.

Van Calenbergh, Hubert. 1999. “Jean Ray and the Belgian School of the Weird.” Studies in Weird Fiction 24 (Winter): 14–17.

“THE REACH”

“The Reach” is a story by Stephen King that was published under the title “Do the Dead Sing?” in the November 1981 issue of Yankee magazine and later collected in Skeleton Crew (1985). It is one of King’s most evocative depictions of life in small-town Maine, and thus can be considered a sidebar to his tales of horror set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock.

Although its narrative point of view is omniscient, the story is essentially a glimpse into the mind of Stella Flanders, a woman who lives on Goat Island off the coast of Maine. In her ninety-five years, Stella has never once crossed the reach, the name given to the stretch of water that separates the island from the mainland. Suffering from cancer, Stella has begun to see ghosts, notably that of her dead husband Bill, who invites her to cross the reach to join him. Stella’s thoughts about Bill and the life and family she had with him leads her to reflect on her many years on the island and the people she has known. Her random memories conjure the image of a self-sufficient, close-knit community who have looked out for one another and lived their lives largely independent of the world beyond their island. At the height of a severe snowstorm, Stella bundles up and sets out to cross the frozen-over reach to the mainland. En route, she finds herself helped out by Bill and friends who passed away over the years. The next day she is found frozen to death on the mainland—and the discovery that she’s wearing a hat that Bill handed to her during her crossing dispels any doubt that the friends who accompanied her were only in her imagination. Her fate also confirms that crossing the reach was not just a physical journey, it was metaphoric for passing from life into the afterlife.

Auspiciously, “The Reach” was published one year before Different Season, a collection of four short novels in which King applied the techniques and approaches he had honed in his macabre fiction to stories with mainstream literary appeal. The tale is one of his most successful demonstrations of the potential for fantastic and supernatural fiction to address concerns universal to fiction irrespective of genre pigeonholing—an appraisal that has gained considerable traction in the twenty-first century with King’s embrace by the literary mainstream. The title “Do the Dead Sing?” alludes to a passage in the story—“Do the dead sing? Do they love?” (King 1986, 566)—made in reference to the souls of the dead singing over the dying into the warm embrace of their community in the afterlife. It casts in a reassuring light the proximity of the dead to the living that is more often depicted as menacing in tales of the supernatural.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: King, Stephen.

Further Reading

Collings, Michael, and Engbretson, David. 1985. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

King, Stephen. 1986. Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet.

Reino, Joseph. 1988. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Boston: Twayne.

Winter, Douglas. 1986. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: Signet.

“THE RECRUDESCENE OF IMRAY”/
“THE RETURN OF IMRAY”

“The Recrudescence of Imray” by Rudyard Kipling was published in America, in 1891, in Kipling’s fiction collection Mine Own People, the same year that it was published in England in Life’s Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People under the title “The Return of Imray.” The story is a loose sequel to Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast,” and like that story it features the character of Strickland, a British police investigator living in India who has a deep knowledge of the Indian people and their ways. Also like “The Mark of the Beast,” “The Recrudescence of Imray” touches on the “imperial Gothic,” the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary subgenre in which traditional Gothic motifs were drawn upon and transformed to show the dominant Western values of the British Empire being threatened by contamination from the “other” represented by colonial subjects, particularly in India and other Eastern locales.

“The Recrudescence of Imray” is in fact set in India, and it begins with the disappearance of Imray, apparently a very genial man-about-town. After Imray has been missing some months, Strickland of the police and his dog Tietjens move into Imray’s bungalow, though Tietjens refuses to enter and sleeps on the veranda. When the narrator visits, he feels and shares Tietjens’s unease, and when he and Strickland investigate some snakes that are living between the ceiling cloth and the bungalow roof, they discover the corpse of Imray. Strickland realizes the murderer could only be Imray’s servant, Bahadur Khan, and he confronts Khan, who confesses: he believed that Imray’s patting the head of his child was the casting of an evil eye, for the child died soon thereafter. But though Strickland wants to hang Bahadur Khan, the man escapes European justice.

Although the two titles of the story hint at humor, “The Recrudescence of Imray” is grim. A benevolent gesture is misinterpreted, for the different cultures have failed to communicate, and the conclusion offers no real hope for better relations: the narrator realizes only that his servant has been with him just as long as Bahadur Khan was with Imray. It can be debated whether the story is a primitive detective story, for Strickland does very little detecting, but in its borderline supernaturalism and in its denouement—the revelation of the rotting corpse of a murdered man hidden in the ceiling of his bungalow—it is remarkably horrific. The only one to escape unscathed is Tietjens, whose entrance into the bungalow at the conclusion reveals that everything has been satisfactorily resolved.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “They.”

Further Reading

Morey, Peter. 2000. “Gothic and Supernatural: Allegories at Work and Play in Kipling’s Indian Fiction.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 201–217. New York: Palgrave.

Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. “Imperial Gothic.” In The Gothic, 44–49. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

THE RETURN

The Return is the second of three novels written by prolific British writer Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and the second of his two longer works (the first being Henry Brocken, 1904) to deal with themes of supernaturalism, for which his short stories and poems such as “The Listeners” are more famous.

Published in 1910 and revised in both 1922 and 1945, The Return tells the story of Arthur Lawford, who, having fallen asleep on a grave on unconsecrated ground, is possessed by the spirit of the grave’s occupant, and who begins to take on the physical (though not entirely the psychological) characteristics of the dead man. Unrecognized by his family and loved ones, Lawford’s condition is the premise for de la Mare’s mournful meditation on death, self-enforced isolation, and the fragility of personal identity and social bonds.

With echoes of Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), de la Mare’s story engages early modernist, twentieth-century anxieties concerning Freudian psychology and the (at the time) growing awareness of the tenuous nature of individual personality.

Lawford’s physical transmogrification is really a foil for de la Mare’s subtler psychological probing into the fundamentals of self and the spiritual and emotional horrors that people would experience were family and loved ones suddenly unable to recognize them. In this way, Lawford’s experience is very much an inversion of the traditional Capgras syndrome frequently found in alien invasion narratives (such as Jack Finney’s 1955 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers), in which the protagonist’s loved ones physically resemble themselves but have otherwise been psychologically taken over by invaders. In this particular instance, it is Lawford’s wife, Sheila, who struggles with the belief that he is, in fact, still her husband.

De la Mare raises questions as to the validity of personal (and religious) faith in the face of logic and reason, and part of the narrative’s horror for the reader derives from the supernatural impossibilities of Lawford’s metamorphosis, as something very much against nature. Moreover, The Return illustrates the notion that body and mind are nondualistic, that they are in fact separate, and that the individual is at all times inherently a stranger to him/herself.

Beyond supernatural horror, The Return is also a painfully human tale about the disintegration of love between a husband and wife, and the psychologically destructive effects of domestic trauma. While Lawford, at first, fears the loss of his family’s love due to his physical change (his wife believes that he is an impostor), his self-imposed retreat from her, and the acceptance he finds from another woman, makes it clear that the emotional horror underpinning this story is the unfathomable power of love and the tragedy that ensues when love between two people fades. Indeed, Lawford’s internalized self-loathing, manifested in the story as a literal transformation into another person, is echoed somewhat in de la Mare’s own personal history; for after his wife became an invalid from Parkinson’s disease, de la Mare himself was cared for by a sick-nurse, whom he in turn loved deeply.

Ian Kinane

See also: de la Mare, Walter; Irving, Washington; “The Listeners”; “Out of the Deep”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Further Reading

Clute, John. 1985. “Walter de la Mare.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 497–504. New York: Scribner Sons.

de la Mare, Walter. [1910] 2012. The Return. London: John Murray.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

McCrosson, Doris Ross. 1966. Walter de la Mare. New York: Twayne.

RICE, ANNE (1941–)

Anne Rice is a leading American horror and Gothic writer who made her mark with her debut novel Interview with the Vampire (1976). She was born to a New Orleans Catholic family, and her work as a writer has been indelibly influenced by these surroundings and religious upbringing, as well as her years living with her poet-husband Stan Rice in Haight-Ashbury and the Castro district in San Francisco, before settling once again in New Orleans. San Francisco and New Orleans are the home of many of her most iconic characters, offering an ideal backdrop for many of her literary explorations of religious belief, Catholic doctrine, sensuality, sexuality, morality, mortality, and the nature of good and evil. These themes and atmospheres underpin her writing. Since the success of her first novel, her writing career has been diverse, following Interview with the Vampire with historical period dramas such as Feast of All Saints (1978) and Cry to Heaven (1982), alongside two series of erotic novels written under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling (Exit to Eden, 1985; Belinda, 1986) and A. N. Roquelaure (The Sleeping Beauty Series, 1983–1985/2015). In the 2000s, in a period in which she reembraced her religious upbringing, she turned to Christian fiction, telling stories about Jesus Christ (The Life of Christ series, 2005/2008) and angels (Songs of the Seraphim series, 2009/2010). While these genres of literature appear on the surface to be contrasting, they share a preoccupation with negotiating identity—of the author as well as her characters.

Despite her taste for generic experimentation, Rice’s most substantial literary contribution has been within horror, returning repeatedly to familiar monsters such as the vampire, the mummy, witches, spirits, and werewolves, and reimagining them in distinct and provocative ways. Her storytelling is both personal and epic, with storylines that often privilege the first-person perspective, inviting introspection, but also positioning her characters within broader cultural and social histories that extend beyond individual books and into long-running series. The most significant of these is her Vampire Chronicles (1976–2015), totaling eleven novels so far as well as a spin-off series, New Tales of the Vampires (1998–1999), which includes a further two books. This is followed by three books within The Lives of the Mayfair Witches series (1990–1994) and The Wolf Gift Chronicles (2012–2013), which to date is comprised of two books. While these books are largely self-contained narratives, with the exception of the Mayfair Witches, which is structured in a more serialized form, they are interconnected pieces within a broad supernatural matrix, creating a fully realized and complex universe in which to position her characters and immerse her reader. The worlds of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches are also interlinked and go so far as to directly intersect when one of the witches is turned into a vampire in Merrick (2000). The historical background of her stories often spans centuries, and even millennia in the case of The Mummy (1989), harking back to the time of Cleopatra, and The Queen of the Damned (1988), which reveals the origins of vampirism as emerging from ancient Egypt. These extensive timespans can reflect the personal immortal existence of her vampires or the many generations of the Mayfair Witches, interweaving real historical moments within her fictional universe. In her work, these supernatural characters clearly exist within or on the periphery of the real world, haunting the shadows, and that is part of their allure and horror.

Novels by Anne Rice

Anne Rice has written nearly forty novels, not all of which have to do with horror. Here is a list of those that do.

1976

Interview with the Vampire

1985

The Vampire Lestat

1988

The Queen of the Damned

1989

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned

1990

The Witching Hour

1992

The Tale of the Body Thief

1993

Lasher

1994

Taltos

1995

Memnoch the Devil

1996

Servant of the Bones

1997

Violin

1998

Pandora and The Vampire Armand

1999

Vittorio the Vampire

2000

Merrick

2001

Blood and Gold

2002

Blackwood Farm

2003

Blood Canticle

2012

Claudia’s Story and The Wolf Gift

2013

The Wolves of Midwinter

2014

Prince Lestat

2016

Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

Matt Cardin

As a horror writer, Rice undermines expectations about monsters, inviting the reader to love them while acknowledging the horrific things that they do and thus implicating the reader in complex moral dilemmas. Interview with the Vampire set the tone for her approach to the genre through its first-person narrative, told by the vampire Louis to a journalist, while its sequel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), is written as an autobiography of the vampire who “turned” Louis. Many of the later novels in the series continue to focus on Lestat, Rice’s brat prince of the vampire world—a character who flaunts his evilness and revels in vampirism—but others open up the storytelling world to recurring characters within Lestat and Louis’s universe, such as Marius, Armand, and Pandora. Together these novels encourage the reader to see the world from the vampires’ perspective, emphasizing the sensuality and romanticism of the vampires alongside their brutality. In this manner, Rice’s work stands as a pivotal moment within the evolution of the sympathetic vampire, a trajectory that runs from the Byronic heroes of Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori to the twenty-first-century vampire works of Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, as well as the proliferation of sympathetic vampires in television series such as Angel (1999–2004), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), and Being Human (2008–2013) and films such as Byzantium (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

Notably, her first vampire novel emerged in the 1970s when horror was undergoing a transition in which audiences no longer feared the monstrous outsider but rather identified with it, highlighting the destabilizing nature of horror in which the status quo is overturned. In Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the reader comes to understand vampires’ experience of the world by seeing it through their eyes and hearing about it via their voices as they take control of the storytelling, dramatically explaining their appreciation of beauty, art, music, literature, the wonders of nature, and their near-orgasmic pleasure in the kill. While wallowing in the allure of vampirism, Rice’s novels embrace the inherent moral ambiguity of their characters and confront readers with tough questions that challenge their understanding of evil. These include the questions of whether the characters are evil because they kill to survive; how readers rationalize their sympathy for characters with such passion for killing; and whether such characters, while they celebrate death, may not also offer a model of living to the fullest, as they revel in life and love as well as death.

While Rice does not always take a direct first-person point of view in each of her stories, her work is always informed by the perspective of the “other,” extending this approach to the other monsters in her creative universes, such as Ramses in The Mummy and the werewolf Reuben in the Wolf Gift Chronicles, two monsters that have generally been rendered the least knowable within horror fiction. The mummy is the regenerated dead driven by a curse and a desire for revenge and therefore often lacking in consciousness, while the werewolf is typically presented as too primal to understand, devoid of human identity when in animal form and therefore impenetrable to the reader. Ramses and Reuben, however, remain highly articulate and thought-provoking creations, offering an alternative to mainstream conceptions of life and living and raising questions about morality. For instance, rather than feeling cursed by his lycanthropy, Reuben is empowered physically and morally, savoring his newfound strength and choosing to hurt those who hurt others; his first killing saves a woman from a rapist and murderer.

Rice’s work explores existential questions about the meaning of good and evil and invites the reader to question the existence and nature of God within a world that allows such monsters to exist. This is particularly prevalent in Interview with the Vampire, but as a theme it recurs across much of her work. The very existence of her characters, whether they are vampires, immortals, regenerated dead, or spirits, challenges traditional conceptions of an afterlife that promises heaven. Her characters provide no such spiritual comfort but rather question the existence of heaven. Vampires, mummies, and spirits, after all, represent a pragmatic perception of an afterlife that is earthbound. More significantly, these monsters are also bound within their bodies, defined by their physicality rather than spiritual transcendence. For instance, the Mayfair Witches achieve their power through the support of a spirit known as Lasher that covets physical form, seeking rebirth through the pregnancy of one of the witches by entering her womb and joining with the fetus. Once born, it develops into a full-grown man and once again seduces and impregnates her and other witches within the family in order to spread its new species, all of which leads to miscarriage and death for the mothers. Through such tales, Rice explores the sensuality and horror of monstrosity, inviting readers to indulge their fascination with monsters while forcing them to question the implications of their sympathies.

Stacey Abbott

See also: Devils and Demons; Mummies; Vampires; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carter, Margaret L. 1997. “The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 27–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. 1996. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 1999. “Interviewing the Author of Interview with the Vampire.” Gothic Studies 1, no. 2: 169–181.

Smith, Jennifer. 1996. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

“RINGING THE CHANGES”

“Ringing the Changes” is the best known of all of Robert Aickman’s “strange stories.” It was first published in his fiction collection in Dark Entries (1964), then reprinted in Painted Devils (1979), which contains revised versions of earlier stories. It also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1971. It was a very significant story for Aickman’s career; Herbert Van Thal, a well-known literary agent, read it and was impressed, and this led to the publication of Dark Entries as well as Aickman’s first novel, The Late Breakfasters (1964).

“Ringing the Changes” is one of only a small number of Aickman’s tales to feature a customary horror trope, here the dead raised to a kind of life. But it is far from a conventional zombie story. Gerald and Phrynne have married after a very short courtship and go away on a belated honeymoon to Holihaven, a faded resort. There is a significant age gap between them; Gerald is twenty-four years Phrynne’s senior. As they arrive, all the churches in town begin ringing their bells to—as another character, Commander Shotcroft later explains—“wake the dead.” And the dead do wake, and dance with the living—an ecstatic revel in which Phrynne is caught up.

The story, as many of Aickman’s works do, explores the Freudian linking of sex and death, of eros (the sexual force) and thanatos (the death drive). When the dead awake, Gerald and Phrynne are making love. The morning after their terrifying experience, as they are walking back to the train station and pass a graveyard where many men are digging, Phrynne flushes with excitement.

Aickman had a sensitivity to the atavistic, to the way ancient and dark rites lie just beneath the surface of civilized modern life. “Ringing the Changes,” along with other Aickman stories such as “Bind Your Hair,” bear similarities to the films of the folk horror movement in British cinema of the era, which expressed similar thematic concerns. The plot of “Ringing the Changes” also illustrates a common Aickman technique: the literalization of a figure of speech or metaphor—in this case, “ringing to wake the dead”—to strange and uncanny effect.

In 1968 a television adaptation of the story under the title “The Bells of Hell” appeared as part of the BBC 2 series Late Night Horror. There have also been two radio play versions, one in 1980 on the CBC series Nightfall, and another in 2000 as a BBC Radio Four production that was adapted by Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss from the League of Gentlemen. “Ringing the Changes” is one of Aickman’s most accessible stories, but it is still characteristically ambiguous and profoundly unsettling.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Aickman, Robert; The Uncanny; Zombies.

Further Reading

Challinor, Philip. 2012. “Till Death Do Us Part: Some Notes on ‘Ringing the Changes.’” In Insufficient Answers: Essays on Robert Aickman, edited by Gary William Crawford, 8–21. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press.

Crawford, Gary William. 2011. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash Tree Press. Kindle edition.

“THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER”

D. H. Lawrence’s weird tale “The Rocking-Horse Winner” renders an early twentieth-century version of the haunted child trope that would later become prevalent in modern and contemporary horror fictions. Written in February 1926, the story was published in several places: the July 1926 edition of Harper’s Bazaar Magazine; Cynthia Asquith’s edited collection The Ghost Book of the same year; and the 1928 Secker edition of Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. The story might never have come to fruition if Asquith had not rejected Lawrence’s initial contribution to her Ghost Book, “Glad Ghosts” (1925), a tale in which a Lawrentian artist is visited in his guest chamber by a ghostly, sexualized figure that Asquith took to be a distasteful version of herself.

In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” an aristocratic mother, Hester, is a proxy for the Asquith whom Lawrence saw as rejecting him. Hester is cold-hearted, stoic, and recognizes her coldness toward her children, something that they too experience as unspoken but distinct. Rosemary Reeve Davies has argued that the genesis of the tale was suggested “by the tragic illness of Lady Cynthia’s oldest son John and by the Asquith marriage itself” (Davies 1983, 121). At times, Lawrence acted as a pseudo-analyst for the Asquith family, particularly for John, who may have been autistic.

It is revealed that Hester’s son Paul, who can thus be read as an extraordinary incarnation of John Asquith, has an uncanny and portentous ability to predict winning racehorses. As his powers heighten, so, too, does a disturbing refrain that echoes throughout his playroom, one that demands that he make more and more money. At the climax of this cautionary but speculative allegory—which warns against the monomaniacal pursuit of wealth—Paul dies after correctly predicting the success of the horse Malabar. While these winnings may clear debts, the family’s betrayal of Lawrentian ideals leads, ultimately, to spiritual and emotional ruin.

“The Rocking-Horse Winner” has been widely anthologized. In 1949 it was adapted as a British feature film.

Matt Foley

See also: Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.

Further Reading

Davies, Rosemary. 1983. “Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and ‘The Rocking Horse Winner.’” Studies in Short Fiction 20, 2/3: 121–126.

Hollington, Michael. 2011. “Lawrentian Gothic and ‘The Uncanny.’” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 172–184. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, Vol. 149. Detroit, MI: Gale.

ROHMER, SAX (1883–1959)

Sax Rohmer is the pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, creator of Dr. Fu Manchu, a sinister supercriminal genius and dispenser of innumerable scientific and biological horrors. A former Fleet Street journalist, Rohmer debuted with a short story, “The Mysterious Mummy” (1903). Despite the author’s frequent forays into horror, he belonged to the British thriller school of mystery fiction. Consequently, Fu Manchu was in the tradition of Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, but was a distinct distillation of the Yellow Peril theme that traced back to the eighteenth century.

His creator memorably described Fu Manchu as a seemingly supernatural figure of horror: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. . . . one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present. . . . Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man” (Rohmer 1970, 17). Introduced in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (later retitled The Insidious Fu Manchu) in 1913, the devil doctor most often battled British police official Nayland Smith and his cohorts. Contrary to accepted fictional portrayals of Asian malefactors, the character was portrayed with a strange mixture of subtle horror and sympathy. A Chinese physician and scientist, Dr. Fu Manchu was brilliant, bound by a strict code of honor, yet utterly diabolical in pursuit of his lofty goals, which typically centered around world domination by China through the Si-Fan, a secret society he controlled.

Although depicted as a coldly intellectual embodiment of evil, Fu Manchu was neither supernatural nor employed occult means to pursue his objectives, even though, as a consequence of imbibing the elixir of life, he was preternaturally ancient and inexplicably possessed the transparent inner eyelid of a feline. The horrors inflicted on his adversaries were most often venomous reptiles and insects, exotic poisons and fungi, and sinister agents of death such as Dacoits or Thuggees. The author was skilled in weaving an atmosphere of horror about the proceedings, and so indelible was Rohmer’s portrayal of Fu Manchu that numerous imitations of Fu Manchu followed. Thirteen novels and a handful of short stories featuring the devil doctor were produced over a thirty-five-year period. By the time the series had run its course in 1959, cultural sensitivities made the iconic but stereotypical figure undesirable, if not entirely passé.

A student of the occult, Rohmer wrote a handful of short stories and novels exploring overtly supernatural themes, chief of which was his acknowledged masterpiece—praised by H. P. Lovecraft, among others—the mummy-themed Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), followed by The Green Eyes of Bast (1920), a short story collection revolving around an occult detective, The Dream Detective (1920), and others. The author was also instrumental in introducing a strain of Egyptian-themed horror into the popular consciousness of his era, and in 1914 he produced a well-researched nonfiction survey of the occult, The Romance of Sorcery. Two lesser novels, The Orchard of Tears (1918) and Wulfheim (1950), were inspired by the author’s Theosophical leanings. Sax Rohmer died in London on June 1, 1959, ironically succumbing to the Asian flu.

Will Murray

See also: Mummies; Occult Detectives; Pulp Horror.

Further Reading

Briney, R. E. 1998. “Rohmer, Sax (1883–1959).” Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, vol. 2, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan, 791–804. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Rohmer, Sax. [1913] 1970. The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. New York: Pyramid Books.

Van Ash, Cay, and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. 1972. Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press.

ROMANTICISM AND DARK ROMANTICISM

During the eighteenth century in Europe, a major cultural movement took place, now known as “the Enlightenment,” and those who participated in this movement celebrated reason above tradition. In politics, religion, and art, they tried to break with tradition and with historical trends, with the idea that a new, much better society could be formed along strictly rationalistic lines. The Enlightenment period gave rise to some of the most sophisticated literature, philosophy, and political thought in European history. In France in 1789, a revolution put people in power who were determined to rebuild the government, and indeed all of France, along lines spelled out by important theoretical works of Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom were also important for the leaders of the American Revolution. Despite many accomplishments, the French Revolution finally produced what became known as “the Terror.” More than 16,000 people were executed for being antirevolutionary in a period of not much more than a single year. For many, both in France and throughout the Western world, this was taken as a sign that the Enlightenment was a failure.

As a literary, aesthetic, and general cultural movement, romanticism was something of a reaction against what was perceived by some to be the soulless rationalism of the Enlightenment. Romantics championed heightened emotion and depth of feeling, and focused on human subjectivity and extreme psychological states.

What has been termed dark romanticism focused on the most pointedly Gothic aspects of the basic Romantic position, with the focus on the human psyche assuming a decidedly darker slant and emerging as a deep dread of the monstrous and sinister forces that might lurk within—and emerge from—the unconscious mind. It is dark romanticism, allied with the Gothic, that serves as the progenitor of modern Western horror fiction.

Matt Cardin

The cultural movement known as romanticism was, if anything, even more widely influential than the Enlightenment thinkers were. For some, romanticism was the rejection of Enlightenment ideals. While they did not dismiss reason as unimportant, they saw it as being soulless; the full human being is more than just a rational mind, being also an often tumultuous or chaotic emotional soul. What reason was to the Enlightenment, the will was to romanticism. However, there were many who participated in the Romantic movement who saw in it an extension of the best aspects of the Enlightenment, building on the best ideas of the previous generation while avoiding their errors.

It is important to distinguish between romanticism and dark romanticism, because a conflict existed between these two artistic directions within romanticism overall. While those who tended to write darker, more Gothic material simply went their own way, other writers who publicly identified themselves as leaders of a Romantic movement, including William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, took issue with the more fantastic and grotesque writing being published as “Romantic literature.” These leaders came to represent the more utopian or uplifting side of romanticism, although even they went on to write a few “dark” pieces themselves.

Important Romantic authors include, in Germany, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Schelling, and Ludwig Tieck; in England, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. In the United States, many canonical authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, are considered either Romantics or to have been strongly influenced by romanticism.

Romantic literature often presents the reader with isolated characters whose psychological states are described in great detail. The concept of the unconscious mind becomes extremely important in Romantic writing and usually appears in some combination with nature; that is, nature is understood as the image or mirror of the unconscious mind. Very often the emotional or mental state of a character will be reflected in the weather or in landscape features; Wuthering Heights is a late example of this, providing in its stormy, remote setting a psychologically appropriate background for a novel about passionate, isolated characters.

This close association of the unconscious mind with nature is often described in terms of the supernatural. Coleridge, for example, believed that the imagination could produce knowledge, just as reason can. The inspired artistic genius was, for him, a seer. From the Romantic point of view, the artist of the Enlightenment was trying to create art by using a sort of recipe; true art, however, was supposed to have a mysterious origin. The artist did not create ideas consciously, but was receptive to the appearance of ideas that originated somewhere beyond the mind.

Modern Western horror fiction has its roots in dark romanticism, which is the more Gothic aspect of the Romantic movement. For some, the unconscious mind was seen as a gateway to higher, loftier thinking, but for others, the unconscious mind was a terrifying presence, an evil twin. Vampires, doubles, specters, all manner of beings meant to represent the guilt or the evil impulses of the main character abound in Dark Romantic writing. Frankenstein’s monster is at times described as an evil double of Frankenstein himself, relentlessly pursuing him, refusing to allow him to forget or abandon his responsibilities. James Hogg’s influential 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner has a similar plot; in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson,” the roles are reversed, and the pursuing twin is the main character’s better side, rather than his evil side.

As the nineteenth century continued, aspects of dark romanticism cropped up in the fiction of later generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde embodies both halves of one character in two distinct persons, while Arthur Machen’s novella “The Great God Pan” revolves around a malevolent woman who represents something like the collective unconscious of all humanity, rather than of a single individual. Many ghost stories of this later era involve considerable uncertainty about the existence of the ghost. It is impossible to say with any certainty that the ghostly woman or double of the main character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is an objectively other entity, or only some other part of her own mind.

Dark romanticism also became mingled with the literary movement known as decadence, which developed around the year 1890. The “Decadents” were writers and artists who also turned away from official rationalism and embraced the unconscious, treating it as a form of cultural exhaustion. Oscar Wilde was often included among the Decadents, as was French author J. K. Huysmans, whose novel about black magic, entitled La-Bas (literally translated as “Down There,” although it has also been published in English under the title The Damned), was influential on H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and other horror writers. The Decadents were as concerned with society as the Romantics were, but had none of the optimistic utopianism of the Romantics; for the Decadents, society was like one huge work of art, and the decay of both society and individuals was regarded as beautiful.

Dark romanticism has since become associated with the aesthetics of a renewed Gothic cultural movement, while many of the aesthetic discoveries and ideas of the Romantics, especially with regard to the unconscious, remain in circulation today. The term is also sometimes used to describe a hybridization of the modern “romance novel,” or love story, and horror fiction.

Michael Cisco

See also: The Brontë Sisters; Byron, Lord; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; “The Great God Pan”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Shelley, Mary; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Further Reading

Fiedler, Leslie. 1966. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day.

Thompson, G. R., ed. 1974. “Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition.” Introduction to The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press.

ROSEMARY’S BABY

Rosemary’s Baby is an American horror novel written by Ira Levin, first published in 1967. Levin’s novel, a story of a woman who becomes the center of a plot by a coven of witches to bring about the Antichrist in New York City, was the beginning of a trend of devil and demon-possession horror novels in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a bestseller for Levin, and the subsequent film adaptation cemented its status as a horror classic.

Ira Levin was already an established writer when he wrote Rosemary’s Baby, his second novel. His first novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1953), won Levin an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Rosemary’s Baby tells the story of Rosemary Woodhouse, a naïve young woman who has just moved to a New York City apartment with her actor husband. Experiencing a difficult pregnancy, she grows suspicious of her neighbors, who she believes are witches, and eventually comes to the conclusion that she is impregnated with the spawn of Satan. The plot is firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition, as a helpless young heroine is isolated in a Gothic-style building with people who want to do her harm. Levin, however, adds depth to his novel by highlighting the powerlessness of Rosemary, who is repeatedly ignored when she seeks help. Her doctor, recommended by her neighbors, dismisses her early concerns when she expresses the painful symptoms of her pregnancy. Later, when her friends, frightened by the mother-to-be’s gaunt and sickly appearance, push Rosemary to get help, Rosemary’s husband, Guy, convinces her that her friends are meddling, hysterical women. When Rosemary finally escapes to a hospital and a doctor who is not under the coven’s control, that doctor promptly calls her husband to pick her up, dismissing Rosemary’s claims as the cries of a paranoid and anxious mother. The true horror, perhaps, lies in Rosemary’s lack of agency as she tries to navigate a patriarchal society that dismisses her as a weak woman rather than one controlled by the satanic threat.

Levin would later return to this premise of women meeting horror at the hands of the men in their life in his next novel, The Stepford Wives (1972). Rosemary’s Baby was met with enormous critical acclaim and commercial success. Levin wrote a sequel titled Son of Rosemary in 1997, but it did not earn the same praise as its predecessor.

Horror film director William Castle bought the rights to Rosemary’s Baby before the novel was even published, eager to bring Levin’s tale to the silver screen. The adaptation was a passion project for Castle, who was known more for his promotion gimmicks than his craft. He hoped that Rosemary’s Baby would make him a respected director; however, the studio refused to make the film if Castle was directing. Instead, Castle took the role of producer, and Roman Polanski wrote and directed. Rosemary’s Baby, the film, debuted in 1968 to enormous critical and popular praise. The movie, starring Mia Farrow as Rosemary, was nominated for several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and several Golden Globes, earning nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Original Score. Ruth Gordon, who played Minnie Castavet, won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. Mia Farrow also earned a nomination at the Golden Globes for Best Actress. Polanski’s film is considered to be a classic horror film, often earning spots on best film lists. It was selected for preservation in the United States’ National Film Registry.

Like the novel, the film adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby spawned sequels and remakes. In 1976, a television film was made titled Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, which was intended to be a sequel. Ruth Gordon reprised her role as Minnie Castavet, but Rosemary was played this time by Patty Duke. The film was universally disliked. In January 2014, NBC released a four-hour television miniseries of the original novel. Zoe Saldana was cast as Rosemary, and the setting was changed to Paris. This television adaptation received lukewarm reviews.

Lisa Kröger

See also: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Adler, Renata. 1968. “Movie Review: Rosemary’s Baby.” New York Times, June 13. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1738E271BC4B52DFB0668383679EDE.

Fisher, Lucy. 1992. “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’” Cinema Journal 31, no. 3: 3–18.

Langan, John. 2008. “A Devil for the Day: William Peter Blatty, Ira Levin, and the Revision of the Satanic.” In American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty, edited by Benjamin Szumskyj, 45–70. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Levin, Ira. 2012. “‘Stuck with Satan’: Ira Levin on the Origins of Rosemary’s Baby.” Criterion.com, November 5. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2541-stuck-with-satan-ira-levin-on-the-origins-of-rosemary-s-baby.

Lima, Robert. 1974. “The Satanic Rape of Catholicism in Rosemary’s Baby.” Studies in American Fiction (Autumn): 211–220.

Valerius, Karyn. 2005. “Rosemary’s Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects.” College Literature 32, no. 2: 116–135.

RUSSELL, RAY (1924–1999)

Ray Russell was an American writer and editor. He was known for his work as fiction editor for Playboy magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, during which time he was responsible for making the magazine a prime market for short fiction, especially horror and science fiction. He was also an accomplished horror writer in his own right, publishing several novels and short stories until his death in 1999.

As fiction editor for Playboy, Russell was responsible for publishing science fiction and horror writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury, to name only a few. It was during his time at Playboy that he discovered Charles Beaumont, a writer with whom he would later work. More than fifty of Russell’s own works appeared in Hugh Hefner’s magazine, including the short story “Sardonicus” (1961), which was later published as part of a trio of stories and adapted into film as Mr. Sardonicus (1961), for which Russell wrote the screenplay. He also penned the script for Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), as well as several other film projects, including The Horror of It All (1964) and Chamber of Horrors (1966). X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes won Russell, along with his fellow screenwriter Robert Dillon, an award at the Trieste International Film Festival in 1963. He continued his work with Charles Beaumont when the two worked together on a screen adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Premature Burial” (1962). The film was directed by Roger Corman.

Russell’s other works include the 1962 novel The Case Against Satan, which tells the story of two priests who come to the aid of a young demon-possessed girl. The novel is remarkable in that it came before William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist. Russell’s 1976 novel Incubus combined the shock of sex and the gore of horror as a demon tries to impregnate human women, mostly with horrific results. A movie based on Incubus was made in 1982, starring John Cassavetes. In the 1970s, Russell continued to work with Playboy, editing several story anthologies (sometimes anonymously) including The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural (1967). In 1985, a collection of his short stories was released, titled Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Tales of Ray Russell. Penguin released a new edition in 2013.

The Case Against Satan: Demonic Possession or Disturbed Psyche?

Russell’s The Case Against Satan (1962) is a classic tale of demon possession and exorcism, notable for the fact that it appeared nine years before William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971).

The plot is a familiar one: teenager Susan Garth begins to act unusually, her behavior marked by explosions of violence and profanity. The Catholic Church sends two priests to perform an exorcism, though the younger of the two priests is skeptical, believing more in modern-day psychology than in biblical demons. The battle between the two priests is perhaps more important to Russell’s novel than is their battle with the demon. Unlike Blatty, who later used a similar plot to espouse his own Christian—specifically Catholic—ideology, Russell sows the seeds of doubt. The clergymen, the Garth family, and the readers are left wondering if the events were supernatural or due to the derangement of an unstable mind.

Given this, The Case Against Satan is less of a supernatural horror novel and more of an intellectual adventure. Most readers will close the book unsure of what exactly transpired, and Russell maintains a sparse tone throughout, offering some sort of distance to the subject matter. Still, though the supernatural is not proven per se, the novel seems to acknowledge a spiritual realm, though maybe not one related to any particular religion.

Russell’s novel was successful in launching a renewed interest in supernatural books that featured demon possession, including Blatty’s novel and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967). Though Blatty’s and Levin’s books take a hard stance on the supernatural, Russell’s lays the groundwork for the skeptic’s possession novels of the twenty-first century, particularly novels such as Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015), in which a reality television crew tapes a teenage girl’s exorcism, which may or may not be supernatural in nature.

Lisa Kröger

Russell’s work earned him two Bram Stoker awards (in 1991 and 1992), as well as the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. Penguin released a new edition of The Case Against Satan in 2015.

Lisa Kröger

See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; The Exorcist; Incubi and Succubi; Matheson, Richard; “Sardonicus”; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Adrian, Jack. 1999. “Obituary: Ray Russell.” The Independent, March 26. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-ray-russell-1083246.html.

Errickson, Will. 2014. “The Summer of Sleaze: Ray Russell’s Incubus.” Tor.com. September 19. http://www.tor.com/2014/09/19/summer-of-sleaze-ray-russell-incubus.

Morgan, Chris. 1998. “Ray Russell.” In St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 494–496. Detroit, MI: St. James Press/Gale.

Staggs, Matt. 2016. “Sardonicus Rising: Horror Master Ray Russsell’s Unexpected Revival.” Unbound Worlds, September 30. http://www.unboundworlds.com/2016/09/sardonicus-rising-horror-master-ray-russells-unexpected-revival.

S

SAKI (1870–1916)

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, whose macabre stories frequently appear in horror anthologies, especially “The Open Window” (1914) and “Sredni Vashtar” (1911). Celebrated for his sly and witty portrayals of the English upper middle classes, Saki’s horror stories introduce bizarre incidents to an Edwardian England full of flappers, languid aristocrats, country homes, garden parties, and cynical young dandies or “feral ephebes” (Byrne 2007, 15).

Munro was born the youngest of three children to an imperial military family serving the British Raj in Akyab, northwest Burma (now Myanmar), on December 18, 1870. His mother died following a miscarriage, and at the tender age of two, young Hector was sent, with his siblings Charlie and Ethel, to his grandmother’s house in England, where the children were in constant fear of two strict aunts who appear as the monstrous female relatives in Saki stories such as “The Lumber-Room” (1914) or “Sredni Vashtar.”

Munro at first chose to follow his father into the Burmese military police, but illness drove him back to England, where he worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines. His first short story was published in 1899 and his first book, a historical study of the Russian Empire, in 1900. From 1902 to 1908, Munro worked abroad as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post, but then returned to London, where he wrote satires on the politics of the day as well as collections of short stories revolving around his ephebe characters Bassington, Reginald, and Clovis Sangrail.

Elements of the horrific fantastic crept into the latter fiction. Saki’s second collection of short stories, Reginald in Russia (1910), included “Gabriel-Ernest,” a chilling tale of a beautiful boyish werewolf with a taste for child-flesh. “Sredni Vashtar,” “Esmé,” “The Music on the Hill,” and “The Easter Egg” all appear in his subsequent collection, The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and “The Open Window” in Beasts and Super-beasts (1914), while The Toys of Peace (1919) featured “The Interlopers,” “The Penance,” and “The Wolves of Cernograst.”

Munro enlisted for World War I in 1914, when he was in his forties, refusing an officer’s commission. He was shot and killed by a German sniper on November 14, 1916 near the village of Beaumont-Hamel on the river Somme. His last words were reported to have been, “Put that bloody cigarette out!” (Byrne 2007, 3).

Saki’s tales are extremely funny, mingling what A. A. Milne called his “careless cruelty” with graceful satires on upper-class society (Milne 2016, 6). For example, in “Louis” (1919), an irritated husband conspires with his sister to gas his wife Lena’s Pomeranian lapdog, only to discover that Lena has been cuddling a lifelike facsimile as an excuse to avoid accompanying him to social engagements. In “Esmé,” an escaped hyena devours a Roma (Gypsy) child in front of two horrified lady hunters, one of whom recounts this episode in a highly amused fashion years later, revealing that she pretended the hyena was her dog in order to obtain a valuable brooch as compensation from a gentleman who accidentally ran it over.

“The Open Window”: Ghosts of the Imagination

The most anthologized of all Saki’s stories is “The Open Window” (1914), with a devastating twist and charmingly cruel practical joker. Suffering from nerves, Framton Nuttel comes to the countryside for a rest but is obliged by his sister to visit her acquaintances. At the Sappleton residence, he is greeted by fifteen-year-old Vera, who weaves a tall tale for Mr. Nuttel. She tells him that their hostess, Mrs. Sappleton, constantly leaves her French window open in the hopes that her husband and two brothers, dead in a hunting tragedy, will someday return. When Mrs. Sappleton joins them, she soon cheerily points out her husband and brothers coming across the lawn with their spaniel trotting at their side, just as Vera has described them. Nuttel believes he is seeing their ghosts and hastily departs, terrified. Mrs. Sappleton’s bewilderment at Nuttel’s abrupt exit is Vera’s cue to produce another tall tale about Nuttel.

Practical jokes are a fixture of Saki’s fiction, and this is a characteristically Saki tale, full of mischievous jabs at conventional society that by no means detract from the “chill shock of nameless fear” (Saki 1976, 261) the reader shares with Nuttel at the sight of the figures approaching the open window. His social awkwardness is contrasted with Vera’s self-possession and the authority with which she defines their moment of shared surreality.

The conventional Nuttel is also portrayed as an unappealing bore. In contrast, the shock that Vera delights in producing, even going so far as to feign “dazed horror” upon spotting the hunters (261), is a welcome interruption to the yawns that Nuttel induces in his hostess as he drones on about his nerves. As with many other horror fictions, the dullness of everyday life is compared unfavorably to the thrill of imagination, however terrifying those thrills might be.

Aalya Ahmad

Saki pits the elegant, highly artificial manners of the Edwardian drawing room against the raw violence of the natural world, most often in the form of animals and children. In his homoerotic werewolf story, “Gabriel-Ernest” (1909), which combines the animal with the child, the hapless gentleman Van Cheele is powerless before both the predations of the werewolf and the overtures of another overbearing aunt, who tries to make the lycanthropic boy her protégè, allowing him to carry off one of the infants from her Sunday-school class. The alluring queerness of the feral boy, reflecting Munro’s own suppressed homosexuality, is mirrored by the god Pan, who appears as a beautiful, laughing boy in “The Music on the Hill” (1911), in which a domineering bride is gored to death by a stag as a punishment for taking an offering of grapes from his shrine.

While many of Saki’s women are similarly punished, leaving the impression that they won’t be missed, and his social comedies abound with disparaging references to the militant suffragettes of his time, he also has a soft spot for the younger, cheekier “flappers” of the early twentieth century. Another of his recurring characters is the precocious flapper Vera, who figures as the niece in “The Open Window.”

Saki’s adults occasionally live to regret their confrontations with the innocent ruthlessness of Nature. In “The Penance” (1919), three children (whose circumstances closely resemble those of Munro’s own childhood) remorselessly pursue their neighbor, who has killed their pet cat, mistakenly under the impression that it was raiding his chickens. Taking advantage of his efforts to placate them, they kidnap his two-year-old daughter and drop her into the muck of the pigsty, refusing to help retrieve her until the frantic father vows to do penance by standing by the cat’s grave holding a candle and declaring himself a “miserable Beast” (Saki 1976, 427). The “inexorable” cruelty of the children—“We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed Olivia,” said the girl, “but we can’t be sorry till we’ve done it” (426)—accentuates the coldness in what might otherwise be simply a cute story of childish revenge. But there is nothing cute about Saki’s youngsters; their hatred of adult injustices is seething, bitter, and heartfelt.

Saki was clearly influenced by Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom have contributed major works of horror to world literature. His later contemporaries P. G. Wodehouse and M. R. James can be compared to him both in point of social satire and, in the case of the latter, the ability to introduce horrifying and shocking elements into scenes of utter normalcy. He has also been compared to the American writer of twist endings, O. Henry. Apart from his best known stories, Saki’s work remains rather obscure, and scholarship on him has occurred but rarely. However, his fiction has been highly praised as inspirational by other authors, including G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, Christopher Morley, H. P. Lovecraft, V. S. Pritchett, and Graham Greene.

Aalya Ahmad

See also: James, M. R.; Lovecraft, H. P.; “Sredni Vashtar.”

Further Reading

Birden, Lorene. 2004. “‘People Dined against Each Other’: Social Practices in Sakian Satire.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2.2.

Birden, Lorene M. 2012. “Saki as Dauphin of the Wildean Witticism.” Anachronist 17: 117.

Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frost, Adam. 1999. “A Hundred Years of Saki.” Contemporary Review 275, no. 1607, 302–304.

Gibson, Brian. 2014. Reading Saki: The Fiction of H. H. Munro. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Milne, A. A. [1911] 2016. Introduction to The Chronicles of Clovis. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. 5–6.

Saki (H. H. Munro). 1976. The Complete Works of Saki. Introduction by Noël Coward. New York: Doubleday.

Salemi, Joseph S. 1989. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4: 423.

Spears, George James. 1963. The Satire of Saki: A Study of the Satiric Art of Hector Hugh Munro. New York: Exposition Press.

SAMUELS, MARK (1967–)

Mark Samuels is a British writer of weird horror, primarily known for his short fiction. He is also a former general secretary of the Friends of Arthur Machen, a society devoted to the works of the visionary late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writer.

Samuels was born in Clapham, South London. He began publishing short fiction in 1988. His debut collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, was published in 2003, and both it and its title story were nominated for British Fantasy Awards in 2004. He has, as of this writing, published four subsequent collections of fiction and one novel, The Face of Twilight (2005), which was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award. In addition, he has had numerous short stories included in horror and weird fiction anthologies.

Much of Samuels’s fiction is set in London. He is influenced in his approach to the city by that of Machen, who saw London as a place where atavistic and/or esoteric forces might at any time erupt. In Samuels’s The Face of Twilight, a recurring character of his, Alfred Muswell (whose initials are a nod to Machen), is quoted as having written, “there are London streets that lead to another world impinging on this one” (Samuels 2006, 20). In Samuels’s work there are two Londons, with a visionary city laid on top of the ordinary one.

Also like Machen, Samuels is intensely interested in the mystical side of Christianity. This can be seen in the tendency for his protagonists’ encounters with the weird to end not in madness and death, as such encounters generally do in much weird fiction, including Lovecraftian fiction (and Lovecraft is another of Samuels’s chief influences), but in ecstasy and transmutation, with the self animated by some primal animism or blinding numinous force.

In addition to Machen and Lovecraft, Samuels’s work also bears the particular mark of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ligotti, Bruno Schulz, Stefan Grabiński, and Ramsey Campbell. But his erudite and densely allusive fiction incorporates much more of the supernatural fiction tradition than just these writers. As in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, who is another key influence, evocations of weird tales; scholarly, occult, and spiritual works; and historical events, both real and fabricated, are braided together in Samuels’s stories into a bizarre yet convincing tissue of quotations.

His story “The Man Who Collected Machen,” the eponymous entry in his 2011 collection The Man Who Collected Machen, is a representative example of Samuels’s approach. A man who refuses to give up a rare edition of a work by Machen is therefore made a member of the Lost Club (a reference to a Machen story of that name) by a jealous collector and banished to a London transmuted by Machen’s vision. But for him it is not a dreadful exile but an ecstatic one, for he sees the wonder in that awful place.

Samuels’s writing has had an important influence on the modern weird fiction tradition. A tribute to his work, Marked to Die, featuring stories by a number of contemporary writers of weird horror, was published in June 2016.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Borges, Jorge Luis; Campbell, Ramsey; Grabiński, Stefan; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Schulz, Bruno.

Further Reading

Cardin, Matt. 2006. “Interview with Mark Samuels: A Sense of Charnel Glamour.” The Teeming Brain, August. http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-mark-samuels.

Samuels, Mark. 2006. The Face of Twilight. With an introduction by Mark Morris. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.

SANDKINGS

Sandkings is a novella written by George R. R. Martin that was first published in the August 1979 issue of Omni magazine; it has since been reprinted numerous times in various anthologies. Sandkings was awarded the Hugo Award by the World Science Fiction Society in 1979 and the Nebula Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1980. It was adapted into a graphic novel by DC Comics in 1987 and was filmed as the first episode of the relaunched The Outer Limits television series that premiered in 1995.

Sandkings opens with Simon Kress, a wealthy collector of exotic animals who lives on the planet Baldur, discovering a shop, Shade & Wo, he has never seen before in an otherwise familiar city. Inside he meets the shop’s proprietress, Jala Wo, who, in response to Kress’s request for an unusual animal, presents him with the insect-like Sandkings. There are four colonies of Sandkings, differentiated by their color scheme—red, orange, black, and white—that live in the four corners of a large terrarium buried in the sand; the queen, or Maw, remains unseen, buried deep below, but directs the Sandkings via telepathic signals. Wo promises Kress that so long as he keeps the Sandkings fed they will provide him countless hours of amusement with their warfare and strategic, purposeful maneuvering. She also informs him that the creatures will grow according to their environment, which heartens Kress, who had expressed reservations about their diminutive size.

Kress purchases the Sandkings and has them delivered to his home, where he keeps them in a terrarium much larger than the one used in the shop. A showman and braggart, Kress organizes viewing parties with fellow elites, calling attention especially to the reproduction of his likeness that the Sandkings sketch on the sides of their homes. While the partygoers are generally satisfied with the warring of the Sandkings, Kress eventually grows bored and begins withholding food from them, making them increasingly vicious. Kress’s abusive treatment escalates and soon he is engaging them in fights with other exotic alien species. Wo warns him against this behavior. When Kress notices that one of his visages has taken on a twisted appearance, he lashes out at the Sandkings queen, gouging a stick deep into her lair and most likely injuring her. The next day Kress is visited by his former lover Cath, who resents his treatment of the Sandkings. She smashes their tank but is injured in the resulting tumult. Kress flees, leaving Cath behind. When he returns much later he finds that the red, black, and white factions of Sandkings have taken over the grounds and consumed Cath. Kress takes steps to exterminate them, but is forced to enlist Wo’s aid. The Sandkings, she explains, have evolved to a point of sentience, but because of Kress’s mistreatment they are pathological and fixated on revenge. Wo and her partner Shade, who is revealed to be an evolved Sandking, assume responsibility for the escaped Sandkings, much to Kress’s relief. Fleeing the scene, Kress eventually stumbles upon a solitary home. Thinking he has found refuge, he discovers that the home is actually a large sandcastle built by the escaped orange Sandkings, which have adopted Kress’s size and likeness. Their captive now, Kress is dragged away screaming, presumably to be devoured by the Maw.

While Sandkings initially reads as pure science fiction, complete with extraterrestrial creatures and an alien world that serves as the story’s backdrop, it also functions as an example of psychological horror. As the story develops Kress experiences a gradual yet ever-increasing sense of dislocation from his environment. His sense of control over the Sandkings gradually erodes, leading to a break with his circle of acquaintances (one hesitates to call them his friends), expulsion from his home, and ultimately a complete separation from his role in Baldur’s culture of wealth and leisure. The closing scene—in which Kress is mobbed by Sandkings who have adopted his visage—effectively blends existential crisis and physical violence as Kress’s identity is symbolically and literally consumed.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Martin, George R. R.; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Bischoff, David. 1995. “The New Outer Limits.” Omni 17, no. 7: 34.

Cotman, Elwin. 2013. “The Colonial Nightmares in ‘Sandkings.’” Weird Fiction Review, March 19. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/03/wfrs-101-weird-writers-22-george-r-r-martin.

“THE SAND-MAN”

“The Sand-man” (a.k.a. “Der Sand-mann”) is a short story by the nineteenth-century German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. Originally published in German in 1817, it first appeared in English in Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors in 1844. One of Hoffmann’s most complex stories, “The Sand-man” exists in several translations and has different versions of its characters’ names, but the story is at its core one of perceptions, with madness and identity and obsession being several of its themes.

The never-seen titular character is folkloric, a “wicked man, who comes to children, when they will not go to bed and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads” (Oxenford and Feiling 1844, 141); he then takes the naughty children to his loved ones, where the children’s eyes are plucked out. The Sand-man is one of young Nathanael’s obsessions, and the story begins with his writing a letter to Lothair, brother of his fiancée Clara, in which he describes his childhood memories of the Sand-man and concludes with recounting a disastrous meeting with the domineering lawyer Coppelius. Coppelius is also an alchemist, and his fiery magical experiments almost lead to Nathanael’s death; they do later lead to the death of Nathanael’s father and the disappearance of Coppelius. But Nathanael believes Coppelius has reappeared as Coppola, a seller of barometers. Nathanael’s letter is sent to Clara, however, who offers Nathanael sympathy, then concludes by telling him that his fears are from his own mind and that he should stop obsessing about Coppelius/Coppola. Nathanael’s next letter reveals that he was wrong in his identification of Coppelius with Coppola, for the two are different people. He additionally reveals that his professor, Spalanzani, has vouched for Coppola and has a beautiful daughter, Olimpia. This letter is sent to Lothair and is correctly delivered.

The richness of “The Sand-man,” especially in terms of philosophical and psychological content, comes through in passages like the following, which is one of many that articulate ideas, dreads, and suspicions that often lurk unexpressed in human minds and hearts until someone with Hoffmann’s authorial acumen gives them voice.

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves. Lothaire adds that if we have willingly yielded ourselves up to the dark powers, they are known often to impress upon our minds any strange, unfamiliar shape which the external world has thrown in our way; so that we ourselves kindle the spirit, which we in our strange delusion believe to be speaking to us. It is the phantom of our own selves, the close relationship with which, and its deep operation on our mind, casts us into hell or transports us into heaven.

Matt Cardin

Source: Hoffmann, E. T. A. [1817] 1999. “The Sand-man.” Translated by John Oxenford. 19th-Century German Stories. http://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html.

The above motifs and situations being semi-established, there are more narrative complexities. There are issues of obsession, identity, and reality, for a person can be machine-like in behavior, and machines may have the appearance of people. Nathanael’s actions reveal that he has become thoroughly unhinged, ultimately dangerously so, though he fails to kill Clara, Coppola, and Coppelius, and concludes by committing suicide, throwing himself from a balcony and leaving Clara to find happiness with another, which she does.

According to the introduction by the story’s original English translators, “the story of the Sand-man had its origin in a discussion which actually took place between La Motte Fouqué and some friends, at which Hoffmann was present. Some of the people found fault with the cold, mechanical deportment of a young lady of their acquaintance, while La Motte Fouqué defended her. Here Hoffmann caught the notion of the automaton Olympia [sic], and the arguments used by Nathaniel [sic] are those that were really employed by La Motte Fouqué” (Oxenford and Feiling 1844, xii–xiii). At the same time, the story is much more than a simple assessment of behavior, and it remains one of Hoffmann’s most complex and idea-driven tales. Significantly, it was used by Sigmund Freud as a chief focus in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” where he dwells on the living doll Olimpia, the significance of the Sand-man’s violence to eyes, and the theme of the double or doppelgänger, and avers that “E. T. A. Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (Freud 2003, 141).

Richard Bleiler

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Psychological Horror; The Uncanny.

Further Reading

Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–162. New York: Penguin.

Mahlendorf, Ursula. 1975. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sand-man: The Fictional Psycho-Biography of a Romantic Poet.” American Imago 32, no. 3: 217–239.

Oxenford, John, and C. A. Feiling, trans. 1844. Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors. London: Chapman and Hall.

Willis, Martin T. 1994. “Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen.” Extrapolation 35, no. 3: 186–200.

SARBAN (1910–1989)

“Sarban” was the pseudonym under which John William Wall, a British career diplomat, published three books of weird fiction between 1951 and 1953. Sarban’s work is considered a bridge between the work of writers in the classic supernatural tradition, such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, and contemporary weird fiction. His stories are especially memorable for their evocative descriptions of foreign lands and exotic cultures for whom mythic survivals are not uncommon.

Sarban’s first book, Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (1951), collects five previously unpublished short stories. The title tale tells of a young woman, Daphne, who cares for three children in a manor house in the Northumbrian moorlands built near an ancient stone circle. The eldest, Nuaman, expresses a vibrant sexuality seemingly beyond his years. The evidence mounts by the story’s end that Nuaman is the avatar of an ancient god in league with the fairy race who built the ringstones, and that Daphne has submitted to his primitive sexual dominance in dreams, if not in waking life. As Peter Nicholls has noted, dramatic tension in the story derives from the juxtaposition of the forbidden primitive sexuality that Nuaman represents to the repressions of modern life that govern Daphne. Survivals from the past infused with primitive sexuality are also elements in “The Khan” (1951), in which an Englishwoman traveling with her stodgy husband in the Persian desert strays into a mystical forest glade where she is groomed to become the sexual partner of a woodland spirit who assumes the form of a massive bear, and “Capra” (1951), in which a satyr from antiquity becomes the victim of a party of sexually uninhibited modern couples in contemporary Greece.

Sarban’s best-known work, the short novel The Sound of His Horn (1952), is an alternate history tale (with none of the traditional science fiction underpinnings) whose protagonist, a prisoner escaped from a POW camp during World War II, slips into a future in which Germany has won the war. That future is not a futuristic extrapolation of the Third Reich, but rather a throwback to the legendary past in which a master forester, Count von Hackleberg, plays the role of the legendary Wild Huntsman, organizing hunts of members of subjugated races for the benefit of senior members of the Reich. The count’s “harriers”—biologically altered females outfitted as naked catlike huntresses—gives the book’s treatment of the themes of dominance and submission a patina of perverse sexuality.

Dominance and submission recur again in The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny (1953), which collects three stories, including the title tale, in which a teenage girl discovers that the handsome young man who lives on the estate next door to her boarding school, and who encourages her romantic inclinations toward him, intends to capture her soul magically in a doll to serve as his plaything. In one of the book’s other stories, “The Trespassers,” a reclusive girl in a country estate uses her sexual allure to persuade two schoolboys who have strayed onto its premises to help her capture a unicorn.

The posthumous collection The Sacrifice and Other Stories (2002) collects four stories, of which two capture the same sense of sexual menace that imbues Sarban’s other fiction: “The King of the Lake,” an Arabian Nights–style fable in which two women lost in a sandstorm are taken to an underground lake by a mysterious stranger whose mythic destiny is bound up with his unsavory designs on them; and “Number Fourteen,” about a religious cult’s obsession with a dancer in (then) contemporary London. Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings (2010) collects a number of fragmentary and previously unpublished works, including the novella “The Gynarchs,” about a postapocalyptic matriarchal utopia.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Machen, Arthur.

Further Reading

Nicholls, Peter. 1986. “Sarban.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume II, edited by Everett F. Bleiler, 667–673. New York: Scribners.

Valentine, Mark. 2010. Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban. North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.

“SARDONICUS”

“Sardonicus” is a short story written by Ray Russell, originally published in the January 1961 issue of Playboy magazine. It is an example of a Gothic story in both its Bohemian castle setting and damsel-in-distress plot, prompting Stephen King to call it “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written” (del Toro 2013, xii). The story was later collected in Unholy Trilogy (1967) with two other tales, “Sagittarius,” which takes place in part in Paris at the infamous Grand Guignol (a theater specializing in horror plays, presented with copious gore), and “Sanguinarius,” a fictional account of the murderous Countess Elizabeth Bathory.

“Sardonicus” tells the story of Robert Cargrave, a doctor, who is called to an ancient estate to help a former love interest, Maude, who is now married to Sardonicus, the owner of the impressive manor. Sardonicus is suffering from a rare medical condition that makes it impossible for him to move his face, which has been frozen in a horrific grin ever since he looked upon the corpse of his father in its grave. He is a prime example of a man who has turned into a monster, specifically, a ghoul. Sardonicus proves to be both an unkind host and an abusive husband, and after he psychologically tortures Robert, the doctor finally retaliates, determined to save Maude. Robert uses his own knowledge of psychology to convince Sardonicus that his mouth will no longer open or close, leaving him to die from starvation.

William Castle: Master of Gimmickry

The American filmmaker William Castle, who produced and directed the movie adaptation of Russell’s Sardonicus, achieved lasting fame, albeit of a gaudy sort, for his low-budget thriller and horror films in the 1950s and 1960s (as well as for his one “high-class” producing effort, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby). The “punishment poll” that he created for Mr. Sardonicus was only one of many gimmicks that he conceived to market his movies. For Macabre (1958), he provided audience members with (fake) life insurance policies in case they died of fright. For The House on Haunted Hill (1959), he had a skeleton fly out over audiences on a wire during the climactic scene (a gimmick given a fond homage thirty-eight years later in director Wes Craven’s Scream 2 [1997]). For The Tingler (1959) he had some of the seats in certain theaters rigged with a vibrating motor to provide a “shock” during the finale, when a monster called “the tingler” gets loose in a movie theater. Today these and Castle’s many other promotional stunts are the stuff of Hollywood and horror movie legend.

Matt Cardin

The same year of its publication, Russell’s story was adapted to film by director William Castle under the title Mr. Sardonicus. The film was released by Columbia in October 1961, with Guy Rolfe playing the titular character. Castle, a master at creating gimmicks to fill theater seats, advertised two endings and let the audience participate in a “punishment poll” to vote on whether Mr. Sardonicus should live or die. The reviews were mixed at best, but even so, Mr. Sardonicus is considered by many to be the best of Castle’s career, due in large part to the makeup effects used to create the horrific smile on Rolfe’s face.

In 2013 Penguin included Russell’s story in Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories, an anthology for Penguin Classics edited by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. In his foreword, del Toro effectively highlighted the significance of “Sardonicus” as both a backward-looking and forward-looking tale when he described it as “a tale of enormous originality that remains, at the same time, a grand homage and a reinvention of the Gothic” (del Toro 2013, xiii).

Lisa Kröger

See also: Monsters; Psychological Horror; Russell, Ray.

Further Reading

Brottman, Mikita. 2004. “Afterword: Risus Sardonicus.” In Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, 141–153. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

Conners, Scott. 2007. “The Ghoul.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 243–266. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Del Toro, Guillermo. 2013. “Foreword.” In Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell, xi–xix. New York: Penguin.

Staggs, Matt. 2016. “Sardonicus Rising: Horror Master Ray Russsell’s Unexpected Revival.” Unbound Worlds, September 30. http://www.unboundworlds.com/2016/09/sardonicus-rising-horror-master-ray-russells-unexpected-revival.

“SCHALKEN THE PAINTER”

Although Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s (1814–1873) most celebrated work remains the vampire novella Carmilla (1871–1872), and to a lesser extent the supernatural short story “Green Tea” (1869), “Schalken the Painter,” one of his earliest supernatural tales, is considered by connoisseurs of the uncanny to be one of his finest offerings. The story has long been a favorite among anthologists, including Montague Summers, Peter Haining, and E. F. Bleiler. M. R. James, who generally held Le Fanu’s writing in high regard, singled out this story in his introduction to Ghosts & Marvels (1924) as being “one of the best of Le Fanu’s good things” (James 2001, 488).

“Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter,” to give the tale its full title, was first published in the Dublin University Magazine in the May 1839 issue. The story originally bore the subtitle “Being a Seventh Extract from the Legacy of the Late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh,” and was part of a loosely linked series of tales and poems, collected posthumously under the title The Purcell Papers (1880). “Schalken,” which is set in Holland, is further notable as being Le Fanu’s first story to be set outside of Dublin.

The titular protagonist Godfrey Schalken is based on the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706), whose chiaroscuro style (an art style that highlights the contrast between light and shadow) informs Le Fanu’s narrative technique, especially the way in which descriptive details are carefully revealed to great uncanny effect. The tale concerns the inspiration for a painting by Schalken depicting a white-robed female figure whose arch smile is illuminated solely by the lamp she bears; in the background is a man with his hand on the hilt of his sword, in the act of drawing it. Whether or not this painting is based on one that Le Fanu had actually seen is a frequent topic of debate among scholars.

Schalken, apprenticed to Gerard Douw (Gerrit Dou, 1613–1675), falls in love with his master’s ward, Rose Velderkaust, who is “possessed of all the dimpling charms of the fair, light-hearted Flemish maidens” (Le Fanu 2014, 78). One evening a sinister stranger appears in the studio—Mynher Vanderhausen, from Rotterdam—whose bluish leaden face is described as “malignant, even satanic” (89). Vanderhausen offers Douw a box of golden ingots in exchange for Rose’s hand in marriage. Despite Schalken’s affection, Douw accepts, and Vanderhausen leaves for Rotterdam with his bride. Some time later, Rose returns to Douw’s house “wild and haggard, and pale with exhaustion and terror” (92). With the aid of an old clergyman, Schalken and Douw attempt to shelter her, but she is taken one night by some unseen hand. Schalken encounters Rose once more in a church in Rotterdam. With an arch smile she leads him to the crypt, where he witnesses a charnel bed and the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen.

“Schalken” shares with Carmilla horrific sexual undertones, especially in its climax, in which sexual congress between the living and the dead is strongly implied. This theme of innocence ruined by the otherworldly can also be found in two of Le Fanu’s later stories, “The Child That Went with the Faeries” (1870) and “Laura Silver Bell” (1872). However, “Schalken” remains Le Fanu’s cruelest and most chilling variation on the demon lover theme.

Le Fanu often reworked his stories throughout his career. For his first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), he included a rewritten version of “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter,” with the truncated title “Schalken the Painter,” and accompanied it with an illustration by frequent Dickens collaborator “Phiz” (Hablot K. Browne, 1815–1882). While neither version of the story is considered better than the other—each has its own merits and flourishes of supernatural subtlety—they do have their differences, notably in the rewritten opening paragraphs and the addition of a Bible quote (Job 9:32–34).

In 1979 the BBC adapted Le Fanu’s story for television. Schalcken the Painter was written and directed by Leslie Meaghy and first aired on December 23. Though a drama, Schalcken was filmed for the arts documentary program Omnibus. It is now considered part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series along with adaptations of M. R. James and Dickens. Meaghy’s faithful adaptation, with its slow build toward the final horrific scene, is also notable for its lush cinematography, reproducing as it does the styles, tones, and compositions of the Dutch masters.

Brian J. Showers

See also: Bleiler, E. F.; Carmilla; “Green Tea”; Haining, Peter; In a Glass Darkly; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Summers, Montague.

Further Reading

Hervey, Ben. 2014. Schalcken the Painter. BFI Flipside: 1–9.

James, M. R. 2001. Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels. In A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings by M. R. James, edited by Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden, 486–490. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press. Originally published in Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, edited by Vere H. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).

Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1839] 2014. “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.” In Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, edited by Darryl Jones, 76–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pardoe, Rosemary. 1988. “Schalken the Painting.” Ghosts and Scholars 10: 28, 34.

Rockhill, Jim. 2002. Introduction to Schalken the Painter and Others by J. S. Le Fanu, ix–xxxiii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

SCHULZ, BRUNO (1892–1942)

Bruno Schulz was a Polish author and artist of Jewish heritage, best known for his collections of fantastic short stories. He wrote atmospheric, phantasmagorical fiction that dwelt on humdrum images and scenes in a way that saturated them with a curious beauty. In some ways, Schulz’s work seems to anticipate what would later be called magical realism, in association primarily with Latin American literature. He was more interested in mystery, wonder, and the play of the grotesque and the beautiful than he was in terror, although much of his fiction does involve a kind of intense emotion of expectancy, if not dread. In modern horror fiction his presence and significance can be felt through his impact on a number of authors, including the American writer Thomas Ligotti and the British writer Mark Samuels.

Schulz was born in Drohobycz, Poland (but now part of Ukraine), where he lived almost his entire life, and which was the backdrop and subject of his fiction. He left home to study art and architecture, then returned, and supported himself by teaching.

Schulz had already been writing for some time, starting no later than 1925, when a friend showed some of his letters to Zofia Nalkowska, a Polish novelist and an important member of the Polish Academy of Literature. She saw Schulz’s extraordinary talent, and encouraged him to publish his work. Schulz’s first collection was published in 1934. Entitled Sklepy Cynamonowe, or Cinnamon Shops, it consisted of a series of linked, dreamlike stories drawn from Schulz’s own childhood and adolescent experiences. The collection was published in English under the title The Street of Crocodiles in 1963. A masterpiece of Polish prose, of delicate fantasy and subtle characterization, the work attracted enough praise to prompt a second book in 1937, Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra, published in English as The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1988.

In 1938, Schulz won the Golden Laurel, a prestigious award presented by the Polish Academy of Literature, identifying him as one of the most important living Polish authors. His reputation outside Poland took longer to develop, but he is now internationally recognized as one of the greatest fantasists of all time.

Schulz managed to avoid being forced to enter a concentration camp like many other Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation, mainly because he had the protection of Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who appreciated Schulz’s art. However, in 1942, Schulz was murdered in the streets of Drohobycz by Karl Guenter, another officer of the Gestapo.

There are three primary recurring characters in Schulz’s stories, apart from the narrator, who is usually more or less a stand-in for Schulz himself. The first is his father, a quixotic, imaginative man who is not referred to by name; while benign, he has attributes of a sorcerer, alchemist, or mad scientist. Many of the most fantastic elements of the stories center on him. The second character is a female servant named Adela; while she works for the family, Adela is no menial, and seems to fill the void in authority, and real solidity, left behind by the remoteness of the father. The third character is Drohobycz; one dimension of Schulz’s work is the animation and expressiveness he attributes to landscape, weather, and above all the town—its buildings, streets, various objects. The moods and desires of the characters are always reflected in local variations in the spirit of the setting, which always plays a dynamic role in these stories.

In 1973, Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy created a feature film version of The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, called “The Hourglass Sanatorium.” A story from Cinnamon Shops, entitled “The Street of Crocodiles,” was adapted into a stop-motion animated film by the Quay Brothers in 1986.

Michael Cisco

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; The Numinous.

Further Reading

Banks, Brian R. 2006. Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination, & Legacy of Bruno Schulz. Ashby-de-la-Zouch: InkerMen Press.

Ficowksi, Jerzy. 2004. Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait. New York: W. W. Norton.

Grossman, David. 2009. “The Age of Genius: The Legend of Bruno Schulz.” The New Yorker, June 8. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/08/the-age-of-genius.

Nolen, Larry. 2013. “The Fragile Reality of ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” Weird Fiction Review, June 4. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/06/101-weird-writers-25-bruno-schulz.

SCHWEITZER, DARRELL (1952–)

Darrell Schweitzer is known to the horror community as principal or co-editor of Weird Tales magazine from 1987 to 2007, a man behind numerous horror anthologies, a ubiquitous critic and reviewer, and the most active interviewer of authors in the horror field. Alongside these efforts, Schweitzer has generated several novels and more than 300 short stories in the horror, fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction genres.

Schweitzer’s critical reputation is of long standing. Tackling the most famous of modern horror writers, his early The Dream Quest of H. P. Lovecraft (1978) is a standout piece of scholarship: a critique of Lovecraft’s work from a writer/editor’s perspective that yields refreshingly frank assessments. His “Readers” series of essay collections, focusing on Thomas Ligotti, Robert E. Howard, and Neil Gaiman, gathers the views of the best of today’s genre critics, and is well known to devotees of horror.

This same community is somewhat less aware of Schweitzer’s own fiction. His outright horror stories can be found in Transients (1993), and his Cthulhu Mythos tales in Awaiting Strange Gods (2015); all hinge on intrusions of the strange and supernatural into contemporary life and are written in a disarmingly understated prose style, often in the first person. The imagery is nightmarish, and the events typically fateful. His characters—innocents, frequently children—explore Schweitzer’s themes of suffering, sacrifice, the meaning of courage, and bewilderment in the face of the unknown. The bright themes that Schweitzer links with the dark—humility, grace, transformation, holiness—share an equal place.

Allowing for invented settings and mythic/religious overtones, Schweitzer’s fantastic fiction can easily be gathered under the horror umbrella as well. The terror of these fantasies is profound and direct: Schweitzer scorns any “Dunsanian restraint” (i.e., the practice of shying delicately away from direct depictions of horror in the manner of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany) and presents chilling images of horror and scenes of bloody death that are shocking and effective. And while he keeps well to the “mythic” tradition in fantasy, the gods that weave the destinies of his characters work to a pattern that these characters will never understand.

In his harrowing best novel, The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995), the child Sekenre, son of a sorcerer, is driven to an act of parricide, by which he himself becomes a sorcerer. This is like contracting Soul Cancer, and it fills him with the souls of all the sorcerers his father had killed. Schweitzer meets the challenge of portraying the psychology of a child whose head is stuffed with the evil, dehumanized spirits of the dead. His “Goddess” series (The Shattered Goddess [1982] and a dozen stories) explores a far-future earth reeling from the death of this titular deity, a time of random horrors and miracles. The linked stories of Living with the Dead (2008) find Schweitzer working in a new palette, spare, pale, absurdist: a town must eternally suffer the cargo-ship loads of undecaying corpses left stacked on its docks.

Schweitzer has been awarded a World Fantasy Award for his editing of Weird Tales. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Steve Behrends

See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Weird Tales; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Behrends, Steve. 1989. “Holy Fire: Darrell Schweitzer’s Imaginative Fiction.” Studies in Weird Fiction 5 (Spring): 3–11.

Loban, Leila. 1996. “The Sorcerer behind the Mask: Darrell Schweitzer Interviewed.” Interzone 111 (September): 35–39.

Rand, Ken. 2004. “Darrell Schweitzer” (interview). The Internet Review of Science Fiction, January. http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10014.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1997. Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantasy Literature. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

“THE SCREAMING SKULL”

F. Marion Crawford, a popular and successful American novelist, wrote a small number of ghost stories in the course of a long career. His ghost stories were sufficiently atypical of his work—he mostly wrote mainstream novels set in Italy—that they were only collected posthumously in Wandering Ghosts (1911). Most of them have become anthology standards. And while one of these, “The Screaming Skull” (first published in 1908), is a powerful story, it is the tale’s technique that most singles it out for study.

It was common for writers of Crawford’s era (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to frame a story by carefully describing the circumstances under which it is told. Here Crawford builds a spooky atmosphere by taking this technique to an extreme. Two retired sea captains are talking on a dark night. The story is told as a monologue, almost stream of consciousness, by one of them, who also acts out part of the continuing drama as he relates the tale—for example, by fetching the box in which the skull of the title is kept, only to discover it missing. According to the narrative, the skull, which has the disconcerting habit of screaming if moved from where it wants to be, was found in the possession of the late Dr. Pratt. The sea captain narrator has a guilty conscience because he told Pratt how a murder was committed by drugging the victim, then pouring hot lead in through an ear. The doctor’s wife, Mrs. Pratt, mysteriously died soon thereafter, and it is uncertain whether the screaming skull, which belonged to Dr. Pratt, is actually hers or just a medical specimen (although something does rattle inside it). Later, the doctor himself was found dead, as if something bit his throat and crushed his windpipe. The narrator says he has inherited the doctor’s house, skull and all. He is convinced that it hates him.

While the reader can easily conclude that the skull is indeed screaming, as opposed to the sound merely coming from the wind, and that Pratt indeed killed his wife and that this is her skull with a lump of lead rattling inside it, the narrator uses his own diffuse narration to avoid coming to terms with these facts until it is too late, and he is likewise found dead “by the hands or teeth of some person unknown.”

The story was adapted to film—although the screenplay’s source in Crawford’s story was unacknowledged and uncredited—in the 1950 low-grade American horror film The Screaming Skull, about a woman who thinks her new husband’s first wife is haunting her.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Crawford, F. Marion; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 2004. “F. Marion Crawford: Blood-and-Thunder Horror.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 26–38. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Moran, John C. 1981. An F. Marion Crawford Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Morgan, Chris, 1985. “F. Marion Crawford.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 747–752. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

SHE

She: A History of Adventure is a novel by H. Rider Haggard. It was serialized in The Graphic between October 1886 and January 1887 and then published in book form in America in 1886 and England in 1887. Haggard was an extremely popular writer, and She was his most popular book, rivaled only by his King Solomon’s Mines (1885). It remains one of the best-selling novels in publishing history, and its influence on subsequent writers of fantasy and horror has been extensive and profound, with its concepts of ancient immortals and lost civilizations influencing writers as diverse as Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

She at first appears to be a traditional ethnographic adventure story, which is to say, an adventure story in which the narrative core depicts Anglo-European travels to another land, often for personal gain but occasionally to resolve ancestral issues, and the travelers’ interactions with the indigenous peoples. She is thus told from the viewpoint of Horace Holly, a middle-aged Cambridge professor, guardian of the young and handsome Leo Vincey. Leo’s father told Holly of his family’s heritage, left Holly with an iron box not to be opened until his son was twenty-five, and died that evening. Holly raised Leo, and on Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, the two open the box and find in it the Sherd of Amenartas, which gives them traveling instructions.

In East Africa they are captured by the Amahaggers, who are ruled by a mysterious white queen, “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” Leo has married Ustane, one of the Amahaggers, when there is a fight in which he is wounded. He is near death when they are taken to the lost city of Kôr, which predates the Egyptians, and meet She, also known as Ayesha, whose scientific knowledge is incredible and whose lifespan is in excess of 2,000 years. She has lived in Kôr following the death of her Greek lover Kallikrates, whom she slew in a jealous rage. She has not seen the ailing Leo, but when she does, she believes him to be the reincarnation of Kallikrates and heals him. She is jealous of Ustane and kills her, and though Holly and Leo object, She is overwhelming. She wants Leo to join her as an immortal ruler, a process that involves an immersion in the Pillar of Fire. To show Leo that it is safe, She immerses herself again, but this second time undoes the benefits and She withers away. Her last words are a promise to return.

The character and story of She proved immensely popular with Haggard’s late Victorian readership, and the book was immediately dramatized, parodied, and pastiched. (Haggard himself assisted in some of these.) She was a strong and independent woman, something relatively rare in Victorian ethnographic adventure stories, which focus on the men; indeed, so strong was She that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung later used her as the embodiment of an archetype, the woman as sustainer and devourer. In addition, Haggard’s presentation of the “Other,” while leaving no doubt of the superiority of the English, is neither patronizing nor demeaning: his characters are sympathetic, even when their ends are, to European eyes, objectionable. She’s “scientific” knowledge and abilities are likewise intriguing, but most intriguing of all, She is riddled with erotic imagery and behavior, presented almost explicitly. These include Holly’s sexuality, Leo’s marriage with Ustane, and the character Bilali’s obsessions, but even She/Ayesha is depicted as having slept next to the corpse of Kallikrates for 2,000 years. Even if they could not put a word to it, Haggard’s audience undoubtedly responded to this.

Haggard wrote continuations and sequels to She: Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1920), and Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923). His attitudes toward the characters gradually shifted and evolved until, at the end, the love triangle resolved itself with She being Kallikrates/Leo Vincey’s destined bride and Amenartas/Ustane being the interloper. All of these works remain readable, and She remains consistently fascinating. Its cultural reach has been extended by multiple extraliterary adaptations. It was adapted for the stage and first filmed in 1899 by cinema pioneer Georges Méliès; there have been many additional productions for film, radio, and other media, including a rock opera.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Haggard, H. Rider; Mummies.

Further Reading

Brantlinger, Patrick. 2001. Introduction to She: A History of Adventure, edited by Patrick Brantlinger, vii–xxviii. London and New York: Penguin.

Deane, Bradley. 2008. “Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 51, no. 4: 381–410.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. “Rider Haggard among the Mummies.” In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, 185–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nelson, Dale J. 2006. “Haggard’s She: Burke’s Sublime in a Popular Romance.” Mythlore 24, nos. 3–4: 111–117.

SHEA, MICHAEL (1946–2014)

Michael Shea was one of the most versatile, brilliant, and sadly neglected talents in modern horror and dark fantasy literature. He began publishing short fiction in 1979 and had soon authored one of the most brilliantly horrific tales in the contemporary canon, “The Autopsy” (1980). His early tales were gathered in a 1987 Arkham House collection, Polyphemus; the eponymous novella, like “The Autopsy,” fuses science fictional and horror elements, depicting the grotesque biology of extraterrestrial beings in imagery and language straight out of H. P. Lovecraft. Shea’s debts to that author were profound, most evident in his 1984 novel The Color out of Time, a Cthulhu Mythos tale of malign alien presences infesting a secluded New England valley. Shea produced several more stories in a Lovecraftian vein, which were eventually gathered into Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2010). Some of these stories evoke the antiquarian milieu of the originals, while others deploy more modern settings, such as his 1987 novella Fat Face, in which a prostitute down on her luck runs afoul of an eldritch monstrosity.

“The Autopsy”: An Alien Parasite That Feeds on Terror

Shea’s “The Autopsy” (1980) is a World Fantasy Award–nominated story about an alien parasite that invades and controls human bodies. As with much of Shea’s other work, it is atmospheric and bleak, as well as vivid and cinematic. “The Autopsy” straddles the line between classic weird fiction and contemporary horror. A continuation of Lovecraftian cosmic dread, it shows humanity coming face-to-face with a cruel and malefic universe; at the same time, it is a forerunner of splatterpunk fiction in its matter-of-fact depiction of bodily violation and bloodletting.

The story centers on Dr. Carl Winters, a pathologist called in to perform autopsies on a number of bodies killed during a mining disaster. One of these cadavers turns out to be infested by the parasite, a highly intelligent and fiendishly manipulative entity with which Dr. Winters engages in a high-stakes battle of wits. The malign creature feeds on human terror, and the tale sustains a tone of barely suppressed hysteria as the full dimensions of the monster’s evil purpose become apparent. Dr. Winters’s ultimate gambit, a self-sacrificial act that turns the tables on the monster, is both ingenious and horrifying.

Written in a style that moves from the grimly clinical to the visionary, “The Autopsy” is one of the most compelling examples of a horror–science fiction crossover in contemporary genre literature. The scene in which the alien reveals itself to Dr. Winters is strikingly unnerving, and the dialogue that ensues between them resonates with the finest works of “first contact” in the science fiction canon, especially stories that depict a form of extraterrestrial life whose biomorphic difference from humanity leads to a fundamental gulf of understanding.

Rob Latham

Shea’s uncanny ability to capture the sensibility of a major forerunner of modern dark fantasy was clear from his first publication, the 1974 novel A Quest for Symbilis, which is set in the decadent far future of Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” series. Shea crafted his own lush science-fantasy venue, reminiscent of Vance and Clark Ashton Smith, in his 1982 novel Nifft the Lean (1982), a picaresque tale with horror elements that was continued in two sequels, The Mines of Behemoth (1987) and The A’rak (2000). The series was well received by critics, with the first book winning a World Fantasy Award, though it did not connect with readers, perhaps because of its unsettled genre status—part sword-and-sorcery, part weird fiction, part quest fantasy—and its tendency to revel in scenes of baroque Gothic excess. His best work simply defies categories: the World Fantasy Award–winning story “Growlimb” (2004), for example, is science fiction in conception but horror in execution, while his 1985 novel In Yana, The Touch of Undying is sui generis (of its own unique kind): an other-world fantasy teeming with bizarre invention. By contrast, Shea’s final novel, Assault on Sunrise (2013), is a more conventional tale of dystopian apocalypse, intended as part of an unfinished trilogy.

Shea’s sudden death in 2014 deprived the genre of one of its most unusual and compelling voices. An excellent “tribute” anthology—And Death Shall Have No Dominion, edited by S. T. Joshi—was released by Hippocampus Press in 2016 and may perhaps begin to revive Shea’s dormant reputation. It is, at present, the only book of his work in print.

Rob Latham

See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Splatterpunk.

Further Reading

Cox, Arthur J. 1988. “The Grim Imperative of Michael Shea.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrel Schweitzer, 115–120. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

“Michael Shea.” 1996. In St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. New York: St. James Press.

Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Michael Shea.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 839–843. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

SHELLEY, MARY (1797–1851)

Despite her accomplished literary life, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is known for two things: writing the novel Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and keeping company with a crowd of highly significant literary figures. This included her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her), and her father, the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, from whom she inherited a political and literary mindset. It also included her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who complicated the authorship of her work, and Lord Byron and John Polidori, with whom she participated in a famous ghost story contest while staying in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. Her novel, Frankenstein, arose from this contest and would not only alter the course of the Gothic tradition with its relatable, tortured monster and its universal questions of life, death, and scientific pursuit, but its creation would also become a scholarly and popular obsession for the next 200 years. It has been a source of inspiration for countless works within Gothic literature, film, and visual art, and recent scholarship has increasingly considered Mary for her own genius rather than for her relationship to the writers around her.

Part of the reason why Mary Shelley continues to fascinate is because early political and social manipulations of her biography caused its veracity to be in a constant state of fluctuation. What is certain is that Shelley’s life was fraught with traumatic births and deaths, the first of both being her entrance into the world, when Mary Wollstonecraft suffered puerperal fever following childbirth. It is rumored that young Mary made frequent visits to her mother’s grave, learning to read by tracing the name in the stone, and eventually holding a courtship with her future husband over the burial plot. Her family life was unconventional for the time, including illegitimate siblings from both her mother’s previous relationship and her father’s remarriage after Wollstonecraft’s death, establishing an early progressive view of human relationships beyond the limitations of law and social structure. She also experienced a high intellectual expectation in such a family, which received frequent visits from the great political and literary minds of the day. It was an expectation she had no difficulty meeting.

At the age of sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, then twenty-one and already married, accompanied by her step-sister Claire Clairmont. It was a tempestuous relationship that would occasion two suicides (Mary’s half-sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife, Harriet). The group expanded to include Byron, who fathered a child with Claire and who would add to the scandal already brewing, as the group was dubbed the “league of incest.” The Shelleys married shortly after the famous summer of 1816 in an attempt to gain custody of Percy’s children via Harriet. They failed in this, with courts questioning Percy’s morality and lifestyle. He and Mary would relocate between England and the continent many times throughout their life together, creating their own circle of friends who shared their political, intellectual, and moral beliefs.

The death of Mary’s first child soon after its birth left a lasting mark on the author, and she notes in her journal that she dreamed it had returned to life after she rubbed it by the fire to warm it. It would be the first glimmering of the central concept (of gaining the power to animate the dead) in Frankenstein, her first novel, which she would write more than a year later. The first edition was published anonymously in 1818, with a revised edition that bore Mary’s name following in 1831. The extent of Percy’s involvement in the writing of these editions and earlier drafts has been a matter of intense scholarly debate, a matter complicated by the Shelleys’ frequent literary collaboration throughout their relationship. The novel became and remained popular in England through its many dramatizations.

Mary was a voracious reader, growing up in her father’s library, finding a haven in her husband’s library, and participating in the latest literary discussions among her intellectual circles. Surrounded by scientific and literary thinkers, she was impressively knowledgeable about the latest in scientific and medical research and political thought, a background that has kept scholars busy in their analysis of the historical and medical context of Frankenstein and her other novels. In the character of Victor Frankenstein, the scientific creator, critics also read motherhood and artistic creation, following the lead of Mary’s biography in their analyses, as intensified by the recovery work of Ellen Moers and the idea of the “Female Gothic” that Moers established in the 1970s. As Frankenstein demonstrates, much of Mary’s work articulates her parents’ politics, particularly the politicization of the domestic sphere—family and education—and individual power and responsibility for egalitarian reform and positive change.

Frankenstein was far from Shelley’s only literary progeny; she wrote six novels, many short stories, several poems, and extensive travel narratives, journals, and letters. In 1818 her one-year-old daughter, Clara, died of dysentery, and less than a year later her son, William, died of malaria at the age of three. These two deaths, in combination with tensions caused by Mary and Percy’s notoriously open relationship, devastated her, driving her into a deep depression. She channeled this grief into the writing of Matilda, originally titled The Fields of Fancy after her mother’s unfinished The Cave of Fancy. Though it was written in 1819, Matilda was not published until 1959 due to its preoccupation with incest and suicide: a father, obsessed and in love with his daughter when they are reunited after a long absence commits suicide when she fails to return this love. While the psycho-biographical approach taken by current scholars confirms the novel to be the product of a deeply depressed mind, the tendency of earlier critics to assign biographical status to much of Shelley’s work becomes problematic here. Godwin, Mary’s father, was disgusted by the text and urged her to hold its publication to prevent adding further scandal to her already unconventional domesticity, a relationship that Godwin did not support until she and Percy married, despite its similarity to his own romantic relationships. She agreed that it would not be published in her lifetime.

In her next three novels, Mary shifted to more historical themes. Written in Italy and influenced by her time there, Valperga (1823) involved extensive research into fourteenth-century Italian politics. Mixing a fictionalized version of this history with the politics of her own day, the novel follows conflicts between two political parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibelines, and attempts by the central characters, Castruccio and Euthanasia, to create a bond between the parties with their love, one that would eventually fail with the fall of Valperga, with Euthanasia’s fictional castle representing republicanism and peace. The novel takes on themes of violence and power, with shades of Machiavellianism and Napoleon. As was the case for many of Mary’s works, however, critics would take the cue of female authorship to prioritize the love story over its political commentary and experimentation.

In 1822, shortly before Valperga’s publication and less than a month after Shelley had suffered a miscarriage, Percy went sailing in the Bay of Spezia and drowned. When Byron died in Greece in 1824, Shelley would write in her journal of feeling like “the last man,” left behind by her children, husband, and friend (Bennett 1998, 83). In her next novel, The Last Man (1826), she embraced biographical connection to its fictional characters as a way of grieving, reserving a place for the central figures in her life within the central characters of her novel. The plot, a kind of fictionalized future history, is one part romance, one part sociopolitical intrigue, and one part Gothic apocalyptic disease narrative. It follows efforts by a first-person narrator and his circle as they successfully replace the monarchy with a republic, but even its leaders are no match for the plague, which systematically dismantles institutions and their laws, leaving men and women as equals and devoid of the restrictions imposed on them by society, before wiping out all of humanity. The narrator soon becomes the last man alive, leaving his narrative behind as a testament to the works and fate of humanity, just as Shelley would strive to memorialize and document her husband’s lifeworks.

Percy’s father, Sir Timothy, approved of his relationship with Mary even less than Godwin did, and he made several attempts to prove that her marriage to his son was invalid and to assume custody of his remaining grandchild, Percy Florence, all of which failed. He agreed to support the dwindling family financially, but only if Shelley agreed to move back to England, which she had no choice but to do. He also forbade her from publishing his son’s biography, and, while Mary waited for the end of his life to lift that ban, she did go ahead and publish a collection of Percy’s poetry, with extensive biographical annotations and additions.

She returned to history in her authorship of The Adventures of Perkin Warbeck (1830), a text that is rarely read and little studied today. It was largely a response to the conservative, transitional sociopolitical environment she found in England when she returned with her son. Historical and cultural research for this novel found her reaching out to friends in Ireland and Scotland, including Walter Scott, to collect folklore and regional histories. The title character Warbeck historically claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III. He was forced to confess the falsity of this claim and was executed, but Shelley’s novel presents his case as truthful and explores questions of citizenship and national and personal identity.

In a drastic turn from the historical novel, Shelley situated her last two novels in her own present day. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are often discussed together and widely believed to be the least dynamic of her novels, written to support her family. Lodore demonstrated a return to her parents’ radical views on education and gender that surfaced in Frankenstein, though the story itself is a conventional tale of a mother/daughter relationship and a father’s education of his daughter. Its inclusion of multiple forms of education amid this common plot has caused critics to disagree drastically as to its radical or conservative leanings. Falkner, written after Godwin’s death, continues the father/daughter theme and is described by some as a rewriting of Lodore. In it, the orphaned Elizabeth has been cut off from a Catholic family that disapproved of her parents’ marriage. When she interrupts Falkner’s suicide (inspired by the guilt of ruining and abandoning a woman), he takes her under his wing, involving her in his past life and its consequences, showing a repetition of some of the themes found in Matilda. Despite its lukewarm reception, Shelley claimed that it was her favorite.

The end of Shelley’s writing career saw a turn from fiction to biographical and travel works, as well as short periodical pieces. While writing Falkner, she took on five volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–1839), in which she chronicled the lives of great thinkers who asserted the ideals of social reform and liberty that she shared. Her last work, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, 1843 (published 1844) detailed her travels alongside her trademark political commentary. Throughout her work, she championed equal education, individual responsibility, egalitarian reform, travel and mobility, rationality, independence, imagination, and science, all sociopolitical topics glossed over by the critics of her day in favor of more “womanly” literary products. This has only recently begun to change, with scholars making concentrated efforts to recover a biography and system of thought that has been sanitized since the nineteenth century.

In the last years of her life, Mary Shelley traveled with her son, Sir Percy Florence, and his wife, Jane, while continuing to prepare her husband’s writings and biography. In 1851, she fell into a week-long coma and died of a brain tumor that had plagued her for many years. She wished to be buried with her parents. They were disinterred from St. Pancras Churchyard, the historic site of her mother’s grave where Mary had spent so much of her youth, and moved to Bournemouth to join the daughter who inherited and built upon their sociopolitical ideologies and intellectual gifts to claim a gradually recognized position of her own within Gothic studies, women’s writing, progressive politics, and the English novel.

Laura R. Kremmel

See also: Byron, Lord; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist; Monster; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.

Further Reading

Allen, Graham. 2008. Critical Issues: Mary Shelley. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bennett, Betty T. 1998. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fisch, Audrey A., Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. 1993. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mellor, Anne K. 1989. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge.

Montillo, Roseanne. 2013. The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. New York: William Morrow.

Schor, Esther, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SHIEL, M. P. (1865–1947)

Matthew Phipps Shiell, who dropped the final letter of his name for all purposes after coming to England in 1885, was a British writer of supernatural horror and science fiction. He was born in Monserrat in the West Indies, the son of a lay preacher, Matthew Dowdy Shiell. Much research has been carried out into the elder Shiell’s ancestry, in association with the supposition that he was the son of a female slave, thus rendering the younger Shiel’s insistence that he had “no black blood” suspect, although the small quantity in question hardly seems relevant now.

“Xélucha”: A Dark and Decadent Parable

Shiel’s “Xélucha” (1896), published first in Shapes in the Fire: Being a Mid-Winter-Night’s Entertainment in Two Parts and an Interlude, uses abstruse vocabulary and a mythic depiction of London to build a dark and decadent parable about the powers of female sexuality.

The story’s events are from the diary of Mérimée, an aged roué once known as a “Destroyer of Women,” who is now dead. As Mérimée roams the streets of London, he recollects his dead friend Cosmo’s pursuit of the feminine ideal, Xélucha. He encounters a woman—apparently a prostitute—and accompanies her to her house, which is lavishly furnished, though with a few discordant details. There, after an intense discussion of life and philosophy, of creation, intellect, and will, Mérimée recognizes the woman and declares that she is Xélucha, though she insists that Xélucha died of cholera at Antioch ten years previously. Mérimée rushes to embrace her but is rendered unconscious, and when he awakens, it is by himself, in a room of the utmost poverty.

Shiel’s language is deliberately abstruse, allusive, dense, wild, and even playful. This matches the setting, for it is a London as conceived by Robert Louis Stevenson and presented in the New Arabian Nights (1882), a city cosmopolitan and urbane yet ancient and decadent, where the world’s mysterious travelers cross paths and share adventures. The narrative likewise owes much to Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed may be seen as a retelling of “Ligeia” (1838), a statement of feminine will and its survival and eventual triumph, even after death. In addition, as Shiel’s subtitle indicates, “Xélucha” is but a part of an entertainment; it is in fact the first of the three shapes, all involving aspects of femininity and the female.

Richard Bleiler

Shiel liked to tell the story of how his father once took him to the uninhabited islet of Redonda and crowned him king, thus entitling him to create the mythical literary kingdom of Redonda in England, bestowing theoretical titles on many of his friends. That institution still exists, although it is possible that Shiel borrowed and adapted the anecdote, along with the plot of his novel The Lord of the Sea (1900), from Camille Debans’s Les Malheurs de John Bull (1884; translated as The Misfortunes of John Bull), whose hero assumes the kingship of the uninhabited island of Pola and similarly distributes titles to his associates.

Shiel’s early literary endeavors were heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and the French writers who had adapted Poe’s work as key exemplars for the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement. Prince Zaleski (1895) features a detective whose lifestyle and posturing are based on Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, but extrapolated to extremes of bizarrerie in the spirit of Decadent style and lifestyle. Shapes in the Fire (1897), similarly issued by Yellow Book publisher John Lane, performs the same function for several of Poe’s other subjects, with an unparalleled flamboyance; alongside five stories and a narrative poem it provides a literary manifesto, “Premier and Maker,” in the form of a dialogue between an alter ego of Shiel and a prime minister identifiable as Lord Rosebery. The cream of Shiel’s short fiction is contained in the collection, including “Xélucha,” in which the eponymous “splendid harlot” returns from the grave in the guise of a Piccadilly whore, and “Vaila,” a vivid transfiguration of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The stories in The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911) are watered down by concessions to convention, but Here Comes the Lady (1928) contains transfigurations of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “A Descent into the Maëlstrom” in “The Primate of the Rose” and “Dark Lot of One Saul.”

Shiel’s only full-length Decadent fantasy, The Purple Cloud (1901), is a transfiguration of the biblical book of Job, in which the population of the Earth is destroyed, except for Adam Jeffson, who spends seventeen years as emperor of the empty Earth, assailed more sharply than any potentate of old by the classic Decadent afflictions of impuissance, ennui, and spleen (weakness, listlessness, and bad temper), before he is obliged to move on by the discovery of a female born as the world died and raised in ignorance of its plight. Stephen King has cited The Purple Cloud as one of the inspirations for his apocalyptic novel The Stand, and Eugene Thacker has identified it as arguably “the text that establishes the blueprint” for the type of modern story in which fogs or mists are portrayed “as gothic, malevolent forces, often that serve as cover for ghosts, monsters, or unknown miasmas,” with examples of texts that follow this blueprint including James Herbert’s The Fog (1975), Stephen King’s The Mist (1980), and director John Carpenter’s movie The Fog (1980) (Thacker 2011, 83, 84).

Few of Shiel’s other novels contain substantial elements of horror, although The Last Miracle (1906) and Dr Krasinski’s Secret (1929) feature the imprisonment and torture of innocents by seeming villains possessed of allegedly respectable ideals. In 1975 Arkham House published a collection of the thirteen stories that Shiel considered his best, Xélucha and Others, some three decades after the book had first been announced. This was followed by a second Arkham House collection, Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk, in 1977.

Brian Stableford

See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy.

Further Reading

Bleiler, E. F. 1999. “Shiel, M. P. (1865–1947).” In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Bleiler, 697–704. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Morse, A. Reynolds, ed. 1983. Shiel in Diverse Hands: A Collection of Essays on M. P. Shiel. Morse Foundation.

Stableford, Brian. 1995. “The Politics of Evolution: Philosophical Themes in the Speculative Fiction of M. P. Shiel.” In Algebraic Fantasies and Realistic Romances: More Masters of Science Fiction, 73–98. The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today 54. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Thacker, Eugene. 2011. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

THE SHINING

The Shining (1977) is a horror novel by American author Stephen King. It is King’s third published novel, following Carrie (1974) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Its success established King’s prominence in the horror genre and introduced motifs that recur throughout his body of work, such as childhood trauma, uncanny psychic abilities, and anxiety regarding creative freedom.

The novel depicts the plight of the Torrance family during their overwinter stay as caretakers in Colorado’s isolated Overlook Hotel. The Torrances—Jack, Wendy, and five-year-old Danny—experience horrors both human and supernatural as they unearth the hotel’s monstrous history. Danny’s latent psychic power (the eponymous “Shining”) provides fuel for the hotel’s evil, while his father begins to unravel mentally under the pressure of isolation, alcoholism, and writer’s block. Eventually the secure family dynamic degenerates as Jack is driven into a murderous rage directed at his family, whom he sees as a barrier to his own happiness and literary success.

As with so many of King’s novels, it is possible to trace autobiographical links between author and protagonist. In the case of The Shining, King concedes the association, admitting that the novel addresses his own ambivalent feelings toward his young family at the start of his writing career. In an interview with Playboy, King spoke of feeling “pressure” and “experiencing a range of nasty emotions from resentment to anger to occasional outright hate, even surges of mental violence that, thank God, I was able to suppress” (Norden 1988, 32). Pressure and suppression are key themes in The Shining, where the ever-building pressure within the hotel boiler serves as an external metaphor for the violence rising within Jack.

The novel’s psychological subtext is overt. The Shining offers a Freudian triangle in microcosm, where the struggle between son and father is cast against the blank canvas of the hotel and its snowy surroundings. So central is Sigmund Freud to the plot of The Shining that, when Steven Bruhm makes the point that the contemporary Gothic is distinguished by its self-conscious application of psychoanalytic theory, he uses this novel as the definitive example (see Bruhm 2002, 263–268).

Though The Shining is a foundational text of modern horror fiction, it is perhaps more widely known in its cinematic adaptation. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the 1980 film is regarded as a classic of horror cinema, though King himself famously dislikes Kubrick’s interpretation. The most famous scene, in which a deranged Jack Nicholson demolishes a bathroom door with an axe, regularly tops lists of “scariest scenes of all time.” The film itself has occasioned much scholarly debate. The 2012 documentary film Room 237 presents several elaborate analyses of the film, ranging from a reading of it as a commentary on the Native American genocide to “proof” that Kubrick was involved in the moon-landing hoax.

Such obsessive devotion to Kubrick’s film often overshadows the impact that King’s novel had on horror fiction. As the most influential haunted house story since Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), The Shining helped launch a new era of horror. Such is the power of The Shining that when King returned to Danny Torrance nearly four decades later in the sequel, Doctor Sleep (2013), he did so with trepidation, admitting that “nothing can live up to the memory of a good scare” (King 2013, 484).

Neil McRobert

See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Bruhm, Steven. 2002. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Gothic, edited by Jerrold Hogle, 259–276. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Indick, Ben P. 1982. “King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 153–167. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller. Rpt. in Children’s Literature Review, vol. 194, 2015, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.

King, Stephen. 2013. Doctor Sleep. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2013. The Shining. London: British Film Institute.

Norden, Eric. 1988. “Interview with Stephen King.” In Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 24–56. New York: McGraw-Hill.

SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS

The Shirley Jackson Awards were created to acknowledge excellence in the literary genres of the dark fantastic, horror, and psychological suspense. Named after the late Shirley Jackson, the Shirley Jackson Awards also acknowledge the lasting impact that Jackson has had on modern writers of numerous genres. The Shirley Jackson Awards thus honor the contributions of Jackson while simultaneously recognizing those works that best carry on her legacy in fiction.

First presented in 2007 with approval from the Jackson family and delivered every year at Readercon (a science fiction convention established in the 1980s by Bob Colby and Eric Van) in Burlington, Massachusetts, the Shirley Jackson Awards are given for six categories: novel, novella, novelette, short fiction, single-author collection, and edited anthology. The awards are voted on by a five-person jury that consists of academics, critics, editors, and writers. An advisory board offers input and recommendations to the jurors, but does not have voting power. There is also a board of directors made up of the jurors from the 2007 awards and the administrator. The awards maintain a website and social media presence for publicity purposes. Previous recipients of the awards include Alison Littlewood, Greer Gilman, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Yoko Ogawa, Lucius Shepard, Gemma Files, Steve Duffy, Lynda E. Rucker, Kelly Link, Simon Strantzas, and Laird Barron.

Despite their relatively young age, the Shirley Jackson Awards have nonetheless served an important role in the field of horror literature by honoring talented authors of genre-specific fiction who might otherwise be overlooked. The awards have received praise from publishers, commentators, and academics alike, with many noting the significance the awards have had on the genres they acknowledge. Likewise, the awards have helped raise awareness of Jackson’s own literary accomplishments, most notably “The Lottery” (1948), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which did not receive much attention outside of horror circles for many years after her death, until the transition to the twenty-first century. Although the awards are not the sole indicator of an increased awareness of Jackson’s literature in recent years, they are certainly an important one that has helped secure her position as a major figure in American literature. With an impressive list of recipients and nominees every year, along with a rise of appreciation for Jackson’s work, the Shirley Jackson Awards have provided an important outlet for the horror fiction community and are likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Joel T. Terranova

See also: Barron, Laird; Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Gaiman, Neil; Hand, Elizabeth; The Haunting of Hill House; Jackson, Shirley; King, Stephen; Link, Kelly; Psychological Horror; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Miller, Laura. 2010. “Is Shirley Jackson a Great American Writer?” Salon, July 14. http://www.salon.com/2010/07/14/shirley_jackson.

The Shirley Jackson Awards. Accessed December 1, 2016. http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org.

“A SHORT TRIP HOME”

“A Short Trip Home” is a ghost story by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in October 1927 and first published in The Saturday Evening Post on December 17 of that year. Its plot concerns the rescue of Ellen Baker, a young female student at home for Christmas vacation who has been seduced by an incubus—dead man Joe Varland, who in life had been a petty swindler of women traveling alone by train. At the story’s climax, narrator Eddie Stinson defeats Varland’s ghost by professing his love for Ellen, freeing her from Varland’s malign supernatural influence.

Recalling Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, whose ambiguous ending it both evokes and simplifies, the story reads as a Gothic allegory dramatizing sexual corruption and the redemption of innocence through love. Whereas James treated these themes with characteristic obscurity, Fitzgerald’s story presents them in terms of a fairy tale–like triumph of good over evil. Varland’s phantom incubus, like the would-be sex-ghosts of Turn of the Screw, “possesses” his innocent victim, making Ellen complicit in her own moral destruction. By this means, Fitzgerald’s story develops a symbolic equation between supernatural threat, corrupt adult (implicitly male) sexuality, working-class criminality, and death.

The way the rhetoric of romance (“bewitchment,” falling “under the spell” of the beloved [Fitzgerald 2003, 372, 376]), which characterizes Stinson’s feelings for Ellen, lapses perversely into signs of sexual/supernatural predation/seduction in the story’s symbolic register is one of the story’s more disturbing elements, since it suggests that redemptive love and corrupting sexuality are part of the same ill-defined continuum. The story’s ambiguous evocation of “home,” which is not a place of safety, but a place of danger, associated both with Ellen’s seduction and with the ghost’s criminality, is similarly unsettling. Stinson’s heroic rescue of his demonically “possessed” beloved from Varland’s incubus has the quality of a successful exorcism, but it also suggests that the story may have been a wish-fulfillment for Fitzgerald, who was coping with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald’s increasingly worsening schizophrenia throughout the period of the story’s composition.

Fitzgerald regarded this critically neglected tale highly enough to include it in his fourth collection of short fiction, Taps at Reveille (1935), a companion volume to his novel Tender Is the Night (1934), which, published at the height of the Great Depression, was a commercial and critical failure. “A Short Trip Home” is noteworthy for being Fitzgerald’s first foray into the ghost story genre, and also because Fitzgerald repurposed the story’s description of Varland’s ghost to describe another street hustler in Tender Is the Night. Although Fitzgerald typically sets his fiction in a realistic social world, his writing is also widely marked by forays into surrealism, romance, and fantasy, notable not only in this story but also in works such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922; loosely adapted to film in 2008) and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922).

Brian Johnson

See also: Incubi and Succubi; Possession and Exorcism; The Turn of the Screw.

Further Reading

Buell, L. 1982. “The Significance of Fantasy in Fitzgerald’s Fiction.” In The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 23–38. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2003. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner.

Petry, A. H. 1989. Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920–1935. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.

“SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW”

Written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, novelist, and short story writer Conrad Aiken, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” was first published in Virginia Quarterly Review in 1932 and later collected in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken in 1960. Perhaps Aiken’s best-known story, it is a recognized classic that stands as one of the most widely read works of American short fiction from the twentieth century.

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” focuses on twelve-year-old Paul Hasleman, an intelligent boy who is gradually and semi-deliberately becoming estranged from everybody and cut off from his world. He envisions snows that cover everything and muffle all noises, obscuring footfalls of postmen; ultimately, the snows communicate with him, sending him messages only he can perceive. Paul’s distracted behavior causes concerns for his parents, and they summon a doctor, who can find nothing physically wrong with him, but the snows are telling him what to do, and he retreats to his room. When his mother knocks on his door, he yells for her to go away, that he hates her. This said, his world fills completely with the snow that only he can perceive.

Opinions differ on how Aiken’s story is to be received. Some have seen it in an essentially Freudian light, interpreting the story as a retreat from the dirty maturity of adulthood into a dream world of pure white snow, and Aiken did indeed claim to be inspired by Sigmund Freud. Others have assessed the story in more abstract terms, with Paul’s behavior seen as an act of creation, making Paul into what is essentially an artistic figure attempting to bring form and meaning into a structureless world. Still others have seen Paul’s withdrawing from humanity as marking the onset of a mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, and in this they reference Aiken’s life, in which his respected father killed Aiken’s mother and committed suicide, leaving young Conrad (age eleven) to discover their bodies. Because it is so open, presenting details without providing facile explanations, the story remains idiosyncratically powerful, horrible by implication.

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” was recognized early for being appreciable as part of the canon of terror and horror literature. Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser chose to include it in their classic 1944 Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The story was also adapted as a segment for a 1971 episode of Rod Serling’s horror-themed television series Night Gallery, with narration provided by Orson Welles.

Richard Bleiler

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; “Mr. Arcularis”; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Gossman, Ann. 1964. “‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’: The Child as Artist.” Studies in Short Fiction 1, vol. 2 (Winter): 123–128.

Spivey, Ted R. 1997. “Fictional Descent into Hell.” In Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey, 91–105. Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press.

Stevenson, Simon. 2004. “The Anorthoscopic Short Story.” Oxford Literary Review 26: 63–78.

SIMMONS, DAN (1948–)

Dan Simmons is an American writer who has published award-winning novels in genres as diverse as mainstream literary fiction, science fiction, dark fantasy, historical fiction (featuring such characters as Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, George Custer, Vlad Tepes, Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, and the crew of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus), hard-boiled crime fiction, and psychological suspense and horror. His work is often informed or influenced by classical poets such as Dante, T. S. Eliot, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Proust, Chaucer, and Homer.

Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948. His family moved around the Midwest when he was a child. One of their stops, Brimfield, Illinois, became the fictional Elm Haven of his novels Summer of Night (1991) and A Winter Haunting (2002). He received a BA in English from Wabash College, along with a Phi Beta Kappa award for creativity in writing and art. During his time at Wabash, he and his roommate published an underground paper called The Satyr. He earned a master’s in Education from Washington University in St. Louis, where his thesis was on television’s effects on cognition and IQ.

In 1969, while working as a teacher’s aide at a school for the blind, he lived in an attic apartment in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, where he witnessed the gang battles and race riots that later appeared in his apocalyptic vampire novel Carrion Comfort (1989). For the next eighteen years, he taught in Missouri, New York, and Colorado, and ended his career in education teaching gifted and talented children. During his years teaching sixth grade, he told an epic story half an hour per day for six months to his students. It featured the first incarnation of the character that would later become the Shrike in his Hyperion Cantos series of science fiction novels, but he lost the manuscript during a move.

His first short story sales were to Galaxy and Galileo, but both magazines folded before his contributions appeared. The American science fiction author Harlan Ellison critiqued Simmons’s story “The River Styx Runs Upstream” at the Writer’s Conference in the Rockies in the summer of 1981. Ellison encouraged Simmons, who was on the verge of quitting writing, to submit his story to Twilight Zone magazine’s short fiction contest for beginning writers, where it tied for first place, won the Rod Serling Memorial Award, and was published in February 1982, on the day Simmons’s daughter was born.

During the summer of 1982, he wrote the horror novel Song of Kali, about an American writer who travels to Calcutta and gets caught up in a horrific cult that worships the eponymous Hindu goddess. It took three years to find a publisher because of the darkness of the story and its failure to follow genre formula. Tor published the book in 1985, and it became the first-ever first novel to win the World Fantasy Award for best novel, although Simmons himself has said that he does not consider it a fantasy. After the success of Kali, he retired from teaching to write full time.

In interviews and essays, Simmons has explained that he vowed to himself that if he had any success in writing, he would not be bound to one form—that he would write whatever moved him, and never allow an editor or publisher to dictate what he worked on. He acted on the assumption that if one publisher was uninterested in a given work, he would be able to find another publisher for it. This proved to be the case, but it has also meant that he is often forced to find different publishers for projects that deviate from prior expectations, as with his Joe Kurtz noir crime novels. This has had the effect of dividing his audience, and he has acknowledged that, for example, only a very small percentage of the people who read his horror novels also read his science fiction works.

In 1989, Simmons released three books, Phases of Gravity, Carrion Comfort, and Hyperion. He tackled the two long science fiction novels—Fall of Hyperion came out in 1990—because the advance allowed him to make a down payment on a house.

Simmons is known for his extensive research and attention to detail and has traveled as far as Romania and Thailand for research. He brought to life the Darwin Awards (the Internet meme that mocks supposedly true stories of people being killed in foolish accidents) in Darwin’s Blade (2000), about an insurance investigator who looks into wrecks caused by vehicular stupidity; and he fictionalized the creation (and near-destruction) of Mount Rushmore in Black Hills (2010). One of his stated rules when using historical figures—even those who are fictional—is to have them refrain from doing anything that contradicts the known facts of their lives; however, the unknown interstices and gaps in their biographies are fair game.

Simmons’s contributions to horror literature include vampires—of the bloodsucking and psychic varieties—ghosts, a godlike killing machine called the Shrike, malicious deities, ancient evils, and soul-devouring monsters. His version of space travel involves being crushed to death and painfully resurrected at the destination.

The author of nearly thirty books and roughly the same number of short stories and novellas, Simmons is the recipient of several Bram Stoker Awards, nearly a dozen Locus Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, a Hugo, a British Fantasy Award, a British Science Fiction Award, and two World Fantasy Awards, and he has been nominated for many others, including the Nebula and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

While many of his books have been optioned for film and television over the years, none have been produced yet, although Simmons did write two teleplays for the Monsters television series in 1990. His script of his 1992 novel Children of the Night was almost the first to be filmed, but the project collapsed. Plans to film his original film treatment “The End of Gravity” aboard the International Space Station did not come to fruition. Darwin’s Blade was green-lit for an ABC series that never launched. Screenwriters have been stymied by the multiple viewpoints and scope of the Hyperion Cantos. Director Guillermo del Toro acquired the rights to Simmons’s novel Drood (2009), about dark goings-on during the final years of Charles Dickens’s life as told by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins, but del Toro put the project on the back-burner when he was hired to direct The Hobbit (which ended up being directed by Peter Jackson instead). In 2016 AMC announced plans to turn Simmons’s historical novel The Terror (2007), which fictionalizes the disastrous arctic journey of Captain Sir John Franklin in the 1840s, into a horror series to air in 2017.

In 1995 Wabash College awarded Simmons an honorary doctorate for his contributions in education and writing. In 2013 he received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award.

Bev Vincent

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Carrion Comfort; International Horror Guild Award; Song of Kali; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Clasen, Mathias. 2011. “Primal Fear: A Darwinian Perspective on Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali.” Horror Studies 2, no. 1 (May): 89–104.

“Dan Simmons: A Man for All Genres.” 2002. Locus 49, no. 4 (October): 6–7, 59, 61.

Shindler, Dorman T. 2000. “Dan Simmons: Between Two Worlds.” Publishers Weekly (November 6): 65–66. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/33845-dan-simmons-between-two-worlds.html.

Shindler, Dorman T. 2001. “Dan Simmons.” The Writer 114, no. 2: 30–33.

SMITH, CLARK ASHTON (1893–1961)

Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who is often grouped with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in discussions of the most significant writers who contributed regularly to Weird Tales in the 1930s. He was also an accomplished poet and sculptor whose dark and powerful imagination gave birth to an extraordinary body of creative work.

Smith was born in Long Valley, California, and spent most of his life living in a cabin built by his parent near the town of Auburn. He did not attend high school, and he completed his education himself, with his parents’ assistance. An inveterate reader blessed with an exceptional memory, he read and digested Webster’s Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica. He began writing exotic adventure fiction at an early age and published a number of stories in his teens.

“Ubbo-Sathla”: Decadent Prose-Poetry Meets the Cthulhu Mythos

Clark Ashton Smith’s short story “Ubbo-Sathla” was first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales and reprinted in the collection Out of Space and Time (1942). Like Smith’s “The Return of the Sorcerer,” it is a Lovecraftian story with an affiliation to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, and deliberately links the substance of that Mythos to Smith’s own developing mythical history of the lost continent of Hyperborea, adding a text by the Hyperborean sorcerer Eibon to the register of the Lovecraftian “forbidden books” and helping to broaden the mythical background, to the advantage of later writers recruited to the subgeneric cause.

The story begins with a quote from the Book of Eibon indentifying Ubbo-Sathla as a protoplasmic mass ancestral to all terrestrial life, which is fated also to be the end-product of that life’s decay. The protagonist Paul Tregardis, a modern occultist, finds a magic lens in a curio shop, which unites him with the personality of the Hyperborean sorcerer who once used and employed it, and allows him to share the sorcerer’s visionary quest to retreat through his past incarnations all the way to Ubbo-Sathla—which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be vast, horrific, and loathsome.

“Ubbo-Sathla” is terse and economical by the somewhat prolix standards of the subgenre, albeit loaded with exotic terminology. Once the initial purchase is made and Tregardis is alone with his crystal, the concluding visionary sequence of “Ubbo-Sathla” becomes close in style and spirit to Smith’s Decadent prose-poetry: an effective injection from which the subgenre has always benefited.

Brian Stableford

Smith’s literary vocation reached its first important landmark when he made the acquaintance of the “Bohemian” poet George Sterling, who was heavily influenced by Charles Baudelaire and other French Decadent writers; Smith became an enthusiastic translator of such material. His first poetry collection, The Star Treader and Other Poems (1912), won some critical acclaim, but he had difficulty following it up; his health was frequently poor and his production slow. A second landmark was reached when he became part of a circle of literary correspondents that included H. P. Lovecraft, who waxed enthusiastic about Smith’s exceedingly exotic narrative poem “The Hashish Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” in his third collection, Ebony and Crystal (1922).

When Smith was forced to attempt to make money from his pen in order to care for his aged parents, it was Lovecraft’s lead that he followed, although he did so with a stylistic and thematic extravagance that was unique to him. The stories he produced during his one brief phase of hectic productivity, between 1929 and 1934, constitute one of the most remarkable oeuvres in imaginative literature. His highly ornamented prose was directed to the purpose of building phantasmagoric dream-worlds stranger than any that had ever been described before. It was not enough for his fantastic narratives to escape the mundane world; Smith wanted to outdo in imaginative reach all the established mythologies of past and present. These tales were first collected in the Arkham House collections Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960) and Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), but they have since been sampled in many other collections and anthologies.

Smith had some difficulty finding an appropriate milieu for his fiction. The imaginary French province of Averoigne allowed scope for pastiches of French fantasy, but not for the products of his wilder imaginings. The lost continent of Hyperborea suited him better, employed in heavily ironic “grotesques” that combined elements of horror and sharp wit evident in the savagely sarcastic “The Testament of Athammaus” (1932) and “The Seven Geases” (1934), in which a prideful magistrate is condemned to descend through a series of hell-like realms to “the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination.” “Ubbo-Sathla” (1933) accommodated Hyperborea to the Lovecraftian schema that became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, as did the magnificently bizarre “The Coming of the White Worm” (1941).

The most dramatically appropriate of Smith’s imaginary worlds was far-future Zothique, “the world’s last continent,” in which science and civilization are extinct, and everything that happens is a mere prelude to final annihilation. Some stories set there are as ironic as the Hyperborean grotesques, but the best are possessed of an unparalleled dramatic momentum that carries them through a mass of bizarre detail to devastating conclusions, juxtaposing the necrophiliac eroticism of “The Witchcraft of Ulua” (1934) and “The Death of Ilalotha” (1937) with the savage cruelty of “Xeethra” (1934), “The Dark Eidolon” (1935), and “Necromancy in Naat” (1936).

These features are not evidence of depravity on the author’s part, but represent a determined effort to confront the most nightmarish products of the imagination and render them intellectually manageable. Even so, they resulted in numerous tales being censored by their original editors; where original texts could still be found they were restored in a series of booklets published by the Necronomicon Press.

Smith’s mother died in 1935 and his father in 1937. Having already slowed down considerably, Smith then gave up writing fiction almost completely, although he continued to write poetry. At the age of 61 he married a widow with children, Carolyn Jones Dman, and lived with them in Pacific Grove, but his health was poor and he eventually died of a stroke at the age of 68.

Brian Stableford

See also: Arkham House; Baudelaire, Charles; Cthulhu Mythos; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

The Eldritch Dark: The Sanctum of Clark Ashton Smith. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://www.eldritchdark.com.

Joshi, S. T. 2013. “A Triumvirate of Fantastic Poets: Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and Clark Ashton Smith.” Extrapolation 54, no. 2: 147–161.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Sidney-Fryer, Donald. [1963] 1997. The Sorcerer Departs. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press.

Stableford, Brian. [1995] 2006. “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.” In The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors, 148–167. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Wolfe, Charles K. 1973. “Introduction.” In Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Charles K. Wolfe, ix–xii. Baltimore: Mirage Press.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a modern Gothic novel by Ray Bradbury that was published in 1962. It represents the culmination of the dark carnival theme that Bradbury had explored in a number of earlier works, notably his short story “Black Ferris” (1948) and the frame story that wraps the contents of his collection The Illustrated Man (1951), which themselves had been influenced by The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), a short novel by Charles G. Finney that Bradbury had reprinted in the anthology Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956). The novel is also set in the same Midwestern milieu as the mostly nonfantastic stories that Bradbury assembled for his novel Dandelion Wine (1957)

The novel’s two main characters, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, are best friends living in Green Town, Illinois. Will was born one minute before midnight on October 30, and Jim one minute after on October 31, Halloween, a distinction that seems relevant to Will’s more cautious behavior and Jim’s attraction to life’s dark side. On October 24 in their thirteenth year a traveling carnival, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, sets up magically overnight in their town, much later than such seasonal entertainments usually operate. When the boys patronize the fair they discover things seriously amiss: the carnival has a house of mirrors that appears to trap people with images of what their lives might have been, and a carousel that can accelerate or reduce aging depending on the direction in which it spins. Will’s father Charles, the only adult who believes in what the boys claim to have seen, is of the opinion that the carnival’s crew are “autumn people” (Bradbury 1998, 193), steeped in death and the grave, who “live off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets” (204). Both Charles and Jim are tempted by the “empty promises” the carnival offers—Charles with the promise of youth that he is now beyond, and Jim with the promise of maturity that he has yet to grow into—before the three find a way to resist its allure and neutralize its threat.

Something Wicked This Way Comes crystallizes themes and approaches that had characterized Bradbury’s writing for the two decades preceding its publication. It extends the investiture of ordinary life with aspects of the Gothic and grotesque that characterizes the stories he collected in Dark Carnival (1947) and The October Country (1955). It also shows Bradbury deploying familiar tropes of weird fiction to address concerns about the everyday lives of people that transcend most genre treatments—notably, the temptation to enjoy experiences that have not been earned and regret for life’s missed opportunities. The novel marks a turning point in Bradbury’s fiction, which, at the time of its publication, was increasingly inclined toward the literary mainstream.

Something Wicked This Way Comes exerted an enormous influence on subsequent fantasy and horror fiction, and has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen, including a 1983 movie produced by Disney and written for the screen by Bradbury himself.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; The Grotesque.

Further Reading

Bradbury, Ray. [1962] 1998. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon.

Eller, Jonathan R. 2004. Ray Bradbury Unbound. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. 2004. “Fathering the Carnival: Something Wicked This Way Comes.” In Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, 256–309. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

Wolfe, Gary K. 1983. “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol. 4, 1769–1773. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

SONG OF KALI

Song of Kali is a novel by Dan Simmons, published by Tor in 1985. It was the first debut novel to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The plot concerns a supposedly mythical cult devoted to Kali, which attempts to introduce the goddess of violence to the larger world through an epic poem.

In the novel, a protégé of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet M. Das, has been presumed dead for eight years. Recent reports from Calcutta claim he is alive and has produced a new manuscript. Harper’s magazine sends poet Bobby Luczak on assignment to India for an interview article and to acquire Das’s poetry for publication. Luczak takes his Indian-born wife Amrita along as a translator, together with their infant daughter, Victoria.

Das’s new poetry is a rambling tribute to the goddess Kali, Calcutta’s namesake. One man Luczak meets claims Das was reanimated during a Kapalika cult initiation. Luczak is constantly assailed by various factions with murky motives, and ultimately his daughter is kidnapped and murdered, her body used in a failed attempt to smuggle gemstones out of India. Seduced by the violent message of the Song of Kali, Luczak returns to Calcutta after burying his daughter, intending to kill everyone he blames for her death, but he overcomes the temptation.

In 1977, Simmons spent ten weeks in India as part of a group Fulbright Fellowship of visiting educators. He came home from that trip with notebooks filled with details and sketches, planning to write an article for The Atlantic magazine. However, after receiving encouragement from author Harlan Ellison at a writing workshop, Simmons decided to use the material as the basis for his first novel, which he wrote in the summer of 1982.

Though he spent only a couple of days in Calcutta, the city made an impression on him, and not a particularly favorable one based on the way he portrays it. The notion that a city could be “too evil to be allowed to exist” or “too wicked to be suffered” (Simmons 1985, 1) permeates the novel, as does the overcrowded city’s miasma, arising from its oppressive climate and environment.

Simmons wrote without a specific genre in mind. The potentially supernatural elements in Song of Kali have alternate rational explanations. Many of the details he incorporated into the novel came from things he either witnessed personally or heard about second-hand. For example, a day spent attending the Calcutta Writers’ Workshop, run by famous poet P. Lal in an ancient hotel with unreliable electric power in stifling heat, inspired the character of M. Das. The novel’s success allowed Simmons to retire from teaching and become a full-time writer.

Bev Vincent

See also: Simmons, Dan; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Bryant, Edward. 1988. “On Song of Kali.” In Horror: The 100 Best Books, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 277–280. New York: Carroll & Graf.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 2002. “Dan Simmons.” In Speaking of the Fantastic: Interviews with Writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 158–171. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.

Simmons, Dan. 1985. Song of Kali. New York: Tor.

“Song of Kali.” 1987. In Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 44, edited by Sharon K. Hall, 253–255a. Detroit, MI: Gale.

THE SONGS OF MALDOROR (LES CHANTS DE
MALDOROR)

The Songs of Maldoror was first printed in its complete form in late 1869. It had been composed in the two years prior by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a Uruguay-born Frenchman living in Paris. It is a bizarre, fragmented work of heightened prose, which tells of the cruel deeds of its eponymous antihero.

The first Chant, or “Song,” of Maldoror was published at Ducasse’s expense in late 1868. It received a review in a literary journal, which praised the work’s originality and strange savageness, but otherwise it went unnoticed. It was published anonymously, but subsequent printings gave the author as the Comte de Lautréamont, a pseudonym Ducasse took from Latréaumont, the eponymous character of an 1838 Gothic novel by Eugène Sue.

In writing Maldoror, Ducasse was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, whom he read and admired at a young age, and by Adam Mickiewicz, John Milton, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Charles Robert Maturin—all writers who had dealt with the theme of evil. Ducasse wished to explore evil in a new and shocking way; the name Maldoror is likely a pun on mal d’aurore or “evil dawn.”

Ducasse’s use of the word chants in his title is interesting. Chants implies “canto,” “lay,” or “epic,” as well as “song.” This leads the reader to expect verse and musicality, but Maldoror is, in fact, a prose work, and a jarring patchwork of many different genres. There are textual appropriations from diverse literary sources: Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, Dante, Baudelaire, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. At some points, long descriptions of fauna and flora, many transcribed from textbooks, are interpolated. At others the book breaks into gothic horror, serial-novel melodrama and sentimentality, and passages of sexual transgression reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade. Maldoror is predatory in its borrowings. It divests itself of an authorial voice, as well as any claim to authority or even significance. It also has an amorphous, hybrid quality. Its metamorphoses can be seen as protean attempts to escape from morality and law.

Ducasse died of uncertain causes on November 24, 1870, at his lodgings in a modest Parisian hotel, during the siege of the city by the Prussian army. At the time, his work was unknown. The original printer of the full texts of The Songs of Maldoror, perhaps fearing a prosecution for blasphemy, did not distribute copies to booksellers. But they were eventually circulated in small numbers, and the book slowly gained a minor following among Symbolist writers. However, it was not until 1890, when the publisher Léon Genonceaux reprinted the work in France, that the book’s reputation was sealed.

The text subsequently has had a major impact, in particular on the Surrealists, who saw in it an almost mystical dimension. It has also had an influence on cinema; Kenneth Anger admired the book and attempted to film it, but could not get together the funds, and a film adaptation in parts by London’s Exploding Cinema Collective and Germany’s Filmgruppe Chaos was completed in 2000.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Byron, Lord; Gautier, Théophile; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Grotesque; Maturin, Charles; Melmoth the Wanderer; Surrealism; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

Further Reading

Lautréamont, Comte de. 1994. Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont. Trans. and with an introduction, notes, bibliography, and afterword by Alexis Lykiard. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change.

Thacker, Eugene. 2015. Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

SPIRITUALISM

The term “Spiritualism” refers to a religion that began in the 1840s in North America and that emerged out of modest and controversial origins to make an indelible mark on the literature of horror and the supernatural. The most significant belief of Spiritualism is that it is possible for the living and the dead to communicate. In 1848, two young sisters from Hydesville, New York, reported making contact with a disembodied entity called Mr. Splitfoot. This was later revealed as a ruse by the girls, but not before their elaborate codes of communication using handclaps and reciprocal “spirit rapping” inspired a generation of mesmerists (hypnotists), psychical researchers, and Spiritualists eager to communicate with the dead. It was Spiritualism that gave rise to the famous Victorian subculture of séances led by spirit mediums who manifested supernatural marvels and conveyed messages from the spirits.

The arcane and obscure nature of Spiritualism also saturated Victorian literary culture, which incorporated the movement’s expanding range of strategies, including “spirit raps,” clairvoyance (psychic seeing), clairaudience (psychic hearing), telekinesis (the movement of objects through sheer mental power), trance talking, and the manifestation of phantom odors, “spirit lights,” and ectoplasm, a gooey substance emitted by mediums and attributed to a spirit’s physical materialization). The influence of Spiritualism on the literature of horror and the supernatural was likewise diverse. When Spiritualism first appeared, it appealed to people who had grown frustrated with conventional religion and were turning away from mainstream belief systems to more liberal and scientific explanations of reality and human life (and death). Committed advocates of Spiritualism such as Edgar Allan Poe, Florence Maryatt, and Elizabeth Phelps included variations of Spiritualism, mesmerism, and Transcendentalism (the influential mid-nineteenth-century American philosophical and social reform movement) in stories that centered on themes of loss and contributed to a growing idealization of the dead—those same stories were often macabre in nature.

Spiritualism was also a powerful social movement, especially in terms of women’s rights, since most mediums were women, and the movement thus enabled women to hold positions of authority. The purported female sensitivity to the spiritual world helped to establish a strong community of female writers of the transgressive supernatural tale, including Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, and Edith Wharton.

However, by the turn of the century Spiritualism was beginning to lose its viability as a social and religious movement of reform, and its associated literature began to represent an increasing culture of ambivalence and unease surrounding both the authenticity and the nature of the movement. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), for example, represented the prevalent fear that Spiritualism was a vehicle for social and sexual violation. Arthur Machen’s stories of Spiritualist villains also echoed this concern. By the mid-twentieth century, many of the beliefs surrounding communion with the dead had dissipated altogether, but Spiritualism continued to be a vital, if distorted, underpinning of supernatural horror. In some rare cases such as Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), psychic phenomena remained a horrifying reality. However, increasingly in twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror, Spiritualism became a source of psychological ambiguity. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), for instance, used mediums and Spiritualists to subvert reader expectations about the meaning of haunting, locating spirits and ghosts not in the beyond but within the psyche of the novel’s characters.

Eleanor Beal

See also: Dracula; Ewers, Hanns Heinz; The Haunting of Hill House; Hell House; Lee, Vernon; Machen, Arthur; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Turn of the Screw; Wharton, Edith.

Further Reading

Bloom, Clive. 2010. “Do You See It?: The Gothic and the Ghostly.” In Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present, 141–162. London and New York: Continuum.

Braude, Ann. 1989. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Geary, Robert F. 1992. “The Gothic Transformed: The Victorian Supernatural Tale.” In The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change, 101–120. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press.

Grimes, Hilary. 2013. The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of Writing. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate.

Leonard, Todd Jay. 2005. Talking to the Other Side: A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship. Lincoln: iUniverse.

SPLATTERPUNK

Splatterpunk refers to a specific subcategory of the horror genre marked by extreme violence and graphic descriptions of gore, often blended with explicit sexual content. Splatterpunk originated in the 1980s, predominantly among a small group of American horror writers, reaching its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The term was coined by writer David J. Schow in 1986 at the twelfth World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. The term “splatterpunk” was meant as a kind of off-handed joke, a play on the term “cyberpunk” that had been recently coined to describe the movement of science fiction writers who focus on how high technology affects the lower classes in a futuristic society. The genesis of the movement is usually traced to Michael Shea’s 1980 story “The Autopsy.” Though the movement did not have any sort of true organization, several writers in the early to mid-1980s began writing similar fiction, all in reaction to what had previously been published in the horror world, specifically, the rather restrained style popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Bloch, one of the older writers whose style was being exploded by the so-called “splatterpunks,” famously criticized the subgenre, saying that “there is a distinction between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea” (Ross 1989, 64).

American Psycho: Splatterpunk as Literary Fiction?

American Psycho (1991) is a controversial novel about a serial killer written by mainstream author Bret Easton Ellis. When published, it sparked furious debates about the fictional representation of violence, with the critical treatment mirroring discussions regarding the extreme methods of splatterpunk authors.

It is narrated by Patrick Bateman, a New York investment banker who casually and brutally rapes and murders a series of colleagues, prostitutes, and homeless persons, in sequences of unsparing brutality. Some of the more grotesque scenes of gendered violence—which include acts of cannibalism and necrophilia—sparked outrage both before and after publication: the originally planned publisher, Simon & Schuster, declined the manuscript (despite Ellis’s substantial literary reputation), and it was eventually published by Vintage Books, prompting the National Organization for Women to seek a boycott, which led to widespread debates about censorship and sexual objectification.

This public furor obscured the fact that the novel was not celebrating Bateman’s misogyny but offering a ruthless satire of an ambitious and egotistical social climber. Indeed, it is a savage critique of the superficial materialism and amoral lifestyle of wealthy yuppies, whose contempt for their social inferiors takes, in Bateman’s case, a literally violent turn. Bateman’s narration is calm and emotionless, whether detailing his murderous rampages, describing scenes of debauched revelry, or offering his views on 1980s pop stars. There are strong suggestions that some of the events he narrates may be imaginary, as he begins to suffer hallucinations and lapses in memory. Reading the novel can be a challenge not only because of its graphic violence but also due to Bateman’s highly confusing and sometimes tedious reveries.

The novel was memorably filmed in 2000, with Christian Bale capturing Bateman’s slick and sleazy persona. A musical adaptation premiered in London in 2013.

Rob Latham

In many ways, splatterpunk is a type of pulp fiction, especially in its big and graphic descriptions of violence used for entertainment purposes. While critics complained that the movement cheapened horror literature by simply aiming to “gross out” readers, supporters of splatterpunk praise its ability to push the boundaries and become a subversive medium, much like the role of punk music; in this way, the subgenre could be considered an amalgamation of the popular (and joyfully gory) “splatter” films and the irreverent punk rock bands of the 1980s. Taboo topics are explored widely in splatterpunk because nothing is truly off limits. This inclusivity has made many argue that splatterpunk is a progressive subgenre, and in a way, that is true. Men and women are equal victims, as are gay or transgendered characters and characters of all ethnicities. No one is exempt from the pain and suffering.

Because of the indefinite boundaries that surround splatterpunk and its somewhat nebulous beginnings, defining splatterpunk writers is a difficult task, and one that is debated and contested. Writers who could be considered as writing in the splatterpunk tradition include David J. Schow, John Skipp, Robert McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, Richard Christian Matheson (not to be confused with his father, horror writer Richard Matheson), and Edward Lee. One of the earliest examples of splatterpunk is Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984–1985), a collection that included such stories as “Rawhead Rex” and “The Midnight Meat Train,” which pushed the boundaries of horror with its visceral descriptions of bodily horror. Barker’s books marked a shift to the new style of horror, influencing novels such as Joe R. Lansdale’s The Nightrunners (1987), which tells the story of a young married couple trying to deal with the aftermath of the wife’s rape. Lansdale uses the brutal attack as a contrast to the supernatural God of the Razor who emerges as the novel progresses. Both the real crime and the supernatural serve to shock the readers with vivid imagery of dismemberment, skinning, and sexual violence. Another exemplary novel of the splatterpunk subgenre is The Scream (1988), written by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Skipp and Spector’s novel, about a rock-and-roll group that turns its fans into zombified maniacs, is over the top in its blood and gore, but the tale is also tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the long history of religious leaders criticizing rock music for introducing Satan to the country’s youth. More than any other writers, Skipp and Spector seem to truly embrace the title of “splatterpunk” as they relish the outlandish nature of exploding body parts and spewing bodily fluids. They continued to work together, establishing themselves as the leaders of the splatterpunk movement, writing such novels as The Cleanup and The Light at the End. Other notable texts are David J. Schow’s novel The Kill Riff (1988) and Silver Scream (1988), a splatterpunk anthology edited by Schow; Richard Christian Matheson’s short story collection Scars (1987); Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In (1988); and Edward Lee’s The Bighead (1997). Though the splatterpunk movement was primarily active in the late 1980s, writers such as Edward Lee kept it alive throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.

Paul M. Sammon, who edited the 1990 anthology Splatterpunk: Extreme Horror, called this group of writers the “outlaws” of the horror genre. Not all writers who have been classified as splatterpunk, however, accept the label. Joe R. Lansdale has said in interviews that he does not like it, mainly due to the fact that it restricts his writing to just one idea, and he wants to be more than just a label. Other authors have also spoken out against the categorization, such as Richard Laymon, who said in a New York Times article, “I don’t want to be identified with that group, especially that one” (Tucker 1991).

Lisa Kröger

See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Brite, Poppy Z.; Ketchum, Jack; Lansdale, Joe R.; McCammon, Robert; Pulp Horror; Shea, Michael.

Further Reading

Bail, Paul. 1996. John Saul: A Critical Companion. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.

Errickson, Will. 2015. “Evil Eighties: The Hollywood Horrors of David J. Schow.” Tor.com, March 13. http://www.tor.com/2015/03/13/evil-eighties-david-j-schow.

Joshi, S. T. 2004. “David J. Schow and Splatterpunk.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Kern, Louis J. 1996. “American ‘Grand Guignol’: Splatterpunk Gore, Sadean Morality and Socially Redemptive Violence.” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 2: 47–59.

Latham, Rob. 2007. “Urban Horror.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 591–618. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Ross, Jean W. 1989. “Bloch, Robert (Albert).” In Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 5. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

Sammon, Paul. 1990. Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Tucker, Ken. 1991. “The Splatterpunk Trend, and Welcome to It.” New York Times, March 24. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/24/books/the-splatterpunk-trend-and-welcome-to-it.html?pagewanted=all.

“SREDNI VASHTAR”

“Sredni Vashtar,” the tenth story in Saki’s second collection The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), is widely considered to be a masterpiece of short fiction and one of Saki’s most horrifying tales. Ten-year-old Conradin is a delicate boy, treated harshly by his domineering female guardian, Mrs. de Ropp, whom he eventually contrives to do away with via a large polecat ferret he keeps hidden away in a hutch as his only solace. The story concludes with the child calmly eating a previously forbidden treat of buttered toast as his guardian’s mauled body is discovered.

Similarities exist between the life of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) and Conradin, the protagonist of “Sredni Vashtar.” Like Conradin, young Hector was thought to be a sickly boy, subjected to “illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullnesses” (Saki 1976, 136). Hector spent his childhood in his grandmother’s house under the reign of two aunts, who are supposed to be the originals for Conradin’s guardian. Like Mrs. de Ropp, the aunts did their duty by the Munro children, but showed little love, imposing “a regime of seclusion, restraint and arbitrary rules” marked by beatings and “coldness, removal of privileges and guilt” (Byrne 2007, 17). In “Sredni Vashtar,” Mrs. de Ropp’s treatment of Conradin leads to the development of a fierce hatred in the boy, “which he was perfectly able to mask” (Saki 1976, 137). In fact, “Sredni Vashtar” may be interpreted as one of the first sightings of that twentieth-century human monster, the amoral psychopath, and Conradin an ancestor of Robert Bloch’s Psycho, with its outwardly meek, mother-obsessed serial killer who cleverly masks his violent impulses. As much as the reader may sympathize with the bullied boy and enjoy his revenge, the conclusion that a cold-blooded murderer might have been unleashed upon the world still lingers.

As in other Saki stories, the animals that Conradin keeps hidden away in his haven, a disused toolshed, represent the feral impulses of Nature versus the oppressive artifice of adult institutions. Thus, the “lithe sharp-fanged beast” (137), the polecat-ferret itself, mirrors Conradin in its eventual escape from the toolshed, passing bloodstained but free into the world after killing Mrs. de Ropp. Like his fictional counterpart, Hector kept a Houdan fowl as a pet. It had to be euthanized, and his sister Ethel described the “hateful smile” on their aunt’s face when this occurs (Byrne 2007, 21). In “Sredni Vashtar,” the first animal to succumb to Mrs. de Ropp’s incursions on Conradin’s retreat is his Houdan hen. In taking this pet from him, she crosses the line, unleashing Conradin’s hatred and inspiring him to pray to his idol, the ferret, for her to be punished.

The transformation of the mundane by the supernatural is a perennial horror trope. In “Sredni Vashtar,” Saki leaves open the possibility that more may be at work than the natural world reasserting itself. Conradin comforts himself by inventing a “god and a religion” around Sredni Vashtar, which is the exotic name he gives the polecat-ferret. Conradin’s worship, in contrast to Christ’s injunction to make peace, values “the fierce impatient side of things” and calls for the death of Sredni Vashtar’s enemies. Mrs. de Ropp’s churchgoing is contrasted with these bloodthirsty rites. Saki leaves it to the reader’s imagination as to what exactly happened to Mrs. de Ropp in the toolshed; Conradin’s “simple brown ferret” may indeed have been a god after all.

Aalya Ahmad

See also: Saki.

Further Reading

Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Drake, Robert. 1963. “Saki’s Ironic Stories.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 5.3 (Autumn): 374–388.

Harding, James. 1994. “Sredni Vashtar: Overview.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, 1038. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

Saki (H. H. Munro). 1976. The Complete Works of Saki. Introduction by Noël Coward. New York: Doubleday.

Salemi, Joseph S. 1989. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4: 423.

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850–1894)

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, travel writer, and short story writer. An extremely productive figure, he is best known for his longer narratives The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island. Although he was a literary celebrity within his own time, Stevenson was, after his death, critically regarded as being a second-rate writer, known for children’s stories and horror narratives. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in Stevenson, with greater attention being given to his imaginative writing, religious and folkloric interests, and deeply nuanced explorations of guilt, duality, and morality. His works have been adapted numerous times, and he is the twenty-sixth most translated author in the world.

“Olalla”: Ancestral Sin and Biological Degeneration

Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “Olalla” was first published in 1885 in The Court and Society Review Christmas issue. Like his longer and more famous work The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), this story draws on issues such as degeneration and tendency toward violence in human nature.

The story follows an English soldier’s residence in a once-noble Spanish household. The unnamed protagonist falls for the daughter of the house, Olalla, who lives with her brother and her mother. The protagonist admits his love for Olalla, who tells him he must leave. Later he cuts his hand and seeks assistance from the mother, who, on seeing the blood, attacks him. Olalla tells him that her family is cursed. He leaves, seeing Olalla only once more, while she prays.

The Spanish setting draws on traditional Gothic narratives from the late eighteenth century as well as anti-Catholic sentiments. The protagonist finds himself disgusted and horrified by the behavior of Olalla’s brother and mother, who are described as like animals. He is also perturbed by the resemblance between Olalla and ancestral portraits. The curse on the family has been read variously as lycanthropy or vampirism.

Stevenson fuses the traditional Gothic elements of ancestral sin with the horror of degeneration. Though Olalla suggests that she is cursed, the narrative also suggests that the family is returning to an animal-like state. Moving away from superstition and toward scientific explanations for human violence, “Olalla” is indicative of the addition of science to Gothic horror that can be seen in the literature of the late nineteenth century.

Kaja Franck

Source: Wasson, Sara. 2010. “Olalla’s Legacy: Twentieth-Century Vampire Fiction and Genetic Previvorship.” Journal of Stevenson Studies 7: 55–81.

Born in Edinburgh to a leading lighthouse engineer of the day, Stevenson was a rather ill child, and poor health would dog him his entire life. Often confined to bed, he was impacted from an early age by his nanny, Alison Cunningham, a devoutly Calvinist woman who was herself deeply influenced by Scottish folk stories. Religious ideas and the folklore of Scotland were to be enduring influences on Stevenson throughout his work. After a sporadic but thorough education, including studying both engineering and law, Stevenson left Scotland for London and by late 1873 was active on the London literary scene, publishing his first essay in The Portfolio. Much of his time was spent occupied in travel (often to warmer climes) for the benefit of his deeply fragile health. His first full-length publication was An Island Voyage (1878), inspired by a canoe trip taken around France and Belgium. The following year he traveled to America to be with his then lover and future wife Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. The trip would result in the publication of The Amateur Emigrant but would also result in his health failing completely—it almost cost Stevenson his life. Between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson traveled extensively, seeking a climate beneficial to his health, summering in various places across the United Kingdom. In this period he was at his most productive, writing Treasure Island (1883)—his first successful book—Kidnapped (1886), and, most famously, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), as well as several notable short stories. Over the course of the next two years, Stevenson resumed traveling, spending time in New York, Tahiti, and the Samoan Islands. In 1890, he purchased a tract of land of around 400 acres on one of the Samoan Islands, and it was there he wrote The Beach of Falesa, Catriona (titled David Balfour in the United States), The Ebb-Tide, and the Vailima Letters, as well as enjoying excellent relations with the local people.

While Stevenson was well regarded during his lifetime, the rise of modernism left him behind. His work was seen as being inferior, less realistic, and thus less skilled. This is principally attributable to Stevenson’s own views on the creative act. Unlike his close friend Henry James, who believed that art should be a reflection of reality, Stevenson argued that the novel exists and thrives through emphasizing its difference from the actualities of life. As a result, much of Stevenson’s fiction does not aim for the unity and psychological insight that the modernist writers so praised, preferring instead to show the divided nature of existence. This duality between the appearance of things and their actuality is a consistent theme throughout his writing and a strong contribution to the tradition of horror literature, as Stevenson explored the divisions between public respectability and private vices on multiple occasions. This was best exemplified in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which has gone on to enter the cultural vernacular in reference to a divided self and become one of the most adapted horror texts of all time. This division between the public and private, between the benign and the immoral, also appears in several of his short stories, drawing upon the Calvinism of his youth and the folklore of Scotland that he was raised with. As a result, Stevenson’s narratives frequently tend toward psychological simplicity and the fantastic, which explains his enduring popularity. However, this also contributed to his critical neglect during the advent and rise of literary modernism soon after his death.

The burgeoning interest in Stevenson has sought to connect him to other more plot-based writers of the day, seeing him as a contemporary of figures such as Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1899) and H. Rider Haggard (She, 1886–1887), as well as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, 1904) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901–1902). Rather than praising psychological sophistication and narrative realism, Stevenson’s focus on imaginative and fantastic plot with the aim of provoking readers into emotional investment lends itself well to Gothic and horror writing and has been highly influential and much imitated. With the increasing popularity of horror fiction and the commensurate rise of horror scholarship, proper and much overdue critical work is more common on Stevenson as one of the most successful and popular writers of the Gothic canon. His wide range of literary works, including children’s stories, poetry, novels, short stories, literary theory, and essays, shows a great breadth of talent, and his enduring popularity is testament to the power his works still hold in engaging the imagination of readers.

Stevenson died very suddenly at the age of forty-four on December 3, 1894, possibly from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was buried at Mount Vaea on the island of Upolu in Samoa, overlooking the sea.

Jon Greenaway

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Psychological Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “Thrawn Janet.”

Further Reading

Ambrosini, Richard, and Richard Dury, eds. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fielding, Penny. 2010. The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Gray, William. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Harman, Claire. 2010. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: HarperCollins.

Livesey, Margot. 1994. “The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Atlantic (November): 140–146.

STOKER, BRAM (1847–1912)

Abraham (“Bram”) Stoker is best remembered today as the author of the most famous vampire novel ever written, Dracula (1897), but in his day he was most notable for his association with his friend and employer, the celebrated English actor-manager Sir Henry Irving of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker served as business manager for Irving’s Lyceum for nearly thirty years and published in the interim a number of fictional works (many of which appropriated Gothic themes), including more than seventeen short stories and works of poetry, three short story collections (one posthumously), and twelve novels. One of these, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), although it was long considered a relatively minor work, has gradually (with the help of multiple movie adaptations) come to be regarded as a semiclassic mummy novel. Stoker continued to write until his death in London in 1912.

Stoker was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Born a sickly child, he suffered from a mysterious illness that kept him bedridden through much of his youth. During his bedridden years he was kept entertained by his mother’s stories and legends from her native town of Sligo. Her stories bore themes of the supernatural, as well as death and disease, themes that would resurface in Stoker’s fiction, especially Dracula. Stoker entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1864, but by then he was a strong young man who competed in athletics and received awards for debate and oratory.

Meeting Dracula for the First Time

Stoker imagined Dracula quite differently from the way most later representations have painted him. Here is the initial description of the eponymous count in Stoker’s novel:

His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. (Stoker 1897, 18)

Matt Cardin

Source: Stoker, Bram. 1897. Dracula: A Mystery Story. New York: W. R. Caldwell & Co.

Even before graduating in 1870, Stoker had already started following in his father’s footsteps in the Irish civil service in Dublin, accepting a position there in 1866. In 1875, he was still working for the civil service when he purchased his master’s degree (a common practice at the time that continues to this day), but in the meantime he indulged his creative passions by writing theater reviews and short fiction. Indeed, it was his review of Hamlet that led to a face-to-face meeting with actor Henry Irving. The encounter changed the course of Stoker’s life, so that in 1878, two years after his father’s death, Stoker accepted Irving’s offer to become the manager of the new Lyceum Theatre, and then immediately moved to London with his new bride (and former Oscar Wilde sweetheart), Florence Balcombe.

Stoker’s demanding responsibilities at the Lyceum and the lengths he went to organize Irving’s English provincial and American tours, including several trips to America by himself, provided experiences that greatly informed his writing of Dracula, which he started in 1890 and continued intermittently until the novel’s publication in 1897. Dracula was immediately popular throughout the English-speaking world, and literary critics showered it with praise through at least the 1910s. However, although Dracula serves suitably well as an autobiographical lens into Stoker’s life, perhaps its greatest value is in laying bare the many tensions of fin de siècle (i.e., late nineteenth-century) England, including the evolving role of women, advancements in science and technology, criminality, and religion.

Stoker suffered two strokes and his health gradually declined after the death of his longtime friend and employer, Irving, in 1905. Still, Stoker wrote several works, including two more Gothic novels, The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), before dying at home on April 20, 1912. His body was cremated and his remains were interred at Golders Green in London. Stoker’s title character Count Dracula remains one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, and his novel Dracula remains one of the most reprinted works in history.

John Edgar Browning

See also: Dracula; The Jewel of Seven Stars; Mummies; Vampires.

Further Reading

Belford, Barbara. 1996. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Browning, John Edgar, ed. 2012. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Critical Feast, An Annotated Reference of Early Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1913. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.

Farson, Daniel. 1975. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. London: Michael Joseph.

Hopkins, Lisa. 2007. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Murray, Paul. 2004. From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. London: Jonathan Cape.

Murray, Paul. 2014. “Bram Stoker: The Facts and the Fictions.” In Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays, edited by Jarlath Killeen, 56–72. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published in 1886. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the inspiration for the story came, at least partly, from a dream the author had. In October 1885, Stevenson’s wife Fanny was awakened one night because Stevenson was crying out in his sleep. Thinking he was suffering from a nightmare, Fanny woke him, only to find Stevenson was quite angry at being disturbed in the midst of his nocturnal imaginings, with the author exclaiming that he had been dreaming a wonderful frightening tale. Stevenson often found inspiration from his dreams: his short story “Olalla,” published in 1885, was also prompted by his nighttime visions. Stevenson referred to these dreams as “brownies,” benign spirits that would take his unconscious imaginings and shape them into material for his stories as he slept.

In film and stage treatments of Stevenson’s famous story, the scene of transformation from Jekyll to Hyde or vice versa is always a spectacular centerpiece. In this analogous scene from the original text, in which Hyde transforms back into Jekyll, Stevenson’s sure hand as an author leavens the event’s spectacular quality with an authentic sense of grim gravitas.

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half-fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll!

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. (Stevenson 1886, 101)

Matt Cardin

Source: Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1886. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Despite the interruption, Stevenson worked on his story feverishly. His stepson Lloyd Osbourne later recalled that writing the first draft took Stevenson no more than three days, and the processes of writing and editing were completed in six weeks.

The story opens not with Dr. Jekyll, nor even with Mr. Hyde, but with the respectable lawyer Mr. Gabriel Utterson. The entire story is told from his perspective, despite the fact that he is eliminated from nearly all film and television adaptations of the work. Utterson is out for a weekly walk around London with his cousin Mr. Enfield when the conversation turns to a repulsive, violent man named Edward Hyde whom Enfield has encountered. Mr. Hyde is somehow connected to a mutual acquaintance, the upstanding and respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, who pays for the damage Hyde causes. Jekyll refuses to answer questions about Hyde, but as time passes he becomes withdrawn and reclusive. Eventually, Hyde commits murder and Jekyll vanishes from society. His friends break down his door and find Hyde dead from suicide, dressed in Jekyll’s clothes. The solution is found in a letter left by Jekyll: he discovered a “draught” to turn himself into Mr. Hyde and enact his repressed, socially unacceptable desires while maintaining his respectable reputation as Dr. Jekyll. He lost control of his alter ego and Hyde took over. Wanted for murder, Hyde killed himself, and so the sorry tale of the doctor’s split personality ends.

The hastily written novella was an immediate success, which is ironic, given that Stevenson had previously labored for eight years on a novel called Prince Otto (1885) that has languished in obscurity ever since it was published. The novella has been interpreted as a detective story, a Gothic tale, and a sensation novel (akin to the Victorian penny dreadful) by literary critics. Like many Gothic and horror tales, Jekyll and Hyde expresses fears and uncertainties prevalent at the time of its writing. Unlike many Gothic tales, however, these fears are not supernatural, but are rooted in apprehensions about science and progress. It expresses these anxieties through tropes and ideas common to both Victorian and Gothic fiction, notably the concept of the double.

The double appears in other late Victorian and early Edwardian fictions such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910). It also appeared in the scientific theory of the era through Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious versus the conscious mind, which raised the frightening prospect of the repressed, unconscious self taking control of the conscious personality. The double, or the doppelgänger, appears in numerous Gothic texts ranging from Jane Eyre (1847) to episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Jekyll and Hyde remains the most famous example of the double in literature.

Furthermore, the fear of degeneration permeates the story. Degeneration was a notion that developed after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, detailing his theory of biological evolution. Degeneration was the fear that Darwin’s theory could be inverted, and that humanity could regress into a beastlier, more vicious version of itself, like the repulsive Hyde. Degeneration was a widespread concern in Victorian society and found expression in other literary works such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), various stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and Stevenson’s own short story “Olalla.” It was not confined to literature: several major scientific works were written about the theory, notably Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892).

Jekyll and Hyde also expresses fears about the city and the rise of urban living. Not for nothing is London chosen for its setting; the city in Stevenson’s novel is represented as a dark, threatening space where crime can flourish. Only a few years later, in 1888, Jack the Ripper would bring terror to the streets of Whitechapel. Although the nature of Jekyll’s nastier, unrestrained self is never explained, all sorts of criminality (particularly sexual deviance) is implied. Literary critic Elaine Showalter even suggests that Hyde is an outlet for Jekyll’s repressed (illegal) homosexuality.

The story about the doctor’s ill-fated experiments concerning his split personality is so well known that it is strange to remember that the story was originally written as a mystery. It has been adapted on numerous occasions for stage and screen, with the earliest stage versions appearing only a year after the book’s first American publication in Boston. There are also plenty of works “inspired” by the tale that depict Jekyll’s unfortunate descendants or else put a new twist on the transformation, such as the film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), in which Jekyll turns himself into a wicked woman. Perhaps the most impressive indicator of the book’s profound and pervasive cultural impact is that the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has passed into the English language as a figure of speech to describe someone with a split personality or severe mood swings.

Carys Crossen

See also: Body Snatching Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Stevenson, Robert Louis.

Further Reading

Dryden, Linda. 2003. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Frayling, Christopher. 1996. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, 114–161. London: BBC Books.

Harman, Claire. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Harper Perennial.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2006. “Introduction.” In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales, edited by Roger Luckhurst, vii–xxxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maixner, Paul. 1995. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.

Showalter, Elaine. 1992. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Virago.

Stepan, Nancy. 1985. “Biology: Races and Proper Places.” In Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, 97–120. New York: Columbia University Press.

STRAUB, PETER (1943–)

Peter Straub is a best-selling American novelist, poet, and editor who is most famous for his horror novels, some of which were among the central texts that drove the horror publishing boom of the late twentieth century. He is a two-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award, ten-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, two-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, Grandmaster of the World Horror Convention, and recipient of the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. His work has helped to shape the face of American popular literary culture, especially, but not solely, in the field of horror publishing, where his status is iconic.

Peter Francis Straub was born in 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1965, he received a BA from the University of Wisconsin; a year later, he earned a master’s degree in Contemporary Literature from Columbia. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Susan. He is father to a son, Ben, and a daughter, Emma. Emma has also pursued a writing career, to date having published three well-received novels and a short story collection.

Straub began his writing life as a poet; among his first published works were a series of six pamphlets that he and longtime friend, horror writer Thomas Tessier (The Nightwalker), put out under the name Seafront Press. Other volumes include My Life in Pictures (1971), Ishmael (1972), and Open Air (1972). Probably the most readily available volume of his poetry is Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970–1975, published in 1983 by Underwood Miller, the closest thing the author has to a “collected works” volume of his poetry.

Straub soon gravitated to writing novels, publishing the mainstream works Marriages in 1973 and Under Venus in 1974. He followed these two efforts with his first forays into the macabre, publishing Julia in 1975 and If You Could See Me Now in 1977.

In 1979, he became something of a brand-name horror author with the publication of his breakout novel Ghost Story. His friend (and later collaborator) Stephen King lauded its virtues in a lengthy chapter in Danse Macabre, his nonfiction survey of horror fiction, where he described it as “the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror ‘wave’ in the seventies—those three, of course, being Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other” (King 2010, 266). It also was included as a title in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books, where it was deftly analyzed by speculative fiction scholar Peter Nicholls.

Interestingly, the only books in Straub’s canon to be adapted to film were two of the early works noted above. Julia appeared in 1976 as Full Circle and was later re-released as The Haunting of Julia. In Straub’s mind, much of the casting was suspect, and the film’s script did not hold up very well. Ghost Story appeared in movie theaters in 1981. Although the film received praise for its effective casting of John Houseman and Fred Astaire as the central characters of Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, and for the debut of Alice Krige as the preternaturally threatening Alma Mobley, it was not a critical success, as Straub’s plot was severely downsized. It did do respectable business at the box office, though.

Shadowland was published in 1980, a novel heavily influenced by John Fowles’s The Magus. Straub followed that effort with Floating Dragon (1983), an expansive, bombastic story of terror set in suburban Connecticut.

His next project was a collaboration with Stephen King titled The Talisman (1984), a fantasy that chronicled the adventures of a boy named Jack Sawyer in a parallel universe. King and Straub published a sequel, Black House, in 2001. Besides updating fans on Jack’s doings, it also established specific links to the worlds that King created as part of his epic Dark Tower saga. The two have discussed a third book in the series, but have not written it as of 2016.

In 1988, Straub published Koko, the first book in what was to become known as his Blue Rose Trilogy. A New York Times best seller, Koko appeared on that list simultaneously with another memorable novel, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. Their appearance there signaled the beginning of a new era in thriller fiction, that of the serial killer as enigmatic antihero.

Like Harris, Straub had not yet finished wringing the last ounce of story value from his situations and characters; unlike Harris, Straub’s subsequent forays into this strange landscape proved just as intriguing as their predecessor, as the author found numerous and creative ways to riff on the situations he set up in Koko, penning two additional novels—Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993)—and writing several striking short stories that gave insight into the characters featured therein (including “Blue Rose,” “The Juniper Tree,” “The Ghost Village,” and “Bunny Makes Good Bread”). In 2010, Straub collaborated with actor Michael Easton to write the graphic novel The Green Woman. Illustrated by John Bolton, the book looks in on serial killer Fee Bandolier, who featured heavily in The Throat.

The Blue Rose Trilogy introduced the character of Tim Underhill, a writer (he purportedly wrote the story “Blue Rose”) who became both Straub’s alter ego and, according to subsequent works, his collaborator. Underhill also played key roles in the novels lost boy, lost girl (2003) and In the Night Room (2004).

Straub introduced one of his most memorable and beloved villains, the despicable Dick Dart, in 1985’s Hellfire Club. He delved into Lovecraftian themes in 1999’s Mr. X. His most recent novel, A Dark Matter, a reflection on the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, appeared in 2010. An alternate version of this story, the novel The Skylark, was published by Subterranean Press that same year.

Although rightfully famous for his novels, Straub has also penned short stories, which have been showcased in his collections Houses Without Doors, Magic Terror, and 5 Stories. In 2016, he published Interior Darkness: Selected Stories. That book, originally conceived as a two-volume edition of his collected stories, features sixteen shorter works, written over the course of some three decades. Writing about the collection in the Washington Post, reviewer Bill Sheehan stated, “There may be no better introduction to Straub’s accomplishments than this new, aptly titled career retrospective” (Sheehan 2016).

Besides his work as a novelist and short story writer, Straub has paid his dues as an editor, helming the Horror Writers Association anthology Peter Straub’s Ghosts in 1995, guest editing an edition of Conjunctions in 2002 (Issue 39, titled The New Wave Fabulists), selecting stories for the Library of America’s H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (2005) and editing a volume titled Poe’s Children, subtitled “The New Horror” (2008). Most recently, he served as editor for a two-volume set, again from the Library of America, titled American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now (2009). As an editor, Straub has sought to point out the richness and diversity of the genre, including stories from horror stalwarts such as Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King, but also promoting the talents of relative newcomers to the genre such as Kelly Link, Glenn Hirschberg, and Nalo Hopkinson, or such unlikely suspects as Dan Chaon and Jonathan Lethem.

Jazz informs much of Straub’s work. His novella “Pork Pie Hat” is a good example, featuring a character based on jazz legend Lester Young. This influence extends to the titles he has used and the names he has chosen for his characters over the years. Jazz-influenced titles include Koko, “The Blue Rose,” and The Skylark. Names such as Teagarden, Mobley, and Parker, and characters such as Henry Leyden of Black House in his guise as Symphonic Stan, the Big Band Man, proliferate. The final few pages of Koko are especially illuminating. There, a minor character named Spanky Burrage explores the differences between two tunes with the novel’s name, one by Duke Ellington and another by Charlie Parker, who borrowed his song’s chord progression from the song “Cherokee,” written by Ray Noble. Parker’s improvisation “bends” those chords, producing an entirely new tune. In a way, this is what Straub does with his stories, using variations on a theme to explore ideas and search for meaning; he often turns his stories inside out, looking at the same events from other angles, all in an effort to get at core truths.

Childhood trauma has always played an important part in Straub’s fiction, from the sexual molestation endured by the narrator of the extremely disturbing short story “The Juniper Tree” (1988) to the terrible car accident that Tom Pasmore, the protagonist of Mystery, suffered in that novel. Not surprisingly, pieces of Straub’s fiction are deeply informed by the events in his own life. In the May 1993 edition of the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Straub described one such event: “As a child, I was hit by a car. I was killed in effect, momentarily, and slowly and to some degree unwillingly returned to an unhappy, pain-ridden, angry frustrated life. I was crazy both with the physical pain and the horrible dread that kind of pain brings—and also, I now know, with anger at having been slapped down so severely” (Stokes 1993, 25). Fortunately for readers of horror fiction, the author has found ways to channel that anger and frustration into some of the most exquisite horror and thriller writing of the modern era.

Hank Wagner

See also: Bram Stoker Award; Ghost Story; International Horror Guild Award; King, Stephen.

Further Reading

Bosky, Bernadette L. 1996. “Mirror and Labyrinth: The Fiction of Peter Straub.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 68–84. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Collings, Michael. 2000. Hauntings: The Official Peter Straub Bibliography. Woodstock, GA: Overlook Connection Press.

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

Sheehan, Bill. 2000. At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

Sheehan, Bill. 2016. “‘Interior Darkness’ for Those Who Love Horror—and Even Those Who Don’t.” Washington Post, February 8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/interior-darkness-for-those-who-love-horror--and-even-those-who-dont/2016/02/08/53b1210a-ce6f-11e5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html.

Stokes, Geoffrey. 1993. “Ghosts: The Many Lives of Peter Straub.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 115 (May): 25–26.

Tibbets, John C. 2016. The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Wolfe, Gary K., and Amelia Beamer. 2010. “Peter Straub and Transcendental Horror.” In Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, 151–163. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

STURGEON, THEODORE (1918–1985)

Over the course of a publishing career that spanned nearly five decades, Theodore Sturgeon established himself as one of the most important short story writers in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His nearly 200 published stories, the best of which were published in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, are characterized by emotional depth and stylistic maturity unmatched by other writers in the field at the time. Even his lighter stories demonstrate a quality and craftsmanship achieved by few of his contemporaries. His attention to matters of narrative style and character was profoundly important for a field that was at the time moving away from its roots in the pulp magazines, and his influence has helped shape the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field that we have today. While he is best known as a science fiction writer who addressed issues of difference and sexuality—as in his best-known work, More Than Human (1953), and in works such as Venus Plus X (1960) and “The World Well Lost” (1953)—Sturgeon’s work often makes use of supernatural elements or pathological behavior to create a sense of terror.

As early as 1940, with the publication of the story “It,” Sturgeon was crafting polished and intense tales of horror. The titular It in this case is a swamp creature, prefiguring DC Comics’ Swamp Thing by more than thirty years. Motivated by neither anger nor revenge, the creature nevertheless cuts a violent swath across the countryside in its futile attempts to come to terms with its environment and its emerging consciousness. The destruction It wreaks on one family, and on one teenaged girl in particular, is especially heart-wrenching, all the more so for the creature’s total lack of awareness of the consequences of its actions. “Killdozer” (1944) presents a very different kind of monster, a bulldozer possessed by an ancient alien entity that has been unintentionally unearthed by a construction corps. A story of possession masquerading as a hard science fiction story, “Killdozer” presents the entity’s exorcism as an engineering problem to be solved, which of course it is by the highly competent engineer who is the story’s lead. It remains a readable and at times intense working out of what would be an absurd notion in the hands of a lesser writer. In this sense Sturgeon laid the foundation for what followed decades later in Richard Matheson’s Duel and Stephen King’s “Trucks” (1978) and Christine (1983). Another story of possession, and one of Sturgeon’s finest, “The Perfect Host” (1948) explores the emotional devastation a body-hopping entity leaves in its wake—and does so through a narrative ploy that contemporary audiences would consider postmodern.

These stories and most others in Sturgeon’s oeuvre can be characterized as horror, fantasy, or science fiction, but “Bianca’s Hands” (1947) eschews these trappings for a study in psychological pathology that is all too believable and all the more disturbing for it. The story follows a man who becomes obsessed with the hands of a possibly mentally deficient teenaged girl, the titular Bianca. After a brief courtship, Bianca’s mother agrees to let them marry, and the man moves in. His obsession grows and worsens, and the ensuing downward spiral that all their lives take is vividly rendered in Sturgeon’s polished prose. An even more powerful portrayal of deviance is played out in “Bright Segment” (1955), in which a solitary man rescues a woman after an auto accident and nurses her back to health in his apartment. As she becomes the focal point of his life, his ministrations turn to imprisonment and torture.

Sturgeon’s work often features protagonists, often children or young adults, confronted by threatening or overwhelming forces. “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” (1948) incorporates time travel into a story of a possessed teddy bear that affects its owner from childhood into adulthood, with a terrifying resolution that effectively undermines its innocuous imagery.

In “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall” (1951) an entity, either alien or supernatural, inhabits the shadow of a child’s room and wreaks destruction on his family. “Prodigy” (1949), one of Sturgeon’s shortest but best stories, relates the fate of a special child and raises disturbing questions about how society manages and reacts to difference. The monstrous child motif, in this case an all-powerful adolescent who can do anything he thinks, appears in “Talent” (1953)—the same year that Jerome Bixby’s classic short story “It’s a Good Life,” about an omnipotent child terrorizing a small town (adapted as the iconic Twilight Zone of the same title), was published. “Twink” (1955) demonstrates Sturgeon at his most humane in a story that explores the burgeoning telepathic relationship between a child in utero and her father. The terror here is one of birth, but it is a trauma elided by familial and human connection—another dominant theme in Sturgeon’s work.

Surgeon was adept at producing stories in various modes. Examples of his lighter, if still darkly tinged work include “Shottle Bop” (1941), “Blabbermouth” (1947), and “Fluffy” (1947), all of which can be read as prefiguring the popular urban fantasy that emerged in the late 1980s and the paranormal romance that has existed as a marketing category since the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. “So Near the Darkness” (1955) is a noir mystery that hints at a lurking supernatural presence. “The Graveyard Reader” (1958), with its protagonist who learns how to read the life stories of the dead by examining their gravestones, anticipates in tone and mood the early work of Neil Gaiman. And “Vengeance Is” (1980) anticipates the HIV/AIDS crisis through a disturbing exploration of rape and revenge via the transmission of a sexually transmitted virus.

Of Sturgeon’s handful of novels, Some of Your Blood (1961) is most relevant here. Told through a series of letters and personnel files, the novel gradually unpacks the life of a soldier committed to a psychiatric ward. What gradually emerges is a childhood history of abuse and neglect and an adult life marked by loss, instances of extreme violence, and blood drinking. It is a remarkable study of aberrant psychology that implies a supernatural underpinning that is left tantalizingly unconfirmed.

The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994–2010) collects in thirteen volumes all the short fiction along with insightful story notes from the editors. Taken as a whole, the retrospective illuminates a career of importance, influence, and sustained brilliance.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Novel versus Short Fiction; Possession and Exorcism; Psychological Horror.

Further Reading

Hartwell, David G. 1989. “An Interview with Theodore Sturgeon, Part 1.” New York Review of Science Fiction 7 (March): 1, 8–11.

Hartwell, David G. 1989. “An Interview with Theodore Sturgon, Part 2.” New York Review of Science Fiction 8 (April): 12–15.

Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. “Theodore Sturgeon.” In Science Fiction Voices #1, 4–18. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Stableford, Brian M. 1985. “Theodore (Hamilton) Sturgeon.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, Volume 2, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 941–946. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Williams, Paul. [1976] 2010. “Theodore Sturgeon: Storyteller.” In Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, 327–354. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Also at http://www.theodoresturgeontrust.com/williams.html.

THE SUBLIME

“Sublime” is a term belonging to aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy devoted to the study of artistic values. It designates an affect (subjective emotional state) or experience that exceeds the ordinary limits of an individual’s capacities. Since horror fiction often deals with overwhelming emotions—whether fear, disgust, or denial—as well as the existence of some other realm beyond the everyday world, the concept of the sublime can be an important tool in understanding horror.

The sublime in ancient literature signified some event or person, or perhaps a thing, that rose above its own level and took on something of a divine aspect. The sublime was the object of considerable attention among eighteenth-century thinkers who endeavored to define laws governing the human response to beauty in art and nature. One of these thinkers, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), published a treatise titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, which would become an important early critical text for scholars of horror literature. Rather than seeing the sublime as a form of superior beauty, Burke separated it from beauty and identified the sublime instead with horror. Much of the current discussion of horror literature still draws on Burke’s idea that horror exerts its own kind of attraction, independent from beauty. It seems clear that Burke’s ideas influenced the development of Gothic fiction. Horace Walpole celebrated Gothic architecture in part because it was grotesque in comparison with the more stately classical architecture of the eighteenth century, which was modeled on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic ideas of beauty and dignity.

The Strongest Emotion

In a section of his Philosophical Enquiry titled “On the Sublime,” Edmund Burke not only begins to define the sublime and identify its sources, but he characterizes it as the single strongest emotion a person can feel:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (Burke 1757, 131)

In a later section titled “Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime,” Burke, in addition to refining and clarifying the nature of the sublime, describes it as so powerful and primal that it precedes reason and compels its course:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. (95)

Matt Cardin

Source: Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Entry into the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-mall.

Romantic philosophy took a modified view of the sublime, largely inspired by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). While Burke made the sublime an aspect of certain kinds of naturally occurring events, such as natural catastrophes, Kant saw the sublime as an aspect of the human mind. The mind, according to Kant, seeks to understand whatever it encounters in reality. Some encounters, however, are overwhelming; the event is simply too large or too powerful for the mind to comprehend. The mind falls short, but, in its failure, still finds something to admire in itself anyway: namely, the heroic effort of the mind to understand something far larger than itself. This mixed feeling of incomprehension and self-respect is what Kant considers the sublime. Later Romantic writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose importance for horror fiction is considerable, would adopt something resembling Kant’s idea, seeing the sublime in ways that mixed psychology with aesthetics.

Edgar Allan Poe provides a good example of the way this altered idea of the sublime affects horror fiction. He pays close attention to both the physical and psychological aspects of overwhelming experiences in order to depict them as intensely as possible, which gives his work its exceptional power. In his essay on horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft wrote: “Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal” (Lovecraft 2012, 55).

The sublime tends to fade in significance, while the psychological aspect of horror grows more important in horror criticism, as the twentieth century begins. The domain beyond, which was once considered sublime, is approached by more contemporary authors in a way having to do with the philosophy of existence, rather than aesthetic philosophy.

Michael Cisco

See also: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Walpole, Horace.

Further Reading

Brown, Marshall. 1987. “A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel.” Studies in Romanticism 26: 275–301.

Burke, Edmund. [1756] 2013. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Doran, Robert. 2015. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Mishra, Vijay. 2015. “The Gothic Sublime.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 288–306. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Voller, Jack G. 1994. The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

SUMMERS, MONTAGUE (1880–1948)

Augustus Montague Summers was an English author, vampirologist, demonologist, and clergyman of dubious religious orders. Enigmatic occultist and sometimes participant in the Black Mass in his earlier days, today Summers is primarily known for his scholarly works on Restoration drama and the Gothic and his occult works on vampires, witches, werewolves, and demons, figures in which he professed his firm belief. Summers was also responsible for the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (1928), the infamous fifteenth-century witch hunter’s manual.

The youngest of seven children, Summers was raised in Clifton, Bristol, then educated at Clifton College before going to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied theology, intending to become a priest in the Church of England. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1905, he attended the Lichfield Theological College to further his religious studies. In 1908, Summers was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, but following accusations of sexual impropriety he converted to Catholicism in 1909, supposedly obtaining holy orders in Italy, and thereafter passed himself off as a Catholic priest, self-styled as the Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers. He wore clerical garments until the day he died in 1948.

A couple of brief excerpts from the first of Montague Summers’s two books about vampires are enough to provide a good indicator of his characteristic style, tone, and approach to writing about supernatural and occult matters. In the now famous opening lines of the introduction to The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, Summers wrote, “In all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest” (Summers 1929, ix). Then in the first sentence of the book’s first chapter, titled “The Origins of the Vampire,” he extended the theme: “Throughout the whole vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with such fearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nor demon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both” (1).

Matt Cardin

Source: Summers, Montague. 1929. The Vampire, His Kith and Kin. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Before turning to writing full-time, Summers worked as an English and Latin teacher at various schools in England and London for several years. Summers’s prose, according to Gerard P. O’Sullivan, “was solemn, archaic, and often impenetrable” (O’Sullivan 2011, xxix). His other important occult works include The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926), The Geography of Witchcraft (1927), The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), The Vampire in Europe (1929), The Werewolf (1933), A Popular History of Witchcraft (1937), Witchcraft and Black Magic (1946), and The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1947).

Perusing older as well as newer texts on the topical areas Summers pursued can scarcely be done without encountering his name and mention of his works, a fact owing as much to his curious demeanor, erudition, and rather quirky, ornate writing style as it does to the breadth of research he published in his lifetime. However, these same texts also reveal the curious absence of any real depth in Summers’s work, and it is perhaps because of this that a stigma has been attached to Summers’s writings for almost as long as they have been in print. Summers’s rather orthodox belief in supernatural figures, his sometimes impenetrable writing style, and the documentation errors his works occasionally show have contributed to a partial and sometimes outright avoidance of his work by researchers.

Summers died suddenly in his home in Richmond, Surrey, on August 10, 1948, with only a handful of close friends in attendance at his simple graveside service three days later. After his death, Summers’s contribution to the critical methodologies used for studying vampires has become undeniable. Without his frequently reprinted works, the image of the vampire that is widely recognized today might have had considerably less to do with comparative cultural studies and more to do with predominantly anglicized representations in film and literature. Indeed, it is because of Summers that the modern serious study of the vampire figure exists today.

John Edgar Browning

See also: Incubi and Succubi; Vampires; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Jerome, Joseph. 1965. Montague Summers: A Memoir. London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf.

O’Sullivan, Gerard P. 2011. “Prologue: The Continuing Quest for Montague Summers.” In The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition, edited by John Edgar Browning, xxviii–lxxii. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.

Sewell, Brocard. 1991. Tell Me Strange Things: A Memorial to Montague Summers. Upton: Aylesford Press.

Summers, Montague. 1980. The Galantry Show: An Autobiography. London: Cecil Woolf.

Summers, Montague. 2011. The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press.

Summers, Montague. 2014. The Vampire in Europe: A Critical Edition. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press.

SURREALISM

Surrealism is a movement in poetry, painting, fiction, and film in which the artist attempts to tap directly into the subconscious, using such means as dreams or automatic writing to fuse subconscious and conscious thought to create a new type of reality. The movement was heavily influenced by Freudian theory and by the Gothic novel, which the founder of surrealism, the French poet Andre Breton, felt was a similar reaction against the art and social mores of an earlier era. These influences perhaps account for touches of horror that may surface in surrealist works.

Founded by Breton in 1924, surrealism grew to prominence between the two World Wars. It diverged from the earlier, nihilistic, Dadaist movement, in which artists rebelled against reason and logic in a disillusioned postwar Europe. The Surrealists sought to create something new and positive, if also shocking and discordant.

Because the term “surrealism” signifies a method of creation rather than a particular style or subject matter, there is little consistency in works so classified, but they do commonly feature strange and disquieting juxtapositions of objects and concepts, as often seen in surrealist paintings. Horrific imagery is often more apparent in film, as in Andalusian Dog (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, with its shocking scenes of a woman’s eye being sliced by a razor and ants crawling out of a wound in a man’s hand. Later Surrealist-influenced films include L’Age d’Or (1930) by Buñuel, Beauty and the Beast (1946) by Jean Cocteau, Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch, and El Topo (1970) and Sante Sangre (1989) by Alejandro Jodorosky.

Surrealist fiction may also contain horrific elements. In The Fashionable Tiger (1947) by Jean Ferry, a vicious tiger is forced by hypnotism to dress and behave as a human in a circus performance. The Rabbits and The Debutante by Leonora Carrington (1939) respectively feature carnivorous rabbits and a hyena who eats a young woman and wears her torn-off face. The Lost Traveller (1943) by Ruthven Todd, based on a series of dreams, follows a man on a quest across a bizarre landscape with bleeding statues and faceless people.

Surrealism largely disappeared as an organized movement after World War II, but its effects were widespread. Some later writers, such as Rikki Ducornet, actually employed surrealist techniques, but the movement also had a more superficial influence on many writers such as William S. Burroughs, Nathanael West, William Sansom, and J. G. Ballard, who often employed the type of disconcerting imagery or disjointedness seen in surrealist works.

The movement was one of many streams of influence on the development of weird fiction and in particular on writers such as Robert Aickman and Angela Carter. More recently, the influence can be seen in the work of the New Weird movement, including China Miéville, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, and Caitlín Kiernan.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Aickman, Robert; Ballard, J. G.; Carter, Angela; Dreams and Nightmares; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Miéville, China; New Weird.

Further Reading

Bradley, Fiona. 1997. Surrealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2011. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. New York: Tor.

T

TEM, MELANIE (1949–2015)

The American author Melanie Tem was a renowned horror and dark fantasy writer known for her humane, insightful domestic horror, which was influenced by her career in social work. She received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards for her writing, which included nearly a hundred short stories, twelve novels, and numerous plays, poems, and storytelling performances.

Tem’s novels include Prodigal (1991), Wilding (1992), Revenant (1994), The Yellow Wood (2015), Blood Moon (1992), and Black River (1997). As a social worker and administrator, she worked with the elderly, the disabled, and adoptive children and parents, which provided her with unique insights into caring for damaged families. Her novels often locate the oppressive scenarios they explore in suburban houses, and she focuses on the domestic and on family interactions. The family’s relationships are a prime location for her horror, which is an exposé of hypocrisy and repressive binary oppositions, taboos, and rituals that prioritize some behaviors while excluding, demonizing, and punishing others. In Blood Moon she explores the violent outbursts of a serially abused, neglected child, and in the short story (with writer husband Steve Rasnic Tem) “Mama” (1995), she identifies the domineering mother, every teenage girl’s guilty secret, as a returned vampire eating flies in the kitchen, gnawing on her dominated husband. The disgusted teenage daughter nevertheless soon succumbs to her own vampire nature. In the lesbian Gothic Wilding, werewolves express hidden, socially unacknowledged passions. Tem deals sensitively with matriarchal power and problems of Othering, inclusivity, and exclusivity central to queer theory. In The Yellow Wood five father-dominated siblings struggle to cope with the traumatizing talents imposed on them, which Alexandra, who leaves, then returns, suspects is more than extreme parenting.

Tem’s horror is based on her insights into families, social practices, and everyday relationships. She excavates the ways in which families and social groups Otherize those who are different, as seen in, for example, their responses of rejection, disgust, abjection, and destruction based on fears of difference, the body, the Other, the abject, the “not I.” She also refuses to end her stories and novels on the kind of horror closure that restores a former state of order that is actually deeply flawed. In all this she undercuts neat reinforcement of the status quo, which some conventional horror embraces in its closure. Tem’s work is caring, thoughtful, and concerned with human values, exposing the lack of all of these qualities in so many family and social settings. She refuses and exposes the demonizing of humanity’s animal nature, other selves, and any easy maintenance of taboos, neat sets of behaviors, and beliefs. Melanie Tem died of metastatic breast cancer on February 9, 2015.

Gina Wisker

See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Vampires; Werewolves; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

Simmons, William P. 2005. “A Conversation with Melanie Tem.” Cemetery Dance 53: 70–75.

Wisker, Gina. 2009. “Devouring Desires: Lesbian Gothic Horror.” In Queering the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and A. Smith, 123–141. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

TERROR VERSUS HORROR

Both “terror” and “horror” have been used to name the affect that characterizes horror fiction. Critics trying to understand the genre better have had to reckon with the different ways in which people can be afraid.

Much of the critical discussion of horror and terror focuses on them as emotional reactions deliberately elicited by the writer. In an influential 1826 essay, Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe wrote that terror was a kind of dread with no clear cause, while horror was a paralyzing or contracting emotion with a clear cause. Terror, according to Radcliffe, was a stimulating, expansive feeling, while horror deadened the mind. Stephen King, writing in his nonfiction survey of horror, Danse Macabre, likewise sees terror as a form of excitement associated with danger, while horror is an experience of helplessness or despair. However, it is not at all unlikely that any given writer might use these terms interchangeably, or reverse their senses.

Although a great many people have weighed in with varying opinions as to what constitutes the dividing line between terror and horror—from working horror authors themselves (such as Stephen King to Dennis Wheatley) to literary scholars and critics (such as Peter Penzoldt, Philip Van Doren Stern, and Devendra P. Varma)—no opinion has been more widely known or influential than that of Ann Radcliffe, who in her classic (and posthumously published) 1826 essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” said this:

Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (Radcliffe 1826)

Matt Cardin

Source: Radcliffe, Ann. 1826. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In The New Monthly Magazine 7, 145–152.

On the other hand, terror and horror can also be understood in terms of the structure of a story. Terror is often the emotion a reader is meant to feel gathering strength as the story unfolds, while horror is the emotion that comes over the reader when the mystery is finally solved, and/or the evil exposed. In horror fiction, the reader is given a series of signs, which may be clues in a mystery, or moments of emotional revelation, or exploration of a place or relationship, and these signs all point toward the horror without naming it or making it too clear. Terror is the name one may give to the mounting impression created by these signs as they accumulate. Many of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories have this structure, so that the final, horrifying revelation of the story comes as a surprise, but does not come out of nowhere. The astute reader, in gradually picking up the writer’s signs, will have come to a vague suspicion that the hidden truth is nightmarish, will anticipate its being revealed, and will be both curious and reluctant to learn what it is. As long as the discovery is feared and postponed, the reader is enjoying the “terrifying” aspect of the story; however, as this unfolds, the “horror” of the story also comes increasingly into view. On re-reading, then, the reader would presumably experience primarily horror, the terror having given way to dramatic irony.

In everyday language, however, the word “terror” is often used to describe intense fear of some concrete or immediate danger, while “horror” is a feeling of denial, triggered by a more general state of affairs. For example, facing imminent death in an airplane crash would be cause for terror, while horror might better describe the sort of feeling one has contemplating one’s own mortality. Seen in this way, horror is the word for a nightmarish situation or destiny that cannot be avoided, but is too painful to accept. Terror, then, would be some avoidable outcome, or a threat that can be faced and defeated. This means that certainty about outcomes is another way to tell these two emotions apart. If the outcome is certainly negative, then the feeling will be one of horror. If there is hope, then the feeling will be terror. Seen in this way, Dracula is primarily a novel of terror, because the vampire is finally defeated. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, however, is a horror story insofar as the reader identifies with the main character, because he ends up beyond help. Lovecraft cites Charles Lamb’s essay “Witches and Other Night-Fears” at the opening of his own classic story, “The Dunwich Horror.” In this extract, Lamb also points out that the terrors of fantasy, such as witches and demons, do not alarm us by threatening us with bodily harm, but in a more philosophical way, threatening our spirits, our sense of self.

Michael Cisco

See also: Dracula; “The Dunwich Horror”; King, Stephen; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Numinous; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Sublime; The Uncanny.

Further Reading

King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

Lamb, Charles. Witches and Other Night-Fears. In The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2: Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, edited by E. V. Lucas, 65–69. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lamb/charles/elia/book1.13.html.

Radcliffe, Ann. [1826] 2004. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, 41–50. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.

TESSIER, THOMAS (1947–)

Thomas Tessier is an American author of horror fiction in a psychological vein, as opposed to the bloody, gory type of horror produced by many of the genre’s other major figures. His books are concise and economical in their writing and plotting—he has never published a book with more than 400 pages—and his style of writing has drawn attention from critics for its lucidity and precision. He frequently leaves the reader suspended between supernatural and naturalistic understandings of the events in his novels, of which, to date, he has published ten. He has also published three volumes of poetry and numerous short stories. He is furthermore a playwright and has had several plays professionally staged, though they have never been published.

Tessier was born in Connecticut in 1947. For college he crossed the Atlantic to attend University College Dublin. He lived for several years in Dublin, and then in London (which later became the setting for several of his novels), before returning to the United States. He currently resides in his home state of Connecticut.

His first novel, The Fates (1978), explores the chilling impact that a strange force, possibly supernatural, has on a small town in America. It set the precedent for Tessier’s later work by offering no final explanation for its frightening events, and by refusing to offer a happy ending. His second novel, The Nightwalker, published in 1979, featured the original American werewolf in London. Its protagonist is a quiet Vietnam veteran named Bobby Ives who is the victim of strange nightmares and violent impulses. It is unclear if Bobby’s fears are due to his (probable) trauma from the war and mental illness, or if he really is turning into a werewolf.

More dark and disturbing fiction followed. Of Tessier’s third novel, Shockwaves (1982), horror icon Ramsey Campbell called it “remarkably dark.” Perhaps for this reason, Tessier’s subsequent novel Phantom, published in the same year, features a child protagonist and actually ends on an optimistic note.

Nevertheless, it was back to familiar territory for Tessier’s next novel, Finishing Touches (1986), which explores themes similar to The Nightwalker, focusing on a young American doctor’s descent into a murderous madness. Rapture (1987) and Secret Strangers (1990) were less supernatural and more conventional thrillers, and Tessier has been far less prolific in the years since they were published. His later novels are Fogheart (1997), Father Panic’s Opera Macabre (2001), and Wicked Things (2007), though he has continued to publish short fiction since the turn of the millennium.

Tessier has received several award nominations and received an International Horror Guild Award for Fogheart in 1998. Though not the most prolific of horror writers, he continues to produce books, essays, and short stories, with his most recent production at the time of this writing being Remorseless (2013), a collection of his short fiction.

Carys Crossen

See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Psychological Horror; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Errickson, Will. 2014. “The Erotic Horrors of Thomas Tessier.” Tor.com, June 20. http://www.tor.com/2014/06/20/summer-of-sleaze-the-erotic-horrors-of-thomas-tessier.

“Thomas (Edward) Tessier.” 2002. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

“THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL A-WINDING”

American writer, editor, and conservative political theorist Russell Kirk (1918–1994) had already produced one collection of ghost stories, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), the Gothic novel Old House of Fear (1961), the picaresque black comedy A Creature of the Twilight: His Memorials (1966), and several seminal publications on social, political, and religious subjects before his story “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” appeared in Kirby McCauley’s anthology Frights: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Terror (1976). The story went on to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1977.

In the story, Frank Sarsfield is walking along a lonely stretch of highway when a blizzard forces him to seek shelter in an abandoned village beside the shell of a prison, where he finds a single dwelling unfelled by time. Sarsfield is a man of simple faith haunted by the belief that “there could be no grace for him” because of his failure to maintain contact with his parents and sister, his terms of imprisonment for raiding church poorboxes, and the degrading day-to-day existence of a vagabond. He has the stature of a Viking but shuns violence, and he loves children but mistrusts women too much to raise a family. Additionally, his untutored intelligence leans less towards making a life for himself or anyone else than toward poetry and the solipsistic daydreams in which his thoughts crowd out the outside world. Snowbound in a house where time and identity become dazzlingly fluid, he experiences an increasing sense of familiarity with his surroundings and its former denizens. He has always been prone to seeing things his fellows could not perceive, but he now notices that the odd movements seen out of the corner of his eye, certain distant sounds, and even the sense of having been touched when on the verge of a dream have taken on an added clarity before he is called upon to play a heroic role in events that coincide with the day of his birth, sixty years in the past.

Through this “signal act of contrition” Sarsfield remits the debt implied in the age-old Christian dilemma posed in the biblical Book of James whereby humanity is saved by faith, but justified by works. Kirk’s heroes rarely play the passive role in uncovering and reacting to spectral phenomena that characterize the protagonists in most ghost stories, choosing rather to take an active, even aggressive stance toward the malignant forces arrayed against them. If Kirk’s villains sometimes seem as transparent as an allegorical character out of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), his fallible heroes are more complex. Despite bearing the marks of the venal, violent world around them, they act decisively to protect the bodies and souls of the innocent, even when their fear is most acute. As John Webster stated in the seventeenth-century tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, “Man, like to cassia [that is, cinnamon], is proved best, being bruised” (Webster 1999, 52). As powerful as this tale is in isolation, it also fits into a larger body of work dramatizing concerns Kirk had voiced in his nonfiction. Working from a central Dantesque trilogy of which this story forms the Purgatorio, “Balgrummo’s Hell” (1967) the Inferno, and “Saviourgate” (1976) the Paradiso, Kirk develops a Christian mythos drawing upon elements of medieval theology, the writings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and others to produce a network of cross-references within his fiction, which reaches a focal and dramatic climax when Ralph Bain suddenly crashes into action in the supernatural thriller Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979) straight from his apparently fatal fall from a cliff-top at the end of 1952’s “Sorworth Place.” Frank Sarsfield’s redemption, entire unto itself, requires no such apotheosis, though he does reappear briefly in Kirk’s “Watchers at the Strait Gate” (1980).

Jim Rockhill

See also: Kirk, Russell.

Further Reading

Guroian, Vigen. 2004. “Introduction.” In Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales by Russell Kirk, vii–xvii. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Herron, Don. 1985. “Russell Kirk: Ghost Master of Mecosta.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 21–47. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

Kirk, Russell. 1984. “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.” In Watchers at the Strait Gate, ix-xiv. Sauk City, WI.

Pelan, John. 2002. “The Ghosts of Piety Hill.” In Off the Sand Road: Ghost Stories, Volume One by Russell Kirk, ix–xvii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

Webster, John. [1623] 1999. The Duchess of Malfi. Mineola, NY: Dover.

“THEY”

“They” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1904 and later collected in Traffics and Discoveries in 1904. It was influenced both by a personal bereavement of Kipling’s and by his keen awareness of the thriving world of Spiritualism—centered on the practice of spirit mediums contacting and speaking for the spirits of the dead—in turn-of-the-century England and America.

The actual story of “They” is quite simple: the nameless narrator, driving in Sussex, makes a wrong turn, finds a beautiful old country house, and barely glimpses a number of children. The owner is a woman, Miss Florence, blind almost since birth; they speak of the children, and she reveals she loves but cannot see them. The narrator speaks of his children, one of whom (it is inferred) is dead, though he never sees faces in his dreams. Miss Florence’s butler Madden, who helps him on his way, has also lost a child to the croup and will not accept a tip. The narrator returns again some months later, becoming emotionally closer with Miss Florence; when a distraught villager appears, the narrator assists by finding and fetching a doctor, then bringing in a nun to assist the dying child. A third visit, in autumn, permits him to see Miss Florence deal with a dishonest tenant; he and Miss Florence take tea, the children audible but not visible, and as he watches her and the farmer, his hand is kissed in a way known only to his dead daughter. He now knows who They are: the ghosts of dead children, visible only to those who have lost children, and Miss Florence tells him that he can never return.

Inspired by Kipling’s loss of his daughter Josephine (1892–1899) to pneumonia, “They” is an elliptical work: the word “ghosts” is never used, and it is unclear until the conclusion if the story has a point or if it is simply a series of anecdotes involving life, death, and nature. Only at the conclusion is it revealed that “They” offers a glimpse into a world in which innocent love and its memories can keep alive the dead, and that those who care the most often cannot see what they care for. It is a poignant and moving story that Somerset Maugham described as “a fine and deeply moving effort of the imagination” (Maugham 1952, xxi). Kipling scholar William B. Dillingham characterizes “They” as “perhaps the most personally revealing of [Kipling’s] stories” (Dillingham 2005, 140).

Richard Bleiler

See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; Spiritualism.

Further Reading

Dillingham, William B. 2002. “Kipling: Spiritualism, Bereavement, Self-Revelation, and ‘They.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45, no. 4: 402–425.

Dillingham, William B. 2005. “The Immortal Woe of Life: Bereavement.” In Kipling: Hell and Heroism, 101–157. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Maugham, Somerset. 1952. Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Prose, vii–xxviii. New York: Macmillan.

“THRAWN JANET”

“Thrawn Janet” is a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in the October 1881 issue of The Cornhill Magazine. It is narrated almost entirely in a thick Scottish dialect, which gives it the character of an old folk legend.

The story is set in 1712 in the moorland parish of Balweary, where the Reverend Murdoch Soulis has newly arrived from college. When he hires Janet M’Clour to be his housekeeper, the locals are aghast because Janet is rumored to be “si to the de’il” (that is, a witch). Soulis saves her from being dunked in the waters of the Dule to prove that she’s a witch, and he has her swear before the townspeople that she renounces the devil. The next day, Janet appears with her head and neck twisted askew, as though she’s been hanged or “thrawn.” Soulis believes that she has suffered a palsy through the cruelty of the townspeople, but the townsfolk believe that something unholy has taken up residence in her body. One stormy evening, after Soulis has had a disturbing encounter with a strange Black Man in the churchyard, he enters Janet’s room and sees her corpse hanging from a thread on a nail in the wall. When Soulis leaves the room, the corpse pursues him, and when he invokes the power of God, the corpse dissolves into ash. The next day, when the Black Man is seen leaving town, the locals reason that it was the devil himself who had possessed Janet’s corpse the last few months. Thereafter, Soulis turns extremely dour and reclusive, and he frightens people with the intensity of his admonitions against the forces of evil.

In his introduction to The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Barry Menikoff praises “Thrawn Janet” as “a masterpiece of linguistic realism” and one of Stevenson’s most complex considerations of the nature of evil. As he notes, neither the villagers’ superstitiousness nor the minister’s rationalism can explain the story’s macabre events. “In effect,” Menikoff writes, “the diabolic served Stevenson as a convenient frame for focusing attention on an aspect of life that appears to resist rational explanation” (Menikoff 2002, xliii). The story was one of Stevenson’s personal favorites, and it moved him to reflect in his personal letters on whether it was wholesome for him to brood upon “the evil in the world and man.”

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Devils and Demons; Possession and Exorcism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Arata, Stephen. 2010. “Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Penny Fielding, 53–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Coleman, O. Parsons. 1946. “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in ‘Thrawn Janet.’” Studies in Philology 43, no. 3 (July): 551–571.

Menikoff, Barry. 2002. “Introduction.” The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Barry Menikoff, xiii–liii. New York: Modern Library.

TRANSFORMATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

Transformation and metamorphosis are both words used to denote a change from one form or shape to another. The difference between the two terms is largely etymological: the Latin elements of “trans-” and “form” broadly correspond to the Greek elements of “meta-” and “morphosis” (meaning “between” and “form” respectively). Both words are used in English to refer to the process of change in a variety of contexts; however, in artistic works, metamorphosis generally connotes a more complete change of state or substance, often effected through supernatural or divine means. In fiction and art, the most common type of metamorphosis is the transformation of the human into another organism or inanimate object (and vice versa). Ideas of transformation have particular significance for the tradition of horror literature, as the enduring fascination with metamorphosis is reflected in numerous texts and narratives throughout the history of horror fiction.

Transformation and metamorphosis are among the earliest concerns of human art. Sculptures and cave paintings dating back to the last Ice Age (ca. 38,000–8000 BCE) depict creatures that are part human and part animal, suggesting species fluidity (either hybridity or metamorphosis). From the earliest examples, literature also evinces this fascination. The ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE) contains, among other things, stories of scorpion-men, humans transformed into clay, and a shepherd turned into a wolf by an angry goddess. In the ancient Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers” (ca. 1200–1194 BCE), a man is transformed into a bull and then into a tree after his death. In this latter case, metamorphosis intersects with resurrection and the afterlife, which is a recurrent motif in both Western and Eastern cultures. Ideas of metamorphosis frequently appear in classical Greek and Latin writing as well, with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca. 760–710 BCE) containing numerous episodes of transformation. For Western fiction, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) is one of the most influential texts on transformation, with its unifying theme extending to episodes of human-animal, human-object, animal-human, and plant-human change, as well as to episodes of gender inversion and physical alteration. The mechanisms of transformation depicted in Ovid’s work are also varied, with metamorphosis being effected by human, supernatural, and divine means, but also as a result of natural change. Ovid’s work draws on earlier literature, but also on mythological and folkloric conceptions of transformation. Almost all known mythologies and folklores include some element of metamorphosis; magical practice, esotericism, and superstition also reflect a perennial concern with effecting transformation, including using rituals and spells to alter shape, status, or circumstance. Many stories are the result of an intermingling of Western and Eastern traditions. For example, One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Arabian Nights) contains numerous stories in which voluntary and involuntary transformation is achieved through the will (or control) of a supernatural being. While some of these stories (such as “The Fisherman and the Jinni”) appear in the oldest manuscripts of the text and probably draw on Persian and Indian folklore, others (such as “Aladdin’s Lamp”) were added by the eighteenth-century French translator, Antoine Galland. Galland was friends with Charles Perrault, one of the writers responsible for the popularity of the literary fairy tale, which has its roots in European folklore and fable. Physical transformation, supernatural alteration of circumstance, and species fluidity are key concerns in all these modes of storytelling.

As well as having folkloric and mythological roots, conceptions of metamorphosis have long been inflected by developments in religious and scientific thinking. In Western traditions, the centrality of an act of transformation to Christianity is significant. The doctrine of transubstantiation, while prescribed as a unique miracle in theological texts, is reflected in European narrative fiction from the twelfth century onward. Medieval romance texts (for example, Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and Enide) reveal a recurrent interest in the redemptive transformation of the individual (usually a man) and the potential for one substance to be translated into another through supernatural or divine will. At the same time as these developments in theology and literature, studies in biology (informed by Greek and Arabic scholarship) increased focus on natural processes of transformation such as digestion, reproduction, and growth. These intersecting influences continue to be a significant influence on fictional tales of metamorphosis.

Horror fiction retains this fascination with transformation and metamorphosis, and the influences of older traditions are visible. In the nineteenth century, a number of Gothic texts addressed the concept of metamorphosis through engagement with both supernatural and scientific ideas. Transformative creatures such as the vampire and the werewolf, whose previous incarnations had been mainly folkloric or theological, became staple figures of horror literature, and new understandings of biology, chemistry, and physics were interpreted through the lens of fiction. One of the best-known examples of such a text is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a seemingly demonic act of horrific physical and psychological transformation is actually effected through secretive scientific experiments. Contemporary horror also often reflects current scientific concerns, incorporating new ideas of evolution, robotics, and genetic modification into older traditions of species fluidity, supernatural transformation, and ritual. For example, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” combines ideas of artificial intelligence with depictions of physical and mental transformation to depict the grotesque metamorphosis of human beings by a vengeful supercomputer. Elsewhere, arcane rites and supernatural evil are responsible for the distortion of the human form, and horrific transformation is a key theme in the works of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and Thomas Ligotti. While Ellison’s supercomputer represents the transformative potential of new technology, works such as Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” draw on fears of ancient or repressed monstrosity and of the possibility of degeneration. Nevertheless, the basic premise of all these narratives—the possibility that a human might become something nonhuman—dates back to some of the earliest examples of artistic creation.

Hannah Priest

See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; The Grotesque; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Kafka, Franz; “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Buzwell, Greg. “Gothic Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Mutating Bodies and Disturbed Minds.” The British Library. Accessed July 8, 2016. http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-fiction-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2001. Metamorphosis and Identity. New York: Zone Books.

Cruz, Ronald Allan Lopez. 2012. “Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror Is Biological Horror.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 40, no. 4: 160–168.

Haddawy, Husain, trans. 1990. The Arabian Nights. New York and London: Norton.

Ovid. 1986. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Paul-Choudhury, Sumit. 2013. “Ice-Age Art Hints at Birth of Modern Mind.” New Scientist, February 13. Accessed March 12, 2016. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729042-300-ice-age-art-hints-at-birth-of-modern-mind/.

TRILBY

Trilby is an illustrated melodramatic novel by George du Maurier, a well-known cartoonist for Punch and other British periodicals. Published as a serial in 1894 and in volume form in 1895, it is largely set in Bohemian Paris.

Trilby O’Ferrall, the daughter of an Irish father and a French mother, models for a group of artistic British gentlemen who literally or nominally represent the remaining three nations of the United Kingdom. The most innocent of these, Little Billee, becomes enamored of the hybrid bilingual heroine, even in the knowledge that, to his respectable family at least, her occupations as a laundry maid and nude model render her little better than a prostitute. The mutual romance, though, is disrupted not by this consciousness but through the intervention of an Eastern European and polylingual Jew, Svengali, who hypnotizes Trilby under the pretense of curing her recurrent ocular neuralgia. While her pain is relieved, Svengali has gained control over her mind and is able to eclipse her everyday character with a “second” Trilby who is compliant with his commands and who remembers nothing of her other life. Under Svengali’s tutelage Trilby, who is normally tone deaf, becomes a celebrated concert vocalist—her stage name of Madame Svengali intimating that the Jew’s control may well extend to a possession of more than just her voice. Svengali humiliates Trilby’s former admirers, Little Billee in particular, by having her ignore them while she is entranced, though when he dies during a concert his command over her is apparently negated. Reconciled with the British artists and Little Billee’s family, Trilby is, however, a broken and confused personality, recalling her distant past as a laundress but not her recent stage career. Though she endures a long physical as well as mental decline, her end comes suddenly when a portrait of Svengali is delivered to her and its eyes command her to a final, fatal crescendo.

Trilby is a significant work for a number of reasons. Immediately, its interest in hypnotism draws upon the revived popularity of that technique in Parisian medical circles at the Victorian fin de siècle. The clinical work of J. M. Charcot, notably, was well publicized in Britain, though folk memories of stage mesmerism and rumors of sexual interference conducted under the guise of hypnotic séance remained as an implicit counterpart to any suggestion that hypnotism might ever be deployed as an analgesic or therapeutic tool. The double personality of Trilby, moreover, is suggestive of the doppelgänger, and du Maurier’s novel ought to be regarded as an influence upon Stoker’s Dracula (1897), given the facial resemblance that unites Svengali and Count Dracula, and their specific interest in gaining hypnotic ascendancy over (nominally) British women. Du Maurier’s anti-Semitism reflects the rhetoric of his work’s heyday, a period of pogroms and Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the crowded streets of London.

Trilby was dramatized in the United States by Paul Potter in 1895 and first staged in London in the same year. It has also been adapted for film, perhaps most memorably in the 1931 American film Svengali, starring John Barrymore as the eponymous villain.

William Hughes

See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dracula.

Further Reading

Berman, Avis. 1993. “George du Maurier’s Trilby Whipped up a Worldwide Storm.” Smithsonian 24, no. 9: 110.

Grossman, Jonathan H. 1996. “An Essay on Du Maurier’s Trilby.” Studies in the Novel 28.4 (Winter): 525–542. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. 2016. Detroit, MI: Gale.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

The Turn of the Screw is a novella by American writer Henry James, first published in 1898. It is now considered by many to be one of the finest examples of the ghost story ever written.

The main story is surrounded by a frame narrative in the style of the classic Gothic tale. Ghost stories are being told by the fireside at a house party; one guest tells a tale about a child being frightened by a ghost, then another guest offers a ghost story that, since it involves two children instead of one, amplifies the horror of the first guest’s tale. In other words, he will give that horror an additional “turn of the screw.”

The guest first speaks about a governess he once knew. She then takes over the narration in her own voice, although her name is never given. The governess is hired by a wealthy man to look after his young niece and nephew, to whom he is indifferent. Their parents have died, and he is unmarried and unwilling to take care of the children personally. The governess goes to live with the children at Bly, her employer’s country estate. They live there together with the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Very quickly the governess comes to the conclusion that Bly is haunted by the ghosts of Peter Quint, the former groundskeeper, and of the previous governess, Miss Jessel. Quint and Jessel were apparently having an affair. Quint died by violence under mysterious circumstances, while it appears that Miss Jessel might have taken her own life, possibly to escape the shame of pregnancy outside marriage.

[I find The Turn of the Screw] to be the most powerful, the most nerve-shattering ghost story I have ever read. . . . When I told the author exactly how I felt while reading it, and thanked him for giving me sensations that I thought no author could give me at my age, he said that he was made happy by my testimony. “For,” said he, “I meant to scare the whole world with that story; and you had precisely the emotion that I hoped to arouse in everybody.”

—William Lyon Phelps. 1916. The Advance of the English Novel.
New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company. 323–324.

The Turn of the Screw is such a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil, of the subtle influence over human hearts and minds of the sin with which this world is accursed, as our language has not produced since Stevenson wrote his Jekyll and Hyde tale. . . . Mr. James’s story is perhaps as allegorical as Stevenson’s, but the allegory is not so clear. . . . These children are accursed, or all but damned, and are shown to have daily, almost hourly, communication with lost souls, the souls that formerly inhabited the bodies of a vicious governess and her paramour, who, in the flesh, began the degradation of their victims. . . . The strongest and most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature (without forcing any didactic purpose upon the reader) it is nevertheless free from the slightest hint of grossness.

—From “Magic of Evil and Love” (an anonymous review of
The Turn of the Screw). 1898. The New York Times Saturday
Review of Books and Art, October 15: 681–682.

Matt Cardin

The governess believes that Peter Quint, in particular, is exerting a corrupting influence over the children. The boy, Miles, has recently been expelled from school for reasons that aren’t clear; all that emerges is that he was speaking to the other boys in an unacceptable way. As the story unfolds, the governess comes to suspect that the spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are trying to possess the children in order to renew their sexual relationship through them. The governess is determined to protect the children and reasons that, if she can compel them to admit that they are seeing Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, she can break the sinister influence of the ghosts. When the governess tries to compel the girl, Flora, to confess, she becomes distraught and seems to experience a hysterical episode that removes her from the story. Later, when the governess pressures Miles to a similar confession, he becomes so overwrought that he dies, possibly of heart failure. It may be that the ghost of Peter Quint has somehow claimed Miles as his victim, or it could be that the governess’s emotional coercion of Miles, and what might be his fear of her rather than Quint, causes his death.

The narrative throws considerable doubt on the governess’s interpretation of events. It is possible that Miles’s behavior at school was only an expression of innocent high spirits. He might be imitating Peter Quint based solely on his memory of the living man, and there is no indication of any sexual activity between the children. So, The Turn of the Screw could be the story of a heroic governess fighting off a supernatural menace, which is the way she sees things, or it could be the story of a delusional governess inventing a terrible crisis when nothing is really wrong, simply to establish her own importance and to impress her employer. James plants a few indications in the story of the governess that suggest she unconsciously wishes to marry her employer and become the lady of the house. Clearly, the governess tends to dominate Mrs. Grose as if she were not essentially a servant of the household herself. The governess also only sees Miss Jessel after learning about her from Mrs. Grose, suggesting that she is embroidering her initial story.

James does not exclude the possibility of a supernatural influence at Bly. The governess sees a strange man at Bly very shortly after she first arrives at the estate. She describes this man’s appearance in detail to Mrs. Grose, who recognizes him as Peter Quint, a man that the governess knew nothing about at the time. This is the one aspect of the story that cannot plausibly be accounted for, since Peter Quint is not an average-looking man, whose appearance might be hit upon by coincidence. The governess says “he’s like nobody” and goes on to give this description of the man she saw:

He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—awfully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor. (James 2009, 47)

The persistent ambiguity about the events at Bly is never resolved. While it is possible the governess might have run across Peter Quint or his description somewhere, that information is not included in the text. Also, the governess is originally from a small village and is not likely to have spent any time in the vicinity of Bly.

Franco-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov’s classic book-length study of supernatural fiction, entitled The Fantastic, derives its definition of “fantastic” fiction almost entirely from a study of The Turn of the Screw. Todorov finds very few examples of what he would call the “pure” fantastic stories, and, because of its carefully constructed uncertainty about the existence of the supernatural, The Turn of the Screw is, for him, the most perfect expression of the “pure” fantastic tale.

The Turn of the Screw has been the subject of numerous adaptations in a variety of media. Benjamin Britten, the famous English composer, transformed the story into an opera. It was dramatized for the stage under the title The Innocents, debuting in 1950, and the play was adapted for a film of the same name in 1961. In 1972, director Michael Winner released The Nightcomers, a film meant to tell the story of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel before their deaths, starring Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham.

Michael Cisco

See also: Frame Story; James, Henry; Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Heller, Terry. 1989. The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision. Boston: Twayne.

James, Henry. 2009. The Turn of the Screw. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Smith, Allan L. 1993. “A Word Kept Back in The Turn of the Screw.” In Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 47–63. London: Pluto Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Wilson, Edmund. 1976. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” In The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, 88–132. New York: Noonday.

U

THE UNCANNY

The uncanny is a concept used to describe something—an object, a place, an atmosphere—that is both strange and familiar at the same time. The overlapping of the known with the unknown generates an unsettling feeling for the reader (or viewer) that can range from discomfort to fear. The sense of what is “real” and “normal” is slightly unsettled by the presence of jarring elements in the narration, and it is uncertain, for both the reader/viewer and the characters, whether these elements have mundane, supernatural, or imaginative causes: a degree of ambiguity has to be maintained for the uncanny to exist. Borrowed from psychoanalysis, the concept has been widely used by literary criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to analyze any type of fiction that plays on this ambiguous feeling of unease, with Gothic fiction, horror literature, and weird fiction being examples. Instances of the uncanny include déjà-vu, time-loops, repetitions, doubles, twins, doppelgängers, ghosts, moving paintings, never-ending staircases, and living dolls. The sense of the uncanny can be compared to the “odd,” the “weird,” and the “incongruous.”

One of the most well-known treatises on the uncanny is Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, of which the English “uncanny” is a loose translation. The term unheimliche is a combination in German of the adjective heimliche—derived from Heime, or “home” in English—and the prefix un. Heimliche is used to refer to the house, the family, and everyday life, but also to what is intimate as well as concealed. As Freud observes, the concept of Heimliche is twofold, with the home a space of both comfort and secrecy. The negative prefix un- makes unheimliche an imperfect opposite of Heimliche: it describes a feeling of estrangement rooted within the familiar that is both threatening and alluring for the subject that experiences it.

Freud’s essay was a response to previous theories of the uncanny, particularly that of the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his pioneering essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906). Freud draws extensively from Jentsch’s theory that the uncanny emerges from indecipherable circumstances and that fiction is the most efficient device to create such conditions. Most of Freud’s response is dedicated to the intricate links between psychoanalysis and literature, expanding on the reading Jentsch offers of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sand-man” (1817), which features childhood monsters, doppelgängers, and a living automata called Olympia. Freud agrees with Jentsch’s opinion that Hoffmann’s story is a landmark of uncanny fiction, but the conclusions he draws are slightly different: while Jentsch sees the living doll Olympia as the locus of the uncanny in the text, Freud believes that the character of the Sandman, a creature that steals children’s eyes at night to feed them to its own offspring, is the central figure. Freud reads the haunting effects that the monster has on the main character as fictionalized versions of the psychoanalytical concepts of repression, repetition compulsion, and anxiety neurosis: repressed childhood fears and conflicts, when brought back to the surface by unexpected elements, trigger a feeling of anxiety that Freud identifies as the experience of the uncanny.

Freud’s theory was highly influential both within and without the realm of psychoanalysis. It paved the way for Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage in human psychological development, and it inspired psychoanalytical feminist philosophers such as Helen Cixous and Julia Kristeva to question the relationship between the “self” and the “other” in the cognitive space. It was also used widely in literary criticism, especially in attempts to define the genres of Gothic and horror fiction. Scholars such as Leslie Fiedler and David Punter consider it a key concept of the Gothic genre, tracing occurrences of the uncanny in foundational Gothic texts such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). Later instances include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories such as “William Wilson,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1926), and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925).

While written fiction was long the dedicated medium for the uncanny, cinema has also explored its potential. From the early days of the movie industry, directors such as F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu the Vampyre, Faust) and Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, M, Metropolis), alongside other figures of expressionist cinema, sought to create feelings of unease through the distortion of reality on screen. Their use of oblique camera angles, stark black and white contrasts, heavy makeup, special effects, and crooked landscapes paved the way for other directors such as Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes), Orson Welles (The Trial, Citizen Kane, The Lady of Shanghai), Alfred Hitchcock (The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Lolita) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Inland Empires).

Elsa Charléty

See also: Brown, Charles Brockden; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; The Haunted House or Castle; Hoffmann, E. T. A. ; James, Henry; Kafka, Franz; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; “The Sand-man”; “Schalken the Painter”; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

Further Reading

Fiedler, Leslie A. [1960] 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. University Presses of California, Columbia, and Princeton.

Peel, Ellen. 1980. “Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature Studies 17, no. 4: 410–417. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245653.

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: Parts 1, 2, 3. 2006. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Written and presented by Slavoj Žižek. London: P Guide Limited. DVD.

Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longman Publishing Group.

Tatar, Maria M. 1981. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature 33, no. 2: 167.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

The term “unreliable narrator” refers to a narrative technique used in fiction when the story is told solely or partially through the single viewpoint of a first-person narrator who proves at some point to have failed to tell the entire truth, either intentionally or unintentionally. An unreliable narrator gives information to the reader that is biased, incomplete, fabricated, and/or insufficient. This type of narrator is especially common to, and significant in, Gothic romanticism, horror literature, and crime fiction.

Even though literary critic Wayne Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 essay The Rhetoric of Fiction, the technique has existed as long as authors have written stories in which the narration, or part of it, is told from a subjective point of view. Early uses of a narrator’s unreliability can be traced as far back as Homer’s Odyssey (ca. eighth century BCE) and The Arabian Nights (ca. ninth century). With the rise of first-person narration in the eighteenth century and the publishing of novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (French: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), the question of the narrator’s reliability would become central in Western literature.

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) epitomizes the narrative technique of the unreliable narrator and stands as probably the most famous and typical example of this technique in Poe’s short fiction. In this case the narrator is an insane murderer, and Poe plunges the reader directly into this narrator’s point of view and frame of mind right from the opening sentence and paragraph:

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The narrator then proceeds to lay out a tale in which the very thoughts and actions that he vigorously presents as evidence of his own sanity and rationality indicate the exact opposite to the reader: that the narrator is hopelessly and incontrovertibly mad.

Matt Cardin

Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 3. New York: Fred De Fau & Company.

The fallibility of a narrator can be spotted through incongruities in his or her account such as repetitions, memory gaps, contradiction with other characters’ versions, and apparent discrepancies between the narrator’s statements and his or her actions. When made apparent, this unreliable quality of the narrator often leads to a complete overturn of the plot. It usually finds the narrator guilty of some dark deeds while he or she had painted himself or herself as innocent. It challenges heavily the reading experience, as a first-person narrator is the sole source of information for the reader.

Because such a narrator delivers skewed perspectives and heightens plot ambiguities, this technique offers a privileged way for authors to challenge the limit between reality and fantasy and intensify the mysterious atmosphere of a text. It allows exploring not just the moral failings of individuals, but also psychological instability. Indeed, in Gothic fiction, the first-person narrator is often proven to be unreliable due to being in a state of mental distress that makes him or her incapable of giving a trustworthy account of events.

For example, a narrator can be unreliable because he or she is a liar or delusional. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), the character of Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, is presented to the reader as a mere chronicler of the drama that unfolds in the plot. However, she plays a greater role than what she says she does, as she is blinded by her emotional attachment to the family she works for. It takes a second narrator, an outsider, to show the cracks in her logic and have the reader question her impartiality.

An unreliable narrator can also be emotionally unstable, as in the case of Roderick Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic Gothic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Described by the main narrator of the story as a feeble, depressed hypochondriac, Roderick Usher is a tortured man haunted by the memory of his dead sister Madeline. He is the only one to know the truth about her death, but his precarious emotional state forces the reader to compensate for his fallibility when he (Roderick) describes Madeline’s death, and come up with his or her own interpretation of the mystery. It is also unclear, by the end of the novel, if the main narrator is completely trustworthy or, in fact, as mad as Usher himself. The reader, as is often the case with Poe’s stories, has to draw his or her own conclusions.

Additional instances of mad narrators can be found in Poe (“The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “Berenice”), with the most representative being the “murderous maniac” of the “Tell-Tale Heart,” a narrative tour de force that uses the whole potentiality of an unreliable narrator to delve into the depth of human madness. A short text written solely from the point of view of an unidentified “I,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees the multiple attempts made by this anonymous narrator to convince the reader of his sanity as he sits in jail, accused of murdering his landlord. As the narration progresses and the narrator tells of the carefully calculated murder, as well as the dismembering and concealing of the body under the floorboards, he seems to have a harder time keeping his story in check. He eventually breaks into a hallucinatory rant and claims to have heard the beating heart of his dead victim through the floorboards. The first-person narrative makes it impossible for the reader to know where the truth lies: either the narrator is indeed mad, and his guilt-ridden conscience has made him fall into an acute paranoiac episode; or the narrator is, as he claims, not insane but the victim of some supernatural trick. Or he may be neither mad nor sane, but merely an avatar of Poe himself, who is playing with the conventions of narration and has invented the whole story from scratch.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” was the precursor for many other figures of “mad” unreliable narrators, including Humbert Humbert, the pervert maniac of Nabokov’s Lolita; the haunted governess of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw; and the murderous German submarine commander of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple.” Movie directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Vertigo), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Trial), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Lolita) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway) have also relied on the point of view of unstable characters to challenge viewers’ assumptions about the plot and create an atmosphere of mystery and fear through the medium of cinema.

Elsa Charléty

See also: The Brontë Sisters; Doubles, Doppelgängers and Split Selves; Faulkner, William; Gothic Hero/Villain; “The Horla”; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Other; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Further Reading

Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nünning, Ansgar. 1997. “‘But Why Will You Say That I Am Mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” In AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22, no. 1: 83–105.

Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Longman Publishing Group.

V

VAMPIRES

As a figure in literary texts, vampires can be read as metaphors for whatever terrifies and disgusts, whatever is seen as Other. They are cultural indices of the concerns of different ages, contexts, and people. Part of what terrifies and disgusts is their liminal position, between life and death, active at night, invading hearth and home as well as the bodies and blood of loved ones, infecting them like a deadly plague. Vampires are embodiments of contagion and the abject (the aspects of bodily life that people tend to reject because they are felt to be distasteful or horrifying). While some characteristics of literary vampires are consistent across time and place—the blood-sucking, fear of the sun and the sacred, including crucifixes and holy water in Christian contexts (although each of these is questioned in contemporary texts)—they are used differently to represent culturally and historically inflected terrors. The vampire of war, for instance, is World War II propaganda, and in Indian culture the god Kali herself is vampiric. It is in their relation to issues of gender, sexuality, property, and racial purity that vampires are widely used in Western culture, their invasions and rejections of boundaries upsetting certainties, laws, and norms at a fundamental level. This particularly emerges in fears of loss of control over sexuality, women’s bodies as property, and the purity of blood.

Early European literary vampires appear in German poetry of the Sturm und Drang period including Gottfried August Bürger’s spectral ballad “Lenore” (1773), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth” (1797), and Robert Southey’s Oriental epic poem “Thalaba the Destroyer” (1801), in which the main character’s dead bride turns into a vampire. Lord Byron mentions vampires in “The Giaour” (1813). In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1797), Geraldine, a lamia character (lamias were feminine demonic proto-vampires in ancient Greek mythology), bewitches and preys on young, innocent Christabel. The first vampire tale by a woman is believed to be Elizabeth Caroline Grey’s Faustian penny dreadful The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress (1828). Malcolm Rymer’s penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847) and John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in his short story “The Vampyre” (1819) build on the ambiguity represented by the vampire in an elegant/hideous, godlike/bestial form, but literary vampires have been more broadly popularized since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), aspects of which—primarily the eponymous vampire’s name—were based on the bloodthirsty fifteenth-century Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes, who ruled Transylvania and who was popularly known as “Vlad the Impaler.” Dracula touched a range of cultural, social, personal, and historical concerns. The character of Dracula himself represents an invasion of the modern technological West by Otherness from Transylvania, part of little known, feared Eastern Europe, as Dracula buys up property in London, his coffins containing his broad vampire family delivered straight into the beating heart of Victorian London, when contemporary news reports indicate widespread anti-Semitism and fear of Jewish settlement. Dracula dramatizes the terror of invasion, both by hordes of others and through the blood of pure women. The vampire invades the home and the body of the beloved, bleeding her to undeath, subtly replacing the familiar loved one with a monster, no longer maternal, trustworthy, pure, and virginal.

“For the Blood Is the Life”

If this 1905 vampire story by F. Marion Crawford may seem conventional to modern readers, they should bear in mind that it was written after Dracula but well before the advent of vampire movies or the existence of fantasy magazines such as Weird Tales in which the vampire could be rendered a cliché. Crawford’s version is highly atmospheric and makes good use of its setting, a backwater village in Italy. The narrator dwells in a sixteenth-century tower, from which a grave-like mound is visible in a little valley nearby. A visitor notices it and remarks that there appears to be a corpse lying on it. But when he goes to investigate, there is only strangely clinging mist, leaving him to wonder if the corpse is an illusion.

The narrator then supplies the main story: A miser died, leaving a great sum of money that was stolen by two masons, thus dashing the prospects and marriage plans of the miser’s much more decent son. Meanwhile a village girl longed for this young man, who never noticed her. By chance, she came upon the thieves burying their loot. They killed her and buried her with it. Driven by rage and restless need, she rose each night as a vampire, luring her beloved (the miser’s son) to a slow death as she drained his life away. She was dispatched with holy water and a stake, but the ghostly outline of her corpse remains.

Crawford was born in Italy of American parents. He spent much of his life in that country, so he was familiar with the region described in the story, which at the time was one of the most backward and inaccessible parts of Europe. There was no reason vampires had to be found only in Transylvania.

Darrell Schweitzer

Male vampires have generally been seen as dashing, frock-coated, alluring, and dangerously, sexually invasive. In popular fiction their predatory natures align them with dashing romantic leads, a version of relationships that, at its darkest, derives from and plays into sadomasochism. Stoker’s Dracula, metamorphosing into bat or huge dog, is not an attractive figure, although his allure for the young Lucy and the vampire women at his castle is based on sexuality and engulfing power. There are exceptions to this rule, however. The loathsome title vampire in Nosferatu (1922), the earliest (but unofficial) film adaptation of Dracula, is clearly more monster than man.

Female vampires have also played into some of these same tropes. The non-nurturing vampire mother, for instance, is also used to explore domestic horror. The three vampire women Dracula keeps in his castle would prefer to eat and bleed a child than nurture it, and Lucy Westenra, after being changed into a vampire by Dracula, is discovered about to devour a child in a graveyard. These are dangerously powerful, sexually voracious, and engulfing archaic mothers who refuse children independence and drain adults and children alike. Both configurations connote male fears of castration and disempowerment, the latter arising from fear of the mother, whose body is seen as disgusting in its fecundity and potentially overwhelming, engulfing. As Barbara Creed notes: “Vampirism combines a number of abject activities: the mixing of blood and milk; the threat of castration; the feminization of the male victim” (Creed 1993, 70).

Vampire mothers are both figures of horror and a vehicle through which more radical contemporary women horror writers undercut the stereotyping of conventional horror’s gender roles. Women disgust in conventional vampire narratives, but are revisited in contemporary women’s horror, such as by Angela Carter and Melanie Tem. In Tem’s “Mama” (1998, with Steve Rasnic Tem), the revenant vampire mother eats flies in the kitchen, gnaws on her husband, and dominates her teenage daughter’s life. Carter simultaneously punctures romance and the vampire role. In “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979), Dracula’s last descendant is trapped by her vampire nature. Though she preys on travelers, she mostly devours small creatures. A victim of the fantasy of romance, she dies having fallen in love with a young wartime bicyclist, leaving the unaware young man a blood-filled rose.

Contemporary women writers have found in the figure of the vampire marvelous potential for radical reappropriation. Vampires and romantic relationships, both heterosexual and homoerotic, are aligned in Anne Rice’s work (such as Interview with the Vampire, 1976), as they are in Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992), in which, post–Vietnam War, transitory vampire teens adopt America’s neglected children, offer community, and, performing as a rock band, devour at will. Brite authored several vampire novels and stories. Like Rice’s, her work is infused with the disruptive power of the erotic, focusing on the performative vampire as rock star, flâneur, and gay/lesbian/queer, figures providing social critique and highlighting and questioning the fixity of roles and behaviors. Others splice representation of vampires with crime (Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, nineteen novels from 1993 to 2010; Sherry Gottlieb’s Love Bites, 1994), time travel (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint-Germain, nineteen novels from 1978 to 2010), and romantic fictions building on the lesbian relations in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) in the works of such writers as Jeanne Kalogridis (The Diaries of the Family Dracul series, 1995–1997), Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories, 1992), and Victoria Brownworth’s collection Night Bites (1996). In popular fiction and media, Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels (2008–2011, televised as True Blood, 2008–2014) built on the popularity of Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), each problematizing representations of vampires as the Other, seeing them as likely to live alongside regular humans in small towns, high schools, and colleges. In this vein, Nina Auerbach celebrates their liberating potential: “Vampires were supposed to menace women, but to me at least, they promised protection against a destiny of girdles, spike heels and approval” (Auerbach 1995, 4). Latterly, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (since 2005) has taken an opportunity to reinforce conventional romantic traditions of the tall, dark, handsome demon lover interlacing teenage escape from boring marginality for Bella, stranded in school in Forks, Washington, with romantic involvement with the powerful, much older (128 years), assertive, masculine, protective vampire Edward Cullen. Meyer’s Mormon religion–influenced series emphasizes conventional family values, a departure from the critique of vampire mothers.

In recent decades vampire literature has been taken in new and interesting directions that expand the field away from its former primary locus in European and American representations. Canadian/Jamaican/Trinidadian author Nalo Hopkinson uses soucouyants (shape-shifting witch-vampires of Caribbean folklore) to explore ageing and community values in “Greedy Choke Puppy” (2001). African American author Tananarive Due’s series concerns underground African vampires known as the Life Brothers, who replay racism by treating mortals and women as worthless (The Living Blood, 2001). In its more radical form, the vampire is no longer abject, rejected with disgust to ensure identity (see Julia Kristeva, 1982, The Powers of Horror), but instead is a figure enabling recognition that the Other is constructed by and from a sense of self and personal fears. The vampire dramatizes endless potential for radical alternative behavior. Recent powerful examples are Moira Buffini’s play/film (the latter directed by Neil Jordan) Byzantium (2013), which exposes historical sexual predation on women, and in contemporary times a mother and daughter reversing relationships of power with the liberation offered by vampire natures, adopted through the powers of a soucouyant. Ana Lily Amirpour’s Persian-language film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), which was also adapted as a graphic novel (also 2014), likewise builds on the radical female vampire figure, depicting a chadur (like a burkha)-clad, motorbike-riding female vampire in Iran.

Vampires are the epitome of metamorphosis. Transcending time, space, death, and the fixity of bodily shape, they are cultural indices of what is most questioned and feared, and they also offer radical potential to problematize whatever constrains, misrepresents, and denies.

Gina Wisker

See also: Byron, Lord; Carmilla; Carter, Angela; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Dracula; Due, Tananarive; Interview with the Vampire; Rice, Anne; Summers, Montague; Tem, Melanie; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.

Further Reading

Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bunson, Matthew. 2000. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books.

Carter, Margaret L. 1989. The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Heldreth, Leonard G., and Mary Pharr, eds. 1999. The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Punter, David. 1999. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwells.

Stoker, Bram. 1897. Dracula. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Tem, Steve Rasnic, and Melanie Tem. 1995. “Mama.” In Sisters of the Night, edited by Barbara Hambly and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Warner Books.

“THE VAMPYRE”

“The Vampyre,” an 8,000-word novelette that stands as the first vampire story in English literature, was written by Dr. John Polidori in 1816 near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, and was first published in The New Monthly Magazine for April 1, 1819. Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, had accompanied him to Lake Geneva and participated in the well-known ghost story contest during the wet summer of 1816, along with Byron and Mary and Percy Shelley.

Mary Shelley’s contribution was Frankenstein. Byron wrote a fragment he intended to develop into a vampire story, but abandoned it after a few pages. Polidori began a novel, Ernestus Berchtold, but put it aside and later used Byron’s fragment and knowledge of his intended outline as his inspiration to write “The Vampyre” for a lady friend. It is more notable today for its historical importance and its influence than for its literary quality. He had not intended it for publication, but the manuscript, by unclear means, came to the attention of the editor Henry Colburn, who published it without Polidori’s knowledge or permission under Byron’s name. It created a sensation, largely due to Byron’s alleged authorship, despite protests by both Byron and Polidori. Colburn also published a chapbook version.

Polidori had taken the prevalent eighteenth-century European folk belief in vampires, corpses that leave their graves to feed on the blood of nearby living relatives, and adapted it to a Romantic literary sensibility. His character, Lord Ruthven, is no walking corpse, but a mysterious aristocratic gentleman, widely traveled, unemotional, immoral, yet fatally seductive to women. He was an obvious caricature of Byron himself. The name Ruthven came from a biting caricature of Byron in the popular novel Glenarvon by Byron’s ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb.

Polidori’s young protagonist, Aubrey, engages Ruthven as a mentor and tours Europe with him, but is soon appalled by his immoral behavior. Aubrey’s love interest, Ianthe, is found dead from the bite of a vampire. Ruthven is later wounded by robbers, and as he dies, makes Aubrey swear an oath not to tell anyone of his death. Then Aubrey discovers Ruthven is Ianthe’s murderer. Ruthven is brought back to life by moonlight, returns home, and courts Aubrey’s sister, driving the oath-bound Aubrey to insanity and death. Aubrey’s relationship with Ruthven has obvious parallels with Polidori’s relationship with Byron.

“The Vampyre” was adapted for the French stage by Charles Nodier in 1819 and premiered as an opera in Leipzig in 1828. The story, with its image of a vampire as a seductive aristocrat, has been extremely influential, directly and indirectly, on all vampire fiction to follow, from Varney the Vampire (1845) through J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871–1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) down to the present day.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Byron, Lord; Carmilla; Dracula; Shelley, Mary; Vampires; Varney the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood.

Further Reading

MacDonald, D. L. 1991. Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of “The Vampyre.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Polidori, John W. 2005. John William Polidori: “The Vampyre” and Other Writings. Edited by Franklin Charles Bishop. Manchester: Carcanet Press.

Senf, Carol A. 1988. “Polidori’s The Vampyre: Combining the Gothic with Realism.” North Dakota Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Winter): 197–208.

VANDERMEER, JEFF (1968–)

Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, an editor, and a publisher. He is best known for his cycle of stories and novels set in the fantastic city of Ambergris, for his Southern Reach trilogy of novels, and for his editorial work with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, with whom he produced a major attempt at establishing a canonical anthology of weird fiction.

VanderMeer was born in Pennsylvania, but spent some of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked; this stay and the subsequent trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe had a formative impact on him, in particular on his early cycle of stories set in the fantastical city of Ambergris.

The Ambergris stories, collected in City of Saints and Madmen (2001), also bear the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946–1959) and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence (1971–1985). They bring decadence and experimental techniques to the urban fantastic mode. Two subsequent Ambergris novels have followed, Shriek: An Afterword (2006), which expands on the structural gameplaying of the earlier stories, and Finch (2009), which modernizes Ambergris and introduces noir elements.

VanderMeer’s publishing and editorial work with his wife Ann has also had a significant influence on the horror field. In 1997 his publishing house, Ministry of Whimsy Press, published Stepan Chapman’s award-wining The Troika, a novel that combines science fiction, surrealism, and body horror. Ministry of Whimsy Press has also published several anthologies of strange short fiction. With Ann, VanderMeer has edited a number of encyclopedic anthologies, most significantly The New Weird (2008) and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012). The New Weird was an attempt to represent a mode of the fantastic that had been suggested in an earlier online discussion, a mode primarily featuring urban settings and written by authors using experimental techniques to expand the possibilities of what weird fiction, and the fantastic in general, can do. In their introduction to The Weird, the VanderMeers set out a thesis that the Weird is a nebulous, hybrid mode, a form of the fantastic that has mutated through contact with other types of surreal, decadent, and experimental fiction.

In 2014 VanderMeer published three novels, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, which form the Southern Reach Trilogy. These works bring together cosmic horror and environmental concerns, and describe the gradual encroachment of an alien wilderness zone, Area X, on the world. VanderMeer is a long-time resident of Florida, and this location is an influence on the setting of these books. In 2016 VanderMeer published the novel Borne, a hallucinogenic take on apocalyptic science fiction.

VanderMeer’s work in breaking down generic boundaries and opening up possibilities in the weird horror field has been of profound significance. He has won the Nebula Award, Rhysling Award, British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, and three World Fantasy Awards, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: New Weird; World Fantasy Award.

Further Reading

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2008. “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’” Introduction to The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, ix–xviii. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff Vandermeer. 2011. Introduction to The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, xv–xx. London: Corvus.

VARNEY THE VAMPIRE: OR, THE FEAST OF BLOOD

Varney thea Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, is an influential English vampire narrative that appeared first as a series of penny dreadfuls in London between 1845 and 1847, when it was published as a book. One of the most popular of the Gothic horror narratives in Victorian England, Rymer and Prest’s narrative drew on earlier vampire conventions and introduced new ones, influencing later writers and filmmakers.

Varney the Vampire is a long episodic tale of almost 900 pages that follows the adventures of Lord Francis Varney (the vampire) as he preys on a series of beautiful young daughters of aristocratic families in search of blood and wealth. In the course of 220 chapters, Varney stalks his victims through London, Bath, and the Continent, slowly becoming conscious of his own wretched fate and eventually committing suicide by throwing himself into Mt. Vesuvius.

Both the penny dreadful of 108 issues and the novel were highly successful, entertaining readers with tales of a wicked upper-class monster. In addition, Varney’s self-awareness and despair at his condition made him sympathetic to Victorian readers, who could feel both horror of and sympathy for the vampire. Gothic horror, which combined pseudo-medieval settings with beautiful young women victimized by aristocratic men, or monsters, was a popular mid-nineteenth-century genre, and Rymer and Prest’s work is an excellent example of the form in both popularity and narrative excess. They also made popular the essential structure of the vampire narrative: an unknown evil appears and threatens the young innocent women of a family and/or community; as the heroine sickens, or dies, a group of men must discover the nature of the evil, figure out how to destroy it, and finally chase it down. In the traditional narrative they succeed, but in the sympathetic variant on the vampire narrative they fail.

Like other penny dreadful writers, the authors of Varney were paid by the word, and as a result the narrative is full of long overwrought descriptions, convoluted plots, and formulaic language and imagery, the better to expand the word count. Despite these drawbacks, Varney remains important because the authors drew on earlier vampire narratives such as John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) and European folklore for aspects of the vampire’s character, while adding such new elements as superhuman strength, hypnotic power, the inability to eat or drink, and fangs that leave two marks in the victim’s neck. These new elements were passed on to later writers whose work established them as standard conventions of the vampire narrative. Rymer and Prest should also be credited with creating the first sympathetic vampire, a character who would become an essential part of horror literature in more polished works such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2014), and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2007).

Jim Holte

See also: Carmilla; Dracula; Penny Dreadful; Rice, Anne; Vampires; “The Vampyre.”

Further Reading

Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sensf, Carol. 2013. The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature. New York: Ace.

“The Vampire before Dracula.” 2005. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume, edited by Elizabeth Miller, 29–97. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 304. Detroit, MI: Gale.

VATHEK

Vathek is a Gothic novel by the English writer William Beckford, first published anonymously as An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript in 1786. Beckford claimed that it was originally composed in French, and that the published version was a translation by another hand, of which he disapproved. If that is true, he probably preferred to write in French partly as an affectation, partly because he obtained some assistance in its composition from Marianne Falque (ca. 1720–1785)—a defrocked nun forced to flee France by scandal, whose Oriental fantasy Abbassai (1753) is not dissimilar in style and manner, although far less excessive in its imagery—and partly because he feared that the book might not be publishable in English because it would be thought indecent.

Beckford had inherited property worth a million pounds, including the accident-prone neo-Gothic monstrosity of Fonthill Abbey. The life he led there was rumored to be debauched, but a shortage of ready money forced him to sell it before its famous tower collapsed for the last time. As nearly as any Englishman, Beckford lived in a fabulous palace, furnished with everything he might desire, fully equipped for the contemplation of absolutes. No one else was ever as well placed to fantasize Vathek.

The following passages come from the closing scene of Vathek, in which the title character, a fabulously wealthy and decadent caliph who has sold himself to the powers of darkness, arrives at the underworld with his mistress Neuronihar. They descend through a portal and find an immense subterranean hall ruled by the demon Eblis. They soon discover that their fate is to be eternally tormented.

In the midst of this immense hall, a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts; without once regarding any thing around them. They had all, the livid paleness of death. Their eyes, deep sunk in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors, that glimmer by night, in places of interment. Some stalked slowly on; absorbed in profound reverie: some shrieking with agony, ran furiously about like tigers, wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other; and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert where no foot had trodden. (Beckford 1844, 543)

. . . Almost at the same instant, the same voice announced to the Caliph, Nouronihar, the four princes, and the princess, the awful and irrevocable decree. Their hearts immediately took fire, and they, at once, lost the most precious gift of heaven—HOPE. These unhappy beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction. Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern aught in his, but aversion and despair. (545)

Matt Cardin

Source: Beckford, William. [1786] 1844. Vathek. In Cyclopaedia of English Literature. Volume II, edited by Robert Chambers. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers.

Vathek is usually classified as a Gothic novel, and it does contain some of the same elements as the archetypal Gothic novels: a defiant and charismatic villain, a darkly obsessive interest in perverse sexuality, and a diabolical bargain that leads the eponymous protagonist to damnation. It is, however, a highly idiosyncratic production, differing from the run-of-the-mill Gothics not merely in the exoticism of its Oriental setting but the grotesquerie of its manner. Its most obvious literary debt is to Antoine Galland’s Thousand-and-One Nights, but a more direct inspiration was probably the French Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire, whom Beckford met in Paris in 1777, who had adapted Oriental tales to his satirical philosophical purposes. Within that tradition, Vathek is an intriguing precursor to the Marquis de Sade’s elaborately extended contes philosophiques (philosophical fables), which proposed that morality is an arbitrary and hollow sham, and that there is nothing in Nature to deny the powerful the right to indulge themselves to the fullest in the perverse pleasure of perpetrating horrors. In the story, Caliph Vathek goes forth in search of a similar extreme.

Whereas the legendary philosopher-magician Faust bargained with the devil for enlightenment, pleasure, and profit, Vathek feels that he has little to gain in such mundane directions. He wants to go beyond mere matters of pleasure and profit toward some final and absolute evil. The fate that claims him at the end is not the kind of petty damnation that was later to claim such Gothic villains as Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), but the revelation that the archfiend Eblis has no such absolute to offer. Vathek’s own hell is the realization that his boundless desires must remain forever unsatisfied, encapsulated in the limited hellfire that cages but never consumes the heart, leaving all the yearnings of the flesh intact while it mocks all ambition, emotion, and enlightenment. The only subsequent writer who came close to matching such imagery was Lord Byron in his own Faustian fantasy Manfred (1817).

Brian Stableford

See also: Devils and Demons; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Monk.

Further Reading

Birkhead, Edith. 1921. “The Oriental Tale of Terror: Beckford.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, 94–99. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Garrett, John. 1992. “Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 1 (October): 15–34.

Herrnstadt, Carol May. 1967. The Gothic Villain in William Beckford’s Vathek. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Hubbard, Jennifer Lee. 2004. The Function of the Grotesque in William Beckford’s Vathek. Seattle: University of Oregon Press.

W

WAGNER, KARL EDWARD (1945–1994)

Karl Edward Wagner was an American writer, editor, and publisher of fantasy and horror fiction whose career coincides with the ascent of horror and dark fantasy as popular categories in trade publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. Wagner’s earliest published work—the novels Darkness Weaves (1970), Bloodstone (1975), and Dark Crusade (1976), and the collections Death Angel’s Shadow (1973) and Night Winds (1978)—featured his immortal Byronic swordsman Kane, a character inspired partly by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Richard Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, whose adventures straddled the boundary between sword-and-sorcery and horror fiction. Wagner’s interest in Howard would lead him to edit three collections of the restored texts of Howard’s tales of Conan, all published in 1977: The Hour of the Dragon, The People of the Black Circle, and Red Nails.

Wagner’s complete short tales of the supernatural were collected in three volumes: In a Lonely Place (1983), Why Not You and I (1987), and Exorcisms and Ecstasies (1997). The best of these stories are informed by his familiarity with classic supernatural fiction, including “In the Pines,” a variation on the theme of Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One,” and “The River of Night’s Dreaming,” which references the work of Robert W. Chambers. His best-known story, “Sticks,” first published in 1974. was both a tribute to the work of Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye and a contribution to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Its central concept and visual image of mysterious lattice-like stick formations that are discovered in the woods, and that seemingly hold horrific supernatural or occult significance, was borrowed for the first season of HBO’s True Detective in 2014 and also, to all appearance, by the makers of The Blair Witch Project (1999). “The Fourth Seal” and “Into Whose Hands” are both macabre ruminations on the modern medical profession (for which Wagner, as a nonpracticing psychiatrist, had trained), while a number of his stories—“Neither Brute Nor Human,” “The Last Wolf,” “Silted In,” ‘‘Lost Exits,” and “The Slug,” among others—are macabre tales about artists undone by their own flaws and vulnerabilities, a recurring theme in his later work.

With David Drake and Jim Groce, Wagner founded the publishing imprint Carcosa, which published four collections of pulp fiction by E. Hoffmann Price, Hugh B. Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman, including the World Fantasy Award–winning Worse Things Waiting (1973) and Murgrunstrumm and Others (1977). Wagner compiled three anthologies of classic sword-and-sorcery fiction in the Echoes of Valor series between 1987 and 1991, and an anthology of medical horror stories, Intensive Scare (1989). Between 1980 and his death in 1994, Wagner edited fifteen volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, an annual series that, in his hands, was instrumental for celebrating the small press’s important contribution to modern horror fiction.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Howard, Robert E.; Onions, Oliver; Wellman, Manly Wade.

Further Reading

Ashley, Mike. 1996. “Wagner, Karl Edward.” St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle, 583–584. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

Drake, David. 1989. “A Brief Introduction to Karl Edward Wagner.” Weird Tales 51, no. 1 (Spring/Fall): 110–112.

Howard, John. 2014. “In Lonely Places: The Essential Horror Fiction of Karl Edward Wagner.” In Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic, 187–202. Staffordshire, UK: Alchemy Press.

Mayer, John. 1997. “The Dark Muse of Karl Edward Wagner.” New York Review of Science Fiction 112, no. 1 (December): 8–17.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1985. “Karl Edward Wagner and the Haunted Hills (and Kudzu).” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, 86–91. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

WAKEFIELD, H. R. (1888–1964)

Herbert Russell Wakefield was an English writer and editor, the best of whose work is noted for its intelligence, dark sensibilities, and clever variations on existing formulas for supernatural fiction. Wakefield matriculated at Marlborough College in Summerfield House from 1902 to 1906, then attended Oxford University, where he received a second-class degree in history, and from 1912 to 1914 he served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe. Wakefield’s father was Bishop of Birmingham, and in 1920, following Wakefield’s service in the First World War, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant, he briefly became his father’s secretary. He later joined publisher Philip Allan (some say Collins) as editor, and in 1932, with Charles Birkin, Wakefield began the editorship of the Creeps series, some fourteen titles of which were published before the series concluded with The Creeps Omnibus (1935). This latter series contained twenty-nine stories, seven of which were by Wakefield.

Wakefield’s first collection of ghost stories, They Return at Evening (1928), was jointly published by Philip Allan and an American publisher, Appleton, Century; in “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” M. R. James praised the volume and described the contents as “a mixed bag, from which I should remove one or two that leave a very nasty taste. Among the residue are some admirable pieces, very inventive” (James 2009, 348). This was followed by additional collections of short stories and a handful of crime novels. At the time of his death, Wakefield had published more than seventy-five short stories, many of them ultimately supernatural, though with a strong element of physical horror. His ghosts were rarely metaphysical.

“He Cometh and He Passeth By”: Conflicting Magics and Rival Conjurors

Wakefield’s “He Cometh and He Passeth By” was first published in 1928 in his supernatural fiction collection They Return at Evening. The story is a simple one and easily described: after his old friend Philip Franton is killed by magic sent by Oscar Clinton, successful barrister Edward Bellamy enlists the aid of rival magician Mr. Solan, studies magic himself, and ultimately causes Clinton to destroy himself via the same magic he used to destroy Franton.

The plot is clearly inspired by M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes” (1911), in which a magical paper must be returned to its sender or the recipient will die miserably. Nevertheless, Wakefield’s is in many ways superior. First, its world is not that of academia and scholarly societies but contemporary England, solidly drawn and clearly recognizable. In addition, while James kept his sorcerous villain (Karswell) largely offstage, letting others describe his powers and imagine his malevolence, Wakefield depicts Clinton at some length: modeled on Aleister Crowley, with perhaps a dash of Harry Crosby, the man is brilliantly amoral, openly indulging in every vice, and his demonstrations of his powers are eerie and convincing. Lastly, Wakefield’s characters have backstories that add to the narrative: Bellamy and Franton have a history of friendship, as do Bellamy and Mr. Solan, and Solan and Clinton know of and respect each other; indeed, Clinton praises Solan’s magical abilities, while Solan states that Clinton may have the best brain of any living person.

It is these touches that add depth to Wakefield’s story, for “He Cometh and He Passeth By” is not simply a story about evading a curse but, rather, a tale of conflicting and maneuvering magics wielded by rival conjurors.

Richard Bleiler

Largely on the strength of “He Cometh and He Passeth By” (1928), a tale of rival magicians inspired by M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” Wakefield is sometimes considered one of the writers indebted to M. R. James and referenced somewhat dismissively as one of the “James Gang.” This classification and categorization does him no service, for although he lacked James’s enormous intelligence, he had a far greater palette than James, a far greater awareness of the world at large, and he was capable of telling more than one kind of ghost story. Wakefield recognized that hauntings did not necessarily need to involve medieval cathedrals and manuscripts or the English public schools; indeed, hauntings could occur in the twentieth century and did not need to involve the English upper classes. Wakefield thus occasionally made use of the traditional English country estate in such works as “The Red Lodge” (published in They Return at Evening), but his settings included golf courses (“The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” in They Return at Evening), and could involve even used cars and American gangsters (“Used Car,” 1932).

Equally diverse were his characters: the misanthropic, seething, and murderous Pownall of “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” (published as “The Unseen Player” in 1928) is beautifully characterized, and his murder of the amiable, better looking, and seemingly luckier Morisson, so that he might win a chess game, is convincingly detailed, as is his fate. At a time when most popular writers were incapable of recognizing the humanity of Asians, Wakefield’s “And He Shall Sing . . .” (in They Return at Evening) matter-of-factly makes use of Japanese as characters, one of whom is a poet; and Agatha of “Damp Sheets” (1931) is not only a strong female character but one who precipitates the action. The relatively late “The Gorge of the Churels” (1951) in many ways epitomizes Wakefield’s fiction: the protagonist is Indian, and when supernaturally threatened, he turns to his ancestral faith, which is superior to Christianity at dealing with local threats.

Wakefield could likewise see new elements in an established situation: the aforementioned “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” does not follow the traditional pattern of supernatural fiction but extends Pownall’s feud with Morisson to a new group of chess players. Finally, Wakefield had a pleasing and occasionally puckish sense of humor: those anticipating the titular story of his collection Imagine a Man in a Box (1931) to be horrific, and perhaps involving coffins and premature burials, will be pleasantly surprised.

In a letter to August Derleth, quoted in editor Peter Ruber’s Arkham’s Masters of Horror, Wakefield boasted: “I had over a million words published before you’d even written one word. I’d had articles in most ever leading English periodical on a variety of subjects from Gold to Economics, from water sports to Shakespearean criticism, from Pan-Uranianism to Fox farms” (Ruber 2000, 134). This material, as well as a number of shorter works of fiction, remains uncollected. It should also be noted that Wakefield’s personal life and habits led to the estrangement of most of his family; in addition, he occasionally claimed the birth date of 1890, apparently fictionalized other aspects of his life, and thoroughly frustrated future researchers by destroying most of his papers and likenesses late in his life. Finally, the date of his death appears to be 1964 rather than the 1965 stated by some reference sources. His best fiction, however, remains timeless.

Richard Bleiler

See also: “Casting the Runes”; Derleth, August; James, M. R.

Further Reading

Indick, Ben P. 1992. “H. Russell Wakefield: The Man Who Believed in Ghosts.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction 1, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 73–93. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 120, edited by Janet Witalec. Detroit, MI: Gale.

James, Henry. [1904] 2009. “M. R. James on Ghost Stories.” In Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James, edited by Michael Cox, 337–352. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Ruber, Peter. 2000. “H. Russell Wakefield.” In Arkham’s Masters of Horror, edited by Peter Ruber, 130–135. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

WALPOLE, HORACE (1717–1797)

The youngest son of Great Britain’s first prime minister, Horace Walpole lived an extravagant life of opulence and privilege typical of many eighteenth-century aristocrats. He was also a voluminous writer whose letters have provided historians with much insight into the political, cultural, and social aspects of the eighteenth century, and his role in the development of the horror genre cannot be overlooked or overstated. It was not until he was in his late forties that he published The Castle of Otranto (1764), a strange work that established the genre of Gothic fiction. As the progenitor of the Gothic, Walpole laid the foundation for what would become the most popular type of literary fiction by the end of the century, directly influencing writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Walpole’s achievements have left a lasting impact on the horror genre, with writers such as Stephen King remarking on his importance to the field.

In the middle of the eighteenth century there was a resurgence of interest in the medieval period among historians, antiquarians, and other intellectuals. Walpole was among those who were fascinated with the Middle Ages, not seeing it as a dark period in history but rather as a more ideal era than previously believed. Using his vast wealth, Walpole constructed a Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill for his personal amusement. His castle, an artificial eighteenth-century construction designed to look ancient, not only influenced others to create similar structures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, but it also served to inspire Walpole in his later literary endeavors. Claiming it came to him in a dream one night in Strawberry Hill, Walpole conceived of the idea to write a Gothic story, called so because of the word’s association with the medieval period, which would take shape as The Castle of Otranto. Unsure of how the reading public would receive his text, Walpole published it anonymously under a fictitious identity who claimed it was a modern translation of a sixteenth-century Italian text. As his novel proved an immediate success, Walpole claimed ownership of his work and republished it in a new edition with an introduction that declared it was the first of a new genre of romance, one that blends the old and new: the Gothic. In 1766, Walpole wrote a Gothic play entitled The Mysterious Mother. However, because his play featured incest between a mother and son, he was again unsure how it would be received, and it was thus only distributed in small numbers to close friends during his lifetime.

Inheriting his family’s earldom in 1791, Walpole died six years later in 1797 at the age of seventy-nine. He left behind a vast art collection, numerous writings, and a significant legacy in horror fiction.

Joel T. Terranova

See also: The Castle of Otranto; The Haunted House or Castle; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Radcliffe, Ann.

Further Reading

Kallich, Martin. 1971. Horace Walpole. New York: Twayne.

Mowl, Timothy. 1998. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: Faber and Faber.

Sabor, Peter. 2013. Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge.

WANDREI, DONALD (1908–1987)

To readers of horror, Donald Wandrei is first remembered as the co-founder of Arkham House publishers, and as co-editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. Less known is his genre fiction, produced in the 1930s with the encouragement of his friends, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and made available in recent years in Colossus (1989), Don’t Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei (1997), and Frost (2000), which collect his science fiction, horror stories, and mysteries, respectively. While critics and readers mostly dismiss much of this work as being of poor quality, especially the bulk of the science fiction, the best of Wandrei’s fiction is distinctive and exceptional.

Donald Albert Wandrei was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he spent most of his life living there in his parents’ house. He suffered a lifetime of vivid nightmares, which disposed him toward writing horror stories, stocked his psyche with unearthly imagery, and provided him an intuitive grasp of the Lovecraftian “stricken awe” that arises from glimpses of the nonhuman universe. Horror and science fiction legend Fritz Leiber, who, like Wandrei, was among the writers whose talent Lovecraft nurtured, famously said he thought Wandrei seemed Lovecraft’s most obvious successor.

Though a few brief, moody pieces transcribe Wandrei’s bizarre nightly visions—such as “The Crater” (1967), “Nightmare” (1965), and “The Lady in Gray” (1933—his best work finds Wandrei mining them for startling images, dreamlike strangeness, and incursions of the terrifying and the irrational. In “The Painted Mirror” (1937; dramatized on the horror television series Night Gallery in the 1970s), a young boy discovers such a thing in an attic, and chipping away the paint reveals a vague, terrible landscape with the figure of a girl in the distance. Each night as he scrapes, the girl draws closer; at the end of this Borgesian tale, the girl/entity switches souls with the boy and paints over the mirror. In “The Eye and the Finger” (1944), this pair of disembodied objects nightmarishly plagues the main character, hovering in his living room, staring, pointing. “Uneasy Lie the Drowned” (1937), a neglected classic of weird fiction, tells of revenge reaching out from an unlived other life.

While these true-felt horror stories are arguably his finest productions, Wandrei’s best science fiction, like that of his friend Smith, is imbued with strong elements of horror as well. An exceptional set of otherwise widely different stories—“Giant-Plasm” (1939), “The Crystal Bullet” (1941), “Something from Above” (1930), and “The Monster from Nowhere” (1935)—finds characters terrified or destroyed by mere chance encounters with alien beings. The nightmarish intrusions here come not from the supernatural, but the abyss of space. One of Wandrei’s last works is a fine novel of cosmic terror, The Web of Easter Island (1948), which has been out of print for more than fifty years, though an early draft (Dead Titans, Awaken!) has recently been made available.

Beyond prose, the young Wandrei was an acolyte of Smith and George Sterling, and produced Dark Romantic and fantastically themed poems of considerable quality. As can be said of much of Wandrei’s work: these are difficult to find today, but are worth the search.

Steve Behrends

See also: Arkham House; Derleth, August; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Behrends, Steve. 1988. “Something from Above: The Imaginative Fiction of Donald Wandrei.” Studies in Weird Fiction 3 (Fall): 22–34.

Klein, T. E. D. 2009. “Donald Wandrei: A Haunted House.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 541–543. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press. Originally published in Studies in Weird Fiction 6: 35–36 (Fall 1988).

Ruber, Peter. 2000. “Donald Wandrei.” In Arkham’s Masters of Horror, edited by Peter Ruber, 64–68. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Schwartz, Julius. 2009. “Donald Wandrei.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 534–540. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press.

Tierney, Richard L. 1989. “Introduction: Donald A. Wandrei.” In Colossus: The Collected Fiction of Donald A. Wandrei, ix–xxix. Minneapolis: Fedogan & Bremer.

WEIRD TALES

Weird Tales was an American pulp fiction magazine published between 1923 and 1954 that, in its initial run of 279 issues, featured the work of most significant writers of horror and fantasy fiction in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Its impact on the shape and direction taken by modern weird fiction is incalculable.

Weird Tales debuted in March 1923 under the editorship of Edwin Baird, a fiction writer who also edited its sister magazine, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. Although Weird Tales was subtitled “The Unique Magazine,” the thirteen issues that Baird edited through the mid-1924 issue were full of mostly run-of-the-mill neo-Gothic potboiler stories. Baird published little fiction of note, but under his editorship he introduced readers to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Seabury Quinn, all of whom became distinguished contributors during the magazine’s golden age.

Having failed to find a supportive readership—even after enlisting the services of celebrity magician Harry Houdini, who put his name on several ghost-written stories published in the magazine in early 1924—Weird Tales went on hiatus after the May/June/July 1924 issue. It resumed publication with the November 1924 issue with a new editor, former contributor and first reader Farnsworth Wright. Unlike Baird, Wright was enthusiastic about weird fiction, and the magazine flourished artistically, if not financially, under his stewardship. The 1930s were the magazine’s greatest years as Wright published stories that attested to the diversity and variety of the weird tale as it had evolved in Weird Tales: Clark Ashton Smith’s imaginary world fantasies, Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery tales of Conan the Conqueror, Henry S. Whitehead’s tales of occult marvels in the West Indies, August Derleth’s traditional ghost stories, Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s Southern Gothic tales, Seabury Quinn’s psychic detective series featuring Jules de Grandin, Edmond Hamilton and C. L. Moore’s scientific fantasies, and stories by H. P. Lovecraft that would later be acknowledged as the foundation for the shared fictional universe known today as the Cthulhu Mythos. Contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos also helped to launch the careers of Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, who would earn distinction for work independent of Lovecraft’s influence. It was during these years that Weird Tales also enlisted the services of artists whose names would become synonymous with that of the magazine: Margaret Brundage, who was known for her cover images of scantily clad, sexually alluring women, and Virgil Finlay, whose black-and-white interior art had a distinctive photorealistic character.

Weird Tales was sold in late 1938 and its offices moved from Chicago to New York. Wright continued to edit the magazine through the March 1940 issue, after which he was replaced by Dorothy McIlwraith, who also edited the new publisher’s general fiction magazine Short Stories. Nearly a year before Wright’s departure the magazine had shifted from monthly to bi-monthly publication as a cost-saving measure. Although the character of Weird Tales changed during the McIlwraith years, the magazine continued to feature work from a lineup of stalwart contributors including Bloch, Derleth (under his own name and his Stephen Grendon pseudonym), and Quinn. Manly Wade Wellman became a regular contributor with his tales of supernatural investigator John Thunstone, as did Ray Bradbury with his modern American Gothic stories. Other contributors of note included Fritz Leiber, Joseph Payne Brennan, Harold Lawlor, and Alison V. Harding. Many stories first published in Weird Tales by these authors would be collected in books published by Arkham House, a publishing company started in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei with whom the magazine developed a close relationship in the 1940s and 1950s. Faced with the same financial pressures and competition from paperbacks and comic books that killed off other pulp magazines, Weird Tales shrank to digest size with the September 1953 issue and ceased publication after the September 1954 issue.

Weird Tales has been revived several times since its original run: for four issues edited by Sam Moskowitz between 1973 and 1974, and for four mass-market paperback anthologies edited by Lin Carter between 1981 and 1983. The two issues edited by Gordon M. D. Garb between 1984 and 1985 were notable for publishing mostly new stories rather than reprints, a trend that continued with subsequent revivals. Between 1988 and 2016, Weird Tales published seventy-two issues under a variety of editors, including four issues published between 1994 and 1996 when the magazine’s name briefly changed to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Arkham House; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Brennan, Joseph Payne; Derleth, August; Howard, Robert E.; Kuttner, Henry; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Quinn, Seabury; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wellman, Manly Wade; Whitehead, Henry S.

Further Reading

Everett, Justin, and Jeffrey H. Shanks. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Weinberg, Robert. 1999. The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

WELLMAN, MANLY WADE (1903–1986)

Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer who is best remembered today for his supernatural fiction, especially for his stories of John the Balladeer, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s and were collected in the Arkham House volume Who Fears the Devil? (1963).

Wellman was born to missionary parents in Portuguese East Africa (now Angola), where he lived with native children and spoke their language before he spoke English. His family returned to the United States, where he was educated in Washington, D.C., Salt Lake City, and Wichita, Kansas. In the 1920s he became friends with a noted folklorist and took many trips through the Ozark Mountains. Later, after a time in New York, Wellman settled with his own family in North Carolina. Culturally, Wellman was a Southerner and always identified himself as such.

He began writing for the pulps in his mid-twenties, with his first story appearing in Thrilling Tales in 1927. Soon he was contributing to Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and Weird Tales. He wrote one genuinely distinguished science fiction novel, Twice in Time, published in Startling Stories in 1940 and reprinted many times since, about a time-traveler who becomes the figure known to history as Leonardo Da Vinci. Wellman also contributed one novel in the Captain Future space-opera series, then moved on to comic books. He also wrote nonfiction and juvenile fiction about the South and its Civil War heroes.

His character John the Balladeer is a wandering singer who travels the backwoods of Appalachia, encountering folkloric spooks, many of which are the subjects of the songs that John sings. The lyrics quoted in the stories are more often than not Wellman’s own and are excellent examples of what folklore scholars call “fakelore,” that is, items or motifs that sound absolutely authentic but are not. In 2004 singer Joe Bethancourt released an album of the songs of John the Balladeer, with Wellman’s lyrics occasionally expanded by Bethancourt and set to traditional melodies.

Wellman’s other series characters, notably Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone, whose adventures appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s and 1940s, also regularly confront supernatural menaces. Pursuivant is retired, but, vastly learned in both legal and occult lore, he sallies forth from his home in West Virginia to do battle with evil. John Thunstone is a playboy Manhattanite who carries a sword cane, but he, too, is learned in the occult and adept at disposing of demonic menaces. Thunstone in particular is an idealization of Wellman himself, a huge, burly man with a moustache, a man of action who is also learned, sophisticated, and a proper gentleman. (Wellman was himself a large, muscular man with a moustache, educated, gracious, etc.)

The majority of the lore in the Wellman stories is by no means made up. Indeed, his greatest strength is the authenticity of the settings he depicts, drawn from those Ozark trips in his youth and from his own long residence in the North Carolina mountains. He was, like Stephen Vincent Benet, one of the genuinely American fantasy writers, drawing on uniquely American motifs and subject matter. Nevertheless, he does invent, sometimes very persuasively, most strikingly in the Thunstone series with the legend of the Shonokins, a dispossessed race that preceded the American Indians, perhaps descended from Neanderthals. The Shonokins are the ancient enemies of the rest of mankind, who work sinister magic but have strange limitations and seek to regain mastery of the Earth. As these stories appeared in Weird Tales at about the same time as Richard Shaver’s “Shaver Mystery” stories (which pretended to be based on fact, also involving sinister ancient races), some readers who were duped by Shaver also began to wonder if the Shonokins might also be real.

After a hiatus in the 1960s, Wellman returned to the fantasy field to much acclaim in the 1970s. He wrote five novels about John the Balladeer (this remained Wellman’s preferred term, despite the publisher’s coinage of “Silver John”). There were also three John Thunstone novels. An expanded volume, John the Balladeer, containing additional stories written later in Wellman’s career, appeared in 1988. Several of his stories have been adapted for television, most notably “The Valley Was Still” as “Still Valley” on The Twilight Zone in 1961. Who Fears the Devil? was filmed badly with the insulting title of The Legend of Hillbilly John in 1972. Wellman despised the film.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Elliot, Jeffrey M. 1982. “Manly Wade Wellman: Better Things Waiting” (interview). In Fantasy Voices: Interviews with American Fantasy Writers, edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot, 5–18. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

Jones, Jeremy L. C. 2014. “Dark Hearts & Brilliant Patches of Honor: A Tribute to Manly Wade Wellman.” Clarkesworld 89 (February). http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wellman_interview.

Meyers, Walter E. 1985. “Manly Wade Wellman.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 947–954. New York: Scribner’s.

Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Manly Wade Wellman” (interview). In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural, 93–101. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

WELLS, H. G. (1866–1946)

Herbert George Wells was a prolific British author and social thinker. Through his imaginative blend of science and speculation, Wells laid the foundations for twentieth-century science fiction and horror literature. One of the most popular writers of his day, Wells published dozens of books and short stories, beginning with his early science fiction in the late nineteenth century. In later life he devoted himself more frequently to realist novels and political tracts, writing new work until his death in 1946.

Wells was born to a lower-middle-class family in Kent. Originally a draper’s apprentice, the academically gifted Wells eventually succeeded in establishing a teaching career. After publishing short newspaper pieces, Wells produced a series of “scientific romances,” beginning with The Time Machine in 1896. These imaginative fictions, heavily informed by contemporary scientific discoveries, launched his literary fame.

Most frequently in his fiction and commentary, Wells attacked the complacency of polite society, seeking to fire the imagination of his readers with novel imagery and perspectives. As a futurist, Wells called up visions of technologically advanced civilizations, often under the control of powerful political oligarchies (When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899), as well as utopian states built upon rational lines (A Modern Utopia, 1905; The Shape of Things to Come, 1933). Most often, these visions of the future emphasize the alienating and violent consequences of technological progress, confronting everyday life with strangely transformed human beings (as in 1897’s The Invisible Man and the chemically produced giants of 1904’s The Food of the Gods), or the ravages of technological warfare. Wells is often credited as the source for such concepts as the time machine, the tank (“The Land Ironclads,” 1903), and the atomic bomb (The World Set Free, 1914).

From his training in biology, Wells also liberally applied concepts from natural history to his thought, most notably the pressures of evolution on humans and civilization (such as the splitting of humankind into two species in The Time Machine, or the Martian invaders of 1898’s The War of the Worlds, evolved into ambulatory brains). Wells repeatedly emphasized the startling commonalities between human beings and the animal world, most strongly in 1896’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Wells’s influence since his death in London in 1946 has been significant and wide-reaching. His works are continually adapted and retold, owing to the continued relevance of the ethical and practical problems of technology and human identity that he proposed.

Miles Link

See also: The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Mad Scientist; The Night Land.

Further Reading

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber.

Hillegas, Mark. 1967. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wells, Herbert George. 1934. Experiment in Autobiography. London: Victor Gollancz.

West, Anthony. 1984. H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. New York: Random House.

WELTY, EUDORA (1909–2001)

In her ninety-two years, Eudora Alice Welty became a canonical American literary figure, who was also associated with the Southern Gothic genre. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909 and died there on July 23, 2001. Southern settings constructed from both nostalgic dreams and twisted nightmares are a common backdrop for her fiction. She was an author who experimented with and had a complex relationship to genre fiction in its many forms. Some scholars, such as Mitch Frye, see traces of “Southern Fantastic” in Welty’s style. Frye defines this categorization as a “mutant form that borrows provocatively from the speculative fiction genres of dystopia, fantasy, science fiction, and the weird tale” (Frye 2013, 75–76). Indeed, her special brand of domestic horror lapses into dark fantasy and the weird.

Welty is generally considered proximal to the horror genre: an important author who chose to “dabble in the supernatural and the psychotic” (Fonseca and Pulliam 1999, 24). Yet she had an understanding of and appreciation for horror fiction. As Suzanne Marrs has suggested, Welty’s prose can be humorous and simultaneously “hauntingly enigmatic” (Marrs 2005, ix). Welty’s narratives expose the deeply insightful within the everyday, through “the comic horror of the small town” (Marrs 2005, ix) or a “tortured interior monologue” (Marrs 2005, x). At times, as in “The Wanderers” (1949), her grotesque reflections juxtapose the horrors of life and love, always with a genteel, perceptive, and elusive lilt, even when decapitation is involved.

Welty produced a substantial corpus of literature during her lifetime, from her early short stories, such as “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic” (both published in 1936), to her later nonfiction, such as One Writer’s Beginning (1984). Her major creative works include two novels, four collections, and four novellas.

Of Welty’s vast literary output, critics such as David Pringle suggest that The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943) contains the best examples of her horror fiction. Darker elements run through “The Wide Net” that connect Welty’s allusions to the rape and murder of a pregnant woman to a still more grim tradition of horror tales. “A Still Moment” conveys, in the narrated perception of one of its characters, “horror in its purity and clarity” (Welty 1998, 238), punctuated by an ephemeral surrealist vision that reinforces her dark aesthetic. She plays with notions of time, distorting them to evoke suspense, dread, or terror. The Wide Net and Other Stories initially divided critics. At the time, some reviewers concluded that the collection was filled with impropriety, while others argued that Welty had developed “her vision of horror to the point of nightmare” by examining “the clear day-to-day horror of actual life” and “the horror of dreams” (Trilling 1943, 386–387). Joyce Carol Oates sees strong horror themes in Welty’s later works. She notes that Welty’s short story “The Demonstrators” (1966), with its “unfocused horror” and depiction of racial tensions, “is horrible” and that “the grotesque has been assimilated deftly into the ordinary, the natural” (Oates 1969, 57).

Not only was Welty adept at portraying realistic horror, as in the evocation of the civil rights era in “The Demonstrators,” but she effectively wrote fantastic fairy tale horror more reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm as well. Her first novella, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), is frequently analyzed for its use of dark fantasy. Studies by Eunice Glenn, Sally McMillan, Rosella Orzo, and Richard Gray explore Welty’s morbid use of fairy tales and the manipulation or “conjuring” of what Glenn once called “scenes of horror” tinctured by Poe and Kafka (Glenn 1947, 81, 90). Sometimes dubbed a “Southern fried fairy tale,” Welty’s novella merges the Grimms’ original fairy tales with American folklore. A unique blend of realistic and fantastic, The Robber Bridegroom depicts bloody violence, torture, and death in a Southern setting (the Natchez Trace) populated by legendary and savage outlaws. The violation of an unnamed native girl in the novella shocks the reader out of fairy tale mode, and through legend ties it to brutal realistic events. In her 1975 essay “Fairy Tales of the Natchez Trace,” Welty describes how she embedded horror in her reimagining of “The Robber Bridegroom.” But she contended that Grimm’s horror exceeds even her own. Her use of these dark stories harkens back to their primary function as horror tales that shock and moralize through fable.

On her own admission, Welty led a sheltered life. Yet within her many macabre and fantastic fictional worlds, there is an undeniable magnitude and depth. Welty was radical and fearless in her exploration of genre, and this extended to her use of horror motifs. In 1969, Joyce Carol Oates extolled the beauty and brutality of what she deemed Welty’s “unintended” horror fiction (54). However, Welty was well versed in horror literature, and her appreciation for and interest in classic horror is evident in reviews such as “Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Jumbees” (1944), where she examines “[g]ood, dependable horror conjurers” like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft, differentiating between “comfort horror” and weird tales (5).

Welty’s strange fantasies and distorted realities have had a far-reaching impact. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Stephen King cites Welty as a new literary influence for his novel Lisey’s Story. Michael McDowell’s fiction has been shaped by the stylistic extravagance of Welty, through her use of Southern Gothic and horror. Her innovations, created by mixing genre conventions, garnered her much acclaim. Welty received a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, thirty-nine honorary degrees, eight O. Henry Awards, the Medal of Freedom, and numerous other prestigious accolades.

By the time Welty died in 2001 of cardiopulmonary failure, she had already cast a mythic shadow over the literary landscape. In recent years, scholarship on the Weird South, the Gothic South, and the Fantastic South has increased for a variety of complex reasons related to the institutionalization of Gothic studies in the American canon and changing notions of genre. As a result, there is renewed interest in the darker aspects of Welty’s fiction.

Naomi Simone Borwein

See also: Dark Fantasy; Faulkner, William; The Grotesque; McDowell, Michael; Surrealism.

Further Reading

Fonseca, Anthony J., and June Michele Pulliam. 1999. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Frye, Mitch. 2013. “Astonishing Stories: Eudora Welty and the Weird Tale.” Eudora Welty Review 5: 75–93.

Glenn, Eunice. 1947. “Fantasy in the Fiction of Eudora Welty.” In A Southern Vanguard, edited by Allan Tate, 78–91. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Marrs, Suzanne. 2005. “Introduction.” In Eudora Welty: A Biography, ix–xix. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Oates, Joyce Carol. 1969. “The Art of Eudora Welty.” Shenandoah 20 (Spring): 54–57.

Trilling, Diana. 1943. “Fiction in Review.” Nation CLVII, October 2: 386–387.

Welty, Eudora. 1944. “Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Jumbees.” New York Times Book Review, September 24: 5, 21.

Welty, Eudora. 1978. “Fairy Tales of the Natchez Trace.” In The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, 306. New York: Vintage Books.

Welty, Eudora. 1998. Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir. New York: Library of America.

Weston, Ruth D. 1994. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press.

THE WEREWOLF OF PARIS

The Werewolf of Paris is a historical horror novel written by Guy Endore and published in 1933. The book is narrated by an unnamed American who travels to Paris to complete his PhD and discovers a testimony written in 1871 by Aymar Galliez in defense of a man called Sergeant Bertrand. Galliez’s testimony tells the story of Bertrand Caillet, the werewolf of the title, and the various crimes this man has committed. It follows Bertrand into the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, ending with his capture and incarceration during the Paris Commune of 1870–1871.

The lycanthropic Bertrand was born to a servant in the employment of Galliez’s aunt. The book’s title leaves little mystery as to the nature of this young man, and so the early chapters are concerned with Galliez’s attempts to come to terms with the “monster” who resides under his roof. Prior to the introduction of the main characters, the reader is told a family history from the Middle Ages. When Jehan Pitamont murdered two members of the rival noble Pitaval family, he was consigned to an oubliette (a small dungeon accessible only from a hatch in the ceiling), fed only on chunks of meat thrown into his prison, and gradually became little more than a wild animal. Centuries later, a descendant of Jehan Pitamont, a priest, raped a teenaged servant girl called Josephine, leaving her pregnant (Bertrand’s mother). Lycanthropy in this novel is treated as a congenital condition—indeed, in a later chapter of the novel, a doctor misreads some of Bertrand’s symptoms as those of “hereditary syphilis,” before consigning him to a cell in an asylum that serves as a modern version of the oubliette.

The suggestion that lycanthropy is the product of the degenerate aristocracy fits with the setting of the Paris Commune. Particularly in the novel’s early chapters, there is implicit criticism of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. However, this is combined with a rather unsympathetic portrait of the communards and their cause, with Galliez coming to believe that the revolutionaries are themselves a race of werewolves. The book is characterized by brutality and violence, including sexual violence enacted toward women, and Bertrand ends up in a relationship with a masochistic young woman named Sophie whose relationship to the Commune is ambiguous. Nevertheless, the storytelling style, in which Galliez’s matter-of-fact tone is mediated through the detached narration of the unnamed American, encourages the reader to view these acts with distaste and horror.

The Werewolf of Paris reached number 1 on the New York Times best-seller list when it was first published, and it remains a cult classic. It was adapted for the screen as The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), though the setting was altered and the political content removed.

Hannah Priest

See also: Monsters; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Martin, Carl Grey. 2014. “Guy Endore’s Dialectical Werewolf.” Le Monde diplomatique, September 15. http://mondediplo.com/outsidein/guy-endore-s-dialectical-werewolf.

Stableford, Brian. 1983. “The Werewolf of Paris.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, vol. 5, edited by Frank N. Magill, 2102–2106. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

WEREWOLVES

The werewolf has been a popular and ubiquitous presence in folklore, mythology, and literature for centuries, almost always taking the form of a human capable of shape-shifting into a wolf or wolf-like hybrid under certain conditions. Half-human and half-animal, the werewolf has long been a powerful and versatile symbol; a liminal figure (that is, one existing on the boundary or threshold between two distinct realms) representing the eruption of the wild into civilization, the beast within the human soul, the werewolf is unable to be fully reconciled with the human or the animal. It is, as such, an endlessly malleable symbol, appearing time and again in popular culture when chaos threatens to disturb an established order.

Some Notable Werewolf Fictions

Literary:

1896

The Were-Wolf by Clemence Housman

1933

The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore

1944

Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

1977

The Howling by Gary Brandner

1978

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber

1979

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (featuring “Wolf-Alice,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “The Werewolf”)

Cinematic:

1935

Werewolf of London

1941

The Wolf Man

1961

Curse of the Werewolf (adapted from The Werewolf of Paris)

1981

The Howling (adapted from Guy Brandner’s novel); An American Werewolf in London

1984

The Company of Wolves (based on Angela Carter’s story)

1994

Wolf

2000

Ginger Snaps

Matt Cardin

The modern-day werewolf has its roots in ancient folklore, such as the Greek myth of Lycaon and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE), and also in ancient legends from the early Christian era (ca. first century CE), which portray the werewolf as a savage, bloodthirsty beast, afflicted with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Roman works, such as Petronius’s Satyricon (ca. late first century CE), later used the werewolf to comedic effect, depicting mysterious men who transform into wolves under the light of the moon. Some medieval romances, by contrast, viewed the werewolf in a benevolent light: several French lais, including “Bisclavret” by Marie de France and the anonymous “Melion” (ca. 1200) and “Guillame de Palerme” (ca. 1200), for instance, portrayed the werewolf as a dignified creature, a pathetic victim of circumstance.

In the sixteenth century, the bloodthirsty werewolf of antiquity was revived in legends circulated across the European countryside, which influenced later depictions of the werewolf in nineteenth-century Gothic novels such as Sutherland Menzies’s Hugue the Wer-Wolf (1838), an early example of a psychological study of lycanthropy, and G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1847), in which a lonely man makes a deal with the devil, becoming a werewolf in exchange for wealth and eternal youth. Though Wagner regrets his decision, he is condemned to prey upon the human species for eighteen months. Other nineteenth-century texts also drew on legends of the werewolf as a bloodthirsty, violent creature: the were-protagonist of Prosper Mérimée’s novella “Lokis” (1869), for instance, murders his wife with a bite to the throat, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s werewolf in “A Pastoral Horror” (1890) commits a string of bloody murders while in his wolf-like state. Female werewolves in nineteenth-century Gothic literature proved to be as savage as their male counterparts, often using their sexually enticing human forms as lures for potential male victims. In Clemence Housman’s acclaimed Gothic novel The Were-Wolf (1896), the rapacious female werewolf can only be killed by one whose blood is as pure as Christ’s.

The bloodthirsty werewolf of antiquity and of nineteenth-century Gothic literature continued to inform depictions of the werewolf in American and British literature of the first half of the twentieth century, despite the rise of the tragic, sympathetic werewolf in popular American horror films such as Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935) and George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood published a number of werewolf and similar shape-shifter stories, such as “The Camp of the Dog” (1908), “The Wendigo” (1910), and “Running Wolf” (1921), while Weird Tales contributed to the figure’s increasing popularity with works like H. Warner Munn’s The Werewolf of Ponkert (1925) and “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (1928) and Robert E. Howard’s “Wolfshead” (1926).

The savage werewolf was memorably depicted in Guy Endore’s critically acclaimed The Werewolf of Paris (1933), arguably the most important werewolf novel ever published and widely considered by many to have done for the werewolf what Dracula did for the vampire. Endore’s werewolf Bertrand is a violent, sadistic beast, a product of the cursed Pitamont clan who were doomed to lycanthropy as punishment for a long-standing feud with a neighboring clan. Bertrand commits impulsive, violent acts against the backdrop of a chaotic Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, leading some critics to view the novel as an allegory. The murderous werewolf—albeit this time depicted in a more complicated manner—also appears in Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think (1944), a noir-influenced dark fantasy in which humans and werewolves have been involved in an eternal war for control of the planet.

Though the murderous werewolf continued to make appearances in the latter half of the twentieth century in horror novels such as Gary Brandner’s The Howling (1977), postmodern and contemporary werewolf texts have often taken a more complicated view of the figure, especially in light of the widespread and increasing popularity of environmental movements. Whitley Strieber’s well-received novels The Wolfen (1978) and The Wild (1991), for instance, depict wolf-like creatures and werewolves as means through which humans can reconcile with nature. In The Wolfen, the eponymous lupine beings prey upon humans as a natural check to the human population, and in The Wild, the werewolf functions as a conduit for reintroducing humans to nature. Twentieth-century werewolf literature has also long recognized the werewolf’s potent charge as a symbol of puberty and dawning sexuality. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) features a number of werewolf stories that invoke this theme to great effect, offering new takes on girlhood and puberty with “Wolf-Alice” and powerful, feminist inversions of the Little Red Riding Hood myth in “The Company of Wolves” and “The Werewolf.”

The werewolf’s perennial presence in mythology, folklore, literature, and cinema has contributed to its versatility in the horror genre as an enduring and ever-changing symbol of spiritual, sexual, and psychological transformation. Forced to stand at the boundary between human and animal, the werewolf’s liminal status renders it forever ambiguous, forever mutable, and forever intriguing.

Brittany Roberts

See also: Carter, Angela; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Weird Tales; The Werewolf of Paris.

Further Reading

Jones, Stephen, ed. 2009. The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men. Philadelphia: Running Press.

Lowder, James, ed. 2010. Curse of the Full Moon: A Werewolf Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press.

Otten, Charlotte F., ed. 2002. The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Stypczynski, Brent. A. 2013. The Modern Literary Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

WHARTON, EDITH (1862–1937)

Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, was born in New York, and her most famous works explore the city’s haute society in intricate novels of manners like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which have critical, naturalist, and anthropological bents, despite her vexed relations with literary naturalism. But the supernatural was also a literary avocation for her; she published about a dozen supernatural short stories. These stories almost all first appeared in lucrative, prestigious magazines, and a few are in her short story collections. Shortly after her death, the nigh-complete collection Ghosts (1937) appeared.

Two major interpretations of Wharton’s supernatural oeuvre compete. The first interpretation concerns the violence and stultifications of domestic life in the stories. In “Kerfol” (1916), a ghost dog pack avenges a French aristocrat’s brutal treatment of them and their mistress. The second interpretation discerns the stories’ anxiety over class division, servants’ roles, and concepts of money, inheritance, and property. “The Looking Glass” (1935) overlays messages from the dead with Wharton’s interest in con artists and business swindlers (from texts like “A Cup of Cold Water,” 1899). Ghostly epistles also factor in “Pomegranate Seed” (1931); a wife intercepts a letter from her husband’s dead first wife and, in an unnerving anticlimax, finds the writing too faint to discern. Sexual and economic anxieties intertwine in “The Eyes” (1910) as a haunted Henry James– or Dorian Gray–esque narrator is unveiled, to his audience’s horror, as a sterile, exploitative parasite.

“Afterward”: A Classic Tale of Greed and Ghostly Retribution

The status of Wharton’s “Afterward” (1910) as one of the great ghost stories in American literature is implied by its appearance in the 1996 collection American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. It is still taught at universities as paradigmatic of a ghost story standard: the return of an apparition who comes to claim a symbolic (in this case financial) debt.

One way to account for the unsettling effect of “Afterward” is to explore its intriguing time register. The story’s plot is straightforward, but Wharton’s conceptualization of the “afterward” remains intriguing. Mary and Edward (Ned) Boyne, newly rich Americans, emigrate to a rural mansion, Lyng, in Dorsetshire, England. After her husband is taken away by a visitor to Lyng, Mary, the central consciousness of the tale, comes to realize the visitant was the ghost of a dead man named Elwell whom Ned had secretly ruined in business.

The endurance and unconscious appeal of Wharton’s story may be illuminated by referring to Sigmund Freud’s theory of deferred action or afterwardness (“Nachträglichkeit” in German). This theory concerns itself with how the return to consciousness of a once forgotten act may collapse any temporality that has passed between the action and its reawakening. This is the temporal register of the ghost in “Afterward,” and it is foreshadowed in the story’s opening lines when Mary recalls the words of a friend, uttered several months before, regarding a ghostly inhabitant at Lyng. Only now, afterward, can she make some sense of what it means to be haunted, just as she realizes, once it is too late, that Elwell has taken her husband away forever.

Matt Foley

Wharton lacks many direct inheritors in horror, for during her lifetime pulps came to dominate in supernatural publishing rather than prestigious magazines. Yet her supernatural fiction’s quality, subtlety, and frisson set her as a late apogee for the Anglo-American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ghost story tradition. She is often associated with her older friends James and W. D. Howells, for the projects of all three involve both unsentimental novels of manners and supernatural short fiction. But the preface of Ghosts reserves Wharton’s highest esteem for supernatural short stories for J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitz-James O’Brien, F. Marion Crawford, and the collection’s dedicatee, Walter de la Mare. In one tribute, the U.K. television anthology series Shades of Darkness (1983) adapts a de la Mare tale and three of Wharton’s (their only multiply adapted writer): “The Lady’s Maid Bell” (1902), “Afterward” (1910), and “Bewitched” (1925).

Bob Hodges

See also: Crawford, F. Marion; de la Mare, Walter; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; O’Brien, Fitz-James.

Further Reading

Jacobsen, Karen. 2008. “Economic Hauntings: Wealth & Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” College Literature 35.1: 100–127.

Killoran, Helen. 2001. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.

McMullen, Bonnie. 2012. “Short Story Markets.” Edith Wharton in Context, edited by Laura Rattray, 103–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shades of Darkness. 1983. Television. Pt. Washington: Koch, 2006. DVD.

WHEATLEY, DENNIS (1897–1977)

British author Dennis Wheatley fundamentally changed horror writing when he developed a form of occult- and satanic-influenced horror that has links to the work of H. P Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Machen. In Wheatley’s work, the appearance of the Devil and his minions in the comfortable British shires and home counties (Berkshire, Essex, Surrey, and Hampshire) can be counteracted first by consulting complex reference tomes of magical lore, and then by the decisive acts of strong, chivalric, upper-middle-class men. Wheatley wrote more than 100 books and sold more than fifty million copies.

Born and raised in South London, Wheatley left his family’s Mayfair wine business after being expelled from Dulwich College, joined the Merchant Navy, and was gassed in World War I. He worked in security in London during World War II, in Churchill’s underground fortress, constructing false stories to mislead the Nazis. He wrote a mystery crime novel, adventure novels, and some science fiction, but is better known for his eight black magic novels—The Devil Rides Out (1934), Strange Conflict (1941), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil a Daughter (1953), The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark Forces (1964), Gateway to Hell (1970)—plus his short stories and edited collections of horror tales. In the 1960s and 1970s each of his black magic books averaged yearly sales of 80,000 copies.

Wheatley’s popularity waned, probably because of the values his novels promote: fear of the foreign, fear of disability (seen as degeneracy), and a patriarchal-based assertion of the need to preserve women’s morality. Each of his novels is related to threats to British respectability, and each is ultimately controlled by the actions of dashing, upper- or upper-middle-class men (such as John in To the Devil a Daughter and the Duke of Richlieu and Rex in The Devil Rides Out).There are levels of voyeurism in Wheatley’s work; for instance, in To the Devil a Daughter the morally righteous reader gains vicarious pleasure observing Christina, a semiclad young woman, rescued by a dashing young man from being sacrificed to the Devil, following a pact agreed by her father, at her birth. Speed, power, reason, and occult knowledge are used against the dark forces. David Punter notes that Wheatley can “smooth out the moments of terror and vision which comprise experience and render them into a unitary whole” (Punter 1980, 407).

While his conservatism, misogyny, and class distinction are rather controversial for today’s readers, it can be argued that the investment in homeland security and leadership by powerful men underpinning such popular entertainments as the James Bond series reflect the same values that infused Wheatley’s work. So do a host of horror and disaster movies, such as the Die Hard series, with each entry featuring Nazi-influenced fanatical villains. Wheatley’s occult horror infuses the everyday and is resolved through strong values and action. Wheatley died of liver failure in November 1977.

Gina Wisker

See also: The Devil Rides Out; Devils and Demons.

Further Reading

Baker, Phil. 2011. The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus.

Caines, Michael. 2013. “Feasting with Dennis Wheatley.” The TLS Blog at The Times Literary Supplement. December 31. http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2013/12/feasting-with-dennis-wheatley.html.

Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman.

Wisker, G. 1993. “Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: The Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 99–110. London: Pluto.

“THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS”

First published in 1973, Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” was inspired by the mainly inaccurate March 1964 report in the New York Times that claimed Katherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese was murdered outside of her Queens apartment in full view of thirty-seven of her neighbors, all of whom refused to render aid. Evidence since the initial publication of the story proves convincingly that no single individual witnessed the murder, which had initially been reported to the police as a domestic argument. Nevertheless, the incident became a kind of urban legend as it captured the idea of an apathetic populace made callous by the dehumanizing effects of life in the American city.

These themes of detachment and dehumanization inform “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” Beth O’Neil, recently come to New York from rural Vermont, witnesses a brutal murder in her apartment building courtyard one evening. She notices that her neighbors are also watching and that some seem to take a perverse pleasure from the spectacle. She is further shaken by a fog that suddenly rises up from the courtyard and, if only for a moment, assumes almost human features. Soon afterwards Beth becomes romantically involved with a neighbor, Ray Gleeson, but as their relationship edges toward emotional and physical violence, Beth ends things. One night Beth awakens to the sound of someone moving about in her apartment. She encounters a burglar who, upon being discovered, attacks her. Their struggle takes them to the balcony, where, on the verge of losing consciousness, Beth notices her neighbors watching. Fearful that past events will replay themselves, Beth has a sudden revelation: In order for people to survive in the city, they must give part of their humanity to it. Ray’s advances were actually an invitation to join a cult that worships the God of the City. She cries out to her neighbors that she understands and wishes to join them, and her assailant is suddenly whisked away, shredded into pieces yet somehow left alive, and dropped onto the courtyard below, which has become a type of sacrificial altar.

Ellison carefully builds toward his reveal, blending the grind of daily existence in the city with an encroaching dread. As with all of his work, the story is saturated with his characteristic judgmental anger. In this case, that fury is built upon a false foundation, but it gives Ellison the opportunity to chastise the world. The story received the 1974 Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

Javier A. Martinez

See also: Ellison, Harlan; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

Further Reading

Cook, Kevin. 2014. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. New York: Norton.

Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena: Salem Press.

Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

“THE WHITE HANDS”

“The White Hands” is a short story from Mark Samuels’s debut fiction collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003). It was nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 2004. It has subsequently been reprinted, notably in editor Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 15 (2004) and editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012). Probably the best-known of Samuels’s tales, “The White Hands” is steeped in the author’s knowledge of the supernatural fiction genre.

John Harrington, the narrator of the tale, tells of his association with Alfred Muswell, a disgraced and reclusive scholar, who has an obsession with a Victorian author of ghost stories, Lilith Blake. Harrington is drawn in by Muswell’s enthusiasm, and he also develops a powerful interest in Blake, partly spurred by the delicacy and paleness of her hands in a surviving photograph. After Muswell dies, Harrington has Blake’s corpse exhumed and, when he opens her coffin, finds her still living, though she swiftly crumbles to dust. Some time later, Harrington decides to attempt to transcribe and interpret The White Hands and Other Tales, Blake’s last collection, dictated after death to Muswell. But the act drives Harrington mad.

“The White Hands” has an ambiguous ending—something common in Samuels’s work, which often explores the transformative (as opposed to the destructive) aspects of an encounter with the Weird. Though it ends with Harrington confined to a psychiatric hospital, plagued by visions of disembodied white hands, there is in his madness much more of ecstasy than despair.

It is typical of Samuels’s erudite work that his best-known tale should have a scholar of supernatural fiction at its heart. Muswell’s thesis regarding the weird tale is expounded at the opening of the story. All great literature, he claims, is concerned with “the quest for hidden mysteries,” and also “should unravel the secrets of life and death,” and therefore bring about “some actual alteration in the structure of reality itself” (Samuels 2003, 2–3). In this statement can be seen Samuels’s own authorial and philosophical approach.

Samuels has said his stories often evolve from a single image that he cannot shake off. In the case of “The White Hands,” this image was that of Blake’s disembodied hands. The image’s source was literary rather than “real world”; it was inspired by Eddy C. Bertin’s “Like Two White Spiders” (1973) and ultimately by the whole lineage of Gothic tales of preternaturally animated severed hands, including William Fryer Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers” and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Hand.” In addition to its intrinsic excellence, “The White Hands” is noteworthy because it has influenced the development of new writing in the weird field that is subtle and metatextual in its approach.

Timothy J. Jarvis

See also: “The Beast with Five Fingers”; Maupassant, Guy de.

Further Reading

Cardin, Matt. 2006. “Interview with Mark Samuels: A Sense of Charnel Glamour.” The Teeming Brain, August. http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-mark-samuels.

Samuels, Mark. 2003. The White Hands and Other Weird Tales. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.

“THE WHITE PEOPLE”

First published in 1904, Arthur Machen’s story of a young girl’s initiation into witchcraft was actually written in 1899, the same year as the publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It is nevertheless pre-Freudian and pre-Jungian (the latter term referring to the psychological system created by Freud’s onetime colleague, Carl Jung), despite its extraordinarily suggestive imagery and barely sublimated sexuality. The author was a mystic and a Catholic whose writings show no interest in psychoanalytical theory, even if he wrote about beautiful women achieving sensuous ecstasy when covered by supernatural snakes.

As is a common technique for Machen, his characters talk out a philosophical idea, after which a narrative is presented to illustrate it. The philosophical idea under question in “The White People” is the nature of evil, which is framed in the opening debate between two characters as “the taking of heaven by storm . . . an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner” (Machen 1922, 117). Evil is a subversion of the natural order, as if roses began to sing. Sorcery and sanctity are “the only realities” (113). Great sinners are probably rarer than great saints.

In a telling passage in the prologue to “The White People”—a passage quoted eighty-five years later by T. E. D. Klein in his deeply Machen-esque horror novel The Ceremonies (1984)—a man named Ambrose explains the real nature of sin and evil to a man named Cotgrave, in words that then resonate throughout the remainder of the story’s primary narrative:

“We underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the ‘sin’ of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”

“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.

“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

“Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.” (Machen 1904, 58)

Matt Cardin

Source: Machen, Arthur. 1904. “The White People.” Horlick’s Magazine. Volume 1. London: James Elliott & Co.

To demonstrate his point, one debater hands the other the diary of a sixteen-year-old girl who was introduced to witchcraft at a young age by her nurse. Her narrative is near stream-of-consciousness and unparagraphed, which perfectly captures the naïveté of the character as she describes things she only half understands and repeats several sinister fairy tales that contain veiled warnings about her eventual plight. After visits with the sinister “white people,” several ventures into strange, unworldly landscapes, and the occurrence of as yet harmless magical pranks such as overturning tables, she is found dead before an ancient pagan statue, poisoned “in time,” as we learn in an epilogue (165).

H. P. Lovecraft, who regarded this as the second greatest weird story in English (the first being “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood), found himself explaining the ending to correspondents. It is subtle: The girl has become pregnant with a monstrous thing, but feeling a mother’s sympathy with her unborn child, she became aware of the abomination within her and so killed herself. When Lovecraft reworked this situation in “The Dunwich Horror,” he was less subtle about it. “The White People” might be imagined as “The Dunwich Horror” from the point of view of a young, innocent Lavinia Whateley (the character in Lovecraft’s tale who is impregnated by an other-dimensional entity). Here we see a major statement of Machen’s “Little People” mythos, which also influenced Lovecraft and numerous others: the idea that the “fairies” of legend are survivals of some ancient race that has gone underground and turned to evil, never having lost its links to prehuman magic.

Apparently “The White People” was intended to be a part of a larger work, a fragment, cleverly made complete by its framing device. If this is true, then the circumstance may be deemed fortunate or even regarded as a stroke of genius, because the story’s fascination stems precisely from Machen’s refusal to go on too long or explain too much.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: The Ceremonies; “The Dunwich Horror”; “The Great God Pan”; Machen, Arthur; “The Novel of the Black Seal”; “The Willows.”

Further Reading

Joshi, S. T. 1990. “Arthur Machen: The Mystery of the Universe.” In The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Machen, Arthur. 1922. “The White People.” In The House of Souls, 111–166. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

WHITEHEAD, HENRY S. (1882–1932)

Henry St. Clair Whitehead, a frequent contributor to Weird Tales magazine and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, is best known for writing weird tales set in the West Indies. Born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Whitehead attended both Columbia College and Harvard University, but failing to earn a degree at either school, he entered Berkeley Divinity School, where he was ordained as a deacon in 1912, entering the priesthood a year later. It was Whitehead’s profession that brought him to the West Indies, where he lived in St. Croix, serving as an archdeacon. Whitehead’s tales, blurring the lines between fantasy, horror, and ethnography, focus on native magic of the West Indies.

Whitehead’s stories explore colonial and native relations in the Caribbean through their investigation of island jumbee, a term related to zombi but here connoting any island spirit or ghost. His tales often involve an academic-minded protagonist who must act as a detective when confronted with irrational forces of native magic. Gerald Canevin, a New England writer living in the West Indies and an obvious stand-in for Whitehead, frequently narrates the West Indies stories. Canevin is an expert on the supernatural and uses his knowledge of island magic to solve mysteries that often shed light on the colonial history of the islands. In “The Shadows” (1927) it is Canevin’s understanding that island magic is not mere superstition that allows him to uncover the story of Old Morris, a colonist whose attempt to harness the powers of an island fish-god for his own gain ends in his death, and in “Black Tancrède” (1929) Canevin discovers that the disturbance at a St. Thomas hotel is the work of the jumbee of a slave seeking revenge on the judge who sentenced him to death for his part in a slave revolt. While Whitehead’s depictions of West Indies natives and native culture often rely on racist stereotypes, they also reveal a more complex understanding of racial relations in the colonial West Indies. Many of his tales reveal coercive practices of colonial representatives, and island magic is often portrayed as a means of resistance for the native population. In “Hill Drums” (1931), for example, when a colonial diplomat offends the native population, they use magic to possess him and force him to leave the islands.

Not all of Whitehead’s tales, however, are set in the West Indies. Some take place in New England or Europe and adhere more to the mode of the antiquarian ghost tale. For example, “The Shut Room” (1930) is a haunted inn story set in England, and “The Trap” (1932) is a haunted mirror story set in a boarding school in Connecticut. However, these tales often refer to Canevin’s time spent in the West Indies as the source of his understanding of supernatural events.

Whitehead spent the last years of his life in Dunedin, Florida, where he died, likely due to a gastric illness. His tales were collected posthumously by Arkham House in Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946).

Travis Rozier

See also: Arkham House; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Weird Tales; Zombies.

Further Reading

Searles, A. Langley. 1995. “Henry S. Whitehead: A Retrospection.” Fantasy Commentator 8 (3–4): 186–200.

Whitehead, Henry S. 2012. Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

“THE WILLOWS”

First published in Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories, “The Willows” has a reputation as a seminal and definitive example of the classic weird tale. Praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a story “without a single strained passage or a single false note” (Lovecraft 2012, 88), its emphasis on carefully established mood and ambiguity contribute to a sustained atmosphere of dread. Its central mystery remains nebulous, adding to the potency of the overall effect.

The story has its origins in a 1901 account of one of Blackwood’s expeditions written by him for Macmillan’s Magazine, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe.” “The Willows” begins similarly as a travelogue describing the canoe journey along the Danube undertaken by the narrator and his Swedish traveling companion. They become stormbound on an island in a desolate, sparsely populated region of marshland and ever-shifting sandbanks and islets; the surrounding wilderness seems to become imbued with a hostile intelligence. Their supplies unaccountably disappear, their equipment is sabotaged, and the narrator witnesses an indistinct, semimaterial presence somehow associated with the willows. They find odd “funnels” in the sand, and the banks of willows seem to encroach ever closer upon their camp. The mysterious assault intensifies until the Swede desperately attempts to drown himself to placate their persecutors, but is rescued by the narrator. Before the Swede passes out, he claims that the immediate threat has been lifted since “they’ve found another victim” (Blackwood 1973, 50). They later discover the drowned corpse of a peasant who had earlier attempted to warn them away from the island, and are horrified when they see the funnel-shaped wounds covering his face and chest.

At one point in “The Willows,” the narrator observes strange shapes among the titular vegetation, “immense, bronze-coloured” shapes with “limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other . . . rising up in a living column into the heavens.” His response conveys the essence of the numinous, that combined sense of fear and fascination before a preternatural reality that inspires a veritably religious sense of awe:

Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world’s history. But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship—absolutely worship. (Blackwood 1917, 153–154)

Matt Cardin

Source: Blackwood, Algernon. 1917. “The Willows.” In The Listener and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The story’s power is generated largely through Blackwood’s refusal to specifically delineate the exact nature of the threat facing the two protagonists. The hostile forces in “The Willows” are tenebrous and obscure, in the tradition of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (1859), Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887), and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). Even when the events are directly witnessed by the narrator, we are given little more information than that they are vague “shapes” or “presences.” Although he continually tries to rationalize their experiences, he is ultimately unable to successfully do so. In contrast, the Swede, through his less hesitant recourse to supernatural or metaphysical speculation, is more immediately able to parse the nature of the encounter. At various points in the narrative, the Swede discusses hostile pagan forces suggestive of a malevolent genius loci, the numinous spirit of a particular place in ancient Roman religion, and themselves as interlopers within a sacred grove. Although Blackwood strongly hints at a supernatural explanation, the two opposing viewpoints create a sustained mood of queasy uncertainty. Blackwood’s particular skill lies in his ability to sustain ambiguity without detriment to the narrative force of the tale. Its cumulative power is enhanced by the increasingly desperate speculation of the protagonists as they struggle to understand their experience.

Included by Dorothy Scarborough in her influential 1921 collection Famous Modern Ghost Stories, “The Willows” has been a staple of horror anthologies ever since. In the Weird Tales golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, the novella was repeatedly singled out for praise by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, who both identified it as among the best supernatural horror stories ever written. It retains its reputation to this day and is the third item in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s seminal attempt at creating a canon of weird fiction, The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories (2012).

James Machin

See also: Blackwood, Algernon; “The Horla”; The Numinous.

Further Reading

Blackwood, Algernon. 1973. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover.

Camara, Anthony. 2013. “Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows.’” Horror Studies 4, no. 1 (April): 43–62.

Joshi, S. T 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2012. The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories. London: Tor.

WILSON, F. PAUL (1946–)

F. Paul Wilson is an American horror and science fiction novelist who has also worked in a few other genres, including historical fiction and medical thrillers. Wilson was born in New Jersey in 1946 and has remained a lifelong resident. In his formative years, he sampled, among other eclectic works of art, the classic horror comic books from EC Comics in the 1950s, the stop-motion special effects extravaganza movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the stories and novels of H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1968.

Wilson began selling short fiction as a first-year medical student. He sold a number of comic scripts to Creepy and Eerie during the 1970s, but generally concentrated on prose fiction. His short stories and novelettes have appeared in all the major markets and numerous best-of-the-year collections; his novels have made various national best-seller lists. His novels The Keep (1981) and The Tomb (1984) both were New York Times best-sellers. His novels and short fiction have appeared on the final ballots for the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and the Bram Stoker Award.

Wilson’s first three novels, all science fiction, form what later came to be referred to as the LaNague Chronicles. Each reflects the author’s libertarian leanings. They were followed by further forays into science fiction later in Wilson’s career.

In 1981 Wilson published his first horror novel, The Keep, about Nazis accidentally awakening a supernatural evil in a remote castle in the Transylvanian Alps during World War II. After this novel, which was included as one of the one hundred best horror novels in the Stephen Jones–edited Horror: 100 Best Books, Wilson published five more books in what he called his “Adversary Cycle”: The Tomb (1984), The Touch (1986), Reborn (NEL, 1990), Reprisal (1991), and Nightworld (1992). The Adversary Cycle introduced several concepts that came to form the core of much of Wilson’s fictional universe: the ancient, evil entity called Rasalom, his eternal opponent Glaeken, the town of Monroe, Long Island, the wandering healing spirit known as the Dat-tay-vao (first seen in The Touch), and the modern pulp hero known as Repairman Jack.

The secretive Jack, who conceals his very existence from the world, made his first appearance in The Tomb. Not intending to establish a series character, Wilson left him near death at the end of that novel, only to have him reappear in Nightworld, playing a key role in frustrating Rasalom’s bid to enslave humanity. Jack’s fans proving persistent, Wilson responded with a new Repairman Jack novel titled Legacies in 1998. That book was followed by thirteen additional Repairman Jack novels, published from 1999 through 2011. Wilson also added six prequels to The Tomb, three set during Jack’s formative years, and another three set during his first months in New York City. Set between the events in The Tomb and Nightworld, the books chronicle Jack’s growing awareness of the battle between Rasalom and the entity he refers to as “the Otherness” or “the Ally,” forming the core of what Wilson has come to call “The Secret History of the World.”

The Keep was adapted as a horror movie by director Michael Mann in 1983. The movie version has attained something of a storied status due to its much-discussed history as a prototypical “troubled production,” and the final result is mostly an incomprehensible mess, but aspects of its lush visual design, courtesy of director Mann and cinematographer Alex Thomson, as well as the hypnotic musical score by Tangerine Dream, have rendered it somewhat memorable.

James Machin

See also: Bradbury, Ray; Lovecraft, H. P.; Matheson, Richard.

Further Reading

Coker, Jennifer R. 2007. “F. Paul Wilson.” Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works 1. Literary Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed August 6, 2016).

“F. Paul Wilson.” 2015. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

Grossberg, Michael. 2011. “The Untrod Path: Interview with F. Paul Wilson.” Prometheus: Newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society 29, no. 3 (Spring). http://lfs.org/newsletter/029/03/FPWilson.shtml.

WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT

The word “witch” derives from the Old English verb “wiccian,” meaning to use sorcery or enchantment. “Witch” is often used as an umbrella term for all practitioners of magic, though this obscures historical and regional differences. Historically, the English terms “witch” and “witchcraft” have specifically referred to European traditions. Contemporary horror fictions that employ the words undeniably evoke the tradition of European witchcraft, though there is often some intermingling with other traditions (e.g., Louisiana Voodoo, Haitian Vodou). Additionally, as European witchcraft has a long and complex history, contemporary horror may approach the idea of the “witch” from varying perspectives.

The Hammer of the Witches

In 1487, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger published a treatise on witchcraft entitled Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches). The book would come to be one of the most infamous texts of the European witch-hunting period. Kramer was a German Catholic clergyman who was expelled from Innsbruck after trying to conduct witchcraft trials without authority. Sprenger was a Dominican Inquisitor who lectured at the University of Cologne.

The Malleus is notorious for its detailed descriptions of witchcraft and for the fervor with which it advocates the eradication of witches. The book describes the infernal pact made by witches, making a direct connection between witches and Satan. It also describes (in graphic detail) the practices of witches, including the way in which witches recruit one another through sexual temptation. The book accuses witches of cannibalism, infanticide, and castration, offering “real-life” examples of such cases. The book’s final section is a step-by-step guide to conducting a witch trial, including examples of torture and execution techniques.

In 1490, the Catholic Church denounced the book. In 1538, the Spanish Inquisition disowned its teachings as false. While the book claimed an endorsement from the Faculty of Cologne, it seems many of the faculty condemned it for contradicting Catholic theology and promoting unethical and illegal procedures. Some historians claim that Sprenger himself denounced the book and used his power and influence to make life difficult for Kramer after its publication.

The book is now commonly cited as a key example of early modern beliefs about women, witchcraft, and diabolical magic. However, the extent to which the book actually had any influence on historical trials is debatable.

Hannah Priest

European traditions of practicing and condemning witchcraft have their antecedents in antiquity. There is evidence that some practitioners of magic faced harsh punishments in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Babylonia. There are also prohibitions against some forms of sorcery in the Old Testament. In these ancient texts, there is a recurrent concern about malicious harm to men, livestock, and crops caused by sorcery. The Christian tradition of condemning witchcraft began to be codified with the Council of Elvira (ca. 305 CE), which decreed that the act of causing death through malicious intent could not be effected without “idolatry.” This decree associated witchcraft with devil or demon worship, and this association continues throughout the European tradition.

Although most early legal prohibitions do not specifically gender witchcraft, there is some evidence of a growing association of malicious sorcery with women throughout the early Middle Ages. This may be a reflection of classical distinctions between types of magic and their respective practitioners, but it may also draw on classical mythology and literature, in which there are a number of malicious female sorcerers (for instance, Circe, a character in Homer’s Odyssey, and Hecate, a Greek goddess). Many texts made the distinction between “necromancy” (learned or ceremonial magic) and “witchcraft” (possession by the devil). The former was the province of clerical and educated men, and the latter of uneducated peasants and women. This distinction was not a rigid one, but it had far-reaching consequences.

In order to draw a clear distinction between necromancy and witchcraft, clerical writers elaborated on the idea of diabolical witchcraft. Drawing on earlier legal codes, medieval writers increasingly began to associate witchcraft with a satanic pact to explain how “common” people might enact feats of magic to rival those of learned magicians. By the thirteenth century, this pact with the devil was imagined as a formal initiation rite or ceremony known as the Sabbat or “witches’ sabbath,” and clerics decried the rite in sermons. At the same time, the repertoire of crimes associated with witchcraft also expanded, incorporating transgressions previously included in accusations of heresy. As well as traditional complaints of malicious harm to livestock and crops, accusations of witchcraft now included references to sexual deviancy, cannibalism, and infanticide. The medieval connection of witchcraft to both idolatry and satanic pact also led to the idea that witches worshipped “familiars,” or demonic spirits concealed in animal form.

In the fifteenth century, accusations of diabolical witchcraft began to become more systematic, and Europe entered a period of organized witch-hunting. Both Protestants and Catholics formed “Inquisitions,” under which thousands of trials were conducted. In some regions, “werewolves” were tried alongside witches, as some Inquisitors (such as Henri Boguet) argued that witchcraft could include demonic shape-shifting—or at least the appearance of shape-shifting. Confessions were sometimes extracted under torture, though this varied dramatically by region, and death by burning, decapitation, or hanging was often the outcome. Corporal punishment, exile, and monetary fines were also passed as punishments. In most areas of Europe, the majority of the accused were women, though Iceland, Estonia, and Russia prosecuted more male than female witches. Throughout Europe, the majority of the accused belonged to lower socioeconomic classes. A number of witch trials were also conducted in European colonies, most famously in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692–1693. However, the fervor for witch trials abated toward the end of the seventeenth century, with a number of legal and religious edicts passed to curtail it. In England, for example, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 dismissed witchcraft as an impossibility and decreed that individuals purporting to practice the craft should be tried as confidence tricksters.

During the period of witch-hunting, numerous publications circulated that denounced and described the practices of witchcraft. In addition to religious and legal guidelines, broadsheets depicted (often in lurid detail) the various crimes of the witches. Additionally, fictional accounts of occult and demonic practice were popular in early modern Europe, and increased literacy meant that these fictions were more widely circulated. As well as behaviors, certain visual characteristics and accessories began to be associated with witches, such as the flying broomstick or distaff, black cats, and, later, the pointed hat.

By the end of the witch trials, the figure of the witch began to appear in other forms of literature. Witches appeared in children’s chapbooks as early as 1710, foreshadowing their common role in folk and fairy tales. The Victorian era saw the beginnings of a more sympathetic understanding of the women tried during the witch-hunts; for instance, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) has a heroine who revises an earlier narrative of persecution, identifying the witch-hunters as the guilty parties and the accused witch as an innocent victim. At the same time, an increasing interest in (reconstructed) pre-Christian beliefs, including Viking, Celtic, and Germanic folk traditions, paved the way for twentieth-century witchcraft “revivals” and modern paganism, such as the development of the contemporary pagan religion of Wicca in the 1920s–1940s. Associated with Neo-Druidism, countercultural movements, New Age philosophy, and reconstructionist pagan traditions, Wicca has also been heavily influenced by the second-wave feminism of the 1970s.

The history of European witchcraft is reflected in contemporary horror in a number of ways. Indeed, the complexity of the history allows for multiple and varied representations of witches. Arcane (often gendered) magical practices can be a source of horror, as in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943); however, books such as Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches (2011) blur genre boundaries by combining sinister occult practices with positive protagonists and fantasy creatures like the romantic vampire. The idea of the “coven” (either a family or social group of witches) often appears in contemporary fiction; for instance, Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series presents a matriarchal family of witches and the malevolent spirit with whom the witches are connected. Elsewhere, it is the practice of witch-hunting that is used to evoke terror and fear. Syd Moore’s Witch Hunt (2012) depicts a present haunted by the specters of women killed during witch-hunts in Essex, and, though its specter is somewhat less sympathetic, “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft draws on the history of the Salem witch trials. Demonic pacts, diabolical cannibalism, and infanticide also appear frequently in modern horror. As with much of the fiction that refers to witch-hunts and trials, there is a tradition of referencing historical and pseudohistorical cases of demonic witchcraft; for instance, Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) is based on an alleged case of demonic possession (and its brutal punishment) in seventeenth-century France. The reclamation of the witch as a positive figure has also been subverted in recent fiction, with paganism and Wicca (rather than witchcraft) being a trope of folk horror fiction, such as Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014).

Hannah Priest

See also: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Possession and Exorcism; Spiritualism.

Further Reading

Blumberg, Jess. 2007. “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials.” smithsonian.com, October 23. Accessed March 26, 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/?no-ist.

Clark, Stuart. 1997. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hutton, Ronald. 1996. “The Roots of Modern Paganism.” In Paganism Today, edited by Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, 4–15. London: Thorsons.

Kieckhefer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Purkiss, Diane. 1996. The Witch in History. London: Routledge.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) revived the British ghost story, introducing social and historical concerns particularly affecting women and families. It enacts social and family cruelties and losses, using the ghostly figure of a woman in black who wreaks deadly revenge on a society whose shortsighted, gendered bigotry separated her from her own child, who drowned tragically when the pony and trap he was traveling in was overwhelmed by sea mist and fell into the marsh sea. The lives of those unlucky enough to come into range and consciousness of the revengeful dead are both haunted and blasted as the curse of Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, leads to the death of local children.

The first-person narration of Arthur Kipps, solicitor, authenticates this traditional Christmas Eve ghost story (a formula reminiscent of M. R. James) as the book begins on that day with Kipps’s step-children asking him to tell them a ghost story. Being too disturbed by the story he has to tell, he instead writes it down.

In his narrated story, Kipps is sent to the remote village of Crythin Gifford to settle the will of the reclusive, heirless Mrs. Drablow. Her home, Eel Marsh House, Lincolnshire, is isolated across a spit covered by sea at high tide. Readers are reminded of the law, inheritance, injustice, fog, and contagion in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and contradictory social values and growing up in Dickens’s Gothic Great Expectations (1861), which also deals with damaging hauntings, and in which Miss Havisham’s house resembles Mrs. Drablow’s with its paralyzing past. The Woman in Black uses familiar ghost story strategies, including spectral visits, sounds in the night, empty rooms echoing with past activities, and an overwhelming atmosphere of dread.

Hill’s novel has a feminist message concerning “fallen women,” focusing on Jennet Humfrye, whose illegitimate son Nathaniel was adopted by her sister, Mrs. Drablow, and whose impoverishment, shame, and mental state disempowered her in life. Nathaniel was brought up at Eel Marsh House without connections to the real world or his increasingly desolate, maddened mother, product of a bigoted age that banished, silenced, and incarcerated unmarried mothers. Her fate, as well as her son’s and subsequently that of the village children, are an indictment against the age.

Isolation is spatially represented by the landline, the narrow spit linking and dividing the house and its wealth from the village, as well as life from death. On his first visit to Eel Marsh House, isolated across the misty marshes, Kipps is traumatized by ghostly movements and sounds, particularly of pony and trap crashing, a terrified child crying, sounds of drowning, then silence. Nathaniel and his nurse Rose Judd, caught in the mist, drowned in the marshes and are condemned beyond death to repeat the fatal accident that drove Jennet to haunt graveyard, marsh, and village while the child’s ghostly crying presence remains on the spit, and at night in the nursery.

Jennet lost everything, went mad, and died. But she returns and wanders as a ghost. Her revenge for her son’s death is wreaked on those whose normal family structures condemned her to the margins. She haunts both graveyard and village, and the children begin to die, one by one. When attending Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Kipps hears of these losses. He also sees the woman in black.

The ghost actually gains a voice beginning when Kipps finds Jennet’s letters begging to see her son. Finally Kipps, too, is caught up in her malevolent revenge cycle. When his wife and son visit and go for a spin in a pony trap he notices, all too late, the woman in black standing at one side. The trap crashes, killing his son and fatally wounding his wife.

The Woman in Black was adapted for the stage in 1987 by playwright Stephen Mallatratt. A British television adaptation was released in 1989 with a script adapted from Hill’s novel by Nigel Kneale. A second film adaptation, directed by James Watkins and starring Daniel Radcliffe as Kipps, was released in 2012 and became a critical and financial success. A sequel, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, was released in 2015.

Gina Wisker

See also: Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; Hill, Susan.

Further Reading

Cox, Donna. 2000. “‘I Have No Story to Tell!’: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.” Intertexts 4, no. 1: 74–89.

Jones, Alan. 2003. “Who Is Haunted by What in The Woman in Black? Alan Jones Considers the Multiple Relations of Susan Hill’s Novel with Its Predecessors in the Gothic Tradition.” English Review 13, no. 3: 10–12.

Kattelman, Beth A. 2014. “Still Scary after All These Years: Gothic Tropes and Theatricality in The Woman in Black.” In Frightful Witnessing: The Rhetoric and (Re)presentation of Fear, edited by Beth A. Kattelman and Magdalena Hodalska, 37–54. Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

WORLD FANTASY AWARD

The World Fantasy Awards are given annually by the World Fantasy Convention, an annual gathering of fantasy and horror professionals and enthusiasts. They are widely recognized as one of the most prestigious awards in the field of speculative fiction. Awards were given at the first convention in 1975 and at all subsequent ones (with some changes in the categories) for best novel, novella (this category was added in 1982), short story, story collection, anthology (added in 1988), artist, Special Award professional, Special Award non-professional, and Life Achievement. A Special Convention Award has sometimes been given. The award is juried by a panel of five judges (usually professional writers, editors, and critics) appointed by the Awards Administration, which is a subgroup of the World Fantasy Convention’s board of directors. Popular nominations may add two items to the final ballot beyond the judges’ choices.

Among prominent novels to have won the World Fantasy Award are The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip (1975), Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson (1976), Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1978), The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe (1980), Little, Big by John Crowley (1982), Towing Jehovah by James Morrow (1995), Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2005), and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (2011). The Life Achievement Awards often reach beyond the usual genre suspects and have been given to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Madeleine L’Engle, and Angelica Gorodischer, in addition to such expected figures as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, and more.

The short story category has also sometimes stretched beyond the expected. In 1989 it went to “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station,” a narrative poem by John M. Ford, and in 1991 to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a Sandman comic by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. The rumor has persisted that the rules were changed to prevent another comic book from winning. This is not true, though if a graphic novel were nominated today it would go in the Special Professional category.

The Special Awards are often given to scholars or editors for a body of effort, not a specific work. The Non-Professional special award often goes to publishers of small-press magazines or books, not amateur material by any means, but endeavors too small for anyone to be doing it for a living.

Given that the first World Fantasy Convention was held in Providence, Rhode Island, and its theme was H. P. Lovecraft and his Circle (with many of his old friends and protégés actually present), it was unsurprising that the award itself took the physical form of a bust of H. P. Lovecraft sculpted by Gahan Wilson. This remained the case for the next forty years, but in 2015, after some recipients expressed unease over Lovecraft’s undeniable racism, the bust was retired amid considerable controversy. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi (who has won twice) angrily returned his awards and announced a boycott of the convention. To date, no new design has been announced, but the award will continue.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Lovecraft, H. P.; Shirley Jackson Award.

Further Reading

Flood, Allison. 2015. “World Fantasy Award Drops HP Lovecraft as Prize Image.” The Guardian, November 9. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image.

Leiber, Fritz, and Stuart David Schiff. 1980. The World Fantasy Awards, Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday.

Wilson, Gahan, ed. 1977. The World Fantasy Awards. New York: Doubleday.

World Fantasy Convention. 2016. http://www.worldfantasy.org.

WYNDHAM, JOHN (1903–1969)

Written during the time of the Cold War (1947–1991) between Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the science fiction horror of British-born John Wyndham—whose full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris—reinvigorated the theme of invasion and end of days, providing a link with and mutual influence between U.S. and British science fiction and fantasy. It also established the disaster focus popular in contemporary films including Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996), 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2009), and the 1953 and 2005 adaptations of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), a major influence on Wyndham’s own writing.

Wyndham’s work depicts strong women as well as men and reflects an island nation’s fear of the invasion of the Other, the terrors of invasion, and a sense of xenophobic powerlessness before the foreign Other with their strange ways. The invasion comes in Day of the Triffids (1951) in the shape of monstrous plants seemingly at home in people’s gardens but actually turned into man-eating, ravenous, independently mobile creatures that prey on helpless people blinded by a meteor shower. In The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), an alien invasion takes place through insemination of human women and the birth of a race of beautiful, soulless blond children (similar to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan youth) who are terrifying partly because of their extreme intelligence.

In Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973), Brian Aldiss misleadingly labeled Wyndham’s work “cosy catastrophe.” The flowering of his science fiction horror (or “logical fantasy,” or “reasoned fantasy” novels—a rejection of the Jules Verne–inspired, largely American label “science fiction”) begins with Day of the Triffids and is followed by The Kraken Wakes (1953), named after Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken” (1830), and serving as a possible influence on director James Cameron’s science fiction action film The Abyss (1989). In Wyndham’s novel the invasion is in the form of alien sea creatures, gas monsters landed from another planet by a meteor shower, which lie dormant inhabiting the sea depths. Living alongside them is impossible, as they harvest humans. The Japanese develop an ultrasonic destructive device that destroys the creatures, but climate change and depopulation have devastated the world. The U.K. edition is less bleak than the U.S. version, implying that humanity is rebuilding civilization.

Wyndham has been recognized as influencing such noted speculative fiction authors as John Christopher, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and Christopher Priest. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (filmed 1956, remade 1978 and 1993) reminds us of both The Day of the Triffids, an example of plant horror, and The Midwich Cuckoos, a changeling tale in which those like humans are in fact inhuman and could take over the world unless destroyed. Wyndham’s final novel, Web (1963), published posthumously, is about spiders on a remote Pacific island that, like Daphne du Maurier’s birds in “The Birds,” suddenly turn en masse against human beings. Wyndham’s invasion disaster horror tales continue to have a widespread influence on contemporary fiction and film.

Gina Wisker

See also: Wells, H. G.

Further Reading

Aldiss, Brian W. 1973. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City: Doubleday.

Ketterer David. 2004. “Questions and Answers: The Life and Fiction of John Wyndham.” New York Review of Science Fiction 16 (March): 1, 6–10.

Manlove, Colin N. 1991. “Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4, no. 1: 29–53.

Moskowitz, Sam. 1966. “John Wyndham.” In Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, 118–132. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.

Y

YARBRO, CHELSEA QUINN (1942–)

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a prolific American author who is probably best known for a series of historical vampire novels, although she writes in other genres as well. She has written (and published) more than sixty novels, numerous short stories, and several works of nonfiction. She was the first female president of the Horror Writers Association, and to date is one of only three female recipients of the World Horror Convention Grand Master’s Award, the others being Anne Rice and Tanith Lee.

Yarbro’s writing career has spanned over forty years, and in that time she written under a number of pseudonyms, including Quinn Fawcett (which represents the historical mysteries she has written, including a series centered on Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft); Camille Gabor (fantasy); T. F. C. Hopkins (works of historical nonfiction); and Trystam Kith (horror). Nonetheless, she is best known as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and has published the majority of her work under that same. She has also collaborated with a number of different authors, notably Armin Shimerman (who is better known as an actor, having played Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Principal Snyder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). She also collaborated with fellow horror author Suzy McKee Charnas on the short story “Advocates,” published in 1991.

Yarbro has contributed to many different genres of fiction, including science fiction, young adult, and Westerns, as well as a few poems. She has said she writes three to four books in a typical year, as advances for her work remain modest and she needs to earn a living. Arguably she is best known for her historical fantasy writing, and perhaps her best known creation is the aristocratic vampire the Comte de St. Germain. This character made his literary debut in 1978 in the novel Hotel Transylvania, only a few short years after Anne Rice revolutionized the literary vampire in Interview with the Vampire (1976). Although he has never quite attained the same level of fame as rock star vampire Lestat de Lioncourt from Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, St. Germain is far more thoughtful and conscience-bound than the rebellious Lestat. He is also noticeably less violent than the majority of fictional vampires, despite facing some truly diabolical nemeses. Introduced amidst the corruption of pre-Revolutionary France in Hotel Transylvania, St. Germain is the prototypical “sympathetic vampire”: he is sophisticated, philosophical, and compassionate, and spends much of his immortal life musing on the shortcomings and follies of mankind. Yarbro deliberately crafted her vampire to be at odds with traditional portrayals of the vampire such as in Stoker’s Dracula, and yet still have him be recognizable as a member of the undead. Nor did she stint on the eroticism that has come to be associated with the modern vampire (with the exception of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series). Although incapable of penetrative sexual intercourse (he has no blood flow), St. Germain finds satisfaction in pleasuring women, a bold stance to take at the time the first books in the series were written, but one that possibly demonstrates the influence of second-wave feminism and a new emphasis on female sexual pleasure.

St. Germain has been portrayed in settings that range from ancient Rome to post–World War II France, and Yarbro continues to plan novels featuring him. He has featured in several of her short stories as well. Yarbro has also produced two spin-off novels, Out of the House of Life (1990) and In the Face of Death (2004), featuring Madelaine de Montalia, St. Germain’s protégé, whom he transforms into a vampire in Hotel Transylvania. A second spin-off series features another prominent lover of St. Germain’s, Atta Olivia Clemens, who stars in a trilogy of her own: A Flame in Byzantium (1987), Crusader’s Torch (1988), and A Candle for D’Artagnan (1989).

Of her other novels and short stories, Yarbro has not written much science fiction since the early 1980s, and much of her fictional output consists of horror and fantasy, including two books devoted to the vampire’s close cousin, the werewolf: Beastnights (1989) and The Lost Prince (originally published as The Godforsaken in 1983). The former focuses on a bestial murderer and rapist stalking the streets of San Francisco, while the latter is a total contrast in that it focuses on the heir to the Spanish throne when the Inquisition was at its most powerful. These novels were inspired by a conversation with her then-editor in which she explained that lycanthropes did not interest her, as she perceived them as victims of fate who were incapable of dealing with their lycanthropy. She wondered why they would not simply end things if life became intolerable. When her editor queried what would happen if suicide was not an option, Yarbro was sufficiently intrigued to begin writing the story of the cursed Spanish prince. The novel is yet another example of how Yarbro typically endeavors to explore established horror themes and motifs from different perspectives and undermine the clichés that have arisen.

Of her nonfiction, Yarbro has authored a book on Middle Eastern history, entitled Empires, Wars, and Battles: The Middle East (2007), and on a naval battle between the Turks and European Crusaders, titled Confrontation at Lepanto (2006). Her works on Spiritualism, Messages from Michael, have also drawn considerable attention. What have become known as the Michael Teachings—a series of four books, the first published in 1979—record the three-decade-long conversations between a spiritual entity known as Michael and a group of friends based in San Francisco. The teachings endorse reincarnation and explore the experiences souls undergo during each lifetime.

She has received a number of award nominations for her writing and has been the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards: a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, and an International Horror Guild Living Legend Award. Strangely, despite the popularity of St. Germain and other stories Yarbro has written, there have yet to be any TV or film adaptations of her work. She continues to be a prolific writer.

Carys Crossen

See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Spiritualism; Vampires; Werewolves.

Further Reading

Bogstad, Janice M. 2003. “Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1942–” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Edited by Richard Bleiler, 993–1002. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Fitzgerald, Gil. 1988. “History as Horror: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 128–134. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

Howison, Del. 2015. “Inkslinger of the Highest Degree: Exclusive Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” Blumhouse.com, December 31. http://www.blumhouse.com/2015/12/31/inkslinger-of-the-highest-degree-exclusive-interview-with-chelsea-quinn-yarbro.

Phin, Vanessa Rose. 2015. “An Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” Strange Horizons, September 21. http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150921/4yarbro-a.shtml.

Swift, Sondra F. 1999. “Toward the Vampire as Savior: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain Series Compared with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni.” In The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature, edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, 155–164. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

October 2016

In this interview Yarbro shares some of the reasons behind several prominent aspects of her authorial career: her reasons for writing across a very broad spectrum of genres, her reasons for writing about vampires and werewolves, and her reasons for approaching established generic and mythic tropes in a way that subverts them. She also talks about her personal interest in Spiritualism and the occult, and she offers a list of recommended genre reading—not just horror but also science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. She closes with some thoughts on the purpose of horror fiction and the reasons why people seek it.

Matt Cardin: In a career spanning five decades, you have not only written a huge number of books, but you have written across a huge span of forms and genres. What is it that drives you toward such diversity in your authorial output? And is there any central impulse lying behind that diversity, a kind of core mission that threads its way through your work and unites it into an organic whole?

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: Most simply put, I like to read in a wide variety of genres, and as a result, I like to write in a wide variety of genres. Doing the same mindset book after book tends to slow me down, but by genre-jumping and genre-straddling, my story sense stays fresh. As to a thematic element in my work, I’m sure there is one, but I don’t worry about it, since paying attention to it would make me self-conscious and that is pure poison to fictionists.

MC: The character of Comte de St. Germain has now entered the canon of vampire literature. What led you to write about vampires in the first place? And why do you think they continue to exert such a mesmerizing power over the minds of not just the reading public but people in general? What’s the fascination?

CQY: I wrote about vampires because there is something fascinating about them, and that’s still true. As I have said before, after reading Dracula at fourteen, I read a lot more vampire fiction, and after a while, I wondered how far the Dracular model of vampires could be turned to the positive and still have a recognizable vampire. I’m still exploring that issue. I think some of the fascination comes from the high level of the ambiguity of the vampire—improperly dead, dependent on the living for its continued survival—which is at the heart of the whole vampire myth.

MC: How about werewolves, which have also played a part in your novels? What fascinates people about them? What fascinates you about them?

CQY: Werewolves are trickier beasties, and not nearly so engaging as vampires, although they, too, are ancient mythic archetypes in all known present and historical human societies. If vampires are The Other outside us, werecreatures are The Other within us. The most fun I’ve had with were-ness has been in The Vildecaz Talents, with Ninianee, who for the three nights of the full moon turns into a mammal, but she doesn’t know which mammal until her first transformation for the month.

MC: In your horror writing you have tended to approach established themes, tropes, and motifs in a way that overturns and undermines them. You greet clichés and then explode them. Is this something you consciously set out to do? Is it perhaps linked to that core sense of authorial mission alluded to above?

CQY: Yes, you’re right—I like to turn mythic figures upside down, back-to-front, inside-out, and so forth, and I do it deliberately, especially where there are inconsistencies in the archetype I’m dealing with. It lets me explore those figures in ways I couldn’t do if I were dealing directly with the folkloric image, and what’s the fun in that?

MC: The fact that you write supernatural horror while also writing about, and being personally involved in, Spiritualism, as expressed in your Messages from Michael series, puts you in relationship with a venerable line of authors in the horror and Gothic traditions—such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Shirley Jackson—who have likewise held personal beliefs about the supernatural that worked its way into their written fictions. How do you personally understand the striking doubleness or duality of the supernatural, which in one context is the standard subject matter for stories about fear and horror, and in another is a source of much more benign and comforting notions and emotions about the nature of reality?

CQY: First, I don’t believe in the supernatural—I believe everything that’s happening, no matter how weird or creepy, is natural, or it wouldn’t be able to occur. What is causing these things to happen is what interests me, and why I’ve been involved in occult studies for years, and so far, continue to do so. My work may reflect my interests in occult matters, but rarely do they reflect my opinions, since one of the most important aspect of writing, at least for me, is to take a story on its terms, and to reveal the experiences and opinions of the characters who inhabit it. The Michael material, which is taken from a real group and actual channeled information, is fictional only in that the identities of group members are not revealed, and most of those characters in the group in the Michael books are amalgamations of members, not portraits.

MC: Having made your mark on horror, what authors and works would you recommend in general to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Or feel free to aim the question at the larger universe of speculative fiction as a whole, since you have worked for so long in all areas of it. Which books and authors strike you as especially important and profound both for speculative fiction and for literature as a whole?

CQY: I’m not very good at recommendations for newcomers to the various genres—I’ve read far too much over the years to be able to know what to point out as a first step. But I can make some generalities. If you haven’t read Dracula and you like vampires, by all means do so. A lot of people like Lovecraft (I don’t very much) for horror, and M. R. James (me, too). Of course, I recommend Robert Bloch for that most difficult of all forms, the funny horror story. If you like science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon were among my early favorites; Sturgeon and Moore remain so to this day. If you like mysteries, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Thorne Smith, James Ellroy, and Dick Francis are some writers whose work sticks with me. As fantasy goes, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, and Ursula Le Guin held my interest more fully than some others. Sitting in his own multi-universe between fantasy and science fiction, R. A. Lafferty was a unique voice in my developmental period. I mention these because they were the ones I liked early in my career, when I was eager to see how the Big Names did it. On the other hand, some of my opinions are colored by having known a number of the ones listed, which probably flavors my understanding [of] their work. Almost all of them are senior citizens now, or no longer with us, and don’t reflect the current array of Big Names, though I like Neil Gaiman very much, and Charles de Lint. I hope this might provide some useful ways to begin; they certainly did for me.

MC: Finally, do you have any thoughts on the purpose or meaning of horror fiction? What does it give us? Why do people actually seek the distressing emotional experiences of fright, dread, disgust, and dismay?

CQY: Most human beings don’t mind being frightened if they’re not in any real danger—think of roller-coasters and films—because it is thrilling to have that frisson that horror provides. A great many folk-stories and fairy tales are not only cautionary but scary because that cold finger down the spine is a lot of fun when it is imaginary, and we seek it out in stories for that reason. Such tales make it okay to be frightened and promise you a kind of vaccine against the very actual dangers and threats of real life. If you know how to handle a Lovecraftian sea monster, there’s a chance that you can deal with dry rot under the deck or the political news from the Middle East.

“THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER”

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in June 1890 in Pasadena, California and published in the New England Magazine (January 1892) under her married name, Stetson. She had suffered from postpartum depression while with her first husband in New England and was ordered by the prominent neurologist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell to take his rest cure, consisting of enforced bed rest for a month, followed by a prescription ordering her to limit her intellectual activities to two hours a day and never to write again. The result brought her to the edge of suicide, until she fought back, left the East Coast for California, and wrote the story over two days in 103-degree weather. She sent the published story to Mitchell, but contrary to rumor, he never responded or changed his therapy.

The semi-autobiographical story, in the form of a diary, recounts the experience of a clinically depressed woman given a rest cure similar to Mitchell’s. The entire story is set in an upper room of a rented house where the woman is allowed nothing but rest, and she has nothing to do but stare at the ugly wallpaper. Eventually, she begins to see something moving behind the wallpaper’s patterns. She soon realizes it is a woman who appears to be trapped behind the twisting pattern and is trying to get out. She decides to free the other woman by stripping off the wallpaper. By the end she has seemingly become the other woman.

More than two decades after the publication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman explained the “story behind the story” in a brief piece that she published in her magazine The Forerunner. “For many years,” she said, “I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” She described how a “noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country,” gave her the “rest cure,” sending her home and instructing her to curtail her intellectual life, “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again.” The result of this treatment, she said, was well-nigh disastrous:

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite—ultimately recovering some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

Matt Cardin

Source: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1913. “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?” At The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/literatureofprescription/b2Reading.html. Originally published in The Forerunner, October 1913.

Several interpretations are possible. Initially “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was seen as a powerful, Poe-esque description of a woman’s psychological descent into madness. This fits with the author’s stated intention in writing it.

Gilman was a feminist activist, and a later view interprets it as a feminist allegory in which the hallucinated woman behind the wallpaper is the narrator’s doppelgänger, and the imprisoning wallpaper pattern symbolizes the contemporary patriarchal social norms. The room where the protagonist is confined is described as a nursery, which has been interpreted as symbolizing the way women were treated as children.

It can also be interpreted as a tale of possession. The woman in the wallpaper is the spirit of a madwoman who had previously been imprisoned in the room and had died there. The room’s barred windows, rings in the walls, nailed-down bed, and deep gouges in the plaster are more suggestive of a prison than a nursery. At the end, the madwoman’s soul possesses the narrator’s mind.

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” has been filmed more than once, by the BBC for Masterpiece Theater (1980) and as a student film by Alyssa Lundgren (2011). A feature film, The Yellow Wallpaper (2012), directed by Logan Thomas, is about Gilman’s creation of the story.

Lee Weinstein

See also: Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.

Further Reading

Dock, Julie Bates, ed. 1998. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Golden, Catherine, ed. 1992. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” New York: Feminist Press.

Scharnhorst, Gary. 1985. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1989. “Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Centenary.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, 51–64. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.

“YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN”

The author of this story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was one of the first writers to make use of the darker corners of America’s Puritan past. He was uniquely suited to do so, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804 and a descendant of John Hathorne, one of the judges involved in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Nathaniel later changed the spelling of the family name, adding the “w,” to distance himself from his notorious ancestor.

Published in 1835, “Young Goodman Brown” is set about the time of the Salem witch panic; an offhand reference to “King William” dates the setting to 1688–1702. The story is heavily allegorical, but anticipates much modern horror fiction. This and others of Hawthorne’s works attracted the admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and had an enormous influence on H. P. Lovecraft.

The grim concluding passage of “Young Goodman Brown” describes the ruinous effect of the story’s events on Goodman Brown—an effect that played out inexorably regardless of whether or not he had truly witnessed a satanic sabbat in the forest:

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom. (Hawthorne 1864, 104–105)

Matt Cardin

Source: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1864. “Young Goodman Brown.” In Mosses from an Old Manse. Volume I. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

The “goodman” (i.e., member of the Puritan community) of the title sets out from Salem into a dark forest at night. His wife, “aptly named” Faith, begs him not to go, but he has an urgent “errand.” Once in the woods he meets a man who is clearly the Devil and who proceeds to disabuse him of the notion that the respectable members of Salem society are true Christians at all. Each of them is in league with Satan in one way or another. Brown overhears the conversation of two prominent clergymen as they ride by on horseback on their way to a witches’ sabbat. Even as he comes to fear that all the world is corrupt, he clings to the hope that his wife, Faith, is pure; but a cloud passes over, he hears voices from it, and a ribbon like the ones Faith wears in her hair drifts down. When he reaches the sabbat itself, he is horrified to discover that just about everybody he knows, both sinners and the supposedly pious, including Faith, are present. He and Faith are to be initiated into the Devil’s communion that night. A demonic preacher delivers a sermon to the effect that sin is the natural state of mankind, which is actually an orthodox Puritan view of things (thus generating a further irony: that the Devil’s theology is quite sound). But right before the two are baptized into evil, Goodman Brown calls out to his wife to resist and look to heaven. The witches vanish. He is alone in the woods.

The implication is that it may have been a dream, and certainly, Goodman Brown gains no comfort from the notion. As he returns to Salem, he sees hypocrisy everywhere, and his ultimately long life ends in despair.

One of the great mysteries of this story is the question of what Goodman Brown was doing in the forest in the first place. Perhaps he was already planning to sell himself to the Devil, and he was only incidentally saved by his horror of seeing his wife succumb to similar corruption. Or perhaps the “gloom” that followed him for the rest of his days was a matter of guilt. As a Calvinist (as Puritans were), he would have believed in double predestination, the idea that some people are bound for heaven and others for hell, and nothing they can do will change the outcome. While it would not be possible to know who is going where, the events of this story are surely not a good sign. In this story, Hawthorne effectively captured the sense of spiritual dread that filled the Puritans’ lives and formed the foundation for some of America’s most sinister folklore.

Darrell Schweitzer

See also: Demons and Devils; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Witches and Witchcraft.

Further Reading

Magee, Bruce R. 2003. “Faith and Fantasy in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 29, no. 1: 1–24.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. 1991. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 111–120. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Olson, Steven. 2009. “A History of the American Mind: ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 52: 31–54.

“Overview: ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” 1997. In Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events That Influenced Them, Vol. 1: Ancient Times to the American and French Revolutions (Prehistory–1790s), edited by Joyce Moss and George Wilson, 420–426. Detroit, MI: Gale.

“YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER”

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” is a short story by Robert Bloch that was first published in the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales and collected in his first American short fiction collection, The Opener of the Way (1945). It has become Bloch’s best-known short story, in part because it was instrumental in popularizing the theme of Jack the Ripper and his traits as a serial killer in horror fiction.

The story unfolds in (then) contemporary Chicago, where British Ripperologist Sir Guy Hollis enlists psychiatrist John Carmody (who narrates the story) in his search for Jack the Ripper, the infamous murderer of five women in London’s Whitechapel district in 1888, who was never caught and whose identity has never been established. Sir Guy purports to have proof that Jack the Ripper’s kills were blood sacrifices made to maintain his immortality, and that he is still alive. He believes that the Ripper’s next cycle of murders is about to take place, and he enlists Carmody to introduce him to Chicago society where he thinks the Ripper may be hiding. The Ripper’s identity, when revealed at the story’s end, comes as a jarring surprise: he is none other than Carmody, the narrator, who has achieved immortality through his murders, which are actually blood sacrifices to dark gods.

“Your Truly, Jack the Ripper” is one of the earliest stories in which Bloch explored the psychology of a serial killer, an interest that would culminate in his renowned novel Psycho (1959). The story became part of an informal trilogy formed by Bloch’s futuristic Ripper story “A Toy for Juliette” and Harlan Ellison’s sequel “Prowler in the City on the Edge of Forever,” both published in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). Bloch’s novel Night of the Ripper (1984), an adjunct to “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” is a period tale about efforts to apprehend the Ripper at the time of his murders. Bloch also wrote the script for the 1967 Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” featuring another take on an immortal Jack the Ripper. “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” has inspired several anthologies of horror stories on the theme of Jack the Ripper, notably Michel Parry’s Jack the Knife (1975), Susan Casper and Jack Dann’s Jack the Ripper (1988), and Ross Lockhart’s Tales of Jack the Ripper (2013). The story has been adapted many times for extraliterary media, first for The Kate Smith Radio Hour in 1944 and, most memorably, as the April 11, 1961, episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

See also: Bloch, Robert; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Larson, Randall. 1986. Robert Bloch: Starmont Reader’s Guide 37. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

Zinna, Eduardo. “Yours Truly, Robert Bloch.” Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Accessed July 5, 2016. http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-bloch.html.

Z

ZOMBIES

The figure now known as the zombie has haunted the peripheries of folklore and narratives since the first stirrings of literature. Defying concrete definition, the figure has been in a state of flux, metamorphosing with each appearance, standing as a descriptive manifestation of cultural anxieties regarding selfhood and the transition from life to death. Its prominence in contemporary narratives is the result of a unique evolutionary development in which traditional stories were altered by popular fiction and film to form a new entry in the gallery of iconic monsters.

The concepts of death and the separation of the soul from the body, or the frightening prospect of a rampant body lacking the guiding reticence of a soul, have figured as themes within folklore and literature since The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE), in which the goddess Ishtar threatens to raise the dead so that they can feed upon the living. Revenants arise in folklore from such varied sources as the Chinese hopping corpse known as Jiangshi and the Scandinavian underworld figure called draugr to the Bible with its multiple examples of human resurrection in the name of God.

The first English appearance of the word “zombie” was in Robert Southey’s three-volume History of Brazil, published between 1810 and 1819. The “zombie” to which Southey refers is the “nzambi” deity of Angolan folklore. It was not until 1929, however, that the notion of zombieism took hold of the American imagination with the publication of William Seabrook’s anthropological account of Haiti, The Magic Island. Seabrook describes Haiti as an island of magic and Voodoo, detailing local accounts of bodies turned into zombies by Houngans, practitioners of Voodoo. These Haitian zombies are described as dead-eyed, laboring brutes, controlled with magic to fulfill the commands of the Voodoo master.

Seabrook’s colorful account of Haiti and Voodoo went on to inspire further developments of the zombie figure, the most notable being the horror film White Zombie (1932), directed by Victor and Edward Halperin. Further examples of the Haitian zombie were depicted in similar films, such as in King of the Zombies (1941), Revolt of the Zombies (1936), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

Simultaneously, an alternative version of the zombie figure was emerging. Inspired by the proto-science fiction narrative of Mary Shelley’s seminal Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) and the somnambulist Cesare from Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922) saw a zombie-like figure emerge that connected scientific zombiefication with cannibalism. The zombie continued to appear as a figure straddling the boundary between Gothic horror and science fiction in films such as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), where extraterrestrials resurrect the dead to wage war against humanity.

World War Z: Breaking the Zombie Mold

Max Brooks’s 2006 novel World War Z was a pivotal novel in the renaissance of zombie fiction in the early twenty-first century, offering a distinct and influential approach to the living dead as a genre by exploring the fall of humanity and society as a result of governmental bureaucracy, ignorance, miscommunication, and global distrust that allowed the zombie virus to spread out of control. In writing the book as a follow-up to his best-selling Zombie Survival Guide (2003), Brooks deliberately chose to avoid the established zombie narrative that focuses on a group of survivors forced to protect themselves from the cannibalistic undead. Instead World War Z is structured as an oral history (modeled on Studs Terkel’s 1984 nonfiction book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II) in which the battle for survival is presented as a global war against an enemy that is relentless and ever-growing.

Forgoing a traditional hero in favor of a multitude of narrators from around the world and across social strata, the novel is constructed as a series of eyewitness testimonies, recounting the firsthand experiences of each stage of a global zombie outbreak and war. While the war has ostensibly been won, this conglomeration of international voices, from military tacticians and CIA operatives to nurses, clerics, and those caring for the survivors, considers the war’s global ramifications, reflecting on how it has reshaped international communities and identity. The novel offers an alternative to the Anglo-Eurocentrism of much of apocalyptic and horror literature, in which the apocalypse is usually equated with the fall of the Western world, by highlighting the impact of sociocultural, economic, and military decisions of global superpowers upon global citizens. It is on the scale of the apocalypse that the horror within the novel lies.

Stacey Abbott

While film director George A. Romero is famously credited as the creator of the modern zombie, it was with the publication of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend in 1954 that the depiction of a zombie-like figure veered away from the familiar mind-controlled Haitian zombie toward a zombie imbued with new characteristics. Albeit not strictly a zombie novel, Matheson’s vampiric figures served as the inspiration for the popular contemporary zombies that dominate film, literature, and video games today. Not only did Matheson’s text invert the Gothic threat from something that haunts from within to an external threat attempting to invade the sanctuary of the Gothic edifice, but it further informed the zombie mythos by interpreting the figure within a dystopian framework, thereby linking the figure with the notion of apocalypse. Further, I Am Legend established the plague mythology as a replacement for Voodoo zombieism.

It was not until the 1964 film adaptation of Matheson’s novel, retitled The Last Man on Earth and starring Vincent Price, that the early form of the zombie began to take shape. The trailer for the film makes multiple references to the creatures’ zombie-like nature and opens with the title card, “This is the world of the living dead,” a phrase that went on to inspire Romero’s first installment of his zombie film series, Night of the Living Dead, a mere four years later.

In Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), radioactive contamination from a returning space probe is responsible for the dead rising from their graves. Following Night of the Living Dead, with its African American protagonist serving as social commentary on racial issues in America, and its basic plot and characterizations offering subtextual criticism of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), Romero continued to release zombie films that echoed the societal concerns of the time. Dawn of the Dead (1978) served as a critique of American capitalism and the cult of consumerism. Day of the Dead (1985) critiqued the Cold War, Land of the Dead (2005) questioned the unequal divide between the American rich and poor, Diary of the Dead (2007) commented on surveillance culture, and Survival of the Dead (2009) focused on patriarchal pride. Romero’s use of the zombie as a figure of social criticism cemented the figure as a malleable representation of changing societal concerns.

Examples of living zombies can also be seen in Romero’s The Crazies (1975, remade 2010), Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), and the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), which depict the apocalyptic effects of untested bioweapons that turn the infected living into homicidal zombie figures. The upsurge of zombie narratives post-9/11 could be seen as a representation of violence against the dehumanized other, while comedic zombie films such as Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) exhibit social commentary on how the mindless regularity of daily routine has already disconnected humanity from reality; society is already in a zombiefied state.

The most recent development of the zombie figure has seen the zombie repositioned as the sympathetic hero, or antihero, as more narratives are frequently imbuing the zombie with sentience. Zombies like those in Isaac Marion’s novel Warm Bodies (2010), adapted into a film of the same name in 2013, are given the capacity to redevelop the human qualities of self-awareness and conscience, and even fall in love. Dominic Mitchell’s BBC drama series In the Flesh (2013–2014) depicts a society in which zombies can control their hunger through regulated doses of medicine, and in this condition attempt to reassimilate into the society they once ravaged, albeit as persecuted Others. This attempt to humanize the zombie reflects contemporary societal concerns with the isolation of “Others” within society and the restructuring of a more inclusive system of racial and gender rights.

Unlike the zombie’s horror brethren, the vampire and the werewolf, who found their popularity in folklore and literature prior to their emergence in film, the zombie has always been a staple figure of the horror film genre and has only seen its popularity as a literary figure increased in the post-9/11 imagination. Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are the Angels (2010), Mira Grant’s Feed (2010), and the popular World War Z (2006) by Max Brooks serve as notable examples of classic zombie apocalypse novels; while John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead (2005), Joe McKinney’s Dead World series (2009–2014), and Brian Keene’s The Rising series (2003–2015) contribute alternative approaches to the figure of the zombie. Keene’s first novel, The Rising (2003), features bodies that have been possessed by evil spirits following a failed particle accelerator experiment; the theme of possession allows for sentient zombies with manipulative intelligence.

The zombie has also gained popularity as the literary subject of graphic novels, popularized by Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead (2003–present), which has been adapted into a television series of the same name, and Chris Robertson and Michael Allred’s comic book series iZOMBIE (2010–2012), featuring a sentient zombie named Gwen who works in a morgue, also adapted into a television series of the same name. The zombie has even invaded classic literature with the mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a parody by Seth Grahame-Smith that sees Elizabeth Bennet taking on the role of zombie hunter, as she and her four sisters fight off a horde of zombies.

The malleability of the zombie and the continued popularity of its use as a figure of social critique ensures that the zombie will continue to function in narratives that explore the sociopolitical concerns of contemporary humanity.

Kelly Gardner

See also: Ajvide Lindqvist, John; Frankenstein; I Am Legend; Keene, Brian.

Further Reading

Bishop, Kyle William. 2010. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Browning, John Edgar. 2010. “Survival Horrors, Survival Spaces: Tracing the Modern Zombie (cine)myth.” Horror Studies 2, no. 1: 41–59.

Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Lauro Juliet, eds. 2011. Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. New York: Fordham University Press.

Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books.

Select Bibliography

Backer, Ron. 2015. Classic Horror Films and the Literature That Inspired Them. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Barron, Neil. 1990. Horror Literature: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Garland.

Birkhead, Edith. 1921. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable.

Bleiler, E. F. 1983. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Bleiler, E. F., ed. 1985. Supernatural Fiction Writers. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s.

Bleiler, Richard, ed. 2002. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. New York: Scribner’s.

Bloom, Clive. 2010. Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present. London and New York: Continuum.

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About the Editor and Contributors

The Editor

Matt Cardin is a writer, editor, college administrator, and college instructor specializing in the intersection of horror, religion, creativity, consciousness, and culture. In addition to teaching English and religion at Ranger College in Stephenville, Texas, he is the editor of ABC-CLIO’s Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture (2014) and Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies (2015). He also edited Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014), for which he received a World Fantasy Award nomination. He is also the author of the horror collections Divinations of the Deep, Dark Awakenings, and To Rouse Leviathan. He blogs at The Teeming Brain.

The Contributors

Stacey Abbott is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton. A genre specialist, she writes extensively about cult television and has also written about vampires, science fiction, romantic comedies, and the horror genre. She is the author of, among others, Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (2016).

Aalya Ahmad holds a doctorate in Comparative Literary Studies, specializing in horror fiction. She teaches across several different disciplines on horror literature and film, and publishes work on various aspects of horror, including the pedagogy of horror, race, class, gender and horror, zombies, indigenization, and Canadian horror film. Her first love was Edgar Allan Poe.

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He specialises in Gothic and Horror Studies, and his publications include Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror: A Literary History (editor, 2016), Horror Film and Affect (2016), Digital Horror (co-editor, 2015), and Body Gothic (2014).

Melanie R. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of English at Glenville State College. She is the author of Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013) and co-editor of The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013) and Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016).

Eleanor Beal is Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her forthcoming publications include entries in the edited collections Transmedia Creatures: Connecting Frankenstein’s Afterlives and Divine Horror: The Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Supernatural. She is the author of the book Postsecular Gothic (forthcoming) for the Palgrave Gothic series.

Steve Behrends edited Clark Ashton Smith’s fugitive fictions (Strange Shadows, 1989) and other Smith titles; contributed to the literary criticism of Smith, Donald Wandrei, and Darrell Schweitzer; and is an avid reader of the British New Wave. He trained in the field of particle physics and is currently employed as a technical analyst in the Boston area.

Richard Bleiler is collections librarian at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book, The Strange Case of ‘The Angels of Mons’ (McFarland 2015), describes the controversy following the September 30, 1914 publication of Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” and collects for the first time many of the primary documents written to argue that angelic forces assisted the English troops.

Clive Bloom is an academic and author who has written widely on areas as diverse as popular culture, the Gothic, and political protest. He is the author of Gothic Histories and the editor in chief of Palgrave Gothic. His latest book, Thatcher’s Secret War: Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974–1990, was listed for “Radical Book of the Year 2016.”

Naomi Simone Borwein is a polymath disguised as a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the Gothic, theory, and modern American literature, with a specialization in Southern literature. She engages with cultural and literary history, and quantitative methodologies.

Jason V Brock is an award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, composer, and artist. He is the author of Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy (2014), and he was art director/managing editor for Dark Discoveries magazine for more than four years. He also runs the biannual digest [NAMEL3SS], devoted to the macabre, weird, uncanny, and esoteric.

Simon Brown is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Kingston University and has written on various aspects of film and TV horror. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Screening Stephen King: King Adaptations and the Horror Genre on Film and Television, which is due for publication in 2018.

John Edgar Browning is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is internationally recognized for his horror, Dracula, and vampire scholarship, with over fourteen published or forthcoming books and over sixty-five shorter works. He is also widely regarded as a chief expert on real vampirism in the United States and abroad.

Chloé Germaine Buckley is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She has a PhD in literature with a focus on contemporary Gothic fiction. She has published numerous articles and chapters on Gothic and horror literature and film, and is co-editor of Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi.

Elsa Charléty is a PhD candidate in American literature at the Sorbonne University and in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her areas of interest include the representation of gendered bodies and voices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature of the American South and the Caribbean, and the literary history of Gothic and horror narratives.

Michael Cisco is the author of various books, including The Divinity Student, The Great Lover, and ANIMAL MONEY. His scholarly work has appeared in Iranian Studies, Lovecraft and Influence, Thinking Horror, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in New York City.

Carys Crossen was awarded her PhD in English and American Studies from the University of Manchester in 2012. Since then she has spent her time alternately studying to become a librarian, and researching and writing. Her favorite topics of study are vampires, gender, the Gothic, and, most particularly, werewolves.

Stephen Curtis has a PhD in English literature and specializes in the darker aspects of early modern literature, in particular the significance of blood in the period and the connections between tragedy and horror. He has written and presented on various aspects of early modern drama, contemporary Gothic literature, horror movies, and video games.

Dara Downey is a Lecturer in English Literature at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and Vice-Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies. She is author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave 2014) and is currently working on a monograph on slaves and servants in American Gothic fiction.

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz has edited many horror fiction anthologies and written many articles and reviews for The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Lovecraft Studies, and other journals. He is a senior editor at Barnes & Noble and has contributed to numerous reference works. He co-edited, with S. T. Joshi, Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (2005).

Benjamin F. Fisher, Emeritus Professor, English, University of Mississippi, has published much about horror and related topics, notably on topics abut Poe. He is a past president of the Poe Studies association and Chairman of the Speaker Series for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

Matt Foley is a Lecturer in English at University of Stirling. He writes on the Gothic, transgression, and modernism. His most recent publication is an article on the acoustics of the Gothic romance for the journal Horror Studies. Current projects include writing a book on haunting modernisms and being the main academic contact for the Patrick McGrath archive at Stirling.

Kaja Franck’s thesis at the University of Herfordshire looks at the werewolf in literature as an ecoGothic monster, concentrating on the relationship between wilderness, wolves, and werewolves, and how language is used to demarcate animal alterity. She co-organized the Company of Wolves conference in September 2015.

Kelly Gardner is an early career researcher and teaching fellow at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her PhD thesis explored the emergence and development of the sentient zombie. Her research interests include Gothic literature, posthumanism, transhumanism, and speculative fiction. Her recent publications have focused on the historical zombie, apocalypse, and the use of sound in zombie-themed media.

Richard Gavin is an acclaimed Canadian author of horror fiction and esotericism. He has published seven books, including Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness (Three Hands Press) and The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul (Theion Publishing). He welcomes readers at www.richardgavin.net.

Jon Greenaway is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University researching theology, Gothic literature, and imaginative apologetics. He is also behind the popular online account @thelitcritguy, popularizing literary and critical theory.

Bob Hodges is a PhD candidate in literature and critical theory at University of Washington. His dissertation covers nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic detective fiction vis-à-vis political liberalism. He is co-editor of the forthcoming The Weird and the Southern Imaginary. He has contributed to Critical Survey of Graphic Novels, ESQ, Poe Review, and Clues.

Jerrold E. Hogle (PhD, Harvard) is University Distinguished Professor in English at the University of Arizona; past President of the International Gothic Association; author of, among other books, The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera (2002); and editor of the Cambridge Companions to Gothic Fiction (2002) and The Modern Gothic (2014).

Jim Holte is a Professor of English and Film Studies at East Carolina University. He is editor of The Fantastic Vampire and author of Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations. He has written extensively on film, horror, and fantasy.

Gary Hoppenstand is a professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, and he currently serves as the Secretary for Academic Governance at MSU. He has published numerous books and articles in the field of popular culture studies, and has won Michigan State University’s 2008 Distinguished Faculty Award.

William Hughes is Professor of Medical Humanities and Gothic Literature at Bath Spa University, England. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of seventeen books, including That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (2015), The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (2013), and EcoGothic (with Andrew Smith, 2013).

Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and a lecturer in creative writing. He has research interests, as a practitioner and critic, in the fields of the Gothic and weird fiction, innovative fiction, digital fiction, contemporary literature, and creative writing pedagogy. His novel, The Wanderer, was published in the summer of 2014.

Brian Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Recent publications include articles on posthumanism and ecology in Swamp Thing, H. P., Lovecraft, and Ridley Scott’s Alien films. His current research focuses on superheroes and melodrama.

S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He is the editor of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (2005) and American Supernatural Tales (2007).

Ian Kinane is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, London. He researches and teaches in the areas of modern and contemporary literature, genre fiction, and global literatures.

Laura R. Kremmel holds a PhD from Lehigh University and is a visiting assistant professor at Lehigh. Her interests include Gothic literature, British Romanticism, medical humanities, history of medicine, and disability studies. She has published articles on Gothic studies, romanticism, and disability, and is co-editor of The Handbook to Horror Literature, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.

Lisa Kröger is a writer and editor living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She has a PhD in Gothic literature, focusing on women writers. Most recently, she edited an essay collection on the writings of Shirley Jackson, published with Routledge. She is also a member of the Horror Writers Association.

Rob Latham is an independent scholar living in Los Angeles. He is the author of Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago 2002) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford 2014) and Science Fiction Criticism: Essential Writings (Bloomsbury 2017).

Chun H. Lee is an instructor at Brazosport College in Lake Jackson Texas. His work has appeared in Many Genres: One Craft, Dissections, and many others. His favorite class to teach is creative writing because seeing imagination at work is always rewarding.

Miles Link is a Research Associate in the School of English in Fudan University, Shanghai. He received his doctorate from Trinity College Dublin. He has published on the popular literature, television, and film of the Cold War, as well as the works of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham.

Roger Luckhurst teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is the author of The Mummy’s Curse (2012) and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015).

James Machin undertook his doctoral thesis on late Victorian and Edwardian weird fiction at Birkbeck, University of London, where he also taught English literature. Since 2013, he has been the editor of Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen.

Steven J. Mariconda’s literary criticism on weird fiction, with an emphasis on close reading and prose style, has been published in a variety of periodicals and collections over the past thirty years. He is the author of H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality (Hippocampus Press, 2013).

Helen Marshall is a Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She has won the Sydney J. Bounds Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award, and she edited the 2017 edition of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Her debut novel Everything That Is Born will be published by Random House Canada in 2018.

Javier A. Martinez is an editor of the academic journal Extrapolation. His articles and reviews have appeared in Dead Reckonings, Extrapolation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Science Fiction Studies, and elsewhere. He has served as department chair, college dean, and university provost, and is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Sean Matharoo is a PhD student of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside, where he studies francophone and anglophone speculative media, postcolonial theory, ecological philosophy, speculative realism, and noise. He has a forthcoming article in a special issue of Horror Studies devoted to sonic horror.

Neil McRobert is a researcher in contemporary horror and Gothic culture. He completed his doctorate at the University of Stirling. His particular interests are experimental horror fiction and film, and the role of technology and the Internet in contemporary horror. Recent publications have focused on found footage cinema and the growth of online horror folklore.

Sean Moreland is a writer, editor, and educator, much of whose research concerns Gothic and horror fiction in its literary, sequential art, and cinematic guises. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Ottawa.

Will Murray is a lifelong scholar of pulp fiction, a contributor to Fangoria magazine, and the author of several celebrated Cthulhu Mythos anthology stories. Enormously prolific, he has penned some seventy novels in series ranging from The Destroyer to The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage. His latest work is King Kong vs. Tarzan.

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Lecturer in Film Studies and American Literature, and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author/editor of numerous publications and Reviews Editor for Gothic Studies. Forthcoming publications include Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (2017) and Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (2018).

Keith M. C. O’sullivan is Senior Rare Books Librarian at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He earned an MA in English from the University of Sussex and has also studied at the Universities of Surrey, Wales, and Stirling. He is currently researching on Ramsey Campbell and the Gothic tradition at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Elizabeth Parker has a PhD in English literature from Trinity College Dublin. She has been published in The Palgrave Companion to Literature and Horror (2017) and elsewhere, and she co-edited Between Space and Place: Landscapes of Liminality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). She is currently the TV editor of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

Bernard Perron is a Full Professor of Film and Game Studies at the University of Montreal, Canada. He is the editor of Horror Video Games (2009), the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Video Games Studies (2014) and Video Games and the Mind (2016), and the author of Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (2012). More information is at http://www.ludov.ca.

Hannah Priest is an academic writer and lecturer based in Manchester, UK. She has a PhD in late medieval literature, and her research interests include gender, violence, and monsters in popular culture. She has published on both medieval and contemporary popular fiction, including work on werewolves, cannibals, and fairies.

David Punter is a writer, poet, and critic, currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published critical monographs in many fields of literature, most notably the Gothic, but also including Romantic writing, contemporary fiction, and literary theory, as well as five small volumes of poetry.

Jean-Charles Ray is a PhD student in Film Studies at the Université de Montréal (Montreal, Canada) and in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France). His main field of study is horror in literature and video games.

Brittany Roberts is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, where she studies Russian and Anglophone horror, science fiction, and weird fiction. She is particularly interested in eco-horror and is currently writing a dissertation that considers the ecological possibilities raised by dark speculative literature and cinema.

Jim Rockhill has contributed to books devoted to E. T. A. Hoffmann, M. R. James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bob Leman, Jane Rice, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as various encyclopedias and journals including Supernatural Literature of the World, Ghosts in Popular Culture and Legend, Dead Reckonings, and Lost Souls.

Travis Rozier earned his PhD in English at the University of Mississippi in 2015 and currently works as a lecturer in the English department at Texas A&M University. His areas of interest include literature of the U.S. South, Southern women writers, material culture, and weird fiction.

Darrell Schweitzer is a former editor of the legendary Weird Tales magazine, a critic, an essayist, and the author of books on Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft. He is also the author of three fantasy novels and about 300 short stories. A World Fantasy Award Winner, he lives in Philadelphia.

Brian J. Showers has written for publications such as Rue Morgue, Supernatural Tales, and Wormwood. He also edits The Green Book, a journal devoted to Irish writers of the fantastic, and runs the Swan River Press, Ireland’s only publishing house dedicated to literature of the Gothic, strange, and supernatural. He lives in Dublin.

Michael Siefener has worked as a freelance writer since 1992, publishing several novels and short stories, mostly in the fantastical vein. He received his LLD in 1991 but never worked as a lawyer. He was born in Cologne and currently lives in a small village in the Eifel, one of the westernmost parts of Germany.

Brian Stableford has been publishing fiction and nonfiction for fifty years. His most recent nonfiction projects are New Atlantis: A Narrative History of British Scientific Romance (Wildside Press, 2016) and The Plurality of Imaginary Worlds: The Evolution of French roman scientifique (Black Coat Press, 2016).

E. Kate Stewart holds a PhD from the University of Mississippi and serves as Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. She has published on Edgar Allan Poe and Transcendentalism, and has contributed to several volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Her primary research interests involve nineteenth-century American fiction.

Joel T. Terranova received his PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2015. Focusing on Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he has published a variety of scholarly works in this field. He also serves as the book review editor for Studies in Gothic Fiction.

Bev Vincent has a PhD in chemistry and is the author of forty peer-reviewed scientific articles. His work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award (twice), the Edgar Award, and the Thriller Award. He has been a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine since 2001. His author site is bevvincent.com.

Hank Wagner is a respected critic and interviewer whose work has appeared in numerous genre publications such as Dead Reckonings, Cemetery Dance, Mystery Scene, and Crimespree. He is a co-author of The Complete Stephen King Universe and Prince of Stories: A Guide to the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman. He also co-edited Thrillers: 100 Must Reads with David Morrell.

Mark Wegley currently teaches at Tacoma Community College and previously taught at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and a master’s from Boise State University, where he completed a graduate thesis on the short fiction of J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

Lee Weinstein is a retired librarian and a lifelong horror fan. His essays have appeared in Studies in Weird Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He is a current contributor to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and has edited several short story collections.

Jillian Wingfield is a PhD candidate and visiting lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire. Her research project is focused on American twenty-first-century vampire fiction, investigating vampire-human as well as intra-vampiric dynamics for what they reveal about a dialogue between genre and post-9/11 culturally dominant fears.

Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature & Higher Education at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of, among others, Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005) and Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction, and co-editor of the online horror journal Dissections. She is currently chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, an HEA Principal Fellow, and a National Teaching Fellow.

Index

Page locators in boldface indicate main entries in the Encyclopedia.

Ackroyd, Peter

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, 129

The House of Doctor Dee, 133–134

Adams, John Joseph, 156

Addison, Joseph, 20

The Spectator (Addison), 20

Aeneid (Virgil), 7

Aeschylus

The Oresteia, 107

Aickman, Robert (1914–1981), 177–179

Aickman’s Heirs, 179

The Attempted Rescue, 178

British Fantasy Award, 178

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 270

“The Cicerones,” 177
compositional strategies, 178–179
critical writings of, 178

Dark Entries, 178
date of birth, 178
death of, 179

Fontana series Great Ghost Stories, 178

Freudian psychoanalysis, 178
full name of, 177

Howard, Elizabeth Jane, and, 178
influence of, 179
influence of Borges on, 235

James, M. R., and, 30

The Late Breakfasters, 178, 179

Marsh, Richard, and, 178

The Model, 179
parents of, 178

“Ringing the Changes,” 709–710
the term “strange,” 178

We Are for the Dark, 178

World Fantasy Award, 178

Aiken, Conrad

Freud, Sigmund, 752

“Mr. Arcularis,” 624–625

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” 752–753

Aikin, Anna Laetitia, 73

Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805–1882), 179–181

City of Manchester honor, 180
early stories of, 180
general academic consensus of, 180–181

Guy Fawkes, 180

Jack Sheppard, 180

Lovecraft, H. P., on, 180

Mitchell, Rosemary, on, 181
obituaries of, 180

Old St. Paul’s, 180
reputation of, 180

The Tower of London, 180

Windsor Castle, 180

Akerman, John Y.

Tales of Other Days (Akerman), 86

Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888), 182–184

“The Abbot’s Ghost” (1867, 1975), 183

“Behind a Mask” (1866, 1975), 183
con artist narratives, 183
death and burial of, 183
her 1860s thriller career, 183

The Inheritance (1849, 1997), 182

The Little Women Trilogy, 182

Long Fatal Love Chase (1866, 1995), 183

“Lost in a Pyramid” (1869, 1998), 183

A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), 183

“The Mysterious Key” (1867, 1975), 183
overview of, 182

“Pauline’s Passion & Punishment” (1863, 1975), 183

“V. V.” (1865, 1976), 183

“A Whisper in the Dark” (1863, 1976), 183

Aldiss, Brian, 102, 126

Frankenstein Unbound, 129

Alien (1979), 63

Allen, Grant

“Pallinghurst Barrow,” 642

Allred, Michael, 872

Alone with the Horrors (Campbell), 184–185

“Cold Print,” 184

Dark Companions, 184
date published, 184

Demons by Daylight, 184
description of, 184
full title of, 184

“Mackintosh Willy,” 184
selection of stories, 184

World Fantasy Award, 185

Alraune, 185–186

Alraune-creature, 185, 186
as a comic book, 186

Endore, S. Guy, 185

Ewers, Hanns Heinz, 185
film versions, 186
legend of the mandrake root, 185
mandragora myth, 185–186
naming of, 185
original language of, 185
plot summary, 185
in the twenty-first century, 186

Amazing Stories, 102

An American Crime film, 386

American International Pictures, 138

“The American Nightmare,” 98
ancestral curse, 186–189

Blackwood stories and, 188

Bleak House (Dickens), 188

The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott), 188

The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 187
clan curses, 188
content of curses, 187

Cowdray Curse, 187

“The Curse” (1832), 188
curses defined, 186
curse tablets (defixiones), 187
evil eye, 187

“execration texts,” 186
family curse stories, 187
the Gothic and family curses, 187

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle), 188
house curse, 188
magical thinking, 188

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 187

The Monk (Lewis), 187, 820

Old Testament curses, 187
recursive, 187
retributive justice and, 188
ritual forms of curses, 186

Roman curses, 187

“threat formulas,” 186–187

Tichbornes curse, 187–188

Tut’s Curse, 188
ancient Greece, 3

Anderson, Sherwood, 366, 405

Andreyev, Leonid
death of, 534

“Lazarus,” 534–535
significance of, 534

Anger, Kenneth, 761
animal horror, 60
the “Antichrist,” 53
antinatalism, 555

Antonio’s Revenge (Marston), 16–17
apocalyptic horror, 51–56

After London (Jefferies), 55
alien invasion, 55
the “Antichrist,” 53
apocalyptic entertainment, 53

Armageddon, 55
conclusion concerning, 56

“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (Poe), 55

Cumaean Sibyl, 53
definition of, 51
the Doomsday play, 52–53
eschatological writing, 51–52
eschatology, 51, 55
illuminated medieval apocalypse manuscripts, 52

The Last Man (Shelley), 53–55
millenarianism, 53
mystery plays, 52
pandemic, 55

Paradise Lost (Milton), 53
secular apocalypse fiction, 53
secular apocalypses, 55

Shelley, Mary, 53

Trinity Apocalypse, 52
types of apocalypse in horror fiction, 54

The War of the Worlds (Wells), 55
zombie apocalypse, 55

Appleyard, J. A., 169

Argonautica (Apollonius Rhodius), 5–6

Arisman, Marshall, 520

Aristotle, xxxii

Arkham House, 33, 88, 153, 189–191
classic ghost story writers of, 190

Collected Poems (Lovecraft), 191

Dark of the Moon, 190

Derleth, August, 189, 190, 191
establishment of, 190

Fedogan and Bremer, 191
fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, 191

“firsts” in horror history, 189t
founders of, 189

Keller, David H., 190

Lovecraft, H. P., 189
major discoveries, 191

Marginalia (Lovecraft), 190

The Outsider and Others (Derleth and Wandrei), 189, 190
poetry, 190, 191
post-Turner Arkham House, 191
purpose of, 573

Selected Letters (Lovecraft), 190

Skullface and Others (Howard), 190

Slan (Vogt), 190

Someone in the Dark, 190

Turner, James, 191

Wandrei, Donald, 189

Weird Tales writers and, 190

Arkham House Books, 307

Armageddon, 55

Asquith, Cynthia, 710

Atkins, Peter, 197

At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft), 192–194

Cthulhu Mythos and, 193
extraliterary adaptations, 193
format of, 192
influence of, 193
narrative form of, 192–193
publication history of, 192
versions of, 192

Atwood, Margaret, 219

Auerbach, Dathan

Penpal, 114

Augustine (Saint), 143

De Civitate Dei or The City of God, 465–466

Austen, Jane

Northanger Abbey (Austen), 639–641

Austin, William

“Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” 86

The Avon Fantasy Reader, 89

Bacon, Jon Lance, 652

Bakhtin, Mikhail

Rabelais and His World, 405

Balderston, John, 627

Ballard, J. G. (1930–2009), 195–196

Concrete Island (1973), 195
controversy over, 195

Crash (1973), 195
culminating tetralogy of, 195
early work of, 195

High-Rise (1975), 195
influences on, 195
movement toward horror, 195
science fiction and, 195
trilogy of disaster novels, 195

Balzac, Honoré de, 605

Bandel, Joe E., 186

Banks, Iain, 235

Bardin, John Franklin, 270

Barker, Clive (1952–), 196–201
artwork of, 200
birthplace, 196

The Books of Abarat, 200

Books of Blood, 40, 119–120, 197–198, 232–233

Cabal, 334

Coldheart Canyon, 200

The Damnation Game, 198, 310–311, 335

“dark fantastique” of, 199
demonic queerness, 334
directorial debut, 199

Dog Company, 196
films of, 198

Galilee, 200

The Hellbound Heart, 196, 198, 334

Hell Priest “Pinhead,” 196, 200

Hellraiser film(s), 196, 197, 198

King, Stephen, on, 198

Lord of Illusions film, 199

Mister B. Gone, 200

Nightbreed film, 199
overview of, 196
religion, horror, and the supernatural, 147
on the roots of horror literature, 143

Sacrament, 200

The Scarlet Gospels, 42, 200
selective Clive Barker chronology: books and films, 197t

Seraphim Films, 199
sexually transgressive work, 167
splatterpunk movement, 40
themes and motifs of, 196

The Thief of Always, 200

Weaveworld, 199, 510
writing style of, 199
young readership and, 200

Barlow, R. H. (1918–1951), 201–202
career in anthropology, 202
death of, 202

“A Dim-Remembered Story,” 202
early writing of, 201–202

Lovecraft circle and, 201

“The Night Ocean,” 202
quality of his writing, 201
reoccurring characters, 202

Barnes, Steven, 349

Barron, Laird, 634

Barron, Laird (1970–), 202–206

Alaskan themes, 203
awards of church, 203
birthplace of, 202

The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, 45, 203
on Cormac McCarthy, 206
cosmicism and, 202–203

The Croning, 45

Dark Gods, 206
early life of, 202
full name of, 202
horror genre and the Lovecraft tradition, 167
influence of, 203
influences on, 203
an interview with, 204–206
on Ligotti, 206

Ligotti, comparison with, 203
on Lovecraft, 205

Lovecraft, comparison with, 202–203

“More Dark,” 203
on music, 204

Pacific Northwest Mythos, 203
pulp modes used by, 203
on the reinvigoration of horror fiction and film, 205
on religious and otherworldly matters, 44–45
on setting, 205

Swift to Chase, 203
on voice, 204

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821–1867), 207–208

“Chacun sa chimère” (To Each His Chimera), 208

Decadent movement and, 207
influence of, 207
innovations of, 207

Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil ), 207

Les Paradis artificiels, opium et haschisch (Artifi cial Paradise, Opium and Hashish), 207

Le Spleen de Paris ( Paris Spleen ),, 207–208

“Mademoiselle Bistouri,” 208
on Melmoth the Wanderer, 605
moral indecency, 207
significance of, 207

Smith, Clark Ashton, on, 207

“The Beast with Five Fingers (Harvey),” 208–210
in anthologies, 209
cinematic adaptation of, 209–210
excerpt from, 208
first publication of, 208

Harvey, W. F., 208
prologue of, 209
reprinting of, 209
revision of, 209
severed/animated hand subgenre, 209
volume one of, 208–209

Beattie, James, 73

Beaumont, Charles (1929–1967), 210–212
birth name, 210

“Black Country,” 211

“The Dark Music,” 37
date and place of birth, 210
death of, 211
friends of, 210

“The Howling Man,” 211

“The Hunger,” 37
imaginative whimsy, 211
influence of, 211
marriage of, 210

Matheson, Richard, and, 592
men’s magazine market, 36

“Miss Gentibelle,” 37, 210

“My Grandmother’s Japonicas,” 211
output of, 211
parents of, 210

Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), 37
social conformity and horror, 37

Southern California Writing School, 210
themes of, 211

Twilight Zone teleplays, 210
writing style of, 211

The Beetle (1897), 75

Bellum Civile or Pharsalia (Lucan), 7

Beloved, 212–213
awards, 212
date published, 212

Morrison, Toni, 212
movie adaptation, 212
plot summary, 212
supernatural literature, 212

“Ben Drowned,” 114

Benjamin, Walter

“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 424

Benshoff, Harry M.

Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, 100

Benson, E. F. (1867–1940), 213–215

The Angel of Pain, 213
animals as horrific elements, 214

“Caterpillars,” 214

Colin, 213

Colin II, 213–214
collections of, 214

Dodo, 213
early life of, 213

“The Face,” 215
family of, 213
full name of, 213
ghost stories of, 30

The Inheritor, 213

Lady Sybil Rorke, 214–215

The Luck of the Vails, 213

“The Man Who Went Too Far,” 213
memorable characters of, 214–215
preface to The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 215

Raven’s Brood, 214

The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, 30, 215
women and, 214–215

Beowulf, 10–11, 12

Besant, Annie, 131

Bestwick, Simon, 270

Betancourt, John Gregory, 154

Bettelheim, Bruno

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, 169

Bierce, Ambrose (1842–1914?), 215–218
birthplace of, 215

“Bitter Bierce” nickname, 216

“The Boarded Window,” 217

“Chickamauga,” 217
children of, 216
circumstances of his death, 215

Civil War actions, 215–216

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, 217
creation of fictional “authorities,” 217–218

“The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 326–328

The Devil’s Dictionary, 217
disappearance of, 217
fictional “authorities,” 217
horror stories, 217
influence of, 218

“An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” 217
journalistic career of, 216–217
marriage of, 216

Mexican Revolution, 217
notoriety of, 217

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 217, 218

“out-of-body” horror tales, 217, 218

“A Psychological Shipwreck,” 218
tall tales, 217
war stories, 217

Billson, Anne

Suckers, 388

Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 78–79

The Birds (1963), 57

“The Birds” (Maurier), 60

Blackwood, Algernon (1869–1951), 218–222
ambivalence toward the natural world, 220

“Ancient Sorceries,” 221
birthplace of, 218

“The Camp of the Dog,” 222

The Centaur, 220–221
death of, 222
early life of, 220

The Empty House, 220

“The Empty House,” 222

Episodes Before Thirty, 220

“The Glamour of the Snow,” 221
influence of, 218, 222

John Silence character, 218, 222

John Silence: Physician Extraordinary, 490–492

“The Man Who Found Out,” 221

“The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” 60, 220
mysticism and, 30, 218

“The Nemesis of Fire,” 222
the numinous, 645

“occult detective” genre, 222
psychic-detective sequence John Silence: Physician Extraordinary, 30, 218, 222

“Secret Worship,” 219
seduction trope, 221

“The Temptation of the Clay,” 60

“The Transfer,” 60

“The Wendigo,” 30, 219, 220

“The Willows,” 30, 60, 103, 220, 222, 847–848

The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), 122

Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (Terminal Reality, 2000), 122

Blatty, William Peter

The Exorcist, 117, 139, 146, 334, 682
public interest in horror, 153

Blavatsky, Helena, 131

Bleiler, E. F. (1920–2010), 223–224
at Charles Scribner’s Sons, 223

The Checklist of Fantastic Literature, 223

Dikty, T. E., 223
at Dover Publications, 223
full name of, 223

Guide to Supernatural Fiction, 223
history of science fiction analogies, 223
significance of, 223

World Fantasy Awards, 223

Blish, James

“More Light,” 509

Bloch, Robert (1917–1994), 224–229

American Gothic, 228
awards to, 228

“The Beasts of Barsac,” 226

“Catnip,” 226

“The Cloak,” 226
comic fantasies, 226
crime and weird fiction, 226–227
crime novels of, 227

Cthulhu Mythos and, 224
death of, 228

Egyptian tales, 225

Fantastic Adventures, 226

“The Feast in the Abbey,” 225
first novel of, 227
first professional appearance in print, 225

Gein, Ed, 414

“The Haunter of the Dark” (Lovecraft), 225
on horror films, 226

“House of the Hatchet,” 226

“Hungarian Rhapsody,” 226

The Jekyll Legacy, 228

Lori, 228

Lovecraft and, 225

“Lucy Comes to Stay,” 227

“The Mannikin,” 225

Milwaukee Fictioneers, 226

Monsters in Our Midst, 228

The Mysteries of the Worm (Prinn), 225

Mythos stories, 225, 307

Once Around the Bloch (autobiography), 226, 228

“One Way to Mars,” 227

The Opener of the Way, 227

Psycho, 39, 224, 227, 414, 618, 685

Psycho, sequels to, 228

Psycho-Paths, 228

The Scarf, 227

“The Secret in the Tomb,” 225

“The Shadow from the Steeple,” 225

“The Shambler from the Stars,” 225

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” 227
on splatterpunk, 764

Strange Eons, 228
supernatural screwball comedies, 226
television/movie scripts, 33, 227–228

That Hellbound Train, 334
trademark ending, 225

“The Weird Doom of Floyd Scrilch,” 226

Weird Tales and, 225
writing for Unknown, 226
writings after the death of Lovecraft, 225–226

“Yours Truly—Jack the Ripper,” 33, 227, 867–868
body horror, 229–230
cinema, 412
classic body horror works, 230

Cronenberg’s films, 230
definition of, 229

Love, 229

“new flesh” idea, 230
prevalence of, 229
prosthetics-based special effects, 230

“The Shadow over Innsmouth” (Lovecraft), 229–230

“Who Goes There?” (Campbell), 229
body snatching, 230–232

Anatomy Act of 1832, 232

“The Body Snatcher,” 231

“The Body Snatcher” (Stevenson), 232

Coma (Cook), 232
current status of, 232
definition of, 230
ethics of, 232
famous body snatchers, 231–232

Frankenstein (Shelley), 232
in literature, 232

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 232
mortsafes, 230

Murder Act of 1752, 232
reason for, 231

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 231

Bond, Nelson, 191

Book of the Dead (anthology), 118

Books of Blood, 232–233

Barker, Clive, and, 232–233
legacy of, 233
reaction to, 233
splatterpunk and, 233
themes of, 233
uniting thread of the stories, 233

Booth, Wayne, 807

Borderlands Press, 153

Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 234–235
characteristics of his fiction, 234, 235
complexity of ideas in, 234

Danielewski, Mark Z., and, 235

Ficciones, 234

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” 234
homages to, 235
importance of, 235
influence of, 235

Labyrinths, 234
labyrinth trope, 234

“The Library of Babel,” 234

“The Lottery in Babylon,” 234

Lovecraft and, 235
significance of, 234

“slipstream” and, 235
the term “Borgesian,” 234

“There Are More Things,” 235

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 234

World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, 235

“Born of Man and Woman” (Matheson), 34

Botting, Fred, 62

Bourgault du Coudray, Chantal, 65

Bowdern, William S., 359

Bowen, Elizabeth
death of, 329

“The Demon Lover,” 328–329

The Demon Lover and Other Stories, 68

Encounters, 68
on the ghost story, 68

Bowen, Marjorie (1885–1952), 235–237
attention to period detail, 235
birthplace, 235
characteristics of her work, 237
family name, 235
first novel of, 235–236
notable writings of, 236
pseudonyms of, 236
supernatural novels of, 236

“twilight tales,” 236

Bradbury, Ray (1920–2012), 237–241
anthology movie, 96

“The Banshee,” 240
birthplace of, 237

Capote, Truman, 239

The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, 240
collections of his earlier works, 240
crime fiction, 240

“The Crowd,” 239

Dark Carnival, 238, 239, 655
early life of, 238

EC Comics magazines and, 240
the Elliot tales, 239

“The Emissary,” 239

Fahrenheit 451, 238
first professional sale of, 238
full name of, 237

The Golden Apples of the Sun, 238
the haunted house story and, 419

“The Homecoming,” 239, 656
horror comics, 93

The Illustrated Man, 239

“The Jar,” 239

“The Lake,” 239

The Martian Chronicles, 239

McClure, Marguerite “Maggie,” 238

The October Country, 238, 239, 655–656

Poe, Edgar Allan, and, 237
quoted on good stories, 238
radio dramas and television anthology series, 240

The Ray Bradbury Theater, 240
recognition for his achievements, 240–241
regimental approach to his chosen profession, 238

“The Scythe,” 239, 656
significance of, 33, 237

“Skeleton,” 239, 656

“The Small Assassin,” 239, 655

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury), 36, 239–240, 758–759

“The Veldt,” 240

Weird Tales, 36, 238
wife of, 238
as “the world’s greatest living science fiction writer,” 238

Bradley, Doug, 197

Bram Stoker Award, 241–242
award process, 242
categories of, 242

Horror Writers Association and, 241

Koontz, Dean, 241
naming of, 241–242
notable past winners, 242
significance of, 241

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), 18

Bratlinger, Patrick, 64

Brennan, Joseph Payne (1918–1990), 242–243
award for life achievement, 243

“The Calamander Chest,” 243

“Canavan’s Backyard,” 243

“Episode on Cain Street,” 243
fantastic fiction of, 242

“The House on Hazel Street,” 243

“Levitation,” 243

Macabre magazine, 242
as a poet, 242
psychic investigator, Lucius Leffing, 243

“Slime,” 243
themes of, 243

Breton, Andre, 786

Breton, André, 605

Briggs, Julia, 436

Brite, Poppy Z. (1967–), 244–245
alternative name of, 244
as a cultural phenomenon, 120

Dangerous Visions and, 118

Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks, 120

Drawing Blood, 244

Exquisite Corpse, 244

The Lazarus Heart, 244

Liquor series, 245

Lost Souls, 244

“Missing,” 244
queer sexuality and, 244
reputation of, 244
sexually transgressive work, 167
short story collections, 244

Swamp Foetus, 244

Wormwood, 244

Brod, Max, 498

Bromhall, Thomas, 85

Brontë sisters, 245–250

Agnes Grey, 245, 248

Anne, 245, 247, 249
as the “Bell Brothers,” 245, 246

Byron, Lord, 248

Charlotte, 245, 247
as children, 245

Emily, 245, 247

Gothic villain, 248
important contribution to English literature, 249
influence of, 248, 249

Jane Eyre, 245, 246–247, 249
on marriage, 249
on moral absolutes, 249
popular culture and, 249
on Radcliffe, Ann, 697
romanticism and, 248, 248–249

Shirley, 247

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 246, 248
their father, Patrick, 245
timeline of, 246t

Villette (autobiography), 247

Wuthering Heights, 245, 246, 247, 808

Brown, Charles Brockden (1771–1810), 26, 59, 250–252

Arthur Mervyn, 251
best-known novels of, 251
date and place of birth, 251
death of, 251
early life of, 251

Edgar Huntly, 251
as a “flawed genius,” 251

Friendly Club and, 251
general consensus of, 251

Godwin Circle, 251
influence of, 250, 251

“My Last Duchess,” 80–81
reputation of, 251, 252

Wieland, 251

Wieland (quoted), 250
work with landscapes, 251

Brown, Dan, 131, 134

Brown, George Brockden

Wieland, 144–145

Browning, Robert

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 318

Dramatic Lyrics (Browning), 79
master of insidious intent, 81

“My Last Duchess,” 80–81

Porphyria’s Lover, 79–80
psychological monologues, 79

Browning, Todd, 136

Brummell, George “Beau,” 259

Brutus (Plutarch), 7

Buchan, John

“No-Man’s Land,” 642

Bulgakov, Mikhail

The Master and Margarita, 334

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 29, 131, 252–254

The Coming Race, 253
early occult short stories of, 252

“The Haunted and the Haunters,” 252, 253
influence of, 252, 253, 254
influences on, 252

The Last Days of Pompeii, 252
as Lord Lytton, 252
popularity of, 252

A Strange Story, 252, 253

Zanoni, 252, 253

Bunuel, Luis, 786

Bürger, Gottfried August, 78, 157

Burke, Edmund (1729–1797)

literary aesthetics, 21–22

“Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime,” 782

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful

(Burke), 21, 73, 783

“On the Sublime,” 782
on terror, 22

Burke, James Lee, 321

Burke, William, 231

Burnt Offerings, 254–255

American haunted house tradition and, 255
comparisons with, 254, 255
film adaptation of, 255
the haunted house story and, 419
importance of, 255

Marasco, Robert, 254
plot summary, 254–255

Burroughs, Edgar Rice

A Princess of Mars, 407

Butler, Octavia Estelle (1947–2006), 255–257

“Bloodchild,” 256

“The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” 256

Fledgling, 257
influence on current generation of writers, 257

Kindred, 256

Nebula Award to, 256

Parable series, 256

Patternist Series, 256
significance of, 255–256

Xenogenesis trilogy, 256

Buzzati, Dino (1906–1972), 257–258

“The Bewitched Bourgeois,” 257
collected short stories, 257
influence of, 258

Larger Than Life, 258

Ligotti, Thomas, on, 258

The Tartar Steppe, 257
theme of, 257

“The Time Machine,” 258

“The Walls of Anagoor,” 257–258

Byron, Lord

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 129

Byron, Lord (1788–1824), 258–260
alternative name for, 258
the Brontë sisters, 248

Brummell, George “Beau,” 259

Byron’s Manfred, 258, 259, 260
characteristics of, 259

“Darkness,” 259
death of, 260

English Romantic movement and, 258

“The Giaor,” 77, 158, 259

Glenarvon, 259
vampire fiction, 157–158

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 128, 258–259

Byronic hero, 260–261

Brontë sisters and, 261

Byron, Lord, and, 260

Byron’s Manfred, 260

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 260

Crimson Peak, 261
current status of, 260, 261
definition, 260

Glenarvon (Lamb), 261
influence of, 261
literary origins of, 260

Manfred, 260
success of, 261
uses of the character type, 260, 261

Vampire Chronicles, 261

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 261

Walpole, Horace, 260

Caldwell, Erskine, 366

“The Call of Cthulhu,” 263–264

Cthulhu Mythos, 264
inspirations for, 263–264

Lovecraft, H. P., 263
opening paragraph of, 263
plot summary, 263, 264
significance of, 264
uniqueness of, 264

Calmet, Antoine Augustin, 21

Campbell, John W., Jr

Unknown, 33–34

“Who Goes There?,” 192, 229

Campbell, Ramsey (1946–), 264–272

Ancient Images, 267
awards to, 265
birthplace of, 264
black humor, 266

California school of contemporary horror, 269
characteristics of, 266

“Chucky Comes to Liverpool,” 265–266

“The Church in High Street,” 265
commercial success, 268

The Count of Eleven, 266

Creatures of the Pool, 265

The Darkest Part of the Woods, 267

Demons by Daylight, 265

The Doll Who Ate His Mother, 266
domesticity theme, 267
early life of, 266
as an editor, 268

The Face That Must Die, 266
film and, 267

The Grin of the Dark, 267

The Height of the Scream, 266

The Hole of the Pit, 268
on horror fiction, 110, 269–270, 271–272

The House on Nazareth Hill, 267

Incarnate, 266

The Influence, 266
influences on, 265

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, 265
interview with, 260–272

James, M. R., 30, 265, 269

Joshi, S. T., on, 267

L’Innomable (Beckett), 270
literary output of, 265

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 265, 271

Lovecraft Mythos, 271

“Mackintosh Willy,” 582–584

Midnight Sun, 267

Needing Ghosts, 268
reputation of, 264

The Seven Days of Cain, 267–268
short stories of, 265
on significant developments in horror fiction, 269–270
significant developments in horror fiction, 269
technique, concern for, 265

Think Yourself Lucky, 267

Thirteen Days at Sunset Beach, 268

Uncanny Banquet, 268
website of, 268

World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, 269

See also Alone with the Horrors (Campbell); “The Chimney” (Campbell)

“Candle Cove,” 114

Capgras syndrome, 704

Capote, Truman, 239

Carey, Mike, 652

Carmilla (Le Fanu), 272–274
cinematic adaptations, 274

Coleridge’s “Christabel” and, 273

Doctor Hesselius character, 272–273
example of, 272

Friston, D. H., 272
genre of, 273

Irish Gothic tradition, 273

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 272
lesbianism, 273
plot summary, 273

Stoker’s Dracula and, 273
as a Web series, 274

Carrington, Leonora, 786

The Debutante, 786

The Rabbits, 786

Carrion Comfort (Simmons), 274–275
awards to, 275
first publication of, 274, 275

King, Stephen, on, 274

“mind vampires,” 274
plot summary, 274–275
title of, 274
vampirism and, 275

Carroll, Jonathan, 275–276

American “magic realism,” 275–276
approach to writing, 275
body of work of, 276

Bones of the Moon, 276

“Friend’s Best Man,” 276

The Ghost in Love, 276

The Land of Laughs, 275–276
parents of, 275

Sleeping in Flame, 276

Carroll, Noël, xxx

The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, 98

Carter, Angela (1940–1992), 276–278
adaptations of his works, 278

“The Bloody Chamber,” 277

“The Company of Wolves,” 277, 278
influences on, 277

“The Lady of the House of Love,” 277

“The Loves of Lady Purple,” 64, 277

The Magic Toyshop, 277, 278

Nights at the Circus, 277

Sage, Lorna, on, 278–280

Carter, John, 627

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Lovecraft), 278–280
cinematic adaptations, 279

Cthulhu Mythos and, 280
first publication of, 279–280
as genuine tragedy, 279

The Haunted Palace, 279
plot summary, 278–279

The Resurrected, 279
uniqueness of, 278

Casting the Runes (James), 280–282
adaptations of, 281
current status of, 281
the demon of, 280–281

James, Montague Rhodes (M. R.), 280
memorable scene in, 280–281

Night of the Demon (cinematic adaptation), 281
plot summary, 280

Castle, William, 716, 731

The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 282–284
impact on the horror genre, 282, 283–284
invention of common characteristics of Gothic novel, 282
its concern with legitimacy, 283
plot summary, 282–283
significance of, 284
subtitle of, 282
success of, 282

Cat People (Tourneur), 302

Cave, Hugh B., 191

Cavelos, Jeanne, 120
celluloid horror stories, 692

Cemetery Dance Publications, 153

Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’s Dinner), 6

The Ceremonies (Klein), 284–287
eco-horror, 60

“The Events at Poroth Farm,” 284
literary horror history and, 285, 286
as a modern horror “classic,” 286
notion of “setting as character,” 286
notions about the natural world, 286
plot summary, 285
as a tribute to Arthur Machen, 285–286
as truly terrifying, 287

Chambers, Robert W. (1865–1933), 287–288
date and place of birth, 287
early collections, 287
fame of, 287

“The Harbour Master,” 288
influence of, 288

The King in Yellow, 287, 508–509

The Maker of Moons, 287

The Mystery of Choice, 287

In the Quarter, 287
reputation of, 288

In Search of the Unknown, 288

The Slayer of Souls, 288

The Talkers, 288
visual imagery, 287

The Champion of Virtue (1777), 73

Chaney, Lon, 670
chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”), 12

Chapman, Stepan, 817

The Troika, 817

Charlemagne, 9, 10

Charnas, Suzy McKee (1939–), 288–290
on American education, 289

“The Ancient Mind at Work,” 289

“Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast,” 288
birthplace of, 289

“Boobs,” 288, 289
eco-feminist political consciousness, 289

Holdfast Chronicles, 288–289

“The Land of Lost Content,” 289

“The Last of Dr. Weyland,” 290

“Lowland Sea,” 288

The Music of the Night, 288

“The Unicorn Tapestry,” 289–290

The Vampire Tapestry, 288, 289–290

The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, 45, 203

“The Chimney” (Campbell), 290–291

“At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour,” 291
plot summary, 290–291
publication history, 290
upbringing of, 291
chivalry, 10

ChiZine Publications, 156

Christ, conceptualization of the figure of, 12–13

Cimon (Plutarch), 7
cinematic horror genres, 57
cinematic possession neurosis, 358–359

Circlet Press, 119

Cisco, Michael (1970–), 291–293

Animal Money, 292
awards/nominations, 292
body of work, 291

“de-genred” fiction, 292

The Divinity Student, 291, 292

The Genius of Assassins, 292

The Great Lover, 291–292
influences on, 292

Member, 292

The Narrator, 292
pastiche as central to his literary approach, 292

Secret Hours, 292
short fiction of, 292

The Tyrant, 292

VanderMeer, Jeff, on, 292

Clark, Lawrence Gordon, 70

Clover, Carol J.

“Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 98

Cloverfield (2008), 113

Clute, John, 373

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome

Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 100–101

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
on the sublime, 783

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), 293–295
on Bertram (Maturin), 595

Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 78–79

Christabel, 158, 293

Coleridge’s poetic solution to the loss of God, 78–79
the English Romantic movement, 293
exploration of the imagination, 78
hallucinations, 293
his “opus maximus,” 295
influence of, 77
on knowledge and the imagination, 714

“Kubla Khan,” 293
laudanum and, 293
on The Monk (Lewis), 168, 614, 820

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 77–78, 293–295

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, excerpt from, 294

Southey, Robert, 293
vampire fiction, 157

Collier, John (1901–1980), 295–296

“After the Ball,” 296

“Another American Tragedy,” 295
awards to, 296

“Bird of Prey,” 296

“The Bottle Party,” 295
death of, 296

“The Devil, George, and Rosie,” 296

“Evening Primrose,” 295–296

“Fallen Star,” 296

Fancies and Goodnights, 296
full name of, 295

“Green Thoughts,” 295

“Incident on a Lake,” 295–296

“Over Insurance,” 296

“Thus I Refute Beelzy,” 296

Tom’s A-Cold, 295

Collingwood, R. G., xxx

Collins, Wilkie, 297–298

After Dark, 297

Armadale, 297

“Brother Griffith’s Story of Mad Monkton,” 297–298

“Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dead Hand,” 297

“Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman,” 297
death of, 298
full name of, 297

The Moonstone, 297, 298
see also “The Colour out of Space” (Lovecraft). See also “The Colour out of Space” (Lovecraft)

“The Siege of the Black Cottage,” 297

“The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed,” 297

The Woman in White, 297, 298

The Color out of Time (Shea), 299

Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther, 1976), 122

“The Colour out of Space” (Lovecraft), 298–300
cinematic adaptations, 299

The Color out of Time (Shea), 299
the Cthulhu Mythos and, 299
first publication of, 298

Lovecraft’s opinion of, 299

At the Mountains of Madness, 298
plot summary, 298–299

Comics Code Authority, 170

Communion (Strieber), 300–302
critical reception of, 301
films of, 301
full title of, 300
idea and image of the “alien gray,” 300
irony of, 301
mysticism and, 301
plot summary, 300
popularity of, 301
significance of, 300

Strieber, Whitley, 300, 301
subtitle of, 301

UFO sightings and abduction, 300

The Complaint: Or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (Young), 21

Condé, Nicholas

The Religion, 146

Conjure Wife (Leiber), 34, 302–303
cinematic adaptations, 303
first publication of, 302
gender solidarity, 302
influence of, 303

Leiber, Fritz, 302
premise of, 302
as profoundly frightening, 302
success of, 303

Connelly, Frances S., 405

Conrad, Joseph

Heart of Darkness, 338

The Conspiracy against the Human Race (Ligotti), 45

Cook, Robin

Coma, 232

Coppard, A. E. (1878–1957), 303–304

“Adam & Eve & Pinch Me,” 303

“Arabesque: The Mouse,” 303–304
on belief in the supernatural, 304

“Clorinda Walks in Heaven,” 304
current status of, 304

“Father Raven,” 304
full name of, 303

“The Green Drake,” 303

“The Old Venerable,” 303
physical horror, 303

“Piffingcap,” 303
copypasta, 114

Corelli, Marie, 131, 254

Cornell, Louis, 670
cosmic indifferentism, 164

Cottam, F. G.

The House of Lost Souls, 134

Council on Books in War Time, 89

“courtly” culture, 12

Cowdray Curse, 187

Crawford, Anne, 160

Crawford, F. Marion (1854–1908), 304–306

“For the Blood Is the Life,” 344, 467

“For Blood is the Life,” 306
date and place of birth, 304

“The Dead Smile,” 306
death of, 306
family of, 304–305
full name of, 305

Khaled, 305

“The King’s Messenger,” 306

“Man Overboard,” 306
popularity of, 304

“The Screaming Skull,” 306, 736–737

“The Upper Berth,” 305, 306

Crawford, William L., 87

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (film), 288
creature horror, 17

Creed, Barbara

“Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” 98

The Creeps Omnibus, 87

Creeps series, 87
creepypasta, 114

“Crew of Light” (Craft), 64

Crocker, John Wilson, 604

Cronenberg, David, 230

Cronin, Justin

The Passage, 44

Crowley, Aleister, 132

Diary of a Drug Fiend, 132
fame of, 132

Moonchild, 132
the Crusades, 10

Cthulhu Mythos, 306–308

Arkham House Books, 307

Bloch, Robert, 307

“The Call of Cthulhu,” 264, 306

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 280
close-up of, 307
codifying of, 308, 330

“The Colour out of Space” (Lovecraft), 193, 299
common elements of, 306
current status of, 308

Dagon (Chappell) and, 309
definition of, 306

Derleth, August, 307–308

Great Old Ones, 306, 308
heavy metal music and, 308
horror movies and, 308
horror video games, 123

Howard, Robert E., 307, 454

Long, Frank Belknap, 307

Lovecraft Circle of horror writers, 307

At the Mountains of Madness, 193

The Mysteries of the Worm, 225

Mythos concepts, 307

Necronomicon, 306
notable contributors to, 308
origin of, 306

“Pseudomythology,” 307

“The Return of the Sorcerer” (Smith), 307
role-playing games, board games, and computer games, 308

Smith, Clark Ashton, 307

Cumaean Sibyl, 53

Dacre, Charlotte

Zofloya the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, 614, 682

Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books (King James I), 15

Dagon, 309–310

Cthulhu Mythos and, 309

Dagon (Chappell) and, 309
plot summary, 309

Dali, Salvador, 786

The Damnation Game (Barker), 310–311
devils and demons, 335

Faustian exchange theme, 310, 311
plot summary, 310
review of, 310–311
significance of, 311

The Damned, 311–312
as autobiographical, 312

Huysmans, J. K. (Joris-Karl), 311

Là-Bas translation, 311
plot summary, 311–312

Danielewski, Mark Z.

The Familiar, 448
horror and, 42

House of Leaves, 112, 235, 447–449

Daniels, Les, 35

Dante Alighieri, 143–144

Divine Comedy, 333, 334

Dare You? 172–173

Dark Ages, 9

The Dark Domain, 313–314

“The Area,” 313

The Book of Fire, 313

“In the Compartment,” 313
élan vital, theory of, 313
favorable notice of, 313

The Grabinski Reader, 313
influence of, 313

Lipinski, Miroslaw, 313

The Motion Demon, 313

“Saturnin Sektor,” 313

Darker Than You Think (Williamson), 34
dark fantasy, 314–315
antihero and, 315
attitude of the writers of, 315
definition of, 314–315
dreamlike horror fiction and, 314

Grendel (Gardner), 315
otherworld of the Cenobites, 314

Phantastes (MacDonald), 314
setting and, 314–315

Dark Forces (1980), 118

Dark Gods (Klein), 315–318
atmospheric tension, 316

“Black Man with a Horn,” 317

“Children of the Kingdom,” 316

Klein, T. E. D., 315–316

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 316

“Nadelman’s God,” 317

“Petey,” 316–317
themes of, 315
vagueness of horror, 316, 317
writing style of Klein, 316

Dark Harvest press, 153

The Dark Knight Returns (Miller), 96

“The Dark Music” (Beaumont), 37

Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, 88

Dark Regions, 153

The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Kellett), 596

The Dark Tower (King), 318–319

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 318
a cult work, 318
film adaptations, 319

The Gunslinger, 318
influence of, 318
interconnectedness of, 318, 319

King, Stephen, 318
significance of, 319
volumes comprising, 318

Darwin, Charles, 145

Das Petermännchen (Spiess), 23

Datlow, Ellen (1949–), 319–323

Alien Sex, 319
awards and nominations for, 320

Blood Is Not Enough, 319
on contemporary horror, 323
on defining horror, 321–322
on dystopian and postapocalyptic fiction, 321
on the field of horror publishing, 322
interview with, 320–323
recommended anthologies, 322–323
significance of, 319

Snow White, Blood Red anthology, 320
themes of Datlow’s anthologies, 320

A Whisper of Blood, 319

Windling, Terri, and, 319

The Year’s Best Fantasy, 319

Davies, Andrew, 70

Davies, Rosemary Reeve, 710
de Bont, Jan, 422

De Felitta, Frank

The Entity, 467

De la Mare, Walter (1873–1956), 323–326
awards to, 325

Collected Stories for Children, 325
date and place of birth, 323

Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe, 326
education of, 324
first published work, 324
full name of, 323

“The Green Room,” 325

“The Guardian,” 334
horror and supernatural writings of, 324–325
influence of, 326

“The Listeners,” 323, 325, 560–562

The Listeners and Other Poems, 324
literary criticism, 325–326

Memoirs of a Midget, 325

“Out of the Deep,” 663–664

The Return, 325, 704–705 “A Revenant,” 325

“Seaton’s Aunt,” 324, 325

Some Women Novelists of the Seventies, 325–326

Songs of Childhood, 324
spirit possession, 325

De Quincey, Thomas

“On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts” (De Quincey), 78

Deane, Hamilton, 341

“The Death of Halpin Frayser” (Bierce), 326–328
archetype of the zombie, 327
creation of fictional “authorities,” 217–218
as an early zombie, 327

Encyclopedia of the Zombie (2014), 327
first publication of, 326

Lovecraft, H. P., on, 327–328
notable features of, 327

Oedipus complex, 327
plot summary, 326
death, theme of, 27–28

Defoe, Daniel

An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (Defoe), 20

The Political History of the Devil, As Well Ancient as Modern (Defoe), 20
significance of, 20

A System of Magic, or the History of the Black Art (Defoe), 20

A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, the Next Day After Her Death, to One

Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705 (Defoe), 85

Del Toro, Guillermo, 731

Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks, 120–121
demonic possession, 359

“The Demon Lover” (Bowen), 328–329

Bowen, Elizabeth, 328, 329
demon-lover ballads, 329
plot summary, 328–329

Dennis, John, 20

Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer), 23

Derleth, August (1909–1971), 329–331

Arkham House, 189, 190, 307, 330–331

“Bat’s Belfry,” 329
the Cthulhu Mythos and, 33, 330

“The Dunwich Horror” and, 351–352
influences on, 329

The King in Yellow (Chambers), 509

“The Lair of the Star Spawn,” 330

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 329, 330

The Mask of Cthulhu, 330

Mythos contributions, 308
outstanding weird tales of, 330
posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft, 330
proprietary influence over the Mythos, 308
regional fiction of, 329–330

Sleep No More, 88

Someone in the Dark, 329

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 330

The Trail of Cthulhu, 330

Weird Tales and, 329
desktop publishing, 90

The Devil Rides Out (Wheatley), 331–332

Duke de Richleau, 331–332
excerpt from, 332
film adaptations, 332
legacy of the investment in occult knowledge, 332
lowbrow anthologies and, 31
plot summary, 332

Wheatley, Dennis, and, 331
devils and demons, 333–335

Barker, Clive, and, 334

The Book of the Law (Crowley), 333
children, linking of demons to, 334
in contemporary works of horror fiction, 334
the Cthulhu Mythos, 334

The Damnation Game (Barker), 335

The Deathbird Stories (Ellison), 334–335
demon defined, 333
demonic queerness, 334
demon lover motif, 334
demons, imaginative depictions of depictions, 333
demons, origin of, 333
demon summoning, 333

Dictionnaire Infernal (de Plancy), 333

Divine Comedy (Dante), 333, 334

The Exorcist (Blatty), 334

Faust, legend of, 333

The Fifth Child (Lessing), 334

The Golden Bough (Frazer), 333

“The Great God Pan” (Machen), 334
grimoires, purposes of, 333
grimoires defined, 333

“The Guardian” (de la Mare), 334
and the iconic representation of urban horror in stories, 334
interest in demonology and grimoires, 333

King, Stephen, 334, 335

King, Stephen, and, 334

The Magus (Barrett), 333

The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov), 334

The Monk (Lewis), 334, 820

The Mysterious Stranger (Twain), 334

Needful Things (King), 335

Paradise Lost (Milton), 334
representations of devils and demons, 333

Rosemary’s Baby (Levin), 334

Satan, 334

Satan (Leven), 334
satanic ambiguous traits, 334

That Hellbound Train (Bloch), 334
use of demons in horror literature, 333–334

Dick, Philip K. (1928–1982), 335–337
alternate history, use of, 336
attempted suicide, 335
awards to, 335

Blade Runner film, 336
central themes in his fiction, 335
death of, 336
education of, 335

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, 336
fear of losing identity, 335
film adaptations, 336
journal of, 336

The Man in the High Castle, 336
popularity of his work, 335, 336
productivity of, 335
settings for his protagonists, 335

Total Recall film, 336

VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System), 336

Dickens, Charles

Barnaby Rudge, 81

Bleak House, 188

A Christmas Carol, 70

“The Signalman,” 70–71, 387

Dictionnaire Infernal (de Plancy), 333
didacticism, 109

Dikty, T. E., 223

Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot), 15

Divine Comedy (Dante), 333, 334

Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 15
the Doomsday play, 52–53

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 389
doubles, doppelgängers, and split selves, 337–339

Caleb Williams (Godwin), 337

The Devil’s Elixirs (Hoffmann), 337
dissociation or multiple personality, 337

“The Double” (Rank), 337

“double personality,” 337
doubles, 337–338

Frankenstein (Shelley), 337

Freud, Sigmund, 337

German romanticism and, 337

Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 338

“The Horla” (Maupassant), 338

King, Stephen, 338

Lynch, David, 338

“multiplex personality,” 338
overtones of sexual panic, 338

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 338
post-traumatic stress, dissociative disorders, 338

Richter, Jean Paul, 337

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann), 337

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 338
trauma theory and, 337
the Uncanny,” 337

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 443–444

Collins, Wilkie, and, 297

The Hound of the Baskervilles, 30, 188, 444–446

“Lot No. 249” (1892), 138, 564–565, 627

“The Ring of Thoth,” 627

Dozois, Gardner, 589

Dracula (Stoker), 339–342

The Beetle (Marsh), 340

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), 341

Carmilla (Le Fanu), 339
complexity of, 339–341

Count Dracula (1977), 341

Deane, Hamilton, 341

Dracula (1979), 341
dramatization of cultural conflicts, 341
an epistolary novel, 339
film versions of, 341
historical Dracula, 342
history of the vampire in English, 339

Horror of Dracula (1958), 341

Laemmle, Carl, 341

Lugosi, Bela, 341

Nosferatu (1922), 341
plot summary, 339
popularity of, 341
renewed fascination with, 341

In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends (McNally and Florescu), 341

Spiritualism and, 763

Stoker, Bram, 339, 341, 342
theatrical version of, 341

Transylvania, 341–342
vampires, definition of, 339

The Vampyre (Polidori), 339

Varney the Vampire (Prest), 339

Vlad Tepes, 341–342

Drake, Nathan, 73

Dramatic Lyrics (Browning), 79
dreams and nightmares, 342–343

“For the Blood Is the Life” (Crawford), 344
dreams defined, 342

“dream worlds,” 344

Fuseli, Henry, 343

“The Hall Bedroom” (Freeman), 344

“The Horla” (Maupassant), 344

“hypnagogic” dreams, 342–343
incubus and succubus, 343

Jones, Ernest, 342

Ligotti, Thomas, 344

“Lukundoo” (White), 343
master image of the Gothic horror genre, 343
night hag, 343

The Night Land (Hodgson), 344

On the Nightmare (Jones), 342

“Nightmare” series of paintings by Fuseli, 343
notable authors using nightmares in their work, 344
notable Gothic novels featuring dreams, 344
notable short stories using dreams as key elements, 344

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann), 344
the Surrealists and, 344
the Symbolists and, 344

White, Edward Lucas, 344

Dresden, Harry, 652

The Drowning Girl (Kiernan), 345–346
awards to, 345
female Gothic tradition, 346

“feminization of the weird,” 346
full title of, 345

House of Leaves (Danielewski), 448

Imp, 346
inspiration from Modernist writers, 345–346

Kiernan, Caitlín R., 345
plot summary, 345

Straub, Peter, 345

Du Maurier, Daphne (1907–1989), 346–348

The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories, 346, 347

“The Birds,” 346, 347, 348, 580

The Birds and Other Stories, 347
as Dame of the British Empire, 348
date and place of birth, 346

“Don’t Look Now,” 347, 348
early reception of her work, 346
family of, 346

Forster, Margaret, 348

Frenchman’s Creek, 346

Horner, Avril, 348

The House on the Strand, 347

Kiss Me Again Stranger, 346–347

The Loving Spirit, 346

Rebecca, 346, 347–348
revival of current interest in, 348

Trilby, 799–800

Zlosnik, Sue, 348

The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), 17

Ducornet, Rikki, 786

Due, Tananarive (1966–), 348–350

The Between, 349
antiracist sensibility, 349
awards to, 348–349

Barnes, Steven, 349
comparison with other black speculative fiction writers, 349

Danger Word, 349
date and place of birth, 349

Devil’s Wake, 349

Domino Falls, 349

Freedom in the Family, 349

The Good House, 349

Joplin’s Ghost, 349
as a journalist, 348
the Life Brothers, 348

The Living Blood, 349

My Soul to Keep, 349

NAACP Image Award, 349

In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Story, 349
preoccupation with the ethics of using power, 349
supernatural thriller series of, 348

“Dunsanian restraint,” 736

Dunsany, Lord, 30

“The Dunwich Horror,” 350–352

Cthulhu Mythos and, 351

Derleth, August, and, 351–352
description of Wilbur Whately’s corpse, 351
film adaptation of, 352
influences on, 350
in mythic terms, 352
plot summary, 350–351

Dyer, Richard

“Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism,” 100

Easton, Michael, 777

EC Comics, 34, 91–92, 96, 153, 170
ecoGothic, 61
eco-horror, 56–61 alternative names for, 56
animal horror, 60
background of, 56–57

The Birds (1963), 57

“The Birds” (du Maurier), 60, 346, 347

Blackwood, Algernon, 60

The Ceremonies (Klein), 60
current status of, 60
ecocentric (naturecentric) viewpoint, 56–57
ecoGothic, 61
eco-horror text defined, 56
environmental movement and, 57

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and, 57

Frogs (1972), 57

Gilgamesh, 59

“golden rule” of eco-horror, 56
horror cinema and, 57

Jaws (Benchley), 60

King, Stephen, 60

Klein, T. E. D., 60
literature, 59

Lovecraft, H. P., 60
main elements of, 56–57

“The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (Blackwood), 60
natural horror, 57
notable natural horror films, 57

Orca (1977), 57
place of contemporary eco-horror literature, 60–61
plant horror, 60

Silent Spring (Carson), 57

“The Temptation of the Clay” (Blackwood), 60

“The Transfer” (Blackwood), 60
trope of the “Deep Dark Forest,” 59

Wilderness Act and, 57

“The Willows” (Blackwood), 60
eco-trauma, 61

Edel, Leon

The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, 483
élan vital, theory of, 313

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 21

Elkins, Charles L., 483

Ellis, Bret Easton, 42

American Psycho, 764

Ellison, Harlan (1934–), 353–355, 842

Again, Dangerous Visions analogy, 354
angry narrative voice, 353, 354
awards to, 353, 355
best-known stories of, 353

“A Boy and His Dog,” 354
characteristics of, 353, 354
controversy and, 354

Dangerous Visions, 89

Dangerous Visions analogy, 354

The Deathbird Stories, 334–335

Deathbird Stories, 353–354
as an editor, 354

“How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” 353

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (Ellison), 798
influence and impact of, 353

Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka/The Fiction of Harlan Ellison, 354

New Wave and, 354
nonfiction of, 354–355

“The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” 354
reputation of, 353
sampling of other stories of interest, 354
on Simmons, Dan, 753

“Strange Wine,” 354
writing strengths of, 353

Elwood, Roger, 89

Encyclopedia of the Zombie (2014), 327

Endore, S. Guy, 185, 835

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 57

Epic of Gilgamesh, 3
eschatological writing, 51–52
eschatology, 51, 55

Etchison, Dennis, 355–356
awards to, 355

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 270
characteristic scenes of his stories, 355
criticism of, 356

“The Dark Country,” 355

Dark Country, 119
as an editor, 356

“It Only Comes Out at Night,” 355

“The Late Shift,” 355

“The Nighthawk,” 355
novels of, 356
reputation of, 356
short fiction of, 355–356

Eumenides (Aeschylus), 5

Euripides, 657

Hecuba, 107

Evance, Susan, 77

Ewers, Hanns Heinz (1871–1943), 356–357

Alraune, 185, 357
childhood of, 356

Das Grauen (The Grey), 357
date and place of birth, 356
death of, 357

Die Besessenen (The Possessed ), 357

Die Religion des Satan (The Religion of Satan ), 357
as an enemy agent, 357

Ewers, Maria, and, 356
family of, 356

Frank Braun trilogy, 357
legacy of, 357
nationalism and, 357
philosemitism of, 357
popularity of, 356

“The Spider,” 357

The Exorcist (Blatty), 358–360

Blatty, William Peter, 358

Bowdern, William S., 359

Catholicism and, 359
cinematic possession neurosis, 358–359
demonic possession, 359

The Devils (film), 359

The Devils of Loudun (Huxley), 359
effect of, 358–359
film adaptation, 358
as iconic, 358
influence of, 360
inspiration for, 359
mainstream fiction and, 39
plot summary, 358

Rosemary’s Baby (film), 359

Rosemary’s Baby (Levin), 359
world’s scariest Christian novel, 358
expressionism, 391

Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (Winters), 397–398

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe), 361–363
cinematic adaptations, 363

“The Haunted Palace,” 81, 361–362, 363

Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and, 363
plot summary, 361, 363
symbolic aspects of, 361, 363

Falque, Marianne, 819

Famous Monsters of Filmland, 95

Farris, John (1936–), 364–365

Dear Dead Delilah, 364
in eBook format, 364

Elvisland, 364
full name of, 364

The Fury, 364

Harrison High School series, 364

High Bloods, 364
homage to, 364
pen name of, 364
personal literary vision, 364

Son of the Endless Night, 364

When Michael Calls, 364

You Don’t Scare Me, 364

Faulkner, William (1897–1962), 365–368

Absalom, Absalom, 367

Anderson, Sherwood, 366
callous prose of, 367
date and place of birth, 366
fame of, 366

Glasgow, Ellen, on, 367

As I Lay Dying, 367–368

Light in August, 367

The Sound and the Fury, 366

Southern Gothic fiction, 366, 367–368

Faust, legend of, 333

Fear (Hubbard), 368–369

Campbell, John W., 368
first publication of, 368
plot summary, 368–369

Scientology, 369

Stableford, Brian, on, 369

Fedogan and Bremer, 191
female Gothic, 70, 346, 696

Ferry, Jean

The Fashionable Tiger, 786

Féval, Paul (1816–1887), 370–371

Catholicism and, 370

Contes de Bretagne, 370
early collections, 370
fame of, 370

Jean Diable (John Devil ), 370

Le Chevalier Ténèbre (Knightshade ), 370

Les Contes de nos pères, 370

Les Habits Noirs, 370

Les Revenants (Revenants), 370

Le Ville-Vampire, 370
place of birth, 370
serial fiction of, 370
son of, 370

Files, Gemma, 167

Finney, Jack

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 37, 39, 139

Fisher, Mark

The Weird and the Eerie, 487

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

“A Short Trip Home,” 467, 750–752
folk horror, notable examples of, 18
forbidden knowledge or power, 371–372
ancient Greek literature and, 371–372

Bluebeard’s wife, 372
horror fiction and, 372

Lucifer/Satan’s war against God, 371–372

Pandora in Hesiod’s Works and Days, 372

Pandoran, 371

Promethean, 371

Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, 371

Fortune, Dion

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, 652
the Fox sisters, 28
frame narratives, 585–586
frame story, 373–374

Books of Blood (Barker), 374

“The Call of Cthulhu” (Lovecraft), 374
the club story, 373–374

Clute, John, on, 373
definition of, 373
examples of, 373

Frankenstein (Shelley), 373

Gothic novels using, 373
in horror cinema, 374

Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 374

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Potocki), 373

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 373
proliferation of the use of, 373
versions of in horror fiction, 374

Frankenstein, 374–377
date of first publication, 375
differences in editions, 376
editions of, 375
full title of, 374

G. & W. B. Whittaker edition, 375
interpretations of, 377

Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jone edition, 375
mad scientist, 584

Moers, Ellen, on, 377
the monster wakes (excerpt from Shelley’s novel), 375
original author of, 374
plot summary, 376
queer readings of, 376
redeeming monsters and, 377

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, on, 376

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 375

Universal Studios’ 1931
film of, 375, 377

See also Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; the legacy of Frankenstein: from Gothic novel to cultural myth

Franklin, Ruth

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, 483

Fraser, Brendan, 628

Fraser, Phyllis, 88

Frayling, Sir Christopher, 158

Freeman, Mary E.

“The Hall Bedroom,” 344

Freud, Sigmund, 337, 405, 418, 426, 728, 748, 752, 805

Friston, D. H., 272

Frogs (1972), 57

Fuseli, Henry
hypnagogic visions, 343

The Nightmare (painting), 343–344, 468
sleep paralysis, 468

Gaiman, Neil (1955–), 379–380
awards to, 379, 380

Coraline, 172, 379–380
current status of, 380

The Graveyard Book, 380

“Make Good Art” commencement address, 380

Penny, Laurie, on, 380
on Kiernan, Caitlín R., 503
place of birth, 379

The Sandman, 379

The Sandman: Overture, 380

Gaines, Max, 91

Gaines, William M., 91–92, 93

Galland, Antoine, 798

The Garden of Fear, 87

Gardner, John

Grendel, 315

Gautier, Théophile (1811–1872), 381–382

“Arria Marcella,” 382
collected works of, 382

“ Deux acteurs pour un rôle ” (“Two Actors for One Role”), 382
femme fatale imagery, 382
historical fantasies, 381

The Hunger (television series), 381

Jettatura (“The Evil Eye”), 382

La Morte amoureuse (Clarimonde), 382

“ Le Chevalier Double ” (The Duplicated Knight), 382

Mademoiselle de Maupin, 381

Nisard, Desiré, 381
perverse eroticism, 382

Spirite, 382
supernatural fantasies of, 382

“Une nuit de Cléopâtre ,” 381

Gein, Ed, 414

Gelb, Jeff, 119
gender, sexuality, and the monsters of literary horror, 61–67

Alien (1979), 63

Botting, Fred, 62

Carmilla (Le Fanu), 64, 272–274

“Crew of Light” (Craft), 64

Dracula.(Stoker), 64
female werewolves, 65

“feminine” tradition, 62

Frankenstein (Shelley), 62, 63, 64
gendered traditions of horror literature, 62

Ginger Snaps (2001 film), 65–66

Gothic Romance, 62

Halberstam, Judith, 65

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 64

“The Loves of Lady Purple” (Carter), 64

Lucy Westenra, 64

“masculine” tradition, 62, 63
misogyny, 63

Mister Creecher (Priestley), 63

The Monster’s Wife (Horsley), 64
monstrosity, 62, 63
overview of, 61–62

Patchwork Girl, 63
queer text, 63–64

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 62

“The Werewolf” (Housman), 65
werewolves, 65–66

Western rape culture, 65

White Is for Witching (Oyeyemi), 64–65

“The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” (Marryat), 65

Genonceaux, Léon, 761

German Expressionism, 411

German romanticism, 337

German School of Terror, 73

Gernsback, Hugo, 102

Gespensterbuch, 85

Ghelderode, Michel de, 344
ghost hunters, 421

“The Ghost Ship,” 382–383

Machen, Arthur, on, 383

Middleton, Richard, 383
plot summary, 382–383
ghosts in Greek literature, 5–6
ghost stories, 67–72

“The Black Cat” (Poe), 70

Bowen, Elizabeth, 68

A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 70
definition of, 67

Female Gothic mode, 70

Frankenstein (Shelley), 68

Ghost Story (Straub), 71

A Ghost Story for Christmas series, 70–71

The Haunting of Hill House, 71

Hoffmann, E. T. A., 67

House of Leaves (Danielewski), 71

James, Henry, 68, 69

James, M. R., 67

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving), 68

The Little Stranger, 71

Lunar Park (Ellis), 71

“The Masque of the Red Death” (Poe), 69–70

“The Mezzotint” (James), 67

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (James), 67
psychological dissolution of characters and, 71

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann), 67

The Shining (King), 71
short story form of, 67

“The Signalman,” 70–71

“The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott), 67
temporal framing of, 68
a timeline of important ghost stories, 1816–1945, 69t

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 68

“The Villa Désirée” (Sinclair), 70

Villa Diodati, ghost story competition occurs at, 68

Wallace, Diana, on, 70

The Woman in Black, 71

Ghost Story (Straub), 383–385

King, Stephen, on, 384
plot summary, 383–384

‘Salem’s Lot and, 384–385
significance of, 383
tone of, 384
as a tribute to previous ghost stories writers, 385

“The Giaor” (Byron), 77

Gilgamesh, 59, 106–107

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

“Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” 108

“The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 108, 685, 863–865

Ginger Snaps (2001 film), 65–66

The Girl Next Door (Ketchum), 385–386

An American Crime film, 386
criticism of, 386
extreme violence, 386
film adaptation, 386
first publication of, 385

Ketchum, Jack, 385, 386

King, Stephen, on, 386
limited edition of, 386
plot summary, 386–387
as “Suburban Gothic,” 385

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (Leiber), 386–388
consumerism and, 386, 388
film adaptations, 388
as the forerunner of a subgenre of vampire stories, 387
innovations in, 387

Leiber, Fritz, 387
plot summary, 386–387

“The Signalman” (Dickens), 387

Suckers (Billson), 388

Vampire Junction (Somtow), 388

Glanvill, Joseph, 19, 550

Glasgow, Ellen, 367

In a Glass Darkly (Le Fanu), 464–465

Carmilla, 464–465

“The Familiar,” 464

“Green Tea,” 464
and the human psyche, 464, 465

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 464

“Mr. Justice Harbottle,” 464

The Room in the Dragon Volant, 464
gloomth, 77

Godwin, William

Caleb Williams, 337

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 157

Gogol, Nikolai (1809–1852), 388–390

Arabesques, 389
characteristics of, 388

Dead Souls, 389
death of, 390

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, on, 389

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, 388
influence of, 389
influences on, 388
length of his writing career, 389

Mirgorod, 389

“The Nose,” 389

“The Overcoat,” 389
reputation of, 388

“A Terrible Vengeance,” 389

The Golden Bough (Frazer), 333

Golden Gryphon Press, 191

The Golem (Meyrink), 390–391
expressionism and, 391
first publication of, 390

Jewish characters, 391

Jewish legend and, 390

Meyrink, Gustav, 390
plot summary, 390

Prague and, 390

“Good Country People” (O’Connor), 391–392
first publication of, 391

O’Connor, Flannery, 391, 392
plot summary, 391–392
reputation of, 391
significance of, 392

Southern Gothic style of, 391

Gordon, Peter E., 97

Gorky, Maxim, 535

Gothic
ecoGothic, 61

Female Gothic mode, 70
fictions, 24
gamification of Gothic, 122

Gothic Romance, 62
horror, 18
modern, 37
novel, 19, 26
return of, 42
science fiction and, 102–103
sublime landscapes, 59
trope of the “Deep Dark Forest,” 59
villain as hero, 29

Walpole, Horace, 23

Gothic hero/villain, 392–395

Caliban hero/villain, 394
compared to a traditional romantic hero, 392
examples, modern, 394
examples of, 393
heroes with moral ambiguities, 393
ideologies of the Enlightenment, 393
moral ambiguities and, 393

Promethean hero/villain, 394
romanticism and, 393
satanic hero/villain, 393–394
twentieth-century incarnations of, 394
types of, 393
the Gothic literary tradition, 72–77

Aikin, Anna Laetitia, 73

Beattie, James, 73

The Beetle (1897), 75
beginning and ending of, 72

Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 72–73

The Champion of Virtue (1777), 73
cinema and, 75
contemporary debates around horror and terror, 73

Decadent movement and, 75
development of the Gothic, 73
difference between the Gothic and horror, 75–76

Drake, Nathan, 73
fears of degeneration, 75

Frankenstein (Shelley), 74

German School of Terror, 73

Gothic importance to horror fiction, 72

Gothic Studies (special journal), 76

“H for Horrific” certificate, 75
horror comics, 75

International Gothic Association, 76

Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 75
legitimization of the Gothic, 76

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 72

The Monk, 73
penny dreadfuls, 75

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 73
public resurgence, 76

Radcliffe, Ann, 73, 74

Reeve, Clara, 73
sensation novel, 75
splatterpunk, 75
studies of, 76
the sublime, 73–74

Supernatural Horror in Literature (Lovecraft), 75
terminological difficulty in, 72
timeline of major Gothic novels, 74t

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 75

The Woman in White (Collins), 75

Gothic poetry, 77–84
background of, 77

Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 78–79

Browning, Robert, 79–81

Bürger, August, 78

Byron, Lord, 77

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 77, 78

Coleridge’s poetic solution to the loss of God, 78–79

“The Conqueror Worm” (Poe), 81, 82–83

De Quincey, Thomas, 78

Evance, Susan, 77

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe), 81

Gray, Thomas, 77

“Lenore” (Bürger), 78

“Ligeia” (Poe), 81

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 78
memorial poetry, 77
mental disturbance, 78

The Monk, 78

“On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts” (De Quincey), 78

“My Last Duchess” (Browning), 80–81

Poe, Edgar Allan, 81–83

Radcliffe, Ann, 77

Ratcliffe Highway murders, 78

“The Raven” (Poe), 81, 83

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge)), 77–78

Scott, Walter, 78

A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (Prichard), 78

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 77

“The Wild Huntsman” (Scott), 78

Grabin´ski, Stefan (1887–1936), 395–397
attitudes toward women, 396
children of, 396
date and place of birth, 395
death of, 396
ecstasy and, 396
first book of, 395

On the Hill of Roses, 395
influence of, 396
influences on, 395

Irzykowski, Karol, on, 395

Lipinski, Miroslaw, translations of, 396
marriage of, 396

The Motion Demon, 395, 396

A Mystery Tale, 396
as a pantheist, 395

Pilgrim’s Madness, 396
as a provincial teacher, 395

“psychofantasy,” 395
reputation of, 395
revitalized interest in his work, 396–397
sickness of, 395
symbolism, 344
theory of motion, 396
on wonder and fear, 396

“Wyznania ” (essay), 396

Grant, Charles L. (1942–2006), 397–399
awards to, 398

The Black Carousel collection, 398
body of his work, 397
critical opinion of, 397–398

The Curse, 397
date and place of birth, 397
death of, 398

Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (Winters), 397

Morrell, David, on, 397
the Oxrun books, 398
pseudonyms of, 397

Ptacek, Kathryn, and, 398

“quiet horror,” 397

The Shadow of Alpha, 397

Shadows anthologies, 40, 118, 397
small town horror, 398

Grant, Donald M., 119

Grant, Mira

Feed, 112–113

Newsflesh Trilogy, 112

“Graveyard” school of poetry, 21

Gray, Thomas, 77

“The Great God Pan” (Machen), 399–401
comparisons to, 401
criticism of, 400
ending of, 400

“The Experiment,” 399
explanation of what it means to “see the god Pan,” 399

The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, 399
homage to, 401
impact of, 401

Joshi, S. T., on, 400

King, Stephen, on, 401

Lane, John, on, 399

Machen, Arthur, 399
as misogynistic, 400
plot summary, 400

“scientific” plot device, 399–400

Great Old Ones, 306, 308

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, 88

Greek tragedy, 5

Greenberg, Martin H., 121

Greenberg, Martin Harry, 90

“Green Tea” (Le Fanu), 401–403

“Conclusion,” 403

In a Glass Darkly, 402

“Prologue,” 402–403
publications of, 401–402
significance of, 403

Swedenborg, Emanuel, and, 402, 403

Griswold, Rufus W., 680
the grotesque, 403–406
an aesthetic mode applied to visual mediums, 404

Anderson, Sherwood, 405

Connelly, Frances S., 405
definition of, 403–404
early literary usage of the term, 404
as an element of horror literature, 405

Freud, Sigmund, 405
global definition of, 405

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” (O’Connor), 404
and horror, 404

Hugo, Victor, use of, 405
important recent scholars of the grotesque, 405
as a literary term, 405

Lovecraft, H. P., use of, 405

McCarthy, Cormac, 405

Montaigne’s use of, 404

Poe, Edgar Allan, use of, 405

Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 405

Ruskin, John, 405

Shelley, Mary, use of, 405

Shun-Liang Chao, 405
significant contributions to the literature of, 405
the term “grotesque,” 404
theories of, 405

Todorov, Tzvetan, on, 400–401, 405

Walpole, Horace, use of, 405

“Grounds of Criticism in Poetry” (Dennis), 20

“The Group,” 638

Guran, Paula, 470, 521

“Gutenberg Parenthesis,” 115

Haggard, H. Rider (1856–1925), 407–408

Allan Quatermain, 408

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 407
current status of, 408
depictions of Africa, 407

Eric Brighteyes, 408

The Ghost Kings, 408

King Solomon’s Mines, 407
the Lost Race novel, 407
main subjects of, 407

Nada the Lily, 408

“Only a Dream . . .,” 408

A Princess of Mars (Burroughs), 407
racial attitudes of, 407

Red Eve, 408

She: A History of Adventure, 407, 738–739

She and Allan, 408, 739
significance of, 407

“Smith and the Pharaohs,” 408

Stella Fregellius, 408
supernaturalism, 407, 408

Haining, Peter (1940–2007), 408–409
body of work of, 408, 409
full name of, 408
pseudonyms of, 409
significance of, 409

Halberstam, Judith, 62, 65

Hamilton, Edmond

“The Man Who Evolved,” 102

Hamilton, Laurell K.

Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, 120

Guilty Pleasures, 120

Hammer Films, 138

Hand, Elizabeth (1957–), 409–411
awards to, 409–410

The Book of Lamps and Banners, 410

Cass Neary thrillers, 409, 410
characters of, 410
critical recognition of, 410

Glimmering, 410

Hard Light, 410
horror motifs of, 410

Mortal Love, 410

Waking the Moon, 410
writing style of, 410

Wylding Hall, 410

The Hands of Orlac (Renard), 411–412
body horror cinema, 412
date published, 411
film adaptations, 411

German Expressionism and, 411
plot summary, 411

Renard, Maurice, 411
significance of, 411–412
speculative fiction, 411

Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), 412–414
belief in ghosts, 412, 413
birthplace of, 412
death and burial of, 413
fiction of, 412, 413

“Novels of Character and Environment,” 412
occult folk belief, 413
poetry of, 412, 413
renown of, 412
role of supernatural belief in his fiction, 413
symbolism in, 413

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 413
view of human existence, 412

Hare, William, 231–232

Harman, Graham, 46

Harris, Thomas (1940–), 414–415
birthplace of, 414

Black Sunday, 414
as a crime reporter, 414

Datlow, Ellen, on, 321

Gein, Ed, 414

Hannibal, 415

Hannibal Lecter, 321, 414

Hannibal Rising, 415

NBC’s Hannibal, 415

Red Dragon, 414
serial killer Buffalo Bill, 414
signature element in his writing, 414

The Silence of the Lambs, 121, 414–415, 777

Harrison, M. John, 167

The Course of the Heart, 133

Harsnett, Samuel

Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (Harsnett), 150–151

Hartley, L. P. (1895–1972), 415–417

The Go-Between, 415
indirection in his work, 415–416

Night Fears, 415–416

“A Visitor from Down Under,” 416

Hartwell, David, 644

Harvest Home (Tryon), 417–418

Joshi, S. T., on, 417
pastoral settings, 418
plot summary, 417, 418
rural horror, 417, 418
significance of, 417

Tryon, Thomas, 417

Harvey, W. F., 208
the haunted house or castle, 418–420

Bradbury, Ray, 419
flexibility of theme, 419

Freud, Sigmund, on the concept of, 418
haunted house, definition of, 418

The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson), 419

The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 419

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 419

Marasco, Robert, 419

Mare, Walter de la, 419

Matheson, Richard, 419

Maupassant, Guy de, 419
notion of “The Uncanny,” 418

Radcliffe, Ann, 419

Reeve, Clara, 419

Walpole, Horace, 419

The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson), 420–422
cinematic influence of, 421
de Bont, Jan, 422
film adaptations, 422
ghost hunters, 421
influence of, 421–422

Matheson, Richard, 421
plot summary, 420
as the quintessential haunted house story, 420

Siddons, Anne Rivers, 421

Society for Psychic Research, 420

The Turn of the Screw (James), 420

Wise, Robert, 422

Hawker, Mary Elizabeth

“Cecilia de Noel,” 646

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864), 422–427, 450

Benjamin, Walter, 424
birthplace of, 422

The Blithedale Romance, 426

Brown, Charles Brockden, 250

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 254
children of, 427
death and burial of, 427

“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” 425
eco-horror, 59

“Ethan Brand,” 425

Fanshawe, 423

“Feathertop,” 425

“The Gray Champion,” 424
the haunted house story and, 419

The House of the Seven Gables, 426, 449–451

“Legends of the Province House,” 424

Lovecraft on, 424

The Marble Faun, 426–427

“The Minister’s Black Veil,” 424–425

“Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe,” 425

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” 424

“Rappaccini’s Daughter: From the Writings of Aubépine,” 423
on revolutionary violence, 424

“Roger Malvin’s Burial,” 425
romance narratives, 425–427

The Scarlet Letter, 425–426
short fiction of, 423
significance of, 422–423
surname change, 423

Twice-Told Tales film, 425

“Wakefield,” 425

“The White Old Maid,” 425
wife of, 427

“Young Goodman Brown,” 424, 684, 865–867

Hearn, Lafcadio (1850–1904), 427–429
birthplace of, 428
early life of, 428

Fantastics, 428
his romantic view of the Orient, 427–428

Japanese tales of, 429

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, 427, 527–528
marriage of, 428–429

“Nightmare-Touch,” 428
parents of, 428

Some Chinese Ghosts, 429
translations, 429

“The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction,” 429

Hecuba (Euripides), 5

Heldman, I. P., 661

Hell House, 429–431
conclusion concerning, 431
criticism, 430
film adaptation, 430

The Haunting of Hill House and, 430

King, Stephen, on, 430

Koontz, Dean, on, 430

The Legend of Hell House, 430

Matheson, Richard, 429
plot summary, 429–430
weaknesses of, 430

Hemingway, Ernest, 33, 270

Herbert, James (1943–2013), 147, 270, 431–433
awards to, 433

Creed, 432

The Dark, 431
date and place of birth, 431

Deadly Eyes, 432
death of, 433
film adaptations, 432

Fluke, 432

The Fog, 431
full name of, 431
graphic depictions of violence, 431

Haunted, 433
key themes of, 432

King, Stephen, on, 431
legacy of, 433

The Magic Cottage, 433

The Rats, 431, 432
reputation of, 432
sales figures for, 431

The Secret of Crickley Hall, 433

Sepulchre, 432

Shrine, 432

The Survivor, 432

Hercules Oetaeus (Seneca), 7
heresy of the didactic, 109

“H for Horrific” certificate, 75

Hichens, Robert (1864–1950), 433–435

Bye-Ways, 433

“The Charmer of Snakes,” 434

“The Cry of the Child,” 433

The Dweller on the Threshold, 434
fashionable occultism, 434

Flames, 434
full name of, 433

“How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” 433, 434

An Imaginative Man, 433

The Man in the Mirror, 434

“A Reincarnation,” 433

“The Sin of Envy,” 434

Tongues of Conscience, 433

Hill, Joe (1972–), 435–436
adaptations of, 435
family of, 435

The Fireman, 107, 435, 436

Heart-Shaped Box, 435

Horns, 435
horror comic projects, 435
horror novels of, 435
as Joseph Hillstrom King, 435

King, Stephen, 435, 513

Locke and Key, 435

Locke and Key, adaption of, 436

Locke and Key series, 43

NOS4A2, 435
parents of, 435
significance of, 43

20th Century Ghosts, 435
writing style of, 435

Hill, Susan (1942–), 436–437
awards to, 436

Briggs’s feminist exploration of women’s ghost stories, 436

The Man in the Picture, 436, 437

The Mist in the Mirror, 436, 437
perennial return of the Gothic, 42
revival of the British ghost story, 436

“The Small Hand,” 437, 854–855

Hinde, Thomas, 270

The Historian (Kostova), 437–439
author of, 437
award to, 438
inspiration for, 438

Kostova, Elizabeth Johnson, 437, 438
plot summary, 437–438
popularity of, 438
style of, 438

Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), 437

Hitchcock, Alfred, 117, 139

Hodgson, William Hope (1877–1918), 30, 439–440

The Boats of the Glen Carrig, 439

Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, 439
date and place of birth, 439
death of, 439, 440

“The Derelict,” 439
early life of, 439

The Ghost Pirates, 439

The House on the Borderland, 439, 451–453

Lovecraft comparison, 439

The Night Land, 344, 439, 452, 635–637
occult detectives, 651
recurrent writing themes of, 439
rediscovery of, 440

“A Tropical Horror,” 439

“The Voice in the Night,” 439

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1776–1822), 440–443
birthplace of, 440

The Devil’s Elixirs, 337

Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir), 441

Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), 441

Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Stories in the Style of Callot), 441
full name of, 440

“The Golden Pot: A Fairytale of Modern Times,” 441
influence of, 440, 442
interest in art, 440–441

“Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” 441

Mozart and, 440
new dimension in Gothic fiction, 442

“Nutcracker and Mouse-King,” 441
originality of, 442
romanticism and, 440

“The Sand-man,” 67, 337, 344, 441, 727–729
significance of, 26–27

Tales of Hoffmann opera (Offenbach), 442

“Undine” (opera), 440–441
writing style of, 441–442

Hogg, James

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg), 683–684

Holy Roman Empire, 9

Homer’s Iliad, 5

Homer’s Odyssey, 3–4

Hopkins, Ernest Jerome, 217

“The Horla,” 443–444 adaptation of, 444
final version of, 443
first publication of, 443
framing device, 443
influence on subsequent horror literature, 444

Maupassant suicide, 443
organization of, 443
plot summary, 443
significance of, 443–444

Horror: A Literary History (Reyes), 76
horror anthologies, 84–91

Arkham House publishing, 88

The Avon Fantasy Reader, 89
background of, 84–85

Bromhall, Thomas, 85

Christian sermons and homiletics, 84
codex, development of, 84–85

The Creeps Omnibus, 87

Creeps series, 87

Dangerous Visions, 89

Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, 88

Derleth, August, 88
desktop publishing, 90
the digital revolution and, 90

The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales (Lovecraft), 89

Elwood, Roger, 89

The Garden of Fear, 87

Gespensterbuch, 85

Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (Sayers), 87

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, 88

Greenberg, Martin Harry, 90

The History of Apparitions, Ghosts, Spirits or Spectres; Consisting of Variety of Remarkable Stories of Apparitions, Attested by People of Undoubted Veracity (Clergyman), 85
international copyright, 86

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 86
magazines, 86, 87

The Moon Terror, 87

MS. Cotton Vitellius A XV, 85

Not at Night, 87

The Not at Night Omnibus, 87

O’Brien, Fitz-James, 86
paperback, 89

“Peter Rugg, the Missing Man” (Austin), 86

Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader, 90

Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823; 3 volumes), 86
reprints of, 86

Sleep No More, 88

A Stable for Nightmares, 86

Strange Doings in Strange Places, 86

Strange Happenings, 86

Tales of Other Days (Akerman), 86

Tales of Terror (St. Clair), 86

Tales of the Dead (ed. Utterson), 85
timeline of, 88t

A Treatise of Specters, or, An History of Apparitions (Bromhall), 85

A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, the Next Day After Her Death, to One

Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705 (Defoe), 85

Utterson, Sarah, 85–86

Weird Tales, 87
younger readership of, 89
horror comics, 91–97
anthology movie, 96
background of, 91–92

Bradbury, Ray, 93

Comics Code Authority (CCA) seal, 93, 95, 96

Creepshow, 96

Dark Horse, 95

The Dark Knight Returns (Miller), 96

EC artists and writers, 92

EC comics, 34, 91–92, 96

Eerie #1 (1947), 92

Fantagraphics, 95

Gaines, Max, 91

Gaines, William M., 91–92, 93

Gilberton Publications’ Classic Comics #13 (1943), 92
impact of, 96
of independent houses, 95

Laurel Entertainment, 96

Marvel and DC publications, 95

Moore, Alan, 96

The Saga of the Swamp Thing, 96

Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham), 93
self-censorship, 93
self-censorship, end of, 95, 96
significant events in the history of, 94t

Tales from the Crypt, 96

Underground Comix movement, 95

U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 93

Vertigo, 95

Warren Publishing, 93, 95

Wertham, Fredric, 93
horror criticism, 97–101

“The American Nightmare,” 98

Benshoff, Harry M., 100

“Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism” (Dyer), 100

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 100–101
contributions to film and literary studies, and queer studies, 100
critical relegation of, 97

Dyer, Richard, 100

Gordon, Peter E., 97

Gothic studies, 98–99

“Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” (Clover), 98

“high” and “low” culture, 97, 101

“Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine” (Creed), 98
horror studies, 97–98

Horror Studies journal, 97
intellectual history, 97

“An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (Wood), 97

Lowenstein, Adam, 98

Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Benshoff), 100
monstrous pedagogies: seven texts about teaching horror, 99

The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (Carroll), 98
publishing in horror studies journals, 100
queer studies, 99–100
scholarship on Gothic fiction, 99
scholars involved in, 98
sociopolitical system of horror films, 97

“On the Supernatural in Poetry” (Radcliffe), 99

Horror Fiction: An Introduction (Wisker), 76
horror in the ancient world, 3–8

Aeneid (Virgil), 7
ancient Greece, 3
background of, 3

Bellum Civile or Pharsalia (Lucan), 7

Brutus (Plutarch), 7

Cimon (Plutarch), 7

“classical antiquity” defined, 3

Epic of Gilgamesh, 3
ghosts in Greek literature, 5–6

Greek tragedy, 5

Hellenistic period, 5–6

Hercules Oetaeus (Seneca), 7

Homer’s Odyssey, 3–4

Latin literature, 6
major genres of literature, 3

Medea (Seneca), 7

Metamorphoses (Ovid), 7

Mostellaria (The Haunted House), 6

Peri thaumasion (On Wonderful Events), 7

Roman Empire, 3

Satyricon (Petronius), 6
a timeline of horror in the ancient world, 4t
horror in the Middle Ages, 8–14
background of, 8–10

Beowulf, 10–11, 12
chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”), 12

Charlemagne, 9
concept of “horror,” 10

Dark Ages, 9
early Middle Ages, 9

High Middle Ages, 9
literary storytelling in the Middle Ages, 10
major motifs of, 8

Middle Ages defined, 8–9

Middle English romances, first, 13
romance narratives (early), 12–13
significance of, 13

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 13
subperiods of the Middle Ages, 9
timeline of, 11t
horror in the early modern era, 14–18

Antonio’s Revenge (Marston), 16–17
creature horror, 17

Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books (Ling James I), 15
definition of the early modern era, 14

Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot), 15

Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 15

The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), 17
early modern era defined, 14
folk horror, 18

Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, and of strange noyses, crackes, and sundry forewarnynges, which commonly happen before the death of menne, great slaughters & alterations of kyngdomes (Lavatar), 15
hauntings and suspected witchcraft, 15
horror and laughter, 17
influence, 18

The Late Lancashire Witches (Heywood and Brome), 15

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 15
nonfiction texts, 15
prose works, 15
prose writing and ballads, 14
religious domain as source of, 14–15

The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton), 17
revenge tragedies, 15–17

Shakespeare, William, 15–16

The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 16
supernatural belief and, 15
supernatural horror, 15

Terrors of the Night (Nashe), 15
timeline, 16t

Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 16, 17

A treatise of spectres or straunge sights, visions and apparitions appearing sensibly unto men

(Le Loyer), 15

Webster, John, 17

The Witch (Middleton), 15

The Witch of Edmonton (Dekker, Ford and Rowley), 15
horror in the eighteenth century, 19–24

Addison, Joseph, 20

Burke, Edmund, 21–22

Calmet, Antoine Augustin, 21

The Complaint: Or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (Young), 21

Das Petermännchen (Spiess), 23

Defoe, Daniel, 20

Dennis, John, 20

Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer), 23

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 21

Gothic fictions, 24

Gothic novel, 19

“The Grave” (Blair), 21

“Graveyard” school of poetry, 21

“Grounds of Criticism in Poetry” (Dennis), 20
horror in the eighteenth century, 23

Longinus, 20

The Monk (Lewis), 23–24, 820

“Night-Thoughts on Death” (Parnell), 21

Parnell, Thomas, 21

Peri Hypsous (Longinus), 20

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 21
poetry and, 21

Sadducismus Triumphatus (Glanvill), 19
the sublime, 20
sublime terror, 20
timeline, 22t
vampire narratives, 21

Walpole, Horace, 23

Wonders of the Invisible World (Mather), 19
horror in the nineteenth century, 24–29
background of, 24–26
death. theme of, 27–28

Frankenstein (Shelley), 26
ghosts and monsters, 28

Gothic novel, 26

Gothic villain as hero, 29

Hoffmann, E. T. A., 26–27

Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 23–24, 820

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 26

“penny dreadfuls,” 26

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg), 26

Rosicrucian romances, 29
social upheavals, 24–25

Spiritualist movement, 28
timeline, 27t
war, 25
horror from 1900 to 1950, 29–35
background of, 29–30

Benson, E. F., 30

Blackwood, Algernon, 30

“Born of Man and Woman” (Matheson), 34

Campbell, John W., Jr, 33–34

Conjure Wife (Leiber), 34

Darker Than You Think (Williamson), 34

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 30

Dunsany, Lord, 30

The Edge of Running Water (Sloane), 34
first weird fiction magazine, 31

Hodgson, William Hope, 30
horror comics, 34

Howard, Robert E., 33

Jackson, Shirley, 34

James, M. R., 30
literary impact of the First World War, 30–31

“The Lottery” (Jackson), 34

Lovecraft, H. P., 31–33

Mare, Walter de la, 30

Matheson, Richard, 34
pulp fiction, 31

Saki (the pen name of H. H. Munro), 30

Smith, Clark Ashton, 33
timeline, 32t

Unknown magazine, 33

To Walk the Night (Sloane), 34

Weird Tales, 31, 33
horror from 1950 to 2000, 35–41
background of, 35–36

Beaumont, Charles, 36, 37

The Body Snatchers (Finney), 37–38

Bradbury, Ray, 36
in extraliterary media, 37

Finney, Jack, 37

Grant, Charles L., 40
horror periodical, 41

Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 40

Jackson, Shirley, 36–37

King, Stephen, 35, 40

Leiber, Fritz, 37

Levin, Ira, 39
macabre, banalization of, 37

Matheson, Richard, 37
men’s magazine market, 36

Rosemary’s Baby (Levin), 39

Second World War, 35, 36

The Shrinking Man (Matheson), 37

The Sinful Ones (Leiber), 37–38
small press and horror publishing, 40

Some of Your Blood (Sturgeon), 39

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury), 36
splatterpunk, 40

Sturgeon, Theodore, 39
timeline, 38t
vampire theme, 39

Weird Tales, 35, 36

Weird Tales alumni, 35
zombies, 40
horror in the twenty-first century, 41–47
background of, 41–42

Barron, Laird, 44–45
conclusion concerning, 46

The Conspiracy against the Human Race (Ligotti), 45

Danielewski, Mark Z., 42

Ellis, Bret Easton, 42

The Girl with All the Gifts (Carey), 44

Hill, Joe, 43

Hill, Susan, 42
infection, contemporary fascination with, 44

King, Stephen, 42

“Let the Old Dreams Die” (Lindqvist), 43

Let the Right One In (Lindqvist), 43

Ligotti, Thomas, 45

Lovecraft, H. P., 44

Mitchell, David, 42
monsters, 43

Mosse, Kate, 42

Nevill, Adam, 43
the “new weird,” 46
noteworthy contemporary horror writers, 43

Owen, Lauren, 42

Palahniuk, Chuck, 42

The Passage (Cronin), 44
postapocalyptic narrative, 44

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Austen and Grahame-Smith), 44, 872

The Red Tree (Kiernan), 42
revival of horror literature, 42

The Scarlet Gospels (Barker), 42

Thacker, Eugene, 46
timeline, 45t
vampires, 43–44

Warm Bodies (Marton), 44

Waters, Sarah, 42
the weird, 44–45

Winterson, Jeanette, 42

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Brooks), 44, 870
zombie fiction, 44
horror literature and science fiction, 101–106

Aldiss, Brian, 102

Amazing Stories, 102
beginning point of science fiction, 103

Blackwood, Algernon, 103
comparison of, 101–102

Frankenstein (Shelley), 103

Gernsback, Hugo, 102
hostile universe notion, 103

King, Stephen, 104, 105

Levin, Ira, 104

Lovecraft, H. P., 103

“The Man Who Evolved” (Hamilton), 102
marketing strategies of publishers, 102

Miéville, China, 105
notable writers of, 104
obliteration of generic distinction, 105
science fiction and the Gothic, 102–103

“Shambleau” (Moore), 102
thematic sublimation, 102

Thomas, Jeffrey, 105
timeline of horror and science fiction, selective, 103–104
use genre, 105

VanderMeer, Jeff, 105

“The Willows” (Blackwood), 103
horror literature as social criticism and commentary, 106–111

Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, 107
background of, 106–107

Campbell, Ramsey, 110

“Cool Air” (Lovecraft), 107
critical role played by horror literature, 110
defining horror, 109–110

De rerum natura (Lucretius), 107

Dracula (Stoker), 108

Euripides’s Hecuba, 107

“Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (Poe), 107

The Fireman (Hill), 107

Gilgamesh, 106–107
heresy of the didactic, 109

I Am Legend (Matheson), 107

Kiernan, Caitlín R., 109

The Monk (Lewis), 107, 108, 820

Oates, Joyce Carol, 108–109

O’Connor, Flannery, 109

Poe, Edgar Allan, 109, 110
positive social change through pointed criticism, 108

Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, 107
use of supernatural threats as allegories of social crisis, 107–108
vampirism-focused fictions, 110

Wisker, Gina, 110

Wood, Robin, 110

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” (Gilman), 108
horror literature in the Internet age, 111–116
background of, 111

“Ben Drowned,” 114, 115

“Candle Cove,” 114–115

Cloverfield (2008), 113
copypasta, 114
creepypasta, 114, 115

“cursed artifact,” 114

Feed (Grant), 112–113

“found-footage” horror movies, 113

“Gutenberg Parenthesis,” 115

A Head Full of Ghosts (Tremblay), 113–114
horror fiction’s engagement with the Internet, 112, 115
horror writing and, 114

House of Leaves (Danielewski), 112
the Internet as a reoccurring trope in cinema, 111

Newsflesh Trilogy (Grant), 112

No Sleep forum, 114
online culture and the horror writing of recent years, 112

Penpal (Auerbach), 114
recent horror films and, 111–112

Reddit.com, 114

Slender Man myth, 115
smiledog, 114
timeline of, 113t

Victor Surge, 115
horror magazines, 117–118
horror periodical, 41
horror publishing, 1975–1995: the boom years, 116–121
anthologies, 118
background of, 120–121

Ballantine Books, 117

Barker, Clive, 119–120
blockbuster novels and their associated film adaptations, 117

Book of the Dead (anthology), 118

Books of Blood (Barker), 120

The Clock Strikes Twelve, 117

Crypt of Cthulhu fanzines, 118

Dark Country (Etchison), 119

Dark Forces (1980), 118
dark suspense, 121

Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks, 120–121
erotic horror fiction, 119

Grant, Donald M., 119

The Gunslinger (King), 119

Hamilton, Laurell K., 120
horror magazines, 117–118

Joshi, S. T., 117

King, Stephen, 117
list of significant authors and titles, 120

McCauley, Kirby, 118
notable writers in, 117

Poppy Z. Brite, 118, 120

Rice, Anne, 119

Scream Press, 119

Shadows (Grant), 118

Shadows with Eyes, 117

The Silence of the Lambs (Harris), 121
small press book market, 119
small-press horror magazines, 118
splatterpunk movement, 118–119
vampiric fiction, 119, 120
zombie fiction, 118–119

Horror Studies journal, 97
horror video games, 121–125

Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment, 2010)., 125

Alone in the Dark, 121, 122, 124

Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010), 124–125

The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), 122

Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (Terminal Reality, 2000), 122

Cabal (1988), 123

The Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium, 1981), 123

Clive Barker’s Jericho (Mercury Steam Entertainment, 2007), 123

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Action Game, 123

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie, 123

Clive Barker’s Undying (DreamWorks Interactive, 2001), 123

Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther, 1976), 122

CRL Group, 122

The Dark Eye (Inscape, 1995), 123

Dark Seed (Cyberdream, 1992), 125

Fatal Frame (Tecmo, 2001), 123

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (Sierra On-line, 1993), 125
gamification of Gothic, 122

Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Dreamers Guild, 1995), 123

Impact Software Development, 123

Infogrames, 121
landmark Gothic tales and, 122

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 123

The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987), 123

Mikami, Shinji, 121

Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013), 123

P.T. (Kojima Productions, 2014), 124

Raynal, Frédérick, 121

Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996), 121, 122

Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005), 124

Silent Hill, 124, 125
subversion of aesthetics, 123
survival horror games, 123–124
text adventures, 122
timeline ofsignificant horror video (and computer) games, 124t
the unreliable narrator, 123

Vampire: Master of Darkness (SIMS, 1992), 123
writer figure, 125

Zork (Infocom, 1979), 122

Horror Writers Association, 241

Horsley, Kate

The Monster’s Wife, 64

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle), 30, 444–446
adaptations of, 446

“the Baskerville effect,” 446
complexity of, 444–445
epistolary format of, 444
excerpt from, 445

Gothic tropes in, 444
place in the horror canon, 446
popularity of, 446
sensational elements in, 446

The House Next Door (Siddons), 446–447

King, Stephen, on, 447
plot of, 446

Siddons, Anne Rivers, 446
style of, 447

House of Leaves (Danielewski), 447–449

Danielewski, Mark Z., 447
experimental horror fiction and, 447
first publication of, 447
horrors in, 448
influence of, 448

“The Navidson Report,” 448
subject of, 448
synopsis, 447–448
as a touchstone of postmodern writing, 447

The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 449–451
cinematic adaptations, 449–450
date published, 449
excerpt from, 450

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 449
influence of, 450–451

Lovecraft, H. P., on, 450
plot summary, 449
primary action of, 449

The House on the Borderland (Hodgson), 451–453
characters of, 452
clumsiness of, 452
first publication of, 451
graphic novel adaptation of, 452
influence of, 452
marginal region idea, 452
narrative flow of, 452
significance of, 452
style of, 451–452

Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 178

Howard, Robert E., 642

Howard, Robert E. (1906–1936), 453–455
birthplace of, 453

“Black Canaan,” 454

“The Black Stone,” 454

Conan the Barbarian, 453

Cthulhu Mythos and, 307, 454

“The Dead Remember,” 454
death of, 454

“The Little People,” 642

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 33, 454

“Man on the Ground,” 454

“Old Garfield’s Heart,” 454

“Pigeons from Hell,” 453, 454

“Sea Curse,” 454

Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults), 454

Weird Tales and, 454

The Whole Wide World film, 454

“Wolfshead,” 454

“Worms of the Earth,” 454, 642

Hubbard, L. Ron (1911–1986), 454–456

Battlefield Earth, 455

Fear, 368–369, 455–456, 685
full name of, 455

Return to the Stars, 455

Scientology, 456

The Typewriter in the Sky, 455, 456

Hugo, Victor (1802–1885), 405, 456–458

Bug-Jargal, 457
exile of, 456

French Romantic movement, 456

“frenetic school” of French horror fiction, 457

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 456, 457

Les Misérables, 456, 457

L’Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs), 457

The Man Who Laughs, 457–458
melodrama and political polemic, 457

Notre-Dame de Paris—1482, 457

Hunter, William/John, 231

Husserl, Edmund, 610

Huxley, Aldous

The Devils of Loudun, 359

Huysmans, J. K. (1848–1907), 458–459

À Rebours, 458–459, 675

The Damned, 467
description of a Black Mass, 459

En Rade, 459
full name of, 458
influence of, 458

Là-Bas, 459
mastery of description, 458
pen name of, 458
phases of his career, 458
religious conversion, 458

“supernatural realism,” 458
writing style of, 458

Huysmans, J. K. (Joris-Karl)

The Damned, 311
hypermasculinity, 65

I Am Legend (Matheson), 461–462
awarded, 462
as a benchmark, 462
cinematic adaptations, 461, 462

Dark Benediction (Miller Jr.) and, 462
impact on popular culture, 462

King, Stephen, on, 462
plot summary, 461

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (Ellison), 463–464
events motivating the writing of, 463
narrator of, 463
plot summary, 463
illuminated medieval apocalypse manuscripts, 52

Impact Software Development, 123
incubi and succubi, 465–469

Augustine (Saint) on, 465–466

“For the Blood Is the Life” (Crawford), 467

Chaldeans, 465

Daemonolatreia (Rémy), 466

The Damned (Huysmans), 467

De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis (Sinistrari), 466–467
definition of, 465

The Entity (De Felitta), 467
film adaptations, 467
first mention of incubi, 465

The Incubus (Russell), 467

Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), 466

The Monk (Lewis), 467, 820

The Nightmare (Fuseli) painting, 468

Rémy, Nicholas, 466

Rosemary’s Baby (Levin), 467
as scientific fact, 466
sexual contact with humans, 465

“A Short Trip Home” (Fitzgerald), 467
significance of, 468

Thomas Aquinas on, 466
witch trials and, 466
infection, contemporary fascination with, 44
intellectual history, 97

International Gothic Association (IGA), 469–470

Advisory Committee, 470

Annual General Meeting, 470
biennial conferences, 469

Executive Committee, 470
founding of, 76, 469

Gothic Studies journal, 76, 469, 470

International Gothic books, 469
mission of, 470
past presidents of, 470
presidency of, 470
website of, 469
work of, 469

International Horror Guild (IHG), 470–471
award categories, 471
date created, 470

Guran, Paula, 470

IHG Awards, 470–471
legacy of, 471

“Living Legend” award, 471
notable IHG Awards jury members, 470
original name of, 470
purpose of, 470
website of, 471
interstitial writing, 634

Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 40, 471–473

Claudia, 472
date published, 471

Dracula’s Daughter film, 472
as an elongated allegory for homosexual desire, 472–473
film adaptations, 473
holy terrors of the Catholic Church, 144
influence of, 473
key influences on, 472
plot summary, 471–472
polymorphous sensuality, 472

Spooner, Catherine, on, 472
sympathetic vampire, 472
a template for Goths, 472

The Invisible Man (Wells), 473–474
author of, 473
date published, 473
film adaptations, 474
initial horror of, 474
as a moral tale, 473
plot summary, 473

Republic (Plato), 473
scientific pursuit and, 474

Irving, Washington, 251

Brown, Charles Brockden, and, 251

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving), 68

Irving, Washington (1783–1859), 474–475
date and place of birth, 474
death of, 475
fame of, 474

“Gotham” and, 475
impact of, 475

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 474, 475
pseudonym, 474, 475

“Rip Van Winkle,” 474, 475

Salmagundi magazine, 474–475

The Sketch Book, 474, 475

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 475

“The Spectre Bridegroom,” 475

Tales of a Traveller, 475

Irzykowski, Karol, 395

The Island of Doctor Moreau (Wells), 473–474, 476–477
author of, 476

“Beast People,” 476
ethics of scientific experimentation, 476
film adaptations, 477
literary influences on, 476

Moreau’s laws, 476
plot summary, 476
primary concern of, 476

It (King), 477–478
author of, 477
awards to, 478

Bangor, Maine, and, 477
date published, 477
influence of, 478

Pennywise the Clown, 477, 478
plot summary, 477
popularity of, 478
serial killer John Wayne Gacy, 478

Jackson, Shirley (1916–1965), 479–483, 685
best-known novels of, 36–37
biographies of, 482, 483

The Bird’s Nest, 481

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 269
children’s stories of, 481
death of, 479
education of, 480

Hangsaman, 481
the haunted house story and, 419

The Haunting of Hill House, 34, 71, 116, 139, 420–422, 481, 685
husband of, 479

Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 479, 480
legacy of, 479

Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, 482

Life Among the Savages, 480

“The Lottery,” 34, 36, 479, 480

“Louisa, Please Come Home,” 480
memory of, 482

Merrell, Susan Scott, on, 482

“My Life with R. H. Macy,” 480

North Bennington, Vermont, 480, 482

“One Ordinary Day with Peanuts,” 480

Oppenheimer, Judy, on, 482
overview of, 36–37

Patchwork Girl, 63
previously unpublished works, 482

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (Oppenheimer), 482

Raising Demons, 480

The Road Through the Wall, 480

Shirley: A Novel (Merrell), 482–483

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Franklin), 483

Shirley Jackson Award, 483

“The Summer People,” 36, 480

The Sundial, 481

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 481–482

The Witchcraft of Salem Village, 480–481

Jacobs, W. W. (William Wymark)

“The Monkey’s Paw” (Jacobs), 615

James, Henry (1843–1916), 483–485

Elkins, Charles L., on, 483

“The Ghostly Rental,” 484

The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (Edel), 483
on ghost stories, 68
on the Gothic horror short story, 69

“The Jolly Corner,” 484
literary output of, 483

“Owen Wingrave,” 484

“The Real Right Thing,” 484

“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” 484

“Sir Edmund Orme,” 484

The Turn of the Screw, 420, 484, 682, 685, 763

James, M. R. (1862–1936), 485–488
academia and, 485

Ash-Tree Press and, 155
audio adaptations of James’s stories, 488

British Film Institute’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (2013), 488

Campbell, Ramsey, 265, 269

“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” (1895), 485

Casting the Runes, 280–282

The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, 485

The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (Joshi), 485

“Count Magnus,” 487
critical opinion of, 485
education of, 485

The Five Jars, 488
full name of, 485
ghost stories and, 67

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 485
hallmark of, 30

“The Haunted Dolls’ House,” 487

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 487

Macfarlane, Robert, on, 487–488

Madame Cowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, 486

“The Malice of Inanimate Objects,” 487

McBryde, James, and, 485–486

“The Mezzotint,” 485, 486, 487

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 485
occult detective fiction, 486–487

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” 485, 486

“The Rose Garden,” 487

The Story of a Troll-Hunt, 486
television film adaptations of James’s stories, 488

A Thin Ghost and Others, 485

“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” 487

“Two Doctors,” 487

“A View from a Hill,” 487

“A Warning to the Curious,” 487

A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories, 485
writing style of, 485

James I (King), 15

Jefferies, Richard

After London, 55

Jentsch, Ernst, 805

The Jewel of Seven Stars (Stoker), 489–490
as a conventional Gothic work, 489–490
doppelgängers, 489–490

Egyptological content of, 490
film adaptations, 489
film adaptations of, 490
plot summary, 489

“Powers—Old and New,” 490
settings, 490

Stoker, Bram, 489

John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (Blackwood), 490–492

Blackwood, Algernon, 491, 492

“Camp of the Dog,” 492
the character of Silence, 491
date published, 491

Nash, Eveleigh, and, 491–492

“Nemesis of Fire,” 492

Order of the Golden Dawn, 492
original intention for, 491
popularity of, 492

“A Psychical Invasion,” 492
the psychic doctor, 491

“Secret Worship,” 492

“A Victim of Higher Space,” 491–492

Jones, Darryl

Horror: A Thematic History in Film and Fiction, 76

Jones, Ernest

On the Nightmare, 342

Joshi, S. T. (1958–), xxx, 492–493
birthplace of, 492
on Campbell, Ramsey and, 267

The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, 485
full name of, 492
on “The Great God Pan,” 400

I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, 492–493
on Jackson, Shirley, 37
on James, M. R., 487
on Klein, T. E. D., 518
on Lovecraft, H. P., 570

The Lovecraft Annual: New Scholarship on H. P. Lovecraft, 493
on The Other (Tryon), 661
on the public’s faith for horror, 117
reputation of, 492

Studies in the Fantastic, 493

Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, 76, 493
work of, 492, 493

Joyce, Graham (1954–2014), 494–495
awards to, 494
death of, 494

The House of Lost Dreams, 494

Nottingham Trent University, 494
poetry and, 494

Requiem, 494

Smoking Poppy, 494

25 Years in the Word Mines, 494
the Jumbie, 146

Jung, Carl, 610, 738

Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), 497–499

Brod, Max, 498

The Castle, 498
death of, 497, 498

Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, 497
influence of, 167, 498–499

Kafkaesque surreality, 498

“The Metamorphosis,” 497–498

“In the Penal Colony,” 497

“A Report to an Academy,” 497

The Trial, 498, 499

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 645, 783

Karloff, Boris, 126, 136, 138, 141, 299, 377, 617

Kavan, Anna

Ice, 166

Keats, John

Lamia, 158
vampire fiction, 157

Keene, Brian (1967–), 499–500
awards to, 499
birthplace of, 499
comic books and, 499

Earthworm Gods series, 499
representative titles, 499
reputation of, 499

The Rising, 499

Keller, David H., 190

Kellett, Arnold, 596

Ketchum, Jack (1946–), 500–502
awards to, 501, 502

“The Box,” 501

Closing Time, 501
common theme in his work, 501
film adaptations, 501

The Girl Next Door, 501
as the “godfather of splatterpunk,” 502

Gone, 501

Hide and Seek, 501

The Lost, 501

Masks, 501

McKee, Lucky, and, 501

Off Season, 500–501

Peaceable Kingdom, 501
pseudonym of, 500
reputation of, 500

Right to Life, 501

She Wakes, 501
splatterpunk movement, 500, 502

Triage, 501

The Woman, 501–502

Kharms, Daniil, 344

Kiernan, Caitlín R. (1964–), 502–507

Alabaster comic book series, 502
authors and works recommended by, 507
awards to, 504
characteristics of, 503

The Dreaming comic book series, 502

The Drowning Girl, 345–346, 503

“feminizing of the weird,” 503

Gaiman, Neil, on, 503
her approach to her writing, 503
imaginative identification and empathy, 503
influences on, 503, 506–507
on the Internet and writing, 505
interview with, 504–507

Low Red Moon, 345

“Persephone,” 503

The Red Tree, 345, 503
scientific background of, 503

Silk, 345, 503

Sirenia Digest, 505
the term “horror” and, 42, 109, 503, 505–506

VanderMeer, Jeff, on, 503
work of, 502

King, Stephen (1947–), 508–512
awards to, 508

The Bachman Books, 510-511

Black House, 511

The Body, 510

Carrie, 508–509
on childhood and creativity, 510

“Children of the Corn,” 510
connective mythology of, 509

“The Crimson King,” 509

Cujo, 60

Danse Macabre, 23, 509, 638

The Dark Half, 338, 510

The Dark Tower, 318–319, 509, 511
date and place of birth, 508
devils and demons, 334, 335

Different Seasons, 511, 702

Doctor Sleep, 511

Dolores Claiborne, 338

Under the Dome, 105, 511

Dreamcatcher, 511

End of Watch, 511

The Eyes of the Dragon, 611
film adaptations, 510–511

Firestarter, 104

Flagg, Randall, 509
on Ghost Story (Straub), 384

“The Glass Elevator,” 508

“The Great God Pan” (Machen), 401

The Green Mile, 509

The Gunslinger, 119
on Hell House, 430
on Herbert, James, 431

Hill, Joe, 435, 511
his focus on writers, 510
on The House Next Door (Siddons), 447
imaginative capacity and resilience of children, 510
influences on, 509

It, 477–478
on Ketchum, Jack, 386

King, Owen, 511

Lovecraftian influences on, 509
on Matheson, Richard, 462

Misery, 611–612, 685

The Mist, 510

Needful Things, 335

Night Shift, 512, 637–638

Pennywise the Clown, 511
popularity of, 509, 513
public interest in horror, 153
on The Purple Cloud (Shiel), 747

Rage, 511

“The Reach,” 702–703
religion, horror, and the supernatural, 147

Riding the Bullet, 156

‘Salem’s Lot, 117, 384–385, 508, 509, 510
on “Sardonicus” (Russell), 730
the “scary child,” 510

The Shawshank Redemption, 511

The Shining, 338, 509, 510, 685, 748–749
significance of, 35, 40, 42, 511

Skeleton Crew, 119

The Stand, 104, 508

Stand by Me, 510
on Straub, Peter, 776

Strengell, Heidi, on, 510

The Talisman, 511
television adaptations of his works, 142

The Tommyknockers, 104

University of Maine Library and, 508
writing style of, 509–510

The King in Yellow (Chambers), 512–514

Blish, James, and, 514

Chambers’s oblique descriptions of the title play, 512

Derleth, August, and, 514

“In the Court of the Dragon,” 513

“The Demoiselle D’Ys,” 513

“The Fates,” 513
importance of, 512
interconnected stories of, 512

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 512

“The Mask,” 513

“The Repairer of Reputations,” 513

Silverberg, Robert, and, 514
terms used in, 512, 513

True Detective HBO television series, 514

“The Yellow Sign,” 513

Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936), 514–516

“The City of Dreadful Night,” 515

The Jungle Book, 514

Just So Stories, 514

“The Lost Legion,” 516

“The Man Who Would Be King,” 514

“The Mark of the Beast,” 515
the Nobel Prize for Literature, 514

“The Phantom ’Rickshaw” (Kipling), 670–671

“The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray,” 703–704

“The Story of Muhammad Din,” 515

“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” 515–516

“They,” 795

“Thrown Away,” 515

“By Word of Mouth,” 515

Kirk, Russell (1918–1994), 516–517

“Balgrummo’s Hell,” 517

“Behind the Stumps,” 517
birthplace of, 517

Catholicism, 516
conservatism of, 516
education of, 517

Enemies of Permanent Things, 516

Lord of the Hollow Dark, 517
main interest of, 517
number of ghost stories written, 517

The Old House of Fear, 517
reputation of, 516

“Saviourgate,” 516–517

“There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” 516, 793–794

“The Watchers at the Strait Gate,” 516

Klein, T. E. D. (1947–), 517–519
awards to, 518

“Black Man with a Horn,” 518

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 270

The Ceremonies, 60, 284–287, 518

“Children of the Kingdom,” 518

Dark Gods, 284, 518

“Dr. Van Helsing’s Handy Guide to Ghost Stories,” 518
eco-horror, 60

“The Events at Poroth Farm,” 517–518
fame of, 284
full name of, 517

Joshi, S. T., on, 518
literary horror history and, 285

“Nadelman’s God,” 518

Nighttown, 518
praise for, 517

Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit, 518

Reassuring Tales, 518

Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine and, 518

Trauma film, 518

See also Dark Gods (Klein)

Kneale, Nigel (1922–2006), 519–520
awards to, 520

“The Calculation of M’Bambwe,” 519

The Creature, 520

“Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty,” 519

The Entertainer, 520

First Men in the Moon, 520
full name of, 519

“Jeremy in the Wind,” 519

Look Back in Anger, 520

“Minuke,” 519

“Oh Mirror, Mirror,” 519

“The Patter of Little Feet,” 519

“Peg,” 519

“The Pond,” 519

Quatermass and the Pit, 520

The Quatermass Experiment, 519

Quatermass television plays, 519

The Stone Tape, 520

“The Tarroo-Ushtey,” 519

Tomato Cain, 519

The Witches, 520

The Woman in Black, 520

Koja, Kathe (1960–), 520–522
awards to, 520–521

Bad Brains, 521
birthplace of, 520

The Cipher, 520, 521
fictions for young adults, 521

Guran, Paula, on, 521

Kink, 521

Lieder, Rick, and, 520

“The Neglected Garden,” 522
nerve (immersive ensemble), 521
notable themes of, 521–522
reputation of, 520
sexually transgressive work, 167

Skin, 521

Skin, a passage from, 521

Strange Angels, 521

“Teratisms,” 522
writing style of, 521

Koontz, Dean (1945–), 147, 241, 430, 522–524
birthplace of, 522

Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion (Kotker), 524
early life of, 523
education of, 523

Eyes, Twilight, 523–524

Fear Nothing, 524
film adaptations, 524
his versatility as a popular writer, 523
message to his readers, 524
as a novelist of thrillers, 671–672
overview of his work, 522
pseudonyms of, 523

Seize the Night, 524

Star Quest, 523

Ticktock, 523
transcendentalism concept, 523
use of “unexpected juxtapositions,” 523

Watchers, 524
work across genre boundaries, 523

Kostova, Elizabeth Johnson

The Historian, 437–439

Kotker, Joan G.

Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion, 524

Kuttner, Henry (1915–1958), 525–527

“The Black Kiss,” 525

“Call Him Demon,” 526
collaborations of, 525

“Compliments of the Author,” 526
contributions to Weird Tales, 525

“The Devil We Know,” 526

“The Eater of Souls,” 525

“The Graveyard Rats,” 525

Hammond, Paul, 525

“Housing Problem,” 526

“Hunger in the Dark,” 525

“I, the Vampire,” 525

“It Walks by Night,” 525
lost world fantasies, 526

“Masquerade,” 526

Moore, C. L., 525

Padgett, Lewis, 525
pseudonyms, 525

“Quest of the Starstone,” 525

“The Salem Horror,” 525

“The Secret of Kralitz,” 525

“A Skull Has No Ears,” 525

“Threshold,” 526

“Thunder in the Dawn,” 525
weird tales of, 526

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (Hearn), 527–528

“The Dream of Akinosuke,” 527
film adaptation, 528

Hearn, Lafcadio, 527

“Jikiniki,” 527
malevolent spirits, 527

“Mujina,” 527

“Rokuro-Kubi,” 527
title of, 527

“Yuki-Onna,” 527

Lacan, Jacques, 806

Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 75

“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” (Barrett), 81

Laemmle, Carl, 341, 627

Lamb, Lady Caroline

Byron, Lord, 260

Glenarvon, 261

Lanchester, Elsa, 127

Lane, Joel (1963–2013), 529
awards to, 529

The Blue Mask, 529

From Blue to Black, 529

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 270
death of, 529

The Earth Wire, 529

The Lost District, 529
reputation of, 529

Where Furnaces Burn, 529

Lane, John, 399

Lansdale, Joe R. (1951–), 529–533
awards to, 530
birthplace of, 530

Bubba Ho-Tep, 530
crime novels of, 530

Datlow, Ellen, on, 321

For a Few Stories More, 530–531
film adaptations, 530

“Guide to (Not Rules of) Writing,” 531
on horror, 532, 533
on important influences, 532–533
interview with, 531–533
on McCammon, Robert, 533

The Nightrunners (Lansdale), 765
reputation of, 529–530

Savage Season, 530

Southern Gothics of, 530
splatterpunk, 765
on writing and/or publishing horror, 532
writing style of, 530

“The Last Feast of Harlequin” (1990), 533–534
influences on, 533

Ligotti, Thomas, 533, 534
plot summary, 533

The Late Lancashire Witches (Heywood and Brome), 15

Latin literature, 6
laughter and horror, 17

Laurel Entertainment, 96

Lautréamont, 344

Lavatar, Ludwig, 15

Lawrence, D. H., 68

“The Rocking-Horse Winner,” 710–711

“Lazarus” (Andreyev), 534, 534–536
acclaim for, 535
date of publication, 534

Gorky, Maxim, on, 535
as a horror classic, 535
the horror of the void in his eyes, 535
plot summary, 534–535

Scarborough, Dorothy, on, 535
subversive reiteration of the biblical message of hope, 535
tone of, 535
translation of, 534
the zombie genre and, 536

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan (1814–1873), 536–540
acclaim for, 539–540

“An Account of Some Strange Disturbances on Aungier Street,” 538

Carmilla, 64, 159, 539
children of, 538

The Cock and Anchor, 538
death of, 539

Dublin University Magazine, 538
early years of, 536–537
education of, 537

The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien, 538
full name of, 536

In a Glass Darkly, 159, 402, 464–465

“Green Tea,” 401–403, 539
the haunted house story and, 419
his beloved Susanna, 538, 539
his method and style of horror, 539
homoeroticism in, 539
horror anthologies and, 86
influence of, 539, 540
literary output of, 536
marriage of, 537
parents of, 536
reputation as the Invisible Prince, 538

“Schalken the Painter,” 732–733

Swedenborg, Emanuel, and, 402, 403, 539

Uncle Silas, 538, 539

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 539

The Warder newspaper, 537

Lee, Edward, 765

Lee, Tanith (1947–2015), 540–542
awards to, 541

Blood Opera sequence, 541

Dark Dance, 541

Darkness, I, 542

“Death Dances,” 540, 541
death of, 542

“Elle Est Trois, (La Mort),” 541

“The Gorgon,” 541

Heart Beast, 541

“La Vampiresse,” 541
literary output of, 540

Personal Darkness, 541–542
the Scarabae, 541
significance of, 542

“The Werewolf,” 540–541
writing style of, 540

Lee, Vernon (1856–1935), 542–543
birthplace of, 542

British aesthetic movement and, 542
femme fatale stories of, 542

Hauntings, 542

“The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” 543

“Marsyas in Flanders,” 543

For Maurice: Five Unlikely Tales, 543

A Phantom Lover (“Oke of Okehurst”), 542

Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales, 543

“Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” 543
pseudonym of Violet Paget, 542
on sexual passion, 542

“The Virgin of the Seven Daggers,” 543

“A Wicked Voice,” 542
the legacy of Frankenstein: from Gothic novel to cultural myth, 125–130

Aldiss, Brian, 126
background of, 125–126

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), 127, 129

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Ackroyd), 129

Faustian and Promethean myths, 126
first adaptation of, 126
first cinematic treatment of, 126

Frankenstein’s monster: Adam or Satan? 128

Frankenstein Unbound (Aldiss), 129
as the fundamental science fiction narrative, 127
galvanism, 129

Gothic (Russell), 129

Haunted Summer, 129
influence of, 127

Karloff, Boris, 126

Lanchester, Elsa, 127

A Monster’s Notes (Sheck), 129
mythical overtones, 127–128
outlandish examples of, 127
parody of, 127

Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (Peake), 126

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 125, 128–129, 130

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 128, 129

Whale’s 1931 adaptation of, 126–127

See also Shelley, Mary; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving), 543–545
film adaptations, 544–545

Ichabod Crane, 544
inspiration for, 544
philosophical debate in, 544
superstitions, 544
as a a vindication of the values of rational thinking, 544
writing style of, 544

Leiber, Fritz (1910–1992), 545–547
awards to, 545
birthplace of, 545

“Coming Attraction,” 545

Conjure Wife, 302–303, 546

“Four Ghosts in Hamlet,” 547

Gather, Darkness! 545

The Ghost Light, 547

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” 386–388, 547

“The Hound,” 546–547

Lovecraft, H. P., 33

Our Lady of Darkness, 547, 662–663

“The Pale Brown Thing,” 662
seminal collections of, 547

Shadows with Eyes, 117
significance of, 545

“Smoke Ghost,” 37, 546
sword-and-sorcery genre and, 545

Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds) and, 545–546

You’re All Alone, 545

Le Loyer, Pierre, 15

“Lenore” (Bürger), 78

Leroux, Gaston, 668

Lessing, Doris

The Fifth Child, 334

“Let the Old Dreams Die” (Lindqvist), 43

Let the Right One In (Lindqvist), 43

Leven, Jeremy

Satan, 334

Levin, Ira
awards to, 715

The Boys from Brazil, 104

Kiss Before Dying, 715

Rosemary’s Baby, 39, 104, 117, 146, 334, 359, 467, 715–717

The Stepford Wives, 104

Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775–1818), 547–549, 820

“Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine,” 548

The Castle Spectre, 548
demon lover motif, 334
fame of, 547
influence of, 26, 548
influences on, 547–548

Journal of a West India Proprietor, 548
poetry of, 548

Radcliffe, Ann, and, 547
on religious and otherworldly matters, 145

“On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 23

Tales of Terror, 548

Tales of Wonder, 548

See also The Monk (Lewis)

LibriVox, 488

Lieder, Rick, 520

Life of Apollonius of Tyana (Philostratus), 543

“Ligeia” (Poe), 549–551, 550

“The Conqueror Worm” (Poe), 550
excerpt from, 549

Glanvill, Joseph, 550
influence of, 550
plot summary, 550

Poe, Edgar Allan, and, 549
prose of, 549–550

The Tomb of Ligeia film, 550

Ligotti, Thomas (1953–), 551–558

The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales, 552
antinatalism, 555
awards to, 552

Born to Fear (a collection of interviews), 553

Cartesian dualism, 557
characteristic elements of his stories, 556

Cioran, Emile, 553
collaboration with band Current 93, 552–553
collections of, 552
connection to Lovecraft, 554–555

“The Consolations of Horror,” xxxii

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 555

Crampton, a screenplay, 552
creating effects, 554
dark philosophical worldview, 552, 553
disillusionment, 552
dolls and puppets, 553–554, 556
dream city, 554
dreamers as characters, 554

“The Dreaming in Nortown,” 534

“Dream of a Mannikin,” 553–554
dreams and nightmares, 557
first stories of, 552

“The Frolic” (film), 553

Grimscribe collection, 534
on human existence, 534
influence of, 45, 555
influences on, 167, 344, 553, 555
interview with, 556–558

“The Last Feast of Harlequin,” 533–534, 798
on Lovecraft, H. P., 558

“Metaphysica Morum,” 554

My Work Is Not Yet Done, 552, 554

“Nethescurial,” 554

The Nightmare Factory, 552
nihilism, 551, 555
notable aspects of his work, 552, 553

“Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” 555
on the novel, 557–558
point of view of, 553

“The Prodigy of Dreams,” 554

“Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror,” 555

“The Red Tower,” 552, 555

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 553
significance of, 553

Songs of a Dead Dreamer, 552

“The Spectacles in the Drawer,” 534

True Detective and accusation of plagiarism, 553
on the value of horror literature, 558

Lindqvist, John Ajvide (1968–), 181–182
allegorical quality of his writings, 182
birthplace of, 181

Hanteringen av odöda / Handling the Undead, 182, 872

Harbour, 182

I Am behind You, 182

Let the Old Dreams Die, 182

Let the Right One In, 181, 182

Lilla stjärna / Little Star, 182

Människohamn / Harbour, 182
reputation off, 181
soubriquet of, 181

Link, Kelly (1969–), 558–560
awards to, 559
characteristics of work, 559
critics on, 559
as an editor, 559

Fabulations, 558

Get in Trouble, 559
husband of, 559
short story collections of, 559
standout titles of individual stories, 559

L’Innomable (Beckett), 270

Lipinski, Miroslaw, 313

“The Listeners” (de la Mare), 560–562
copy of, 561
date written, 560
fear of resolute silence, 560
horror underlining, 560
menace of unexplained occurrences, 560
the phantom listeners, 560
publishing of, 560
questions raised in, 560
storyline of, 560

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Daniels), 35

“Locksley Hall” (Tennyson), 81

Long, Frank Belknap (1901–1994), 562–564
collections of his weird tales and science fiction, 564
contributions to Unknown, 563
contributions to Weird Tales, 562

Cthulhu Mythos, 307, 562

“The Dog-Eared God,” 562

The Early Long, 564
as an editor, 564

“Fisherman’s Luck,” 563

The Horror from the Hills, 562

“The Hounds of Tindalos,” 562, 563

Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, 564

“Johnny on the Spot,” 563

Lovecraft, H. P., 562, 564

“The Man with a Thousand Legs,” 562
modern Gothic romance novels of, 564
poetry of, 564
pseudonym of, 564

“Second Night Out” (aka “The Dead Black Thing”), 562

“The Space Eaters,” 562

“Step into My Garden,” 563
themes of early stories, 562

Longinus

Peri Hypsous, 20

“Lot No. 249” (Doyle), 564–565
film adaptations, 565
first appearance of, 564
importance of, 565
plot of, 564
plot structure of, 565

Lovecraft, H. P. (1890–1937), 566–571, 845
on Ainsworth, William Harrison, 180
alien races, notion of, 567–568
alternative definition of weird fiction, 164
anthrophobia and, 570

Arkham House, 189–190
birthplace of, 567
body snatching, 232

“The Call of Cthulhu,” opening paragraph of, 263

“The Call of Cthulhu,” use of the club story, 374

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 271

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 278–280
childhood of, 567

Collected Poems, 191

“The Colour out of Space,” 165, 298–300, 569

“Cool Air,” 107
on cosmic horro, 164, 165
cosmic imagery of, 569
cosmology of, 567

Crypt of Cthulhu fanzines, 118

Cthulhu Mythos, 123, 193, 225, 264, 280, 306–308, 568
current status of, 570–571

“Dagon,” 570
death of, 567
on “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (Bierce), 327–328
description of Wilbur Whately’s corpse, 351
the “Dreamlands” stories, 568

“The Dreams in the Witch House,” 570

Dunsanian fantasy and, 568

Dunsany, Lord, 30

“The Dunwich Horror,” 350–352

The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales, 89
eco-horror, 60
on Edgar Allan Poe, 164

“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” 570
foreshadowing technique of, 569
ghostwriting, 33
the grotesque, use of, 405
hasard, 569

“The Haunter of the Dark,” 225
on Hawthorne, 424

“He,” 570

Hodgson, William Hope, 439

“The Horror at Red Hook,” 570
horror video games, 123
on The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), 450–451
immigration and, 570
on the importance of atmosphere, 569
influence of, 31, 33, 34, 566–567, 570
on James, M. R., 487

Joshi, S. T., and, 570

The King in Yellow (Chambers), 509

Ligotti, Thomas, on, 558
literary realism, 569

Lovecraftian games, 567

Lovecraftian music, 567

Lovecraftian television, 567

Lovecraft Mythos, 271

Lovecraft’s Legacy, 121

“The Lurking Fear,” 570

Marginalia (Lovecraft), 190
marriage of, 567

At the Mountains of Madness, 165, 192–194, 298
movies directly based on Lovecraft’s stories, 566
movies featuring a distinct Lovecraftian influence or direct Lovecraftian references, 566

“The Music of Erich Zann,” 628–630

Necronomicon Press, 155
the numinous, 645

“Nyarlathotep,” 570
overview of, 31–32

“Pickman’s Model,” 673–675

Poe, Edgar Allan, 164, 569
as a poet, 569

Providence, Rhode Island and, 567
on Quinn, Seabury, 689
racism of, 570

“The Rats in the Walls,” 570, 698–700
science fiction, 33
as a science fiction writer, 103

Selected Letters (Lovecraft), 190

“The Shadow out of Time,” 193

“The Shadow over Innsmouth,” 31–32, 229–230, 570

“The Shunned House,” 570
significance of, 566
small press and, 153
on Smith, Clark Ashton, 756
on the sublime, 783

Supernatural Horror in Literature, 23, 75, 163, 164, 363, 424, 569, 783

“symbolic phantasy,” impetus for, 568
use of New England local color, 570

Wandrei, Donald, 33
the weird and, 44
weird and cosmic horror fiction and, 163, 164

Weird Tales, 165

“The Whisperer in Darkness,” 569–570

Wright, Farnsworth, 31
on Yog-Sothoth, 568

Lovecraftian horror, 571–573
the Cthulhu Mythos, 572
definition of, 571
futility theme, 572

“outsideness,” 571–572
unique innovation of, 572

Lowenstein, Adam, 98

Lucretius

De rerum natura, 107

Lucy Westenra, 64

Lugosi, Bela, 136, 341, 617

Lumley, Brian (1937–), 573–575
awards to, 573, 574

The Caller of the Black, 573

“The Cyprus Shell,” 573
date and place of birth, 573

Derleth, August, and, 573

“Dreamscape” series, 574
early life of, 573

“E-Branch trilogy,” 574
first two novels of, 573
influences on, 573

“Psychomech” series, 574
short stories of, 574

“Titus Crow” series, 573, 652

Weinberg, Robert, on, 574
writing style of, 573

The Lurker at the Threshold, 575–576

Cthulhu Mythos, 575–576
date published, 575

Derleth, August, and, 575
first part of, 575

“posthumous collaborations,” 575
second part of, 575
third part of, 575

The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987), 123

Lynch, David, 338
macabre, banalization of, 37

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 15

MacDonald, George

Phantastes, 314

Macfarlane, Robert, 487–488

Machen, Arthur (1863–1947), 577–582

“Angels of Mons” legend, 579–580
association of child-like figures with supernatural forces, 580–581
birthplace of, 577

“The Bowmen,” 579

“The Bright Boy,” 580

The Children of the Pool, 580

The Chronicle of Clemendy, 577
critical reaction to, 578
critical recognition of, 580
death of his first wife, 579

Don’t Look Now, 580

“A Double Return,” 577
on “The Ghost Ship,” 383

“The Great God Pan,” 132, 166, 286, 334, 399–401, 578

The Green Round, 580, 581

The Hill of Dreams, 579
later life of, 581–582
legacy of both fiction and nonfiction, 581

“The Lost Club,” 577

“N,” 581

“The Novel of the Black Seal,” 641–642
the numinous, 645

Order of the Golden Dawn, 579

Ornaments in Jade, 579

“Out of the Earth,” 580
output during the Great War, 580

Quilter, Harry, on, 578
religiosity of, 581
on the roots of horror literature, 143
second wife of, 580
significance of, 166, 577

Starrett, Vincent, 580

The Terror, 580

The Three Impostors, 166, 578, 579
timeline of, 578

Todorov, Tzvetan, on Machen, 400–401

“unhealthy” literature, 579

War and the Christian Faith, 580

Wells, H. G., on, 578

“The White People,” 285, 579, 844

“Mackintosh Willy,” 582–584
author of, 582
awards to, 582

Campbell, Ramsey, 582, 583
dialogue in, 584

“loophole for a natural explanation,” 583
plot summary, 582–583
tradition and, 583

MacRitchie, David, 642

MAD magazine, 93
mad scientist, 584–585
archetype during the nineteenth century, 584–585
archetype during the twentieth century, 585
as a cliché, 585

Frankenstein and, 584
historical sources of, 584
magical realism, 692, 734

The Magus (Barrett), 333
major genres of literature, 3

Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), 15, 466

Malpertuis (Ray), 585–587
date of first English translation, 585
date of first publication, 585
as an example of a latter-day Gothic romance, 585

Flemish-language film adaptation of, 586
frame narratives, 585–586
plot summary, 585–586
themes in, 586

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Potocki), 587–588
admirers of, 588
complexity of, 587, 588
inspiration for, 587
occultism, 588

Polish film adaptation of, 588

Potocki, Count Jan, 587
publication history of, 587
synopsis of, 587

Marasco, Robert

Burnt Offerings, 254–255, 419

Mare, Walter de la, 30
the haunted house story, 419

Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels, 45

Mark Twain

The Mysterious Stranger, 334

Marsh, Richard, 178

The Beetle, 340, 682

Martin, George R. R. (1948–), 588–590

The Armageddon Rag, 589
awards to, 589

Dozois, Gardner, on, 589

Fevre Dream, 589

Game of Thrones, 588, 589

“Meathouse Man,” 589

“The Monkey Treatment,” 589

“Nightflyers,” 589

“The Pear-Shaped Man,” 589

Sandkings, 725–727
scripting and producing for television, 589
short form horror fiction, 589

“The Skin Trade,” 589

Song of Ice and Fire series, 588, 589

“The Masque of the Red Death” (Poe), 590–592
comic undercurrents in, 590
date and place first published, 590
excerpt from, 591
film adaptations, 590–591
as a ghost story, 69–70

Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and, 590
plot summary, 590

Mather, Cotton, 19

Matheson, Richard (1926–2013), 592–594

Beaumont, Charles, and, 592

“Born of Man and Woman,” 34
date and place of birth, 592
death of, 594

“Disappearing Act,” 646
in film and television, 592, 593
full name of, 592
hallmarks of his oeuvre, 592

Hell House, 419, 421, 429–431

I Am Legend, 43, 107, 162, 461–462, 592
importance of, 594
as Logan Swanson, 462

“Nightmare at 20,000 feet,” 593
personal demons of, 593

Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), 37

The Shrinking Man, 37, 592
significance of, 592

“The Southern California Writer’s Group,” 592
writing style of, 594

Maturin, Charles Robert (1782–1824), 594–596

Bertram, 595
characteristics of, 594
date and place of birth, 594
death of, 595
education of, 594
marriage of, 594

Melmoth the Wanderer, 26, 72, 78, 144, 187, 595, 603–605
pseudonym use, 595

Scott, Sir Walter, and, 595

Maugham, Somerset, 795

Maupassant, Guy de (1850–1893), 596–597

“Boule de suif” (Ball of Fat), 596

The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Kellett), 596
death of, 597
frame story, 596
full name of, 596
the haunted house story, 419

“The Horla,” 338, 344, 443–444, 596

Kellett, Arnold, on, 596

“La Parure,” 596

“Lui?” (tr. as The Terror; 1883), 596

“Qui sait?” (Who Knows? 1890), 596
war stories, 597

Mayr, Dallas. See Ketchum, Jack (1946–)

McBryde, James, 485–486

McCammon, Robert R. (1952–), 597–600

Baal, 597

Bethany’s Sin, 597–598

Blue World, 600

The Border, 599

Boy’s Life, 599

The Five, 600
full name of, 597

Gone South, 599

The Hunter from the Woods, 599

I Travel By Night, 599

Last Train from Perdition, 599

Mine, 598, 599

Mystery Walk, 598
significance of, 597

Speaks the Nightbird, 599–600

Stinger, 599

Swan Song, 510, 599

Usher’s Passing, 598–599

The Wolf’s Hour, 599

McCarron, Kevin, 171

McCarthy, Cormac, 44, 206, 405

McCauley, Kirby, 118

McClure, Marguerite “Maggie,” 238

McDowell, Michael (1950–1999), 600–601

The Amulet, 600

Blackwater, 600

Candles Burning, 601

“Death Collection” of, 601
death of, 601
education of, 600
film and television work, 601
full name of, 600
influence of Eudora Welty, 601
pseudonyms of, 601

Southern Gothic novels, 600, 601

McGrath, Patrick (1950–), 602–603
archive of his professional materials, 603

Asylum, 602
awards to, 602
critical study of, 602
father of, 602

Ghost Town, 602
influences on, 602

Martha Peake, 602
reputation of, 602

Zlosnik’s monograph Patrick McGrath, 602

McIlwraith, Dorothy, 33

McKee, Lucky, 501

McMahon, Gary, 270

Medea (Euripides), xxxii, 5

Medea (Seneca), 7

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 603–605

Balzac, Honoré de, on, 605

Baudelaire, Charles, on, 605

Breton, André, on, 605
contemporary reviews of, 604–605

Crocker, John Wilson, on, 604
in France, 605
full title of, 603
the Gothic as a critical mode, 604

Maturin, Charles Robert, 604
plot summary, 604–605
reputation of, 605

Sebastian Melmoth the Wanderer, 604

The Songs of Maldoror and, 605
structure of, 604

Menikoff, Barry, 796
men’s magazine market, 36
mental disturbance, 78

Merrell, Susan Scott

Shirley: A Novel, 482–483

Metamorphoses (Lucius Apuleius), 7

Metamorphoses (Ovid), 7

Metcalfe, John (1891–1965), 605–607
at Arkham House, 606

Arm’s-Length, 606

“The Bad Lands,” 606

Brenner’s Boy, 606

“The Double Admiral,” 606
education of, 605

English regional dialect use, 606
father of, 605

The Feasting Dead, 606
full name of, 605
and“Funeral March of a Marionette,” 606

Judas, and Other Stories, 606

“Mortmain,” 606

“Mr. Meldrum’s Mania,” 606

The Smoking Leg, and Other Stories, 606

“Time-Fuse,” 606

T’Strike (one-act play), 606

Meyrink, Gustav (1868–1932), 607–608
arrest of, 607
birth name, 607
characteristics of his fiction, 607
exhibition of his work, 607

The Golem, 390–391, 607
noteworthy works of, 607
religious faith and, 607

“The Mezzotint” (James), 67

Middle English romances, first, 13

Middleton, Richard

“The Ghost Ship,” 382–383

Miéville, China (1972–), 46, 105, 167, 608–609
awards to, 608–609

Bas-Lag Series, 608

The City & the City, 608, 609
education of, 608

Embassytown, 608

Iron Council, 609

Kraken, 608
as a Marxist, 608

“new weird” movement, 608

Perdido Street Station, 608

Railsea, 608

The Scar, 608
steampunk, 608

Un Lun Dun, 608

“weird fiction,” 608
writings of, 608

Mikami, Shinji, 121
millenarianism, 53

Milne, A. A., 721

Milton, John

Paradise Lost, 144, 334

The Mind Parasites, 609–611
horror pedigree of, 610

Husserl, Edmund, 610

Jung, Carl, 610
manipulation of humanity, 610

The Mind Parasites, 610

The Outsider, 610
plot summary, 609–610
reflection upon disarticulation, 610
vanguard of modern American vampire, 609

Wilson, Colin, 609

Misery (King), 611–612
as autobiographical, 611
date published, 611

The Eyes of the Dragon, 611
film and theater adaptations, 611
genesis for, 611
the “hobbling” scene, 611

King, Stephen, 611, 612
metafictional “trilogy,” 611
plot summary, 611
significance of, 612
misogyny, 63

Mitchell, David, 42

Moers, Ellen, 377, 742

The Monk (Lewis), 612–615, 820
adaptations, 614
ancestral curse, 187
canonical writers inspired by, 614

Catholicism, 107, 108, 144, 613

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on, 168, 614
criticism of, 614
effect of, 23–24, 612
excerpts from, 613
the “female monk,” 614
as first novel of supernatural horror in English, 23
influences on, 614

“Lenore” and, 78

Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 547, 612, 820

Mathilda, succubus-like character, 334, 467

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 614, 632
plot summary, 612–614
popularity of, 23, 612
prominent themes in, 613
publication history, 612

Radcliffe, Ann, and, 614
reactions to, 168, 169
religious horror, events breeding, 144
rewriting of, 614
scandal of, 612
significance of, 73
in the twenty-first-century, 614

Valancourt Press 2013 edition of, 615

“The Monkey’s Paw” (Jacobs), 615–616
adaptations of, 616
date of first publication, 615
influence of, 615–616
inspiration for, 615

Jacobs, W. W., 615
plot summary, 615
monsters, 616–618

Darwinian evolution and, 617
definition of, 617
early examples of, 616
embedded meaning, 617
horror films and, 617
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,, 617
new monsters, 618
as products of cultural anxieties, 617

Psycho, 618
science fiction–influenced, 618
slasher genre, 618
in the twentieth century, 617–618
vampires, 616–617

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 616
zombies, 618

See also gender, sexuality, and the monsters of literary horror

Moore, Alan

The Saga of the Swamp Thing, 96

Moore, Alan (1953–), 619–620

“The Courtyard,” 619

From Hell series, 619

Lovecraft, H. P., 619

Providence series, 619
reputation of, 619

The Saga of the Swamp Thing, 619
significance of, 619

Moore, C. L., 525

“Shambleau,” 102

“moral insanity,” 78

Morrell, David (1943–), 620–621
birthplace of, 620

Black Evening anthology, 621

Fireflies, 620

First Blood, 620
on Grant, Charles, 397–398
horror anthologies and, 621

Klass, Philip, and, 620
literary output of, 620

Long Lost, 620

Nightscape anthology, 621

The Totem, 620

Morrison, Michael A., 672

Morrison, Toni (1931–), 621–622
awards to, 621

Beloved, 212, 622
date and place of birth, 621

Desdemona, 622
education of, 621

Faulkner’s Southern Gothic and, 621
ghost stories, 622
influence of, 621
influences on, 621–622
literary output of, 621, 622

Playing in the Dark (lecture collection), 622

Princeton University Library archive of, 622
at Random House, 621
significance of, 621

Morrow, W. C. (1854–1932), 622–624

The Ape the Idiot & Other People, 622–623
date of birth, 622
full name of, 622

“His Unconquerable Enemy,” 622, 623

A Man: His Mark, 624
notable stories of, 623

“Over an Absinthe Bottle,” 623

“The Pale Dice-Thrower,” 623
reputation as a horror writer, 622

Mosse, Kate, 42

Mostellaria (The Haunted House), 6

“Mr. Arcularis” (Aiken), 624–625
adaptations of, 625

Aiken, Conrad, 624

The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 624, 625
criticism of, 625
first publication of, 624
plot summary, 624–625

Schorer, Mark, on Ailen, 625

MS. Cotton Vitellius A XV, 85
mummies, 625–628

Balderston, John, 627

Carter, John, 627
as a character in horror literature, 625
in contemporary fiction, 628

Egyptomania, 627
interest in, 626–627

The Jewel of Seven Stars (Stoker), 627

King Tut, 627

“Lot No. 249” (Doyle), 627
mummification, 626

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (Rice), 628
mummy defined, 625

The Mummy film, 627, 628
mummy movies, 627–628
notable mummy fictions, 626
and the rational world, 626
revenant defined, 625

“The Ring of Thoth” (Doyle), 627

“Some Words with a Mummy” (Poe), 627

“The Music of Erich Zann” (Lovecraft), 628–630
dates written and published, 628
forbidden and obscure knowledge, 629
horror of the cosmic void, 629

Lovecraft, H. P., 628
popularity of, 629
setting, 629
themes in, 629

Myers, Frederick, 338

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 630–632

Emily, 631–632
excerpt from, 631
impact of, 632
influence of, 630

The Monk (Lewis) and, 614, 632, 820
plot summary, 630–631

Radcliffe, Ann, 630
significance of, 632
success of, 630
unintended consequence of, 631

“A Mystery of the Campagna,” 160

Narine, Anil, 61

Nash, Eveleigh, 491–492
natural horror, 57

Necronomicon Press, 153, 155

Nevill, Adam, 43

“The New People” (Beaumont), 37

New Weird, 633–634
definition of, 633
film and television, 633

The New Weird anthology, 633
notable examples of, 633
position in weird fiction, 633

The Silver Web, 633
validity of the term, 634

VanderMeer, Jeff, on, 167, 633

Newman, Kim (1959–), 634–635, 635

Anno Dracula, 635

Bad Dreams, 634–635
erudition in twentieth-century popular culture, 634

Nightmare Movies, 634

The Night Mayor, 634
the pastiche and, 635
pseudonym, 634
reputation of, 635
short fiction of, 635

Nicholls, Peter, 729

The Night Land (Hodgson), 635–637

“cosmic horror” of, 636
critical opinion of, 635
frame narrative of, 635

Hodgson, William Hope, 635
mock-archaic style of, 635
plot summary, 635–636
prose of, 635, 636
publication date, 635
vision of the world’s end, 635

Night Shift (King), 637–638

“The Boogeyman,” 637
on film, 637

“Graveyard Shift,” 637

“Gray Matter,” 637

“I Am the Doorway,” 637

“Jerusalem’s Lot,” 637

King’s trademark approach to horror, 637

“The Ledge,” 637

“The Mangler,” 637

“marketable obsession,” 637–638

“One for the Road,” 637

“The Woman in the Room,” 637
nihilism, 551, 555

Nisard, Desiré, 381

Nodier, Charles, 816

Nolan, William F. (1928–), 638–639
birthplace of, 638
on Dashiell Hammett, 638
full name of, 638

“The Group,” 638
literary output of, 638
on Max Brand, 638
poetry and screenwriting, 638–639
style of, 639
themes of, 639

Nordau, Max, 145

Northanger Abbey (Austen), 639–641
adaptations of, 640

Austen, Jane, 639
date published, 639
the Gothic novel and, 639
new version of, 640
as a parody of the Gothic novel, 639, 640
plot summary, 639–640

Nosferatu (film), 341

No Sleep forum, 114

Not at Night, 87

The Not at Night Omnibus, 87

“The Novel of the Black Seal” (Machen), 641–642
biological and cultural atavism, 642

Euhemerist theories of MacRitchie, 642
influence of, 642
influential idea in, 641
synopsis of, 641–642

The Three Impostors, 641
novels versus short fiction, 643–645
collections of horror stories, 644
early American Gothic short novels, 644
early Gothic fictions, 643
examples of lengthy Gothic novels, 643

Gothic novels, 643

Gothic theater and poetry, 643

“great Gothic craze,” 643

Hartwell, David, on, 644
horror fiction in novel-length form, 644

Poe on the value of short fiction, 644
sentimental novels, 643
short form fiction in America, 643–644

Southern Gothic fiction, 644
the numinous, 645–646

Blackwood, Algernon, 645

“Cecilia de Noel,” 646
definition of, 645

Kant, Immanuel, and, 645

Lovecraft, H. P., 645

Machen, Arthur, 645
as mystical, 645
the noumenal, 645
numinous experience, 645

Otto, Rudolf, and, 645
as philosophical, 645
scientific speculation and, 645
significant example of a numinous story, 646

“And When the Sky Was Opened,” 646

Oates, Joyce Carol, 108–109

Oates, Joyce Carol (1938–), 647–649

The Accursed, 648

“The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly,” 647

“The Aesthetics of Fear,” 647

American Gothic Tales (1996), 647
awards to, 647, 648

Beasts, 648

Corn Maiden, a collection, 647

Death-Cup,” 647

Do with Me What You Will, 648
on the experience of terror, 647

First Love: A Gothic Tale, 648

“Fossil-Figures,” 647

“Gothic Saga,” 648
historical tales, 648
horror literature and, 647
literary output of, 647
mainstream publishing and, 647, 648

Night-Side, a collection, 647
novels of, 647–648

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” 648

Zombie, 648

O’Brien, Fitz-James (1828–1862), 649–651

“An Arabian Night-Mare,” 649
birth name of, 649
birthplace of, 649

“The Diamond Lens,” 649

“The Dragon-Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu,” 649
first collection of poetry and tales, 649

“The Golden Ingot,” 649
horror anthologies and, 86

“The Lost Room,” 649

“The Pot of Tulips,” 650

Salmonson, Jessica, on, 649
significance of, 649, 650

“What Was It?,” 649, 650

“The Wondersmith,” 649
occult detectives, 651–652

Carl Kolchak, 652
definition of, 651
earliest examples of, 651
earliest series character, 651

Felix Castor, 652

Flaxman Low, 651

Harry Dresden, 652

Jules de Grandin, 651–652

Moris Klaw, 651

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, 651

Thomas Carnacki, 651

Titus Crow series, 652
occult fiction, 130–135

Besant, Annie, 131

Blavatsky, Helena, 131

Brown, Dan, 131, 134

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 131

Corelli, Marie, 131

The Course of the Heart (Harrison), 133

Crowley, Aleister, 132

The Daylight Gate (Winterson), 134–135
definition of magic, 131–132
development of occult fiction, 131–132

The Devil Rides Out (Wheatley), 132–133

Diary of a Drug Fiend (Crowley), 132

“The Great God Pan” (Machen), 132

Hermes Trismegistus, 131

The House of Doctor Dee (Ackroyd), 133–134

The House of Lost Souls (Cottam), 134

Moonchild (Crowley), 132
occult fiction since the nineteenth century: a selective chronology, 131

Order of the Golden Dawn, 131, 132

Ordo Draconis, 131
practical magic, 131
precursors and progenitors of occult fiction, 131

Tartt, Donna, 134

O’Connor, Flannery (1925–1964), 652–655
anthologies and, 653

“The Artificial Nigger,” 653–654
awards and accolades, 653, 654–655

Bacon, Jon Lance, on, 652
birthplace of, 653
on classification of her stories, 109
death of, 653

Everything That Rises Must Converge, 654
on Faulkner, William, 366
full name of, 652

“The Geranium,” 653

“Good Country People,” 391–392, 653

“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” 404, 653

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, 653
illness of, 653
impact of, 653
influences on, 653

Manners and Mysteries, 654
the Misfit as an icon, 654
posthumous honors, 654–655
recent biographies, 654
reputation of, 652–653

Southern Gothic and Southern grotesque, 652, 653
style of, 653

The Violent Bear It Away, 654

Wise Blood, 653

The October Country (Bradbury), 655–656

Dark Carnival, 655

“The Homecoming,” 656

“Jack-in-the-Box,” 655

“The Man Upstairs,” 656

“The Next in Line,” 655

“The Scythe,” 656

“Skeleton,” 656

“The Small Assassin,” 655

“There Was an Old Woman,” 655

“Uncle Einar,” 656

Offenbach, Jacques

Tales of Hoffmann opera, 442

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (James), 67

Old French narrative poetry, 12

Oliver, Reggie (1952–), 656–659
atmosphere, 657
on being a horror writer, 657
biographer of Stella Gibbons, 656
collections of, 657

“The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini,” 657
humor, 657
language, use of, 657
literary output of, 657
person’s character, 657
worldview in his fiction, 657

Onions, Oliver (1873–1961), 659–661

“The Beckoning Fair One,” 659, 660
characters of, 660
collections of his ghost stories, 660
compared to Le Fanu, 660

“The Painted Face,” 660
plausibility, attention to, 660
preferred horror theme of, 660

“The Real People,” 660
reputation of, 659

“Rooum,” 660

“The Rope in the Rafters,” 660

“The Rosewood Door,” 660

Widdershins, 660

Oppenheimer, Judy

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, 482

Orca (1977), 57

Order of the Golden Dawn, 131, 132, 492, 579

Ordo Draconis, 131

Oresteia (Aeschylus), xxxii

The Other (Tryon), 661
film adaptation, 661

Heldman, I. P., on, 661
impact of, 117, 661

Joshi, S. T., on, 661
mainstream fiction and, 39
plot summary, 661

Otto, Rudolf, 645

Our Lady of Darkness (Leiber), 662–663
awards to, 662
comparisons with, 662
influences, 662
megapolisomancy, 662

“The Pale Brown Thing,” 662
plot summary, 662

“Out of the Deep” (de la Mare), 663–664
atmosphere of, 663
date published, 663

Freudian psychology and, 663
plot summary, 663
upper class’s fears of their subordinates, 663

The Outsider and Others (Derleth and Wandrei), 189, 190

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE), 797

Owen, Lauren, 42

Pacific Northwest Mythos, 203
page to screen: the influence of literary horror on film and television, 135–143

Addams Family (1964–1966), 141

Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/ NBC, 1955–1962), 141

American International Pictures, 138
anthology and television, 141
background of, 135

Blade, 140

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 136

Bride of Frankenstein (1935), 138

Browning, Todd, 136

Carrie, 140

Curse of Frankenstein (1957), 138

The Dead Zone, 140

Dracula (1897), 136

Dracula (1931), 136

Dracula (1958), 136

Dracula (made-for-television adaptation), 141

Drakula, Russian, 136

Drakula halala ( Dracula’s Death ), Hungarian, 136

The Exorcist, 139

Frankenstein (miniseries adaption), 141

Frankenstein (Whale, 1931), 136

Frankenstein: The True Story, 141
graphic novels, 140

Hammer Films, 136, 138

Harry Potter, 140

The Haunting, 139

The Haunting of Hill House, 139

Hellboy, 140

Hitchcock, Alfred, 139
horror fiction and horror films, 135–140
horror fiction and horror television, 140–142

I Am Legend, 139

Interview with the Vampire, 139

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 139

The Invisible Man (1933), 138

Jaws, 139

King, Stephen, cinematic adaptations of his works, 140

King, Stephen, television adaptations of his works, 142

Life Without Soul (1915), 136

Mary Reilly (1996), 138

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), 138

Misery, 140

The Mummy (1932), 138

The Munsters (1964–1966), 141

Nosferatu: eine Simphonie des Grauens, 136
notable cinematic horror adaptations, 137t

One Step Beyond (ABC, 1959–1961), 141

The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–1965), 141

Pet Sematary, 140

Psycho, 139

The Queen of the Damned, 139

Rosemary’s Baby, 139

Secret Window, 140

The Shining, 140

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), 138

Tales from the Crypt (HBO, 1989–1996), 141

Tales from the Dark Side (1983–1988), 141

Thriller (NBC, 1960–1962), 141

Twilight saga, 140

Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1954), 141

Universal monster movies, 136

Universal Pictures, 138

The Vampire Chronicles, 139

The Vampire Diaries, 142

The Walking Dead, 142, 872

The Wolf Man (1941), 138

Young Frankenstein (1974), 138

Palahniuk, Chuck (1962–), 665–666

Damned, 666

Diary, 665

Doomed, 666

Fight Club, 665

Fight Club, graphic novel sequel, 666

“Guts,” 666

Haunted, 665–666
his horror trilogy, 665, 666
image of horror and, 42
inspiration for the turn to horror, 666
literary output of, 665

Lullaby, 665

Paradise Lost (Milton), 53

Parnell, Thomas

“Night-Thoughts on Death” (Parnell), 21

Paulding, James Kirke, 680

Peake, Mervyn, 816

Gormenghast books, 816

Peake, Richard Brinsley

Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (, 126

Penny, Laurie, 380
penny dreadful, 666–668
best-known penny dreadfuls, 170, 667

The Boy’s Own Paper, Boys of England, 667
conversion of penny papers, 667
definition of, 666

Dick Turpin hero, 667
fuel for, 26

The Knight of the Road, 667

Newgate Calendar, 667

Penny Dreadful (Showtime horror series), 667–668
plagiarism and, 667
printing of, 666
serial stories, 667

Springhall, John, on, 170

Spring-Heeled Jack, 667

The Terrific Register, 667

Wild Boys of London; Or, The Children of the Night, 170

The Young Gentleman’s Journal, 667

Peri Hypsous (Longinus), 20

Peri thaumasion (On Wonderful Events), 7

Perrault, Charles, 798

Persae (Aeschylus), 5

Pettitt, Thomas, 115

The Phantom of the Opera, 668–670

Leroux, Gaston, 668
mythical, literary, and contemporary sources used in, 669–670
plot summary, 668–669
as a silent film released by Universal, 669–670
stage and screen adaptations, 669t, 670

“The Phantom ’Rickshaw” (Kipling), 670–671

Cornell, Louis, on, 670
first publication of, 670

Kipling on, 671

“Personal Daemon,” 671
plot summary, 670–671

Phantoms (Koontz), 671–673
as a film, 673

Koontz, Dean, 671–672

Morrison, Michael A., on, 672
plot summary, 672
subplot, 672

Taylor, D. W., on, 672

“Pickman’s Model” (Lovecraft), 673–675
appreciation of, 673
first publication of, 673
ghoul culture, 673
homages to, 673

Lovecraft’s description of Pickman’s paintings, 674
plot summary, 673–674
setting of, 673

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 675–676
adaptations of, 676
book version of, 675, 676
compared to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 675
criticism of magazine version, 676
first publication of, 675
homoeroticism, 675

Lewin’s version of, 676
major influences on, 675
plot summary, 675

A Rebours (Huysmans), 675

Plautus (T. Maccius Plautus), 6

Plutarch, 7

Pocket Books imprint, 89

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849), 676–681, 808–809
birth date of, 677

“The Black Cat,” 70, 109, 677

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 678, 679

Broadway Journal, 680

Brown, Charles Brockden, and, 251

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, and, 254

Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 680

Campbell, Ramsey, on, 269

“The Coliseum,” 678

“The Conqueror Worm,” 81, 82–83, 550, 678

“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” 55
criticism of, 676
death and burial of, 680
early years in Baltimore, 678
education of, 677
examples of Poe’s artistic, 679

“Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 107

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” 81, 361–363
as a foster child of John and Frances Allan, 677–678

Gothic horror literature as trite, 679

Gothicism, 678

Graham’s Magazine, 680

Griswold, Rufus W., on, 680
the grotesque, use of, 405

“The Haunted Palace,” 81
heresy of the didactic, 109

The Journal of Julius Rodman, 680

“Ligeia,” 81, 549–551

“The Masque of the Red Death,” 69–70, 590–592

“MS. Found in a Bottle,” 678

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 680

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 680
overview of, 81–83
parents of, 677

Paulding, James Kirke, and, 680

“The Philosophy of Composition,” 82

Poe, Henry, 678

Poe, Rosalie, 677

Poe, Virginia, 678, 680

Poe, William Henry Leonard, 677
poverty and, 676
prize competitions, 678
on Radcliffe, Ann, 697

“The Raven,” 81, 83, 678
reputation of, 680

Saturday Visiter competition, 678
siblings of, 677
significance of, 676

“Some Words with a Mummy,” 627
at the Southern Literary Messenger, 679
on the sublime, 783

“Tales of the Folio Club,” 679

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, preface of, 680

Tamerlane and other Poems, 678

“The Tell-Tale Heart,” 109, 685, 807, 808–809

“Ulalume,” 678

“Usher,” 165
on the value of short fiction, 644
at West Point, 678
poetry
on decay and ruination, 77

“Graveyard” school of poetry, 21
horror in the eighteenth century, 21

Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 548

“The Listeners” (de la Mare), 560–562

Long, Frank Belknap, 564
of meditations on the picturesque, 77
memorial poetry, 77

Old French narrative, 12

See also Gothic poetry

Polanski, Roman, 716

Polidori, John

“The Vampyre,” 75, 77, 129, 158, 539, 616

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 68

Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823; 3 volumes), 86

Porphyria’s Lover (Browning), 79–80
possession and exorcism, 681–683
ambiguity of possession, 682
authority and power of, 681

The Beetle (Marsh), 682

The Case Against Satan (Russell), 682
within the Catholic Church, 681
criticism of exorcism, 681
episcopal approval for exorcism rites, 681
exorcism defined, 681

The Exorcist (Blatty), 682
in film, 682

“The Great God Pan” (Machen), 682

Major Exorcism rite, 681
manifestation of demonic possession, 681
modern media attention to, 681
possession as a regular occurring theme in horror, 682

Rituale Romanum, 681

The Turn of the Screw (James), 682

Zofloya the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century (Darce), 682
postapocalyptic narrative, 44

Potocki, Count Jan

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 373, 587–588

Potter, J. K., 119

Prest, Thomas Peckett

Varney the Vampire, 26, 75, 158, 817–818

Price, Robert M., 118

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Austen and Grahame-Smith), 44, 872

Priestley, Chris, 63

Mister Creecher, 63

Tales of Terror, 172

Pritchard, Hesketh and Kate, 651

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg), 683–684

Calvinism, 683

“Editor’s Narrative,” 683
plot summary, 683
psychological horror and, 683
rediscovery of, 684
sheep joke, 684
significance of, 26, 684

“Pseudomythology,” 307
psychological horror, 684–687
critical perspectives that unite psychological horror with something else, 686
definition of, 684
in film, 686
literary history of, 684–685
recent examples of, 685
stories of Poe and, 685
subdivisions of horror, 684

“The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe), 685

The Turn of the Screw (James), 685

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” (Gilman), 685

“Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne), 685
psychological monologues, 79

Ptacek, Kathryn, 398
pulp fiction, 31
pulp horror, 172, 687–688

Argosy, 687
definition of, 687

Detective-Dragnet, 687

Dime Mystery Magazine, 687, 688
as formulated, 687, 688

Grand Guignol Theater, 687
horror as “off-trail,” 687

Horror Stories, 688
menace detective fiction, 687

“Men’s Sweat” magazines, 688
sex and sadism, 688

Steeger, Harry, 687

Terrill, Rogers, on writing formula, 687–688

Terror Tales, 688

Weird Menace, 688

Weird Menace formula, 688

Weird Tales, 687

Queneau, Raymond, 701

Quilter, Harry, 578

Quinn, Seabury (1889–1969), 689–692
birthplace of, 689
case studies of Jules de Grandin, 690–691

Christmas trilogy “Roads,” 690
conventional wisdom about, 689
de Grandin’s adventures, 651, 689, 690–691

The Devil’s Bride, 689

“The Devil’s Rosary,” 691
ethics and, 690–691
first professional fiction sale, 689
full name of, 689

“The Gentle Werewolf,” 690

“Glamour,” 690

“The Globe of Memories,” 689

“The Golden Spider,” 690

“The Isle of Missing Ships,” 690

Is the Devil a Gentleman? 689, 690
literary output of, 689

Lovecraft on, 689
on lycanthropy, 689–690

“Masked Ball,” 690

“Mortmain,” 690

Night Creatures, 689

“The Phantom Farmhouse,” 689
repeating situations, 691
on social injustice, 690

“Stealthy Death,” 690
tableaux creation, 691

“There Are Such Things,” 690

“The Thing in the Fog,” 690

“Two Shall Be Born,” 690

“Uncanonized,” 690

Quiroga, Horacio (1878–1937), 692–693
best compilation of Quiroga’s tales, 692
celluloid horror stories, 692
death of, 693

“The Decapitated Chicken,” 692

English translations of, 692

“The Feather Pillow,” 692

History of a Troubled Love, 692

Jungle Tales, 692
magical realism, 692

Past Love, 692
significance of, 692–693

Tales of Love, Madness, and Death, 692

“The Vampire,” 692

Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1823), 695–697
birth date of, 695

Brontë sisters and, 697

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 696
chronology of, 695
death of, 696
distinction between terror and horror, 74
female Gothic, 696

Gothic Romance, 62
the haunted house story and, 419
her place in the history of horror fiction, 696
her response to Matthew Lewis, 696
influence of, 23, 26, 697

The Italian, 614, 696
on Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 547
literary output of, 695
moralistic “terror,” 23

Mysteries of Udolpho, 23, 144, 614, 630–632, 696
in opposition to The Monk (Lewis), 614

Poe, Edgar Allan, on, 697
poetry of meditations on the picturesque, 77
popularity of, 695

Radcliffean Gothic, 697
on religious and otherworldly matters, 145

The Romance of the Forest, 696

Rossetti, Christina, and, 696, 697

A Sicilian Romance, 696
significance of, 696–697

“On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 99, 696
on terror and horror, 790–791
use of “the explained supernatural,” 73

Rampo, Edogawa, 167

Rank, Otto

“The Double,” 337

Ratcliffe Highway murders, 78

The Rats (Herbert), 697–698
date published, 697
film adaptation of, 698

Herbert, James, 697
inspiration for, 697
plot of, 697, 698
signature style and themes, 697
significance of, 698
working-class focus of, 698

“The Rats in the Walls” (Lovecraft), 698–700
comparison to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 698, 699
date published/written, 698
date written, 698

Lovecraft, H. P., 698
plot summary, 699

Ray, Jean (1887–1964), 700–702
birthplace of, 701
books of, 701
film adaptations, 701
first book of, 701
first English edition of his work, 701
imprisonment of, 701

“The Mainz Psalter,” 701

Malpertuis, 585–587, 701
parents of, 701
pseudonyms of, 700, 701

Queneau, Raymond, and, 701

Resnais, Alain, 701

“The Shadowy Street,” 700, 701
style of, 344, 700

Raynal, Frédérick, 121

“The Reach” (King), 702, 702–703
appraisal of, 702

Different Season and, 702
first publication of, 702
plot summary, 702

“The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray (Kipling),” 703–704
denouement of, 704
first publication in American, 703
the imperial Gothic and, 703

Kipling, Rudyard, 703
plot of, 703
setting of, 703

Reddit.com, 114

The Red Tree (Kiernan), 42

Rees, Celia, 170–171

The Stone Testament, 172

Reeve, Clara, 73, 419
the Reformation, 15
religion
in the early modern era, 14–15
eschatological writing, 51–52
eschatology, 51, 55
loss of religious faith, 19
mystery plays, 52

Trinity Apocalypse, 52
religion, horror, and the supernatural, 143–148

American Gothic, 144–145

American Jewish Gothic stories, 147

Anglicanism, 144

Asian horror, 147

Augustine of Hippo, 143
authors’ perspectives on the representation of the religious and supernatural, 145

Barker, Clive, 147
the body and, 146

Calvinism, 145

The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 144

Catholicism, 143, 144
conclusion concerning, 147

Dante Alighieri, 143–144
emancipatory project of the Enlightenment and, 144
evil invasion of the female body, 146

Frankenstein (Shelley), 144

Gothic mainstreaming, 145

Harvest Home (Tryon), 146

Herbert, James, 147
horror as a subgenre of Gothic literature, 146

Islamic horror stories, 147
the Jumbie, 146

King, Stephen, 147

Koontz, Dean, 147

Machen, Arthur, 145

Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 144

The Monk (Lewis), 144

Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 144
overview of, 143–144

Paradise Lost (Milton), 144
possession and dispossession, 146

Protestantism, 143

Protestant sects and Puritan paranoia, 145
racism and anti-Semitism, 146

The Religion (Condé), 146
religious imagination, 143–144
roots of horror literature, 143
scientific materialism, threat of, 145

Song of Kali (Simmons), 146–147

Spiritualism, 145
splatterpunk movement, 147

Victorian occult horror story and supernatural tale, 145

Vodou, 146

Wieland (Brown), 144–145

Wilde, Oscar, 145
the zombie, 146

Rémy, Nicholas

Daemonolatreia, 466

Renard, Maurice

The Hands of Orlac, 411–412
significance of, 411
speculative fiction, 411

Republic (Plato), 473

The Return (de la Mare), 704–705

Capgras syndrome, 704
date published, 704
date revised, 704

Freudian psychology, 704
nondualistic body and mind, 705
plot summary, 704
self-loathing, 705

The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton), 17
revenge tragedies, 15–17

Reyes, Xavier Aldana

Horror: A Literary History (2016), 76

Reynolds, Kimberley, 169, 170

Rice, Anne (1941–), 705–709
birthplace of, 705
characters of, 708

Christian fiction, 706
existentialism and, 708
first-person point of view, 706, 707, 708
historical background of her stories, 707
husband of, 705

Interview with the Vampire, 119, 139, 162, 163, 471–473

Lives of the Mayfair Witches series, 707, 708

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned, 628
negotiating identity, 706

New Tales of the Vampires, 707
novels by, 706t
pseudonyms, 705, 706

Ramses in The Mummy, 708

Reuben in the Wolf Gift Chronicles, 708
sensuality and horror of monstrosity, 708
style of, 706
the sympathetic vampire, 707–708
themes and atmospheres in her writing, 705

The Vampire Chronicles, 139, 162, 706–707

The Vampire Lestat, 707

The Wolf Gift Chronicles, 707

Richmond Park Academy, London, pupils of, 172

Richter, Jean Paul, 337

“Ringing the Changes” (Aickman), 709–710
first publication of, 709
folk horror movement in British cinema, 709

Freudian linking of sex and death, 709
plot summary, 709
radio play versions of, 710
television adaptation of, 710

Thal, Herbert Van, and, 709

“The Rocking-Horse Winner” (Lawrence), 710–711

Asquith, Cynthia, and, 710
date written, 710

Davies, Rosemary Reeve, 710
film adaptations, 711
genesis of the tale, 710
haunted child trope, 710
plot summary, 710–711
publication of, 710

Rodenbach, Georges, 344

Rohmer, Sax (1883–1959), 711–712

British thriller school of mystery fiction, 711

Brood of the Witch-Queen, 712
death of, 712

The Dream Detective, 712

Dr. Fu Manchu character, 711–712

Egyptianthemed horror, 712

The Green Eyes of Bast, 712

Moris Klaw character, 651

“The Mysterious Mummy,” 711

The Orchard of Tears, 712

The Romance of Sorcery, 712

Wulfhiem, 712
romance narratives (early), 12–13

Roman Empire, 3
romanticism and dark romanticism, 712–715
association of the unconscious mind with nature, 714

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 714
concept of the unconscious mind, 714
current status of, 715
dark romanticism defined, 713

Dark Romantic writing, 714
the Decadents, 714–715
distinguish between romanticism and dark romanticism, 713
the Enlightenment, 712–713

French Revolution, 713

“The Great God Pan” (Machen), 714
important Romantic authors, 713–714
influence of romanticism, 713
modern western horror fiction and dark romanticism, 714
romanticism defined, 713

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 714

Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 714

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” (Gilman), 714

Romero, George, 96

Night of the Living Dead, 40, 44, 119, 871

Rosemary’s Baby (Levin), 715–717

Castle, William, 716
compared with The Exorcist, 359
date of first publication, 715
evil invasion of the female body, 146
film adaptation, 715
film adaptations, 716
impact of, 117, 715

Levin, Ira, 715
plot summary, 715–716

Polanski, Roman, 716
sequel to, 716
success of, 716
witch’s coven reimagined, 39

Rosicrucian romances, 29

Rossetti, Christina, 696, 697

Ruskin, John, 405

Russell, Ken

Gothic, 129

Russell, Ray (1924–1999), 717–719
awards to, 718

The Case Against Satan, 682, 717, 718

Castle, William, 716, 731
as fiction editor for Playboy, 717, 718
film projects of, 717

Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Tales of Ray Russell, 718

The Incubus, 467

Incubus, 717

Sagittarius,” 730

“Sanguinarius,” 730

“Sardonicus,” 717, 730–732

Ruth, Greg, 169

Rymer, James Malcolm, 159, 817–818

Sadducismus Triumphatus (Glanvill), 19

Saki (1870–1916), 721–724

Beasts and Super-beasts, 721

The Chronicles of Clovis, 721
comparisons with, 723
death of, 30, 721
early life of, 721

“Esmé,” 722

“Gabriel-Ernest,” 722–723
his “careless cruelty,” 721
influences on, 723
innocent ruthlessness of Nature, 723
as inspirational, 723

“Louis,” 721–722

Milne, A. A., on, 721

“The Music on the Hill,” 723

“The Open Window,” 722

“The Penance,” 723
pen name of H. H. Munro, 721
practical jokes and, 721, 722

Reginald in Russia, 721
reputation of, 721

“Sredni Vashtar,” 766–768
suppressed homosexuality, 723

The Toys of Peace, 721
women of, 723

Salmonson, Jessica, 649

Sammon, Paul, 118

Samuels, Mark (1967–), 724–725
awards, 724
birthplace of, 724

The Face of Twilight, 724
horror genre and the Lovecraft tradition, 167, 724
influences on, 724

London setting of, 724

Machen, Arthur, and, 724

“The Man Who Collected Machen,” 725
mystical side of Christianity, 724
representative example of his work, 725
tribute to his work, 725, 843

Sandkings, 725–727
adaptations of, 725
awards to, 725
first publication of, 725
plot summary, 725–726
psychological horror and, 726

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann), 727–729
excerpt from, 727
first publication of, 727

Freud, Sigmund, and, 728
origin of, 728
plot summary, 727–728

Sarban (1910–1989), 729–730
best-known work of, 729

“Capra,” 729

Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings, 730

The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny, 729–730

The Gynarchs,” 730

“The Khan,” 729

“The King of the Lake,” 730

Nicholls, Peter, on, 729

“Number Fourteen,” 730
as a pseudonym, 729

Ringstones and Other Curious Tales, 729

The Sacrifice and Other Stories, 730
significance of his work, 729

The Sound of His Horn, 729

Wall, John William, 729

“Sardonicus,” 730–732

Castle, William, 731
del Toro, Guillermo, 731
film adaptation, 731
film adaptation of, 717
first publication of, 730

King, Stephen, on, 730
plot summary, 730–731
significance of, 731

Satyricon (Petronius), 6

Savory, Brett Alexander, 156

Sayers, Dorothy

Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, 87

Scanlon, Noel

Black Ashes, 146

Scarborough, Dorothy, 535

“Schalken the Painter” (Le Fanu), 732–733
adaptations of, 733
critical opinion of, 732
demon lover theme of, 733
first publication of, 732
full title of, 732

Ghost Stories for Christmas series, 733

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 732
plot summary, 732–733

The Purcell Papers and, 732
rewritten version of, 733
subtitle of, 732

Schauerromane (shudder-novels), 23

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 552

Schorer, Mark, 625

Schow, David J., 40, 763

Schulz, Bruno (1892–1942), 167, 344, 734–735
adaptations of, 734
awards to, 734
birthplace of, 734
magical realism, 734
murder of, 734
recurring characters in Schulz’s stories, 734–735
reputation of, 734

The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 734

Sklepy Cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops), 734

The Street of Crocodiles, 734

Schweitzer, Darrell (1952–), 154, 735–736

Awaiting Strange Gods, 735
awards to, 736
characters and themes of, 736
critical reputation of, 735

The Dream Quest of H.P. Lovecraft, 735

“Dunsanian restraint,” 736

“Goddess” series, 736
horror stories of, 735–736

Living with the Dead, 736

The Mask of the Sorcerer, 736

Weird Tales magazine, 735

Scientology, 369

Scithers, George H., 154

Scott, Sir Walter

The Bride of Lammermoor (Scott), 188

Maturin, Charles Robert, and, 595

“Wandering Willie’s Tale,” 67

“The Wild Huntsman,” 78

The Scream (Skipp and Spector), 765

“The Screaming Skull,” 736–737

Crawford, F. Marion, 736–737
film adaptation of, 737
plot summary, 737

Scream Press, 119

Second World War, 35, 36
secular apocalypses, 55

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 64, 376

Seneca the Younger (L. Annaeus Seneca), 7

Serling, Rod, 117

The Shadow over Innsmouth (Crawford), 190

Shakespeare, William, 15–16, 148

Shakespearean horrors, 148–152
conclusion concerning, 152

Cymbeline, 151–152

Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (Harsnett), 150–151

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 150

Hostel (2005), 149

Julius Caesar, 150

King Lear, 150

Macbeth, 151

Midsummer Night’s Dream, 150

Othello, 150
overview of, 148

Saw (2004), 149

Shakespearean horrors in the modern world, 149t
significance of Shakespeare, 148

The Tempest, 152

Titus Andronicus, 148–149
torture-porn, 149

The Winter’s Tale, 152

She (Rider), 738–739
adaptations of, 739
erotic imagery and behavior, 738–739
evolution of, 739
first appearance of, 738
full title of, 738

Haggard, H. Rider, 738

Jung, Carl, and, 738
plot summary, 738
popularity of, 738
presentation of the “Other,” 738
sequels to, 739

Shea, Michael (1946–2014), 739–741

Assault on Sunrise, 741

“The Autopsy,” 739, 740, 764
awards to, 740

Color out of Time, 739

Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales, 739
death of, 741

Fat Face, 739

“Growlimb,” 740

Lovecraft, H. P., 739

The Mines of Behemoth, 740

Nifft the Lean, 740

Polyphemus (collection), 739

A Quest for Symbilis, 740

The A’rak, 740

“tribute” anthology, 741

In Yana, The Touch of Undying, 740

Sheck, Laurie

A Monster’s Notes, 129

Shelley, Mary (1797–1851), 375, 741–745, 743–744
burial of, 745
death of, 745
death of her first child, 742
early life of, 742

Falkner, 744
family of, 742

“Female Gothic,” 742

Frankenstein, 26, 62, 63, 64, 68, 74, 103, 144, 337, 616, 742
full name of, 741
the grotesque, use of, 405

The Last Man, 53–55, 743–744
last years of her life, 745

“league of incest,” 742
literary output of, 743

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–1839), 744

Lodore, 744

Matilda, 743

Moers, Ellen, on, 742

The Nightmare (painting), 343–344, 468

Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, 1843, 744–745
reputation of, 741

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 375, 741, 742, 743, 744

Valperga, 743

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 68, 128, 741

See also the legacy of Frankenstein: from Gothic novel to cultural myth

Shiel, M. P. (1865–1947), 745–748

Arkham House collections of, 747
birthplace of, 745

Decadent fantasy, 747

Decadent movement, 746

Dr Krasinski’s Secret, 747
father of, 745
full name of, 745

Here Comes the Lady, 747

King, Stephen, on, 747

The Last Miracle, 747

The Lord of the Sea, 746

The Pale Ape and Other Pulses, 747

Poe, Edgar Allan, influence of, 746–747

“Premier and Maker,” 747

Prince Zaleski, 746

Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk, 747

The Purple Cloud, 747

Shapes in the Fire, 747

Thacker, Eugene, on, 747

“Vaila,” 747

“Xélucha,” 746, 747

Xélucha and Others, 747

The Shining (King), 748–749
autobiographical links in, 748
cinematic adaptation, 748–749
as a foundational text of modern horror fiction, 748

Freud, Sigmund, and, 748

King, Stephen, 748
plot of, 748
sequel of, 749
significance of, 749

Shirley Jackson Awards, 749–750
advisory board, 750
categories of, 749
date first presented, 749
effect of, 750
importance of, 750
jury of, 749–750
purpose of, 749
recipients of, 750
site of awards, 749
website and social media presence, 750

“A Short Trip Home” (Fitzgerald), 750–752
evocation of “home,” 751
first publication of, 750

Fitzgerald’s opinion of, 751
plot of, 750–751
rhetoric of romance, 751
surrealism, romance, and fantasy, 751

Tender Is the Night, 751

Turn of the Screw, comparison with, 751

Showalter, Elaine, 775

Shun-Liang Chao, 405

Siddons, Anne Rivers

The House Next Door, 421, 446–447

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” 752–753
adaptation of, 752

Aiken, Conrad, 752

The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 752
first publication of, 752

Freud, Sigmund, 752

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural and, 752
opinions on, 752
plot of, 752

Silent Spring (Carson), 57

Silverberg, Robert

Thorns, 509

Simmons, Dan (1948–), 753–755
adaptations and, 755
awards to, 753, 754, 755

Carrion Comfort, 146, 753
date and place of birth, 753
education of, 753

Ellison, Harlan, on, 753

Fall of Hyperion, 754
first short story sales, 753
his career in education, 753

Joe Kurtz noir crime novels, 754
literary output of, 753, 754
reputation of, 754
research of, 754

“The River Styx Runs Upstream,” 753

Shrike character, 753

Song of Kali, 146–147, 754, 759–760

Sinclair, May, 68, 70

The Sinful Ones (Leiber), 37–38

Sinistrari, Ludovico Maria

De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis, 466–467

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 13

Skipp, John, 40, 118, 765

Sleep No More, 88

Slender Man myth, 115
slipstream fiction, 166

Sloane, William

The Edge of Running Water (Sloane), 34

To Walk the Night (Sloane), 34
small press, specialty, and online horror, 153–157

Amazon Kindle, 156–157

Arkham House, 153

Ash-Tree Press, 155

Blatty, William Peter, 153

Borderlands Press, 153

Cemetery Dance Publications, 153
chapbooks and hand-stapled ephemera, 157

ChiZine Publications, 156

Dark Harvest, 153

Dark Regions, 153
digital publishing, 156
early history of, 153
eBook, 156, 157

EC comics, 153
electronic magazines, 156
eZines, 156
the Internet, 155–156

King, Stephen, and, 156

Leisure Books, 154

Lovecraft, H. P., 153
magazines, 153

Necronomicon Press, 155

Nightmare Magazine, 156

Night Shade Books, 155, 156
notable imprints (2009), 155
notable imprints (2010), 156
notable writers for, 153

Prime Press, 153
print-on-demand, 156

PS Publications, 156

PS Publishing, 155

Sarob Press, 155
small press consolidation, 153
specialty presses, 157

Tartarus Press, 155, 156

The 3rd Alternative, 155
timeline of, 154

Tor, 154, 157

Weirdbook, 153

Weird Tales, revival of, 154

Whispers, 153
www.Gothic.net, 156

Zebra, 154
small press and horror publishing, 40
small town horror, 398
smiledog, 114

Smith, Clark Ashton (1893–1961), 33, 207, 755–758
birthplace of, 755
censure of, 757
collections and anthologies of, 757

“The Coming of the White Worm,” 757

“The Dark Eidolon,” 757
death of, 757

“The Death of Ilalotha,” 757
education of, 755

“The Hashish Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” 756

Hyperborea, 757

Lovecraft, H. P., on, 756

“Necromancy in Naat,” 757

Necronomicon Press booklets, 757
period of hectic productivity, 756–757

“The Return of the Sorcerer,” 307

“The Seven Geases,” 757
significance of, 755

The Star Treader and Other Poems, 756

Sterling, George, and, 756

“The Testament of Athammaus,” 757

“Ubbo-Sathla,” 756, 757

“The Witchcraft of Ulua,” 757

“Xeethra,” 757

Zothique, “the world’s last continent,” 757

Some of Your Blood (Sturgeon), 39

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury), 758–759

Bradbury, Ray, 758, 759
as the culmination of the dark carnival theme, 758
date published, 758
influence of, 759
plot summary, 758
as a turning point in Bradbury’s fiction, 759

Somtow, S. P.

Vampire Junction, 388

Song of Kali, 759–760
award to, 759
influence of Calcutta on, 760
plot summary, 759–760
success of, 760

The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), 760–762
death of Ducasse, 761

Ducasse, Isidore-Lucien, 760–761
film adaptations, 761
first Chant, 761
first printing of, 760
impact of, 761
influences on, 761
metamorphoses of, 761
original printer of the full texts of, 761
plot of, 760–761
publication of, 761
reprinting of, 761
textual appropriations in, 761
use of the word chants, 761

Sophocles

Oedipus the King, 107

Southern Gothic fiction, 365, 366, 404, 447, 453, 621, 644

Southey, Robert, 293

The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 16

Spector, Craig, 40, 765

The Light at the End, 118
speculative fiction, 411

Spiritualism, 28, 145, 762–763
advocates of, 762
belief of (most significant), 762

Dracula (Stoker), 763

The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson), 763

Hell House (Matheson), 763
influence on literature of horror and the supernatural, 762

Mr. Splitfoot ruse, 762
séances, 762
social and sexual violation and, 763
as a social movement, 762
as a source of psychological ambiguity, 763
strategies of, 762

Transcendentalism and, 762

The Turn of the Screw (James), 763

Victorian literary culture and, 762
splatterpunk, 763–766

American Psycho (Ellis), 764

“The Autopsy” (Shea), 764

Bloch, Robert, on, 764

Books of Blood, 233
critics on, 764–765
defining splatterpunk writers, 765
definition of, 40, 763
examples of splatterpunk, 765

Gothic literary tradition and, 75
inclusivity of, 765

Ketchum, Jack, 500, 502

Lansdale, Joe R., on, 765–766

Laymon, Richard, on, 766

Lee, Edward, 765

The Nightrunners (Lansdale), 765
religion, horror, and the supernatural, 147

Sammon, Paul, 118

Sammon, Paul M., 765

Schow, David J., 763

The Scream (Skipp and Spector), 765

Skipp, John, 118, 765

Spector, Craig, 118, 765
taboo topics, 765
writers of, 765

Spofford, H. P., 650

Spooner, Catherine, 472

Springhall, John, 170

“Sredni Vashtar” (Saki), 766–768
biographical similarities in, 766–767
plot of, 766, 767
transformation of the mundane by the supernatural, 767

A Stable for Nightmares, 86

Starrett, Vincent, 580

St. Clair, Henry, 86
steampunk, 608

Steeger, Harry, 687

Sterling, George, 756

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894), 28, 334, 768–770

The Amateur Emigrant, 769
birthplace of, 769

“The Body Snatcher,” 231, 232
burgeoning interest in, 770
childhood of, 769
critical regard for, 768, 770

Cunningham, Alison, and, 769
death of, 770
duality between the appearance of things and their actuality, 769–770
education of, 769
health of, 769

An Island Voyage, 769
literary output of, 769, 770
modernism and, 769

“Olalla,” 768
popularity of, 768, 769, 770
religious ideas and the folklore of Scotland, 769

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 62, 334, 338, 584, 773–776

“Thrawn Janet,” 796
travels of, 769

Stoker, Bram (1847–1912), 770–773
birthplace of, 770
death of, 772

Dracula, 64, 78, 108, 159–160, 162, 339–342, 772
dramatic rights to Dracula, 341
education of, 772
full name of, 770
historical Dracula and, 342
illness of, 771
in the Irish civil service, 772

Irving, Henry, and, 771, 772

The Jewel of Seven Stars, 138, 489–490, 627, 771

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, and, 539
literary output of, 771, 772
as Lyceum Theatre business manager, 770, 772
meeting Dracula for the first time, 771
at Trinity College, Dublin, 771–772

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 773–776
adaptations of, 775
concept of the double in, 774
cultural impact of, 775
degeneration, 774–775
double or doppelgänger, 338, 774
doubles, doppelgängers, and split selves, 338
fears about the city and, 775
first publication of, 773
gender, sexuality, and the monsters of literary horror, 62
iconic representation of urban horror, 334
inspiration for, 773

“mad scientist” figure, 584
plot summary, 774
popularity of, 774
processes of writing and editing, 774

Showalter, Elaine, on, 775
transformations of Jekyll and Hyde, 773, 798

Strange Doings in Strange Places, 86

Strange Happenings, 86

Straub, Peter (1943–), 776–779
awards to, 776

Blue Rose Trilogy, 777
character of Tim Underhill, 777
childhood trauma, 778
children of, 776
collaborations with Easton, Michael, 777
collaborations with King, Stephen, 777
critical opinion of, 776
current residency of, 776

A Dark Matter, 777
date and place of birth, 776
as an editor, 778
education of, 776
film adaptations, 776–777
first published works of, 776

Floating Dragon, 777
full name of, 776

Ghost Story, 383–385, 776

The Green Woman, 777
influence of jazz on, 778

Interior Darkness: Selected Stories, 778

“The Juniper Tree,” 778

Kiernan, Caitlín R., and, 345

King, Stephen, on, 776

Koko, 777
novels of, 776–777
poetry of, 776

“Pork Pie Hat,” 778

Seafront Press, 776

Shadowland, 777
short stories of, 777–778
significance of, 776

The Skylark, 777
supernatural vocabulary and Christian values, 147

The Talisman, 777
wife of, 776

Strengell, Heidi, 512

Strieber, Whitley (1945–)

Communion, 300–302

Sturgeon, Theodore, 39

Sturgeon, Theodore (1918–1985), 779–782

“Bianca’s Hands,” 780

“Blabbermouth,” 781

“Bright Segment,” 780

The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994–2010), 781

“Fluffy,” 781

“The Graveyard Reader,” 781
importance of, 779

“It,” 780

“Killdozer,” 780
monstrous child motif, 780

More Than Human, 779
novels of, 781

“The Perfect Host,” 780

“Prodigy,” 780

“The Professor’s Teddy Bear,” 780

“Shadow, Shadow on the Wall,” 780

“Shottle Bop,” 781

Some of Your Blood, 781

“So Near the Darkness,” 781

“Talent,” 780

“Twink,” 781

“Vengeance Is,” 781

Venus Plus X, 779

“The World Well Lost,” 779
the sublime, 782–784
aesthetics and, 782
in ancient literature, 782

Burke, Edmund, on, 782, 783

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on, 783
definition of, 782
eighteenth-century thinkers and, 782–783
horror and, 782, 783
in horror criticism, 783

Kant, Immanuel, on, 783

Longinus’s Peri Hypsous, 20

“Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime” (Burke), 782

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 73–74, 783
philosophy of existence, 783

Poe, Edgar Allan, on, 783

Romantic philosophy and, 783
significance of, 783

“On the Sublime” (Burke), 782

Supernatural Horror in Literature (Lovecraft), 783

Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 466

Summers, Montague (1880–1948), 784–786
avoidance of his work by researchers, 785
as a Catholic priest, 785
contribution to the critical methodologies used for studying vampires, 785
death of, 785
education of, 784–785
excerpts from his first two books, 784
full name of, 784
important occult works of, 785
prose of, 785
significance of, 784
stigma of, 785
surrealism, 786–787

Breton, Andre, 786

Carrington, Leonora, 786
definition of, 786

Ducornet, Rikki, 786
effects of, 786–787

The Fashionable Tiger (Ferry), 786
fiction and, 786–787
in films, 786
founder of, 786
influences on, 786, 787

The Lost Traveller (Todd), 786
as a method of creation, 786
paintings and, 786

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 402, 403, 539, 794

Swinburne, Algernon, 82

Tales of Other Days (Akerman), 86

Tales of Terror (St. Clair), 86

Tales of the Dead (ed. Utterson), 85

“The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott), 67

Tartt, Donna, 134

Taylor, D. W., 672

Telegraph, The, 172

Tem, Melanie (1949–2015), 789–790
awards to, 789

Blood Moon, 789
closures of, 789
death of, 790
family relationships, 789

“Mama,” 789
novels of, 789
reputation of, 789

Wilding, 789

The Yellow Wood, 789

Tennyson, Alfred, 81

Terrill, Rogers, 687

Terrors of the Night (Nashe), 15
terror versus horror, 790–792

Dracula, 791
emotional reactions and, 790–791
horror defined, 791

King, Stephen, on, 791

Lovecraft, H. P., and, 791

Radcliffe, Ann, on, 790–791
story structure and, 791

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 791
terror defined, 791

“Witches and Other Night-Fears,” 791

Tessier, Thomas (1947–), 792–793
awards to, 793
current residency of, 792
date and place of birth, 792
education of, 792

The Fates, 792

Finishing Touches, 792

Fogheart, 793
literary output of, 792

The Nightwalker, 792

Phantom, 792
poetry of, 792

Rapture, 792–793

Remorseless, 793

Seafront Press, 776

Secret Strangers, 793

Shockwaves, 792
short fiction of, 792, 793
writing style of, 792

Thacker, Eugene, 46, 747

Thal, Herbert Van, 709

“There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” (Kirk), 793–794
awards to, 793

Dantesque trilogy, 794
first appearance of, 793

Kirk, Russell, 793–794

Kirk’s heroes and villains, 794
plot summary, 793–794

“They” (Kipling), 795
as an elliptical work, 795
first publication of, 795
inspiration for, 795

Kipling, Rudyard, 795

Maugham, Somerset, on, 795
plot of, 795

Spiritualism, 795

Thomas, Jeffrey, 105

Thomson, Christine Campbell, 87

“Thrawn Janet” (Stevenson), 796
first publication of, 796

Menikoff, Barry, on, 796
plot summary, 796

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 796

Tichbornes curse, 187
timeline of

1900 to 1950 horror, 32t

1900 to 2000 horror, 38t
ancient world horror, 4t
the Brontë sisters, 246t
early modern era horror, 16t
eco-horror, 58–59t
eighteenth century horror, 22t
ghost stories, 1816–1945, 69t

Gothic novels, major, 74t
horror anthologies, 88t
horror comics, 94t
horror literature through history, xxxv–xlviii

Internet age horror, 113t

Machen, Arthur, 578t

Middle Ages horror, 11t
nineteenth century horror, 27t
science fiction and horror (selective), 103–104
small press, specialty, and online horror (selected), 154t
twenty-first century horror, 45t
video (and computer) games horror, 124t

Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 16, 17

Todd, Ruthven

The Lost Traveller, 786

Todorov, Tzvetan
on Machen, 400–401, 405
on The Turn of the Screw (James), 802–803

Tolstoy, Leo, xxx

Tor, 154, 157
torture-porn, 149

Townshend, Dale, 73, 168

Trachiniae (Euripides), 5
transformation and metamorphosis, 797–799
biology and, 798
definitions of, 797
difference between, 797
historical, 797
horror fiction and, 798

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (Ellison), 798

“The Last Feast of Harlequin” (Ligotti), 798

Medieval romance texts, 798
most common type of metamorphosis, 797

One Thousand and One Nights, 797–798

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE), 797
redemptive transformation of the individual, 798
religious and scientific thinking and, 798

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 798
transformation and horror literature, 797
transformative creatures, 798
transubstantiation, doctrine of, 798

A Treatise of Specters, or, An History of Apparitions (Bromhall), 85

A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (Prichard), 78

Tremblay, Paul

A Head Full of Ghosts, 113–114, 448

Trilby, 799–800
adaptations of, 800
anti-Semitism, 800
doppelgänger, 800

Du Maurier, Daphne, 799
hypnotism and, 800
influence on Stoker’s Dracula, 800
plot summary, 799
publications of, 799
significance of, 800

Tryon, Thomas

Harvest Home, 146, 661

The Other, 39, 117, 661

Turner, James, 191

The Turn of the Screw (James), 800–803
adaptations of, 803
critical opinions of, 801
first publication of, 800
frame narrative, 800
plot summary, 800–803

Spiritualism and, 763

Todorov, Tzvetan, on, 802–803

Twain, Mark, 269

28 Days Later (2002), 44, 871

The Twilight Zone, 117

The Twilight Zone (television show), 37
the uncanny, 805–807
in cinema, 806
definition of, 805
examples of, 806

Freud, Sigmund, and, 805

Jentsch, Ernst, on, 805
as a key concept of the Gothic genre, 806

Lacan, Jacques, 806
in literary criticism, 805, 806
psychoanalytical feminist philosophers and, 806

“The Sand-man” (Hoffmann) and, 805–806

Universal Pictures, 138, 627–628

University of Maine Library, 510

Unknown fiction, 33, 34
unreliable narrator, 807–809

Booth, Wayne, on, 807
definition of, 807
early uses of, 808
mad narrators, 808–809
spotting of, 808

“The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe), 807

“Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe) and, 808–809
uses of, 808

Wuthering Heights (Brontë ) and, 808

Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (Joshi), 76, 493

Utterson, Sarah, 85–86

VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System), 336
vampire bats, 160
vampire fiction from Dracula to Lestat and beyond, 157–163, 162

Bürger, Gottfried August, 157

Byron, Lord, 157, 158

Carmilla (Le Fanu), 159

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 157

Dark Shadows (1966–1971), 162, 163

Dracula (Stoker), 159–160, 162

Draculas the world over in film, television, and video games, 160–161

In a Glass Darkly (Le Fanu), 159

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 157

I Am Legend (Matheson), 162

Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 162, 163

Keats, John, 157, 158

“The Mysterious Stranger” (Wachsmann), 158

“A Mystery of the Campagna,” 160
new character trait of, 162

Polidori, John, 158
short fiction featuring vampire characters, 162
sympathetic vampire, 162–163
vampire bats, 160

The Vampire Chronicles (Rice), 162
vampire renaissance, 162

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 158

Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood, 158

“Vespertilia” character, 160

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 158
vampires, 811–815

Auerbach, Nina, on, 814

“For Blood Is the Life” (Crawford), 306, 812

Byzantium film, 814

Calmet, Antoine Augustin, 21

Carmilla (Le Fanu), 272–274, 539

Carrion Comfort (Simmons), 274–275
characteristics of literary vampires are consistent across time and place, 811
character of Dracula himself, 811–812

“Christabel” (Coleridge), 158, 296
contemporary women writers and, 813–814
definition of, 339
as embodiments of contagion, 811
epitome of metamorphosis, 814
female vampirism, 64–65, 813
first vampire tale by a woman, 811
in German poetry, 811

“The Giaor” (Byron), 77

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night film, 814

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (Leiber), 386–388
the god Kali, 811

“I, the Vampire” (Kuttner), 525

I Am Legend (Matheson), 43, 107, 162, 461–462, 592

Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 40, 119, 162, 163

I Travel By Night (McCammon), 599

La Morte amoureuse (Clarimonde), 381

Last Train from Perdition (McCammon), 599

“La Vampiresse” (Lee), 541

Les Revenants (Revenants), 370

Le Ville-Vampire, 370

Life Brothers, 814
loathsome title vampire, 812–813
male vampires, 812

“Masquerade” (Kuttner), 526

The Mind Parasites, 609–611

Nosferatu film, 341, 813
penny dreadful and, 811

Some of Your Blood (Sturgeon), 39
soucouyants, 814

Summers, Montague, 784
as a sympathetic individual, 40

Vampire Chronicles (Rice), 139, 162, 706–707

The Vampire Diaries, 142
vampire mothers, 813
vampire of war, 811
vampiric fiction, 119
vampirism-focused fictions, 110

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 811

Varney the Vampire (Rymer & Prest), 26, 75, 123, 158, 811, 817
as viral infections, 43–44

“Vlad the Impaler,” 811

A Whisper of Blood, 319

“The Vampyre” (Polidori), 68, 75, 77, 129, 616, 815–816

VanderMeer, Ann

The Weird, 166

VanderMeer, Jeff, 46, 105, 633, 816–817

Acceptance, 817

Annihilation, 817

Authority, 817
awards, 817
birth and childhood, 816

Borne, 817
on Cisco, Michael, 292

City of Saints and Madmen, 105, 816

Finch, 816
on Kiernan, Caitlín R., 503

New Weird, 167, 633

Shriek: An Afterword, 816

Southern Reach Trilogy, 105, 817

Veniss Underground, 105

The Weird, 166, 817

Van Helsing (2004), 18

Varney the Vampire: Or, the Feast of Blood, 817–818

Vathek, 819-820

“Vespertilia” character, 160

Victor Surge, 115

Villa Diodati ghost story competition, 68, 74, 158, 616

The Village (2004), 18

Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), 141, 437

Vodou, 146

Wachsmann, Karl Adolf von

“The Mysterious Stranger,” 158

Wagner, Hank, 654

Wagner, Karl Edward, 821–822

Bloodstone, 821

Dark Crusade, 821

Darkness Weaves, 821

Death Angel’s Shadow, 821

Hour of the Dragon, 821

In a Lonely Place, 821

Night Winds, 821

People of the Black Circle, 821

Red Nails, 821

Why Not You and I, 821

Wakefield, H. R., 822–825

The Clock Strikes Twelve, 117

The Creep’s Omnibus, 822

“He Cometh and He Passeth By,”

The Walking Dead (Kirkman), 44, 872

They Return at Evening, 822, 824

Wallace, Diana, 70

Wallace, Sean, 156

Walpole, Horace, 21, 77, 825–826

The Castle of Otranto, 23, 72–73, 144, 187, 282–284, 825
the grotesque, 405, 783
the haunted house story and, 419, 825–826

The Mysterious Mother, 825

Wandrei, Donald, 33, 189, 330, 826–827

Don’t Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei, 826

The Legend of Hillbilly John, 831
short stories, 826–827

Warm Bodies (Marton), 44

The War of the Worlds (Wells), 55

Warren, James, 94–95

Warren Publishing, 93, 94

Waters, Sarah

The Little Stranger, 71

Webster, John, 17

The Duchess of Malfi, 794

Weinberg, Robert, 121, 574
the weird, 44–45

The Weird (VanderMeer), 166
weird and cosmic horror fiction, 163, 163–168, 166
alternative defi nition of weird fiction, 164

“The Colour out of Space” (Lovecraft), 165
cosmic horror defined, 164
cosmic indifferentism, 164

Ice (Kavan), 166
important mid- to late twentieth-century works, 167
important weird writers of the 1990s, 167
interstitial relationship between weird fiction and contemporaneous literary movements, 166–167

Kafka, Franz, 167

Lovecraft, H. P., 163, 164, 165

Machen, Arthur, 166

At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft), 165, 192–194

New Wave movement(s) in speculative fiction., 167

New Weird, 167

Rampo, Edogawa, 167

Schulz, Bruno, 167
slipstream fiction, 166

Supernatural Horror in Literature, 164

Supernatural Horror in Literature (Lovecraft), 163
suspension of natural laws, 164
verisimilar writing techniques, 164–165

The Weird (2012), 166

The Weird (VanderMeer), 166

Weird Tales, 165, 827-829
the word “weird,” 165
weird fiction, 172
weird fiction magazine, first, 31

Weird Tales, 31, 87, 118, 165, 225, 424, 827–829, 846

Weird Tales alumni, 35

Wellman, Manly Wade, 829–831
magazine publications, 829–830
short stories, 829–831

Who Fears the Devil?, 829–830

Wells, H. G., 831–832

The Food of the Gods, 831

The Invisible Man (Wells), 473–474, 831

The Island of Doctor Moreau, 476–477, 584–585, 832
on Machen, Arthur, 578

The Shape of Things to Come, 831

Welty, Eudora, 832–835
essays, 833

One Writer’s Beginning, 833

The Robber Bridegroom, 833
short stories, 833–834

Wilde Net and Other Stories, 833

“The Werewolf” (Housman), 65

The Werewolf of Paris (Endore), 835, 837
werewolves, 65–66, 836–838
modern-day, 837

Wertham, Fredric

Seduction of the Innocent, 93, 170

Western rape culture, 65

Wharton, Edith, 68, 838–840

“Afterward,” 839

The Age of Innocence, 839

Ghosts, 839

The House of Mirth, 839
short stories, 839

Wheatley, Dennis, 840–841

The Devil Rides Out, 132–133, 331–332, 841

Gateway to Hell, 841

The Haunting of Toby Jugg, 841

The Ka of Gifford Hillary, 841

The Satanist, 841

Strange Conflict, 841

They Used Dark Forces, 841

To the Devil a Daughter, 841

“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (Ellison), 842

White, Edward Lucas
dreams and plots, 344

“Lukundoo,” 343

“The White Hands” (Samuels), 843

“The White People” (Machen), 844

Whitehead, Henry S., 32, 846

“Black Tancrede,” 846

Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales, 846

“The Shadows,” 846

“The Shut Room,” 846

“The Trap,” 846

West India Lights, 846

White Is for Witching (Oyeyemi), 64–65

“The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” (Marryat), 65

“Who Goes There?” (Campbell), 192

“Why Horror Is Good for You (And Even Better for Your Kids)” (Ruth), 169

Wiene, Robert, 411

Wilde, Oscar, 145

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 338, 675–676

“Sebastian Melmoth,” 604

Wilderness Act, 57

“The Wild Huntsman” (Scott), 78

“The Willows,” 847–848

Wilson, Colin

The Mind Parasites, 609–611
overview of, 609

The Philosopher’s Stone, 609

Wilson, F. Paul, 849–850

The Keep, 849

Nightworld, 849–850

Reborn, 849

Reprisal, 849

The Tomb, 849–850

The Touch, 849

Windling, Terri, 319

Winter, Douglas E., xxxi

Winterson, Jeanette, 42

The Daylight Gate, 134–135

Wise, Herbert, 88

Wise, Robert, 422

Wisker, Gina, 64, 110

Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005), 76

The Witch (Eggers), 18

The Witch (Middleton), 15

“Witches and Other Night Fears” (Lamb), 168

Witches and witchcraft, 850–853

Christianity and, 851–852

The Hammer of the Witches, 851
witch trials, 853

The Witch of Edmonton (Dekker, Ford and Rowley), 15

Wolfe, Thomas, 33, 366

Wollheim, Donald A., 89

The Macabre Reader, 116–117

More Macabre, 117

The Woman in Black, 854–855

The Woman in White (Collins), 75

Wonders of the Invisible World (Mather), 19

Wood, Robin

“An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” 97
on radical horror, 110

Wordsworth, William, 168, 293

World Fantasy Award, 855–856
past winners, 856

World Fantasy Convention, 855–856

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Brooks), 44, 870

Wright, Farnsworth

The Moon Terror, 87

Wright, Edgar

Shaun of the Dead, 871

Wyndham, John, 857–858

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn, 859–861

Beastnights, 860

A Candle for D’Artagnan, 860

Confrontation at Lepanto, 860

Crusader’s Torch, 860

Empires, Wars and Battles, 860

A Flame in Byzantium, 860

Hotel Transylvania, 859

In the Face of Death, 860
interview with, 861–863

The Lost Prince, 860

Messages from Michael, 860

Out of the House of Light, 860

“The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 863–865
young adult horror fiction, 168–174, 172

Appleyard, J. A., 169

Bettelheim, Bruno, 169

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), 172
chapbooks, 168

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 168

Comics Code Authority, 170

Coraline (Gaiman), 172
criticism of, 168–169, 172

Dare You? 172–173

EC Comics, 170
evaluations of young adult horror, 171
female teens and horror fiction, 170–171

Goosebumps (Cusick), 171

Harry Potter phenomenon, 171–172
horror comics, 170

McCarron, Kevin, 171

The Monk (Lewis), 168, 169
moral panic, 170, 171

Oblivion (2012), 172
penny dreadfuls, 170

Point Horror series, 171

Power of Five series (2005–2012), 172

Prom Dress (Bates), 171
pulp horror, 172

Rees, Celia, 170–171

Reynolds, Kimberley, 169, 170, 171

Richmond Park Academy, London, pupils of, 172

Ruth, Greg, 169

Seduction of the Innocent, 170

Springhall, John, 170

The Stone Testament (Rees), 172

Tales of Terror (Priestley), 172
therapeutic benefits of horror, 169
use of disgusting imagery, 169

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Bettelheim), 169
weird fiction, 172

Wertham, Fredric, 170

“Why Horror Is Good for You (And Even Better for Your Kids)” (Ruth), 169

Wild Boys of London; Or, The Children of the Night, 170

“Witches and Other Night Fears” (Lamb), 168

Wordsworth, William, 168

Zom-B, 172
zombie serials, 172

“Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne) 424, 684, 865–867

“Yours Truly—Jack the Ripper” (Bloch), 33, 227, 867–868

Žižek, Slavoj, 46

Zlosnik, Sue, 602

Zombies, 869–872
of the apocalyptic, 118–119

“The Death of Halpin Frayser” (Bierce), 327

Devil’s Wake, 349

Domino Falls, 349
establishment of zombie fiction, 44, 869–870
influences on, 44

“Lazarus” (Andreyev), 536
popularity of, 44
reinterpretation of, 40, 69–70
zombie apocalypse, 55
zombie serials, 172

Zork (Infocom, 1979), 122