Unutterable Horror
Unutterable Horror
A History of Supernatural Fiction
S. T. Joshi
Hippocampus Press ———————— New York
Copyright © 2012, 2014 by S. T. Joshi. First Hippocampus Press edition, 2014. Originally published by PS Publishing Ltd. Published by Hippocampus Press P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156. http://www.hippocampuspress.com All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert. Cover illustration by Harry Clarke for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos. First Electronic Edition 135798642 978-1-61498-113-8 epub 978-1-61498-114-5 mobi
To Steven J. Mariconda
Contents
Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century Preface
I. Introduction
II. Anticipations i. Supernaturalism in Greek Literature ii. Supernaturalism in Latin Literature iii. The Middle Ages and the Elizabethans
III. The Gothics i. Types of Gothic Fiction ii. The Historical Supernatural iii. The Explained Supernatural iv. The Byronic Gothic v. The Christian Supernatural vi. The Theory of the Gothic vii. The Nature of Gothic Fiction
IV. Interregnum i. Supernaturalism in the Romantic Poets ii. German Grotesque iii. The Weird Short Story iv. French Supernaturalism v. Anticipations of Poe: Washington Irving
V. Edgar Allan Poe i. Poe and the Gothics ii. Theory and Practice iii. Death as Threshold v. Fantasy and Science vi. The Longer Tales vii. Conclusion
VI. Mid-Victorian Horrors i. Christian Supernaturalism ii. High and Low iii. Occasional Supernaturalism iv. The Americans v. French and German Supernaturalism vi. Irish Gothic: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
VII. The Deluge: British and European Branch i. Ghosts and More Ghosts ii. Horrors in the Mainstream iii. Between the Genres
iv. French Horror v. Slumming with Stoker and Others
VIII. The Deluge: American Branch i. The East Coast School ii. The West Coast School iii. Eccentrics
Epilogue
Bibliographical Essay
Bibliography A. Primary Texts B. Secondary Literature
Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries Preface
IX. The Titans i. Arthur Machen: The Evils of Materialism ii. Algernon Blackwood: Nature as God and Refuge iii. Lord Dunsany: Fantasy and Terror iv. M. R. James: The Pinnacle of the Ghost Story
X. Other Early Twentieth-Century Masters i. The Evolution of the Ghost Story ii. Walter de la Mare: The Psychological Ghost Story iii. Other British Masters iv. The American School
XI. Novelists, Satirists, and Poets i. William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds ii. The Horror Novel iii. Horror and Satire iv. Horror and the Mainstream
v. Some Europeans vi. The Development of Weird Poetry
XII. H. P. Lovecraft and His Influence i. Lovecraft and the Pulps ii. The Life of a Dreamer iii. The Theory of the Weird Tale iv. The Lovecraft Mythos v. Characteristics of Lovecraft’s Work vi. Borderline Weirdists: Howard, Smith, Merritt vii. Disciples: Long, Derleth, Wandrei, and Others viii. The Poetry of the Lovecraft Circle
XIII. American Pulpsmiths i. Weird Tales, Unknown, and Other Pulps ii. The Mixing of Genres: Moore, Kuttner, Bloch, Leiber
XIV. Horror at Midcentury i. The Group: Bradbury, Matheson, Beaumont, Nolan ii. Some Short Story Writers iii. Some Novelists iv. Domestic Horror: Shirley Jackson
XV. Anticipations of the Boom i. Throwbacks: Russell, Kirk, Brennan, Walter, Du Maurier ii. Looking Ahead: Dahl, Grubb, Serling, Case
iii. Robert Aickman’s “Strange Stories” iv. Some Novelists: Sturgeon, Wilson, Davies, Levin, Stewart
XVI. The Boom: The Blockbusters i. A Disquisition on Bestsellerdom ii. The Breakthrough: Blatty and Tryon iii. The Bestseller Factory: Stephen King iv. Successors to the King v. Vampires and More Vampires vi. Horrors from the Mainstream vii. The British Invasion viii. Splatterpunk and Its Antecedents ix. The Bridge: Peter Straub
XVII. The Boom: The Literati i. Ramsey Campbell: Horrors of the City ii. Other Short Story Masters iii. Mainstream Horror iv. More Vampires v. Some Other Tale-Spinners
XVIII. The Contemporary Era i. The Blockbusters Resume ii. The Literati Continue iii. Caitlín R. Kiernan: Prose-Poet of the Lost iv. Still More Vampires v. The British School vi. The American School
Epilogue
Bibliographical Essay
Bibliography A. Primary Texts B. Secondary Texts
Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century
Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home. —Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Ambitious Guest” (1835) Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid where I sat. —Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia” (1838) . . . everywhere cowers and darkens the Unutterable Horror. —Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni (1842)
Preface In spite of the length of this work, my goals in it are relatively humble. I am chiefly interested in the aesthetic and philosophical issues involved in the introduction of the supernatural in a literary work, and I am also interested in tracing the history of this literary mode from the time it became a recognised genre—the later eighteenth century—to the present day. I have also considered it a significant part of my enterprise to gauge the overall aesthetic success of the works I study, with particular emphasis on the effectiveness of the supernatural manifestation in a given work. To that degree, I am attempting to establish a viable canon of supernatural writing, although I trust it will be evident that my judgments are merely suggestive rather than prescriptive. The number of authors and works to be covered has necessitated some sharp curtailments in the kinds of analysis I can provide and perhaps even in the overall scope and direction of the work. For example, I have not found sufficient space to place the authors and works discussed within the context of cultural and intellectual history, even though I see such a context as the most profitable avenue toward the understanding of the literature in question. I have also been unable to examine many individual works in the depth and detail they deserve, nor have I treated non-Anglophone weird fiction as much as I should have. Within these shortcomings, I hope that I have supplied a more adequate picture of the historical progression of supernatural fiction than previous histories, most of which I am sorry to say I find unsatisfactory. My focus has been on the major writers in the field—those, in other words, who have contributed significantly to the genre and who have produced a corpus of work of sufficient breadth and complexity to be worth studying carefully. Individual works of the supernatural by authors who have generally not worked in this mode are rarely discussed unless they are of great
significance and influence. I have also not found it fruitful to compare authors with one another or to treat their works thematically, since it strikes me that each author of supernatural fiction is of such distinctiveness that comparisons would produce minimal enlightenment. Naturally, biographical information on the authors in question is limited to those facets of their lives that are of significance to the understanding of their work. And, of course, every critic of a relatively little-known or understudied branch of literature faces the quandary of how much plot summary to supply. In those works that can be assumed to be widely read I have reduced plot summary to a minimum, but for other works I have felt it necessary to include a somewhat ampler synopsis so that my analysis can be more fully understood. It will be evident to most readers—especially those who know my previous work in the field—that I have found much inspiration in both the theoretical underpinnings and some specific critical judgments in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (first published in 1927). I cite this work throughout the text, using the simple abbreviation S. The edition cited is listed in the bibliography. I have sought to provide exact citations to all quotations of primary and secondary works. The editions cited—the great majority of them are not first editions—are listed in the bibliography. I have not always had access to the soundest or most recent editions, as some of these are already difficult to obtain even in large libraries. For shorter works (stories, poems, and the like), I have provided information on original periodical appearances, if known. I may not have cited secondary sources as much as is customary; there is indeed a fair amount of useful criticism and biography on many of the authors discussed in this volume, although some figures have yet to receive the attention they deserve. A bibliographical essay preceding the bibliography provides some discussion of important reference works in this field and other critical works that may be of use to the student and scholar. I have been studying supernatural literature for more than thirty years and have had highly stimulating discussions with many friends and colleagues. Among those who have supplied me with the greatest insights, either in print or viva voce, are Mike Ashley, Jason Brock, Donald R. Burleson, Scott Connors, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Jack M. Haringa, John Langan, Steven J. Mariconda, David E. Schultz, and Robert H. Waugh. I am also grateful to several contemporary authors of supernatural literature for
illuminating many aspects of their own work, among them Sherry Austin, Laird Barron, Ramsey Campbell, Les Daniels, Philip Haldeman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, W. H. Pugmire, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr, Michael Shea, Peter Straub, and Jonathan Thomas. —S. T. J. Seattle, Washington November 2009
I. Introduction The study and analysis of the mode of writing that I call supernatural horror is vexed with a multitude of difficulties and paradoxes. I cannot think of any other genre, with the possible exception of the love story (itself a highly nebulous and imprecise construct, since love plays a role in a number of literary modes, including supernatural horror itself), that is defined by an emotion. The genres of the mystery story, the science fiction story, and even the Western are largely formal designations, chiefly constructed around a certain kind of plot or scenario (a puzzle regarding the perpetrator of a crime; the role of science—or, more precisely, some future extrapolation of science or technology—in human life and society) or setting (the American West). What is more, the genre—if indeed it is a genre—is generally designated by those literary exemplars where the twin elements of the supernatural and of horror (which are logically separable) function exclusively or predominantly. There is horror of a sort in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but these works are not customarily regarded as works of supernatural horror. Analogously, the supernatural can function in a narrative without the concomitant sensation of horror, although such instances of what is called benign supernaturalism are relatively rare and have generally not been well received by readers and critics, chiefly because of a certain emotive tameness and, more relevantly, because of their excessive closeness to the fairy tale or folktale. What this means is that the horror story (whether supernatural or not) somewhat untidily encompasses those works that focus on the emotion of fear, largely to the exclusion or minimisation of other elements, emotions, or motifs—specifically a broad portrayal of character or of those human relations where fear of terror does not play a role. That this exclusive or
extensive focus on terror substantially accounts for the prejudice directed against the genre by mainstream critics is a matter I shall discuss presently. Part of the reason why this genre is so fraught with conceptual difficulties is that it may not have become a definite genre until well along in its literary development. If, by general consensus, the first work of supernatural horror—the work that initiated the “Gothic” school of writing —was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it is at least arguable that supernatural writing did not become a concretised genre until about a century and a half later. The great majority of the nineteenth-century writers who either dabbled or specialised in this mode—notably Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce—do not appear to have considered themselves “horror writers” in anything like the contemporary sense of the term. It is not merely that they published much fiction that is very far from horror (humour and satire in both instances), or that the supernatural work they did publish did not appear in venues specifically devoted to this kind of writing (there were none such until the establishment of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1923); it is that, so far as can be ascertained from their critical and autobiographical writings, they seem not to have envisioned themselves as writing exclusively or even partly in a given mode of writing radically separable from the mode of writing commonly referred to as “mainstream” fiction. The closest that Bierce came to designating his horror tales (whether supernatural or non-supernatural) by some kind of discrete label is when he referred to them in a letter as “tragic” stories (A Much Misunderstood Man 197). I will maintain that the establishment of Weird Tales itself was the definitive beginning of “supernatural horror” as a distinct genre, just as the establishment of Amazing Stories in 1926 canonically introduced the genre of science fiction. Further difficulties have been caused by a wide confusion—or, perhaps more charitably, a lack of agreement—in the use of terminology to designate the genre. Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919) was translated into English as “The Uncanny”—perhaps not the happiest rendition, since the German appears to refer chiefly to phenomena that are unfamiliar or strange. Matters became further confused when Tzvetan Todorov’s treatise Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970) was translated into English by Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). Howard rendered le fantastique as “the fantastic,” understandably enough; but when Todorov sought to
distinguish what he regarded as neighbouring genres or subgenres by the terms l’étrange (what would now be called non-supernatural horror or psychological suspense) and le merveilleux (supernatural horror), Howard rendered these terms as “uncanny” and “marvelous,” respectively, even though the former is very different from what Freud had in mind. Analogously, Rosemary Jackson’s stimulating treatise Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) uses “fantasy” as an apparent synonym for supernatural horror, even though the former designation now means something very different among writers, readers, and critics working within the genre of supernatural literature. It may be best if I were simply to lay down my own terminology—one chiefly drawn from a general consensus (so far as I can ascertain it) within the contemporary horror community—and elucidate it accordingly. In my understanding, the broad paradigm within which supernatural horror functions is “imaginative fiction,” which includes three fairly separate and distinct genres—science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror. (Whether mystery or suspense fiction should be regarded as a component of imaginative fiction is a matter of dispute; in my judgment, it should not be, even though this genre has significant relations to supernatural fiction.) There is in my view a certain overlap in all the genres mentioned, and they might be schematised as follows:
Some of these overlapping segments have their own designations, although there is not the strictest agreement either as to the actual terms to be used for them or their precise peramaters. The overlap between supernatural horror and crime/suspense is perhaps the most fruitful, and I see it as encompassing at least three different subgenres: the explained supernatural, where the supernatural is suggested but explained away at the end as the product of error, hallucination, madness, or trickery (its exemplars are Ann Radcliffe and Charles Brockden Brown among the Gothic writers, as well as the crude “weird menace” pulps of the 1930s); psychological suspense or dark fantasy, where the scenario is non-supernatural but the portrayal of madness or hallucination is so intense as to generate a quasi-supernatural emotion of horror (prototypical are Robert Bloch’s Psycho and the early novels of Thomas Tryon); and the ambiguous horror tale, where doubt remains to the end whether the supernatural has come into play or whether the events are the product of madness, hallucination, or error. Todorov privileged this last subgenre as representative of what he called “the fantastic,” evidently regarding it as aesthetically superior to either supernatural or non-supernatural horror. But an examination of the entire range of horror literature suggests that the ambiguous horror tale represents a very thin sliver of the field, and that the “hesitation” that Todorov felt was the dominant trait of fantastic writing is, on the whole, merely a literary technique to maintain the reader’s interest until the tale finally resolves (as almost all do) into either supernaturalism or non-supernaturalism. (I may remark incidentally that Todorov and others have apparently been led to their view by their admiration of what they take to be the most distinguished instance of the ambiguous horror tale, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, although I shall argue that it is in fact not “ambiguous” in the sense in which it is most frequently assumed to be.) Todorov’s embarrassing suggestion that the rubric of the fantastic can be extended “by temporarily omitting the end of the narrative” (43) shows how far a critic’s perspective lies from that of a creative artist—and how far a theoretician will go to maintain the spurious integrity of a misguided theory. Although Todorov’s schema has been influential (among critics) and has been largely followed by such a work as Terry Heller’s The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror (1987)—who adds some interesting reflections on the “pleasures” to be gained from reading horror tales,
derived in part from Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory—I have not found Todorov’s classification of “the fantastic” to be helpful. The intersection of science fiction and supernatural horror would seem to be paradoxical, since science fiction (like mystery fiction) is a mode manifestly based upon the use of reason, whereas the essence of supernatural horror is the incursion of the irrational into an objectively real setting. L. P. Hartley emphasised this disjunction between the mystery story and the supernatural horror story in terms that apply just as well to science fiction. In speaking of the “extra thrill” that some people need to maintain an interest in life, Hartley states: Detective-story writers give this thrill by exploiting the resources of the possible; however improbable the happenings in a detective story, they can and must be explained in terms that satisfy the reason. But in a ghost story, where natural laws are dispensed with, the whole point is that the happenings cannot be so explained. A ghost story that is capable of a rational explanation is as much an anomaly as a detective story that isn’t. The one is in revolt against a materialistic conception of the universe, whereas the other depends on it. (vi–viii) Those final two sentences are a bit problematic, but the general sense of the passage is sound. Science fiction is commonly misunderstood to be fiction utilising some element of science or technology, but in fact it must be based upon some hypothetical advance or development of contemporary science or technology; this is where the “imaginative” element enters in. Nevertheless, in doing so, it must adhere to the “possible” (or, at least, the conceivable), else it will cease to be science fiction. (Early instances of the mode, such as the novels of Jules Verne, where some of the uses of scientific advance seem nowadays pretty fantastic do not affect the overall thrust of the argument, since Verne appears to have regarded his scientific developments as plausible or conceivable.) The fusion of supernatural horror with science fiction occurs prototypically in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and some of his followers, with perhaps an anticipation in the work of William Hope Hodgson and others. There are clear historical reasons why the mingling of these two modes occurred at this time (the
early twentieth century), as I shall explain when I study these writers. In the course of their work, it is possible that supernaturalism gets left behind altogether; but since the manifest purpose of these writings was to create a sense of horror, they can be regarded as hybrids. The relation of supernatural horror and what I call fantasy is perhaps the most problematical—or, at any rate, the one with the fewest examples that come to mind. Fantasy, as now understood, refers to a scenario where the author creates his/her world either out of whole cloth (as in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth) or, at least, creates the metaphysical “rules” of his/her realm, even if it is not markedly different from the objectively real world; and these rules are fundamentally arbitrary (I do not use this term pejoratively) because there is no reason why the particular “rules” have been utilised as opposed to other rules that might be imagined. Much of Lord Dunsany’s work may fall into this mode: the realm of Pegana that he envisioned in his early work is a kind of fusion of Greek myth, Middle Eastern or Asian legendry, and so forth, but it is fundamentally a nevernever-land of his own creation that—even though he made some faint efforts to suggest that it existed in the dim prehistory of the earth—has little connexion with the contemporary world as we know it. It is populated by a multitude of gods, demigods, worshippers, and so forth; but there is no intrinsic reason why these particular gods should occupy Pegana as opposed to others that might be imagined. There is considerable terror in some of his tales, but overall the emphasis is on a kind of otherworldly beauty rather than horror. There are very few other instances of this fusion of supernatural horror and fantasy that come to mind. (Fantasy itself can contain elements of horror, but it is not its main emphasis.) Whether the core emotion or complex of emotions that are the focus of the genre—fear, terror, horror, dread, and so forth—can be adequately distinguished is a matter of debate. Various critics—beginning with Ann Radcliffe, who, as we shall see in Chapter III, tried to distinguish terror and horror—have attempted to do so, but their conclusions have not been universally accepted. I do not believe that such an attempt is worth the effort, because any such distinctions will be arbitrary and will only be of use for a given theoretical framework or critical analysis. Consider Noël Carroll’s occasionally insightful The Philosophy of Horror (1990). Although, to my mind, Carroll errs seriously in failing to recognise the fundamental distinction between supernatural horror and science fiction,
and errs still further in maintaining that the crux of the horror tale is a monster (thereby banishing some of the most significant examples of supernatural and non-supernatural horror to some nebulous ground outside the realm of “horror” as he conceives it), he goes on to define the “tale of terror” (15) as the tale of non-supernatural horror and the “tale of dread” (42) as the tale where weird events come to the fore. This latter distinction, he claims, is necessary because “the emotional response they [tales of dread] elicit seems to be quite different from that engendered by art-horror” (42)—a highly dubious assertion, in my judgment, but one that plays a role in his overall analysis. I suppose it could be maintained that I myself am now devising another brace of technical terms for the purpose of my own analysis, and I do not deny that this is so. I have, for example, long borrowed from Lovecraft the terms “weird tale” and “weird fiction” (see my study, The Weird Tale) as a kind of umbrella term for those facets of imaginative fiction encompassing fantasy, supernatural horror, and the overlaps between supernatural horror and crime/suspense. As for horror, my general sense—and it is not much more than that— from an examination of the use of this term both in reference to real life and in reference to fiction is that, in addition to (and perhaps above and beyond) its suggestion of a perception of fear (stemming either from personal danger or from danger to another) and a feeling of disgust and revulsion, it carries with it the idea of the contemplation of something appalling and dreadful. This last component may, indeed, allow for the genre of horror to exist at all, since the sentiment goes beyond the immediate apprehension of bodily harm (which is fear) and points toward the witnessing of some phenomenon that the human mind, whether perceiving immediate danger or not, both fails to comprehend and finds somehow wrong in a moral or metaphysical sense. My major emphasis in this book will be on instances of pure supernatural horror, although the overlapping subgenres discussed above will have to be treated on occasion, if only because of the singular merits of some instances of them or because of their significant influence on the development of supernatural horror itself. Nevertheless, I regard the distinction between supernatural and non-supernatural horror so essential to the understanding of this genre that it may need further elucidation. In order for there to be a discrete genre called supernatural horror, there must be a general understanding—necessarily in flux, and in accordance
with the fluctuations of human knowledge—of what constitutes the “natural.” Non-supernatural horror, or psychological horror, evokes a certain kind of horror, but that emotion is so radically different from the emotion we experience when we witness what Lovecraft somewhat flamboyantly called a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (S 23) that the two must be considered radically distinct. There is an undeniable sense of fear in witnessing the depradations of a mass-murderer, or even in sensing that the murderer may come after oneself; there is also a sense of fear in witnessing extreme aberrations of the human mind (something we find, for example, in Ramsey Campbell’s magnificent novel of paranoia, The Face That Must Die); but the fear here evoked is not a metaphysical fear, because there is no sense in which our understanding of the universe is jeopardised. But if we were forced to believe in the actual existence of a vampire or a werewolf, our whole conception of the universe would be seen to be fatally erroneous, and this would occur all apart from any terrors evoked by physical mayhem or even by the vagaries of a diseased mind. It is, therefore, entirely understandable that supernatural horror only came into existence when, by the eighteenth century, science (and human knowledge as a whole) had advanced to the point where certain objects or events could be stated with fair certainty to be impossible or, at best, highly improbable. The ghost, the witch, the vampire, the werewolf, the haunted house—these and other motifs only gained currency as supernatural fiction once they were banished from the realm of fact. Lovecraft is particularly emphatic on this point. Remarking that “the crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen,” he goes on to say: If any unexpected advance of physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related to the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel. (Selected Letters 3.434)
This distinction between the natural and the supernatural is vital in understanding why fairy tales, folktales, and the like cannot be regarded as components (although they can be regarded as significant anticipations) of supernatural horror: the events related in them are not rigorously distinguished in terms of their metaphysical status, so that what we would regard as supernatural (if occurring in an objectively real setting) is regarded merely as wondrous or awesome or perhaps even just a little out of the ordinary. Religion is also an important consideration here. The “events” described in most of the world’s scriptures would nowadays be considered “supernatural”—but they were presumably not so considered by their original believers (and, strictly speaking, by their present-day believers, although many non-fundamentalists would not wish to be pinned down on this point), because these events are putatively regarded by each religion as phases of the actual workings of the cosmos. Accordingly, any literary works that rely in religious presuppositions, or that employ religious allegory, cannot be considered instances of supernatural horror. I am not suggesting that all supernatural horror must be rigidly secular in its outlook; we will, indeed, encounter any number of writers who use weird fiction to convey what they believe to be truths about the universe that are in line with some religious worldview or another. Rather, from an historical perspective, literary work must have segregated itself from religious orthodoxy for the supernatural to evoke its full range of emotive effects. (If it is pointed out that many supernatural tales, right down to the present day, make extensive use of demons or of the Devil himself, I can reply that in nearly every instance these figures are used symbolically or metaphorically —in some cases just on this side of allegory.) It is my contention that supernatural horror is a distinctively metaphysical mode of writing, because it allows writers—whether they are aware of it or not—to confront directly the very nature of entity. No other mode of writing appears to embody this possibility. The universe can, in essence, be refashioned—at least as regards the specific supernatural phenomenon utilised—in consonance with an author’s philosophical conceptions. Let it pass that many authors may not be entirely cognisant of this procedure; the fact that supernatural horror holds out the prospect of doing so is what is significant.
Indeed, I will utter the seeming paradox that, just as supernatural horror was born at a time when the very idea of the supernatural was being banished from science and human thought in general, so the majority of supernatural writers—and readers—do not in fact “believe” (literally) in their supernatural creations. The insertion of a ghost in a narrative does not automatically mean (although it might) that the author ascribes to philosophical dualism. I do not wish to suggest that all or even most authors of supernatural fiction are atheists or agnostics; rather, these authors have chosen entities or events “which could not possibly happen” as a means both of conveying a sense of dread to their readers and for broader aesthetic ends. The distinction with mimetic fiction comes to the fore here. Sinclair Lewis may not have thought that any single individual named George F. Babbitt existed, but the essence of the novel Babbitt, and the chief reason why it is such a stellar piece of social realism, is that such an individual could have existed and could have done the things that Babbitt does in that novel. Lovecraft, for his part, was well aware that there was no such entity as Cthulhu, but the distinction is that Lovecraft knew further that there could not possibly be any such entity. Supernatural motifs can be—and usually are—used either for purposes of “imaginative liberation” (as Lovecraft pointed out) and/or for symbolic purposes. The supernatural has been found to be a particularly felicitous and forceful way to convey central human concerns in a way that mimetic fiction cannot do—or, at least, cannot always do so vividly. The vampire, to put it crudely, can be a symbol of a human being’s isolation from society in a way that a depiction of the most radical social “outsider” may not be. I do not wish to assert that supernatural fiction is somehow always superior to mimetic fiction in this use of symbolism; but the history of this literary mode suggests that writers of many different stripes have found the supernatural a valuable means to convey sentiments and effects more potently and plangently than can be done in conventional realism. At the same time, there is a danger that the use of supernatural motifs as symbolism can veer into allegory—a process that effects a negation of the supernatural, since the disjunction between an objectively real world (a world that is, in this precise sense, natural) and the incursion of a given supernatural element would cease to be maintained. The exact relation between author and reader comes into play at this point. It is widely known that many of the leading motifs of supernatural
horror—the ghost, the witch, the haunted house—have their origin in the depths of human history or prehistory. There is every reason to believe that these motifs were believed in as literal realities for millennia, and in some cultures (including our own) a certain proportion of individuals may continue to believe in them. Indeed, it is worth noting that, in the West, many of the standard “monsters” of suprenatural fiction—preeminently the vampire, but also the witch, the sorcerer, and even the werewolf—gained a particular potency because they came to be regarded as violations of the norms of Christianity. But in modern cultures (beginning, say, in the eighteenth century), scientific advance has relegated these motifs to the dustbin of intellectual history, where they can inspire at most a vestigial sentiment of quasi-belief. It is this sentiment that supernatural writers depend on: because belief in ghosts or vampires, for example, can never be wholly eliminated from human thought and emotion, the convincing depiction of them in fiction evokes a dual response—terror at the possible existence of such an entity, and supernatural horror because the conscious mind is aware that these entities “could not possibly” exist. If these two responses seem antipodal or paradoxical, it is by design: the evocation of the strange “reality” of the unreal is the secret to the effectiveness of supernatural horror as a literary mode. Freud seems to have come to this conclusion when he noted that “Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe” (240). He elaborates the point later in his essay, discussing various conceptions such as the return from the dead: We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: “So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!” or, “So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!” and so on. (247–48)
Freud may have been a bit sanguine in adding, “Conversely, anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny” (248), since some of the most distinguished practitioners of weird fiction—notably Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft—were, by all accounts, pretty hard-headed materialists. But it is exactly the secret of their success that they were momentarily able to frighten themselves by the contemplation of things they knew could not be, and were therefore able to convey that fear to their readers. The literature of supernatural horror has for many years been the subject of literary and cultural prejudice, and perhaps in some circles it continues to be today. There are a multitude of reasons for this, and I think one of the main ones is a surprising inability on the part of mainstream critics to grasp the rhetoric of supernatural fiction. Consider a remark by a distinguished critic, Graham Hough, on D. H. Lawrence’s ghost stories: “Ghosts should be raised in fiction by people who believe in them or by those whose aim is to produce a shudder of the nerves. Lawrence belongs to neither of these classes, and his ghostly visitants only produce effects that in his more vigorous moods would have been achieved through the conflict of character and circumstance” (quoted in Thornton 138). I have already maintained that very few writers of ghost stories actually believe in the literal reality of ghosts (or, at any rate, in the ghosts they have depicted in their tales), and very few aside from hack writers are interested only in producing a shudder. The supernatural can—and, in Lawrence’s work, does—enhance the “conflict of character and circumstance.” Possibly the relative absence, in weird fiction as a whole, of the kind of interpersonal conflict found in mainstream fiction has had something to do with this critical blindness. Many weird writers’ emphasis is elsewhere. It is not that they are uninterested in the portrayal of character or of interpersonal interaction, but that their focus is largely upon the psychology of fear as it affects individuals and groups. And, of course, the obtrusive presence, on bookstore shelves and movie theatres, of flamboyant works of “horror” that are nothing more than excuses for bloodletting and the display of outlandish monsters has worked its harm—although to judge the whole field of weird fiction by these examples would be as fair as to judge mainstream fiction by the examples of Danielle Steel and Dan Brown.
But there are—or have been—broader cultural forces that have led to a denigration of the literature of terror. The chief of them is that, in the Anglo-Saxon world at any rate, the evocation of such an unpleasant emotion as “horror” is regarded as somehow indelicate or even blasphemous. I am not entirely sure that this accusation can be entirely deflected; even L. P. Hartley noted, “Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill” (vii). Lovecraft put the matter a bit less pejoratively: Reality is all right enough so far as it goes . . . The only trouble is that it doesn’t go far enough for a guy with extreme sensitiveness. . . . It is perfectly true that mild, conventional, and highly respectable people like the average business or professional man can get enough of a kick out of watching the meaningless routine phaemonena of this pimple on the cosmos to warrant their staying alive—but even with them you can see it wears thin now and then, especially in this latest age of standardisation and decreased variety and adventurousness. . . . (Selected Letters 3.139) This may be pejorative in a different way, but it leads to the following conclusion: The real raison d’être of [weird] art is to give one a temporary illusion of emancipation from the galling and intolerable tyranny of time, space, change, and natural law. If we can give ourselves even for rather a brief moment the illusory sense that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been—or could be—invalidated or defeated, we acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion. Indeed, religion itself is merely a pompous formalisation of fantastic art. Its disadvantage is that it demands an intellectual belief in the impossible, whereas fantastic art does not. (Selected Letters 4.417– 18)
It is customary to deride this “illusion of emancipation” as “escapism,” but Lovecraft’s final remark makes clear what nearly every reader of supernatural fiction will acknowledge: readers are well aware that the whole effect is indeed an illusion—albeit a pleasurable one for them. What is more, the use of the supernatural as symbol underscores the obvious point —one that I trust this treatise will confirm—that significant truths about humanity and its place in the cosmos can be conveyed well outside the context of mimetic realism. If, then, supernatural horror is written for a small coterie of the “sensitive” who don’t find “reality” quite compelling or satisfying, then we are forced to admit that it is a relatively minor literary mode; but that admission does not carry with it the corollary that great work cannot be done in this mode. The long and rich history of supernatural literature, of which this book can treat no more than the most noteworthy exemplars, is a sufficient argument that many distinguished authors have found it tempting to engage in it when conventional modes of realism prove insufficient, and that those relatively few authors who have specialised in it have in some instances produced a body of work that need not fear competition with any other mode of writing. Supernatural horror enjoyed general popularity in only two periods in literary history—the Gothic novel (roughly from 1780 to 1820) and the “horror boom” of the 1970s and 1980s. For the rest of its history, its appeal was indeed restricted to the few, and there is a good case to be made that its greatest aesthetic successes were directly due to that fact. If the prejudice against the supernatural in literature has waned—and a signal instance of it may be the recent publication of two large volumes of American Fantastic Tales (2009) by the Library of America, the nation’s guide to the American literary canon—then it may have done so in part for adventitious reasons, such as the general increase in attention that all genre literature has gained in recent decades as academic and other critics go slumming in the bogs of “popular culture” as a relief from the stodgy and overworked standard canon. My own view is that the study of the literature of supernatural horror need not be regarded as merely a sociological exercise, but rather that the genre at its best can offer aesthetic rewards as high as any other mode of writing, and that it does so in a manner that could not be achieved in any other mode. To delineate and analyse how weird
fiction achieves its effects is a large part of the critical task I have set for myself.
II. Anticipations It is as much a truism to say that supernaturalism enters literature at the very dawn of literary history as it is to say that the lack of a distinction, until relatively recent times, between what is understood to be “natural” and what is “supernatural” makes any examination of antecedents or predecessors to the genre of supernatural fiction that commenced with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) highly problematical. This difficulty confronts us in what is among the earliest surviving literary documents, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the “old version” of which probably dates to around 1700 B.C.E. Although this text includes such staples of later weird fiction as a descent to the underworld, prophetic dreams, and ghosts and monsters of various sorts, the precise degree of the author’s—or, more precisely, the contemporaneous Babylonian culture’s—awareness that these phenomena are “supernatural” is notoriously difficult to determine. Gilgamesh himself comes across as a kind of superhero, since he is of impressive physical stature (“A triple cubic foot was his foot, half a rod his leg, / Six cubits was his stride” [3]) and has other attributes far in excess of ordinary mortals; but, although he is initially portrayed as a tyrant, he undertakes a Faust-like quest for eternal life. As a result of several prophetic dreams, Gilgamesh sets out to kill the fire-breathing ogre Humbaba. Tablet V of Gilgamesh, depicting the battle between Gilgamesh and Humbaba, is highly mutilated, so the details of the conflict are cloudy; but a bronze situla depicting the battle indicates that Humbaba is humanoid in shape (see Andrew George’s translation [45]). There are later battles with a “Bull of Heaven” and a scorpion monster. In spite of his defeat of these entities, Gilgamesh fails in his ultimate quest and comes to the realisation that he must die.
Although Gilgamesh is obviously a work of fiction, it is still not sufficiently distinct from its religious tradition to constitute an independent literary work in which the “supernatural” is employed for its own sake. Gilgamesh himself, although mortal, is declared to be “two-thirds . . . god” (2). In any event, aside from its role in influencing the biblical account of the Deluge, Gilgamesh had little influence upon subsequent literature in the West. As such, it is fitting to begin our discussion of antecedents to supernaturalism with the Greeks.
i. Supernaturalism in Greek Literature There has not been, to my knowledge, much examination of the question of why Greek myth is so bountifully endowed with monsters— several, to be sure, of humanoid form, others of hybrid form, and still others of more eccentric form. Perhaps the question is unanswerable, but some tentative speculation may be useful. As Denys Page long ago noted in The Homeric Odyssey (1955), many of what we would now term “fantasy” or “weird” elements in the earliest literary text of direct relevance to us, Homer’s Odyssey (probably fused together—from oral sources dating to as early as the 12th century B.C.E.—around 700 B.C.E.), are derived in part from, or are representations of, folktales. For example, the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus is an echo of numerous European myths in which a hero is trapped within a giant’s cave. The Odyssey also appears to borrow numerous details from the story of Jason and the Argonauts, evidently a separate myth-cycle that had nothing to do with Odysseus and his peregrinations. As it is, the dominant quasi-supernatural thread running through Greek myth—which, obviously, was not invented in any meaningful sense by the Homeric poets but was merely borrowed or adapted by them—is the existence of a plethora of monsters of all sorts. Some of these monsters are only tangentially alluded to in Homer or in the nearly contemporaneous Theogony of Hesiod, and they range from pure hybrids (the Chimaera, a fire-breathing creature with the head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a snake; the Hydra, a snakelike and multiheaded creature that had the remarkably imaginative feature of growing two heads when one was cut off; the Harpies, depicted usually as birds with the faces of women; the Sirens, also fusions of birds and women) to personifications of natural forces (Charybdis, a whirlpool) to creatures of much more bizarre configuration (Scylla, originally a woman but transformed into a sea creature with six heads and twelve feet, each head having a triple row of teeth). Many of these creatures were featured in the Herakles cycle of twelve “labours.” It is worth noting that every one of these monsters was declared to be the offspring of the gods (as, indeed, were most of the
“heroes” of Greek myth), so that they cannot be envisioned as independently conceived entities of a literary imagination, although some of their details and actions were no doubt the result of literary treatment. In any event, Odysseus’ remarkable narrative of his adventures (books 9–12 of the Odyssey) constitutes perhaps the most concentrated account of supernatural and fantastic events in all antiquity. To the extent that this passage, unlike the (probably much earlier) Iliad, exhibits the burgeoning Greek fascination with the world beyond the confines of Greece or Asia Minor (a fascination likely engendered by traders’ accounts of such remote areas as Sicily, northern Africa, and even the straits of Gibraltar), it could be considered parallel to a similar fascination, exhibited in mediaeval or early Renaissance times, that resulted in the fantastic narratives of Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and other travellers. Book 9 focuses on Polyphemus, the Cyclops, one of a race of uncivilised, unsociable creatures dwelling on an unspecified island in the Mediterranean (105f.). Oddly enough, the fact that this race of beings has only one eye is not specified until line 333, but no doubt every reader (or listener) would have been aware of the fact (the word cyclops means not “one-eyed” but “round-eyed”). Polyphemus himself is referred to as “a monstrous wonder made to behold, not / like a man, an eater of bread, but more like a wooded / peak of the high mountains seen standing away from the others” (9.190–92). His devouring of several of Odysseus’ men, Odyseus’ craftiness in identifying himself as Outis (Nobody), and his ultimate defeat of Polyphemus by getting him drunk and then poking out his eye, are all too well-known to require elaboration. The Laestrygonians—a giant cannibal race whom Odysseus encounters in Book 10—also eat some of Odysseus’ men. At one point a woman member of the race is described as “big as a mountain peak” (10.113). The Greeks flee and come to Circe’s isle of Aiaia (10.135f.). She is surrounded by animals “whom the goddess had given evil drugs and enchanted” (10.213). Sure enough, she gives Odysseus’ men a “potion” (10.234) and strikes them with a wand, whereupon they become pigs. It is of interest that the god Hermes gives Odysseus some “medicine” (10.287) as protection from Circe—the mysterious substance that Homer calls moly. Eventually she changes his men back to human form, but in the process she tells Odysseus that he must go to the house of Hades and talk with Tiresias, the
deceased prophet, for advice on how to return home and what to expect when he gets there. This sets up the descent to Hades in Book 11. We have already seen that a trip to the underworld was included in the Gilgamesh cycle, and no doubt it was a common feature of many mythologies. In the Odyssey, the entire episode was probably an independent narrative that was later inserted into the text (Page 46). In Homer, Hades (let us call it such, even though the customary Greek expression—en Haidou [“in (the house) of Hades”]— makes it clear that Hades is the name of the god ruling the realm and not the name of the place) is not depicted as being under the earth, but rather in some unspecified area to the north (10.507). In any event, Odysseus makes the journey, encountering not only the ghost of Elpenor, a shipmate who had fallen overboard and is therefore unburied, but other ghosts as well. In a bizarre ritual that we find in no other author, the ghosts recognise Odysseus and are able to speak to him only after they drink blood from a sacrifice he has made (11.145f.). In one of the most poignant passages in the work, Odysseus attempts to embrace the shade of his mother but is unable to do so (11.204f.): manifestly the shades are, although visible, either entirely immaterial or of such fine matter that they cannot be grasped. It is also interesting to note that the dead do not know anything of what has happened in the world of the living since their deaths: at one point Achilles, the leader of the Greeks at Troy, after memorably noting that he would rather be a slave in the living world than a king of the dead, asks Odysseus to “tell me anything you have heard of my proud son [Neoptolemus], whether / or not he went along to war to fight as a champion” (11.492–93). There follows a memorable passage about certain shades who are being punished (11.576f.): Tityos (whose liver is being eaten by vultures), Tantalos (who, standing up to his neck in a lake, finds the water receding as he tries to drink it and fruits flying out of his reach as he tries to pluck them), and Sisyphus and his stone. These are, indeed, the sole instances of shades undergoing punishment in Hades; indeed, the passage is so anomalous that, even in antiquity, it was regarded with suspicion, and the critic Aristarchus (among many others down to the present) regarded it as spurious. Book 12 deals with the twin horrors of Scylla and Charybis (12.73f.), followed by the Sirens (165.f). Circe herself provides a memorable description of Scylla:
“In that cavern Skylla lives, whose howling is terror. Her voice indeed is only as loud as a new-born puppy could make, but she herself is an evil monster. No one, not even a god encountering her, could be glad at that sight. She has twelve feet, and all of them wave in the air. She has six necks upon her, grown to great length, and upon each neck there is a horrible head, with teeth in it, set in three rows close together and stiff, full of black death. Her body from the waist down is holed up inside the hollow cavern, but she holds her heads poked out and away from the terrible hollow, and there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking for dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger, some sea monster, of whom Amphitrite keeps so many; never can sailors boast aloud that their ship has passed her without any loss of men, for with each of her heads she snatches one man away and carries him off from the dark-prowed vessel.” (12.85–100) Sure enough, Scylla snatches six of Odysseus’ men (he appears to have an endless supply) as they pass by her (12.245f.). Charybdis appears to be
nothing more than the embodiment of a whirlpool. There is, curiously enough, no physical description of the Sirens (the notion that they are halfhuman and half-bird derives from their depiction on various surviving works of art, presumably of a later date than the Odyssey). Circe had called them “enchanters of all mankind” [12.39–40]), but the wax that Odysseus puts into the ears of his men allow them to escape the Sirens’ fatal song. All the leading Greek tragedians—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.E.), Sophocles (496?–406/5 B.C.E.), and Euripides (485?–406 B.C.E.)— broached the supernatural in their plays, although in widely varying manners and degrees. It is unfortunate that we have only seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles, out of the dozens they wrote over their long careers, but even the plays that survive provide tantalising hints of the manner in which they approached the supernatural. Aeschylus’ Persae (472 B.C.E.; The Persians), written a few years after the Greeks’ remarkable victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480, introduces what is presumably the first ghost in Western tragedy—the ghost of Darius (the Persian emperor who was himself defeated by the Greeks at Marathon in 490—a battle in which Aeschylus had fought—and died in 485). Darius does little but lament the destruction of the Persian army and fleet, but it is significant that the chorus is indeed afraid of his very appearance: “I shrink in awe from gazing upon thee, I shrink in awe from speaking in thy presence by reason of mine old-time dread of thee” (694– 96), suggesting that, at a minimum, the appearance of a ghost is an anomalous event. As in Homer, Darius is ignorant of what has happened since his death, although in a sense this becomes simply an excuse for his widow Atossa and his son Xerxes to explain the awful fate of the Persians. Darius does state that he comes from “the world below” (697)—one of the first extant indications that Hades is in the underworld. The chief work of Sophocles, from a supernatural perspective, is the Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis; probably staged before 440 B.C.E.). This play deals with the concluding period of the life of the hero Herakles, who has married Deianira and, because of his murder of Iphitus, son of Eurytus, is living in exile in Trachis. A Messenger tells Deianira that Herakles has taken Iole (daughter of Eurytus) as a paramour (379), a point confirmed by Lichas, Herakles’ herald. Deianira is naturally disturbed, but she hopes she can retain Herakles’ love—specifically by the use of a substance given to her by the centaur Nessus. Some time earlier, Nessus,
attempting to rape Deianira, had been killed by Herakles, who sent a poisoned arrow into Nessus’ side. As he is dying, Nessus tells Deianira: “Gather with thy hands The clotted gore that curdles round my wound, Just where the Hydra, Lerna’s monstrous breed, Has tinged the barbèd arrow with her gall. Thus shalt thou have a charm to bind the heart Of Heracles, and never shall he look On wife or maid to love her more than thee.” (572–77) Deianira accordingly rubs this substance over a robe that she then instructs Lichas to present to Herakles. Now Deianira believes that the substance is merely a love-potion that will simply “bind the heart / Of Herakles”; indeed, not long thereafter she frets that she has made a disastrous mistake (“I know not, but I tremble lest deceived / By fond hopes I have wrought a grievous harm” [666–67]). She learns quickly what that “harm” is. She tells the story of how she used a piece of wool to rub the substance over the robe: But as I passed indoors behold a sight Potentous, well nigh inconceivable. It chanced that I had thrown the hank of wool Used for the smearing into the full blaze Of sunlight; with the gradual warmth dissolved It shrank and shrivelled up till naught was left
Save a fine powder, likest to the dust That strews the ground when sawyers are at work— Mere dust and ashes. (693–701) Deianira’s astonished reaction is the clearest indication that she herself has witnessed a supernatural phenomenon. The cataclysm now follows quickly. Hyllus, the son of Deianira and Herakles, states that Herakles, having put on the robe, is experiencing excruciating pain. Deianira promptly kills herself in grief and remorse. It is only at this point that the dying Herakles makes his appearance, dragging his ravaged body onto the stage and telling of the dreadful pain he is feeling (“Again the deadly spasm; it shoots and burns / Through all my vitals. Will it never end, / This struggle with the never-dying worm?” [1081–3]). Aside from a very compressed account of his twelve labours, he tells of the prophecy made by his “sire” (Zeus) that he would be killed not by a living person, but by a dead one (i.e., Nessus). The Trachiniae is a perfect embodiment of the “pity and fear” that governs Greek tragedy, and the plainly supernatural manner of Herakles’ death, caused unwittingly by his own wife, makes it a striking anticipation of much supernatural work in the centuries to come. By an historical accident, we have more plays by Euripides—nineteen —than by the other two tragedians combined. We are accordingly able to get a somewhat better idea of the broad range of topics that the tragedians as a whole broached, although Euripides himself was known in antiquity for his daring, even radical treatments of such issues as feminism, the role of the gods, and so on. Indeed, Euripides developed a reputation even in his own time for religious scepticism, perhaps even atheism—although it is difficult to believe that any of the tragic playwrights, or indeed any of the leading writers or philosophers of the fifth century B.C.E., gave unqualified credence to the Greek pantheon. Some of Euripides’ work embodies what would later be called physical or non-supernatural horror, such as the grisly fate of Pentheus in the Bacchae (405 B.C.E.), who, because he dared to challenge the god Dionysus, was torn to pieces by Dionysus’ servants, the Maenads. Herakles Mainomenos (c. 417 B.C.E.; The Madness of Herakles) is of somewhat
greater relevance. Throughout his life Herakles was dogged by the hostility of Hera, and in this play she incites Herakles into such madness that he kills his wife, Megara, and his children. To the extent that this event is (in the context of the play) unequivocally brought about by the goddess, it cannot from our perspective be considered a supernatural phenomenon. Earlier in the play there is a choral ode that tells of Herakles’ twelve labours. It is unfortunate that these labours are not treated in extenso in any extant work of Graeco-Roman literature, for of course several of them involve manifestly supernatural entities or events—the Hydra; the Nemean Lion, an otherwise invulnerable monster whom Herakles manages to choke with his bare hands; and in particular the final labour, the fetching of the threeheaded dog Cerberus from the underworld. Euripides’ masterwork of horror is Medea (431 B.C.E.). By this time Medea’s reputation as a witch or sorceress was firmly established; and yet, at the outset the reader’s (or viewer’s) sympathy is on her side, as she has been scorned by her husband Jason, who has taken up with a younger woman, Creusa, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Her revenge is to lace a coronet and dress with “poisons” (52), which, when Creusa dons them, causes her extreme pain: Then suddenly we saw a frightening thing. She changed Colour; she staggered sideways, shook in every limb. She was just able to collapse on to a chair, Or she would have fallen flat. Then one of her attendants, An old woman, thinking that perhaps the anger of Pan, Or some other god had struck her, chanted the cry of worship. But then she saw, oozing from the girl’s lips, white froth; The pupils of her eyes were twisted out of sight; The blood was drained from all her skin. (163–70)
It is difficult to know exactly what kind of “poisons” have brought about this effect; but that something highly bizarre is going on is confirmed by the fact that Creon, coming to aid her daughter, somehow sticks to the dress (which by this time has set Creusa’s body on fire), and both perish. The long Messenger’s speech (1136–230) in which this entire episode is related is one of the most powerful and sustained set-pieces of supernatural horror in all Greek literature. One of Euripides’ latest extant works is the Cyclops, the only surviving satyr play. The satyr play was a lighter, oftentimes quite ribald pendant to the trilogy of tragedies performed in the annual dramatic contests in Athens, and its focus on Dionysus or Bacchus (with its consequent emphasis on drinking and sexual licence) structures Euripides’ play in a significant manner. There is nothing, strictly speaking, supernatural about the Cyclops except the very presence of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. The point of interest in this work, from our perspective, is the manner in which virtually the identical scenario found in the Odyssey—the entrapment of Odysseus and his men (here in conjunction with Silenus, an attendant of Bacchus) within Polyphemus’ cave, Polyphemus’ eating of two of Odysseus’ men (described in a quite grisly monologue [557f.]), Odysseus’ plans to get Polyphemus drunk and then stab his eye with a burning wooden stake, and even an elaborate play on words when Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “Outis”—can be used for the purpose of slapstick comedy. By the time we come to the Argonautica of Apollinius Rhodius (295?– 215 B.C.E.), we are in a very different atmosphere from either the Homeric epics or fifth-century Greek tragedy. As one of the most prominent of the Alexandrian poets of the fourth and third centuries, Apollonius and his friend Callimachus adopted a very different attitude to poetry from their predecessors: concerned with displaying their erudition and their sophistication (rather in the manner of such twentieth-century poets as Eliot and Pound), they clearly regarded the tales of Greek myth merely as fodder for the exhibition of their poetical talents. Perhaps Apollonius chose to relate the voyage of the Argo simply because it had not been the subject of any prominent epic (or, for that matter, tragedy) in the past. The result is a work of only intermittent interest—one that in some ways fails to hang together as a unity, but which contains some striking set-pieces. One of the most striking is the story, in Book 2, of the prophet Phineus, who, having offended Zeus, is plagued by the Harpies (their name means “the
snatchers”), who pluck his food away just as he is about to eat it. In many ways this punishment is notably analogous to that of the three notorious characters in Hades, Tityos, Tantalus, and Sisyphus; but Phineus dwells in the very real locale of Bithynia, on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor. Two heroes from the Argo, Zetes and Calaïs, give chase to the Harpies, but the goddess Iris intervenes, saying that they will no longer bother Phineus. It is Phineus who tells the Argonauts of the dangers of the Cyanean Rocks, or the Clashing Rocks. This account—of the immense cliffs that, at the Bosphorus, clash together, crushing any ships that dare attempt to make their way through them—has the flavour of a traveller’s tale, and is perhaps nothing more than a supernaturalisation of the narrowness of the strait at this juncture. The Argo manages to get through, albeit not without difficulty: “Once more the Rocks met face to face with a resounding crash, flinging a great cloud of spray into the air. The sea gave a terrific roar and the broad sky rang again. Caverns underneath the crags bellowed as the sea came surging in. A great wave broke against the cliffs and the white foam swept high above them. Argo was spun round as the flood reached her” (2.565–70). But the most interesting portion of the Argonautica, from our perspective, is the entirety of Book 3, the tale of Jason and Medea. This account deals with the initial encounter of Medea, daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, whom—it is of some significance to note—the gods cause to fall in love with Jason, and so help him obtain the golden fleece. At the very outset Medea is called “something of a witch” (epei doloessa tetuktai [3.89] —doloessa really meaning subtle or wily). Hecate, goddess of the underworld and of witchcraft, has taught Medea the use of magic herbs, and Medea herself has made a magic ointment from the ichor of Prometheus. This helps Jason overcome the various challenges that Aeetes puts to him— the serpent’s teeth that, when sown, spring up as soldiers, fire-breathing bulls, and so forth. Then, in Book 4, when the golden fleece is found being guarded by an immense snake, Medea fashions a “spell” (4.157) that puts the snake to sleep. The Peri thaumasion (On Marvels) by Phlegon of Tralles (early first century C.E.), a freedman of the Emperor Hadrian, is a prime instance of the accidental nature of the transmission of ancient texts. This text is itself fragmentary, but it is only one example of a minor but apparently popular genre in antiquity—what nineteenth-century scholars somewhat
cumbersomely labelled paradoxography, or accounts of miracles and marvels. This genre goes back at least to the poet Callimachus in the third century B.C.E., and such luminaries as Varro and Cicero evidently dabbled in it; their works, however, do not survive, but Phlegon’s, written in a rather crude and easily understood Greek, does. Phlegon is a kind of Charles Fort of the ancient world, having amassed bizarre and generally preposterous stories of giant bones, women turning into men, monstrous births, and so forth; but his little treatise gains its greatest interest in its opening three chapters, which are humble and not ineffective stories of ghosts. The first and most celebrated one, the tale of Philinnion and Machates, is unfortunately fragmentary, but we can gain some idea of its overall plot from a summary of the story (clearly not invented by Phlegon) in Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Republic. Proclus dates the events of the story to the reign of Philip of Macedon (r. 359–336 B.C.E.), whereas the extant text of Phlegon fails to provide any date. Proclus goes on to say that a young woman, Philinnion, died shortly after she was married to one Krateros. Six months later she returned from the dead, appearing for several nights to one Machates, “because of her love for him” (quoted in Hansen’s edition of Phlegon, 200), when Machates was staying with her parents. Then she died again, “proclaiming that what she had done was done in accord with the will of the subterranean deities.” This is, aside from the opening segments, largely the tale that Phlegon tells; he has Philinnion state, “It was not without divine will that I came here” (27). She is a surprisingly substantial ghost, as “she ate and drank” (27) with Machates. It is, in fact, not entirely clear why she chose to appear to Machates, as she does not seem to have had any prior relationship with him; or, rather, the true mystery is why Machates was staying with Philinnion’s parents in the first place. In any case, Philinnion’s tomb is opened and, sure enough, it is found empty. This is a remarkable instance of a physical, rather than merely spiritual, resurrection. The other ghost stories in Phlegon are of no particular interest. His treatise was only first translated in full into English in 1996, and the translator, William Hansen, states bluntly that Phlegon “dwells especially on the sensational, the grotesque and the bizarre” (11). Given that Phlegon evidently regards his accounts as true, it is a question whether they should be considered a contribution to supernatural fiction at all; but, as we shall see presently, his little book gained a surprising disciple seventeen hundred years after it was set down.
ii. Supernaturalism in Latin Literature In the realm of weird literature, as in many other realms, the Romans were mere copiers of the Greeks; they took over Greek myth nearly intact, fusing some of the Greek gods with native gods of approximately similar attributes and elaborating upon various Greek myth-cycles in a manner that rarely exceeds the originals in distinction or substance; but by a series of historical accidents, we have some striking examples of weirdness in Latin literature merely because the Greek originals have perished. It is of some interest to note that the first extant instance of supernaturalism (or, rather, pseudo-supernaturalism) in Latin literature is a piece of buffoonery—the Mostellaria of T. Maccius Plautus (250?–184 B.C.E.). This play is generally translated as The Haunted House (from mostellum, a diminutive of monstrum); perhaps a more accurate, if clumsy, rendition would be “Place Where a Strange Entity Appears to Exist.” Of course, there is no ghost or “monster” in this comic play; rather, the ghost is a fabrication by the clever slave Tranio as a means of distracting Theopropides, the father of the wastrel Philolaches, from becoming aware that his son has frittered away a great deal of money by purchasing the freedom of a fetching female slave and giving a succession of lavish parties. Tranio makes no secret of the fact that his purpose is to “frighten his [Philolaches’] father” (421). The plan is to assert that the house has become haunted because its former owner had killed his guest—an appalling crime in Graeco-Roman civilisation and one, therefore, that could plausibly (among the credulous, at any rate) engender the kind of haunting that Tranio is attempting to put over. What is more, Tranio maintains that the guest was actually buried in the house. This, in the slave’s words, is what the spirit of the murdered guest told Philolaches: “Diapontius am I, a guest from o’er the sea. Here do I abide, this house is the abode allotted to me. For Orcus [god of the underworld] hath denied me entrance into Acheron, I having been cut off before my time. I trusted, and I was betrayed. Here was I murdered by my accursed host, for the sake of gold, and in this very house did he
give me secret, unhallowed burial. Hence with you now! Accursed is this house, ’tis a defiled abode!” (497–504) All this sounds plausible enough, but the charade collapses very quickly. The “haunted house” element in Mostellaria comprises a small element of the plot, but to the extent that it is the catalyst for the entire scenario it can be considered significant enough. The fear that Theopropides—in spite of his initial scepticism of the ghost’s appearance to Philolaches in a dream (his repeated queries, “In his sleep?” [in somnis?] suggest that he is initially inclined to interpret the dream merely as a dream and not as a spectral occurrence)—for a time experiences is meant to suggest nothing more than his own credulousness. In spite of Plautus’ racy and slang-ridden prose, clearly reflective of the language of the streets, the manner in which the ghostly phenomena are made the butt of jest suggests a degree of scepticism in even the more uncultivated members of his audience that argues for a substantial level of doubt among the Roman public as a whole as to the reality of supernatural phenomena. It is, indeed, worth comparing this piece with a work of a very different sort written nearly three centuries later—the celebrated letter to Licinius Sura (Letters 7.27) by Pliny the Younger (61?–113? C.E.). This is, of course, the account of a purportedly “real” haunted house. It is remarkable that the otherwise learned and cultivated Pliny can state at the outset his inclination to believe in the existence of ghosts, based in part on a rather absurd story told to him by one Curtius Rufus—a governor’s assistant who claimed that the figure of a woman of immense size appeared to him and announced that she was the spirit of Africa—and in part on the story he proceeds to tell “just as it was told to me” (545). As in Plautus’ play, we are dealing with a house in Athens. It had a bad reputation, as on occasion the clanking of chains could be heard, followed by “the spectre of an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long flowing beard and hair on end, wearing fetters on his legs and shaking the chains on his wrists” (545). This actually led some occupants of the house to perish in fear, whereupon the house was deserted and lay empty. A philosopher, Athenodorus, comes to Athens and takes note of the house. As in so many later works of Gothic fiction, he decides to spend a night there. He too hears the clanking; then the ghost appears. But being a philosopher, Athenodorus is not frightened. The ghost leads him into the courtyard of the house, then vanishes. The next day
Athenodorus brings city officials to the place and—predictably enough— the bones of the “ghost” are discovered, “twisted round with chains” (547). I repeat my amazement that a figure so obviously civilised as Pliny could swallow this bit of hokum. His purpose, obviously, is not to terrify but to recount a narrative that he genuinely believes to be an indication of the reality of spectres. Several Roman poets made use of ghosts, witches, and lamias (understood variously as witches or sorceresses); perhaps the most noteworthy is Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 B.C.E.), whose fifth Epode is entirely concerned with Canidia, a witch with “locks and dishevelled head entwined with short vipers” (375), who utters a mad incantation intended to prevent a hapless youth from falling in love with any other woman but her. The poem is richly atmospheric, and Canidia’s evocation of her predecessors in witchcraft—specifically Diana and Medea —adds potency to her incantation. It is difficult to pass over in silence the mad Poem 63 of Catullus (C. Valerius Catullus, 84?–54? B.C.E.), written in a highly unusual metre found almost nowhere in extant Latin poetry and dealing graphically with the selfcastration of Attis, the son and lover of the great mother-goddess Cybele. In the end the poet can only conclude: “Goddess, great goddess Cybele, goddess, lady of Dindymus, far from my house be all thy fury, O my queen; others drive thou in frenzy, others drive thou to madness” (97). Perhaps the subject-matter of this poem is not as distinct from myth as a work of supernatural terror should be, but its vivid first-person depiction of religious frenzy and madness makes it a notable and virtually unique contribution to Latin literature. Also unique, in a very different way, is the Satyricon of Petronius (T. Petronius Arbiter, d. 65 C.E.), the arbiter elegantiae who calmly committed suicide after earning the wrath of his former patron, the emperor Nero. The celebrated werewolf episode in the Satyricon (61–62) is of interest both for numerous details and for the manner in which the story is narrated. A man accompanies a soldier at dawn along a road, as “the moon shone high like noon.” At one point the soldier 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 man hears that a wolf had killed many of the sheep on a farm but had been injured in the neck before he fled. The soldier shows up at an inn, wounded in the neck. This
compact and engaging tale is told by one of Trimalchio’s guests at his banquet, and although he makes evident efforts to depict it as a tale of terror (“My heart was in my mouth, but I stood like a dead man”), the comic undercurrent is unmistakable. It is noteworthy that the narrator is keen on dispelling the incredulity of the assembled guests by vowing to the truth of the account: “Please do not think I am joking; I would not lie about this for any fortune in the world.” The extant text of the Satyricon is perhaps onefifth, or even one-tenth, the size of the total work (it was itself probably left incomplete by Petronius’ death), so possibly it contained other supernatural episodes; but the general tone of this one bespeaks an aggressive scepticism of supernatural phenomena, at least on the part of the refined segments of Roman society. Of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) it is difficult to speak in small compass, for the entire fifteen books of this epic deal with shape-shifting. Although most of his accounts deal with transformations brought about by the gods, some are of a different sort; and in other cases, the final transformation is only a contrived expedient that allows Ovid to tell several gripping tales of the supernatural, in poetry that is fluid and elegant, if at times glib. We have a half-parodic retelling of the account of Perseus’ slaying of the sea-monster and the 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 directed toward terror; instead, he seeks to evoke wonder at the transmutation of human to animal. The most celebrated Roman account of a visit to the underworld is of course the sixth book of the Aeneid of Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro, 70–19 B.C.E.), but here terror is even farther from the author’s purpose. At the outset the Sibyl—a witch- or sorceress-like figure—instructs Aeneas on the particulars of his descent (including the pregnant line facilis descensus Averno [6.126]—“the descent to Avernus [the underworld] is easy”—with the implication that the return is of a different order of difficulty). There is considerable horrific imagery in certain aspects of that descent— a deep cave there was
By the dark mere and forest’s gloom, o’er which Nothing that flies could wing a scathless way, Such breath from the black jaws outpouring sped Into the vault of heaven . . . (6.236–41) —followed by a chilling depiction of the monsters he may encounter— Grief and avenging Cares have made their bed; And pale Diseases house, and dolorous Eld, And Fear and Famine, counsellor of crime, And loathly Want, shapes terrible to view, And Death and Travail, and, Death’s own brother, Sleep, And the soul’s guilty joys, and murderous War Full on the threshold, and the iron cells Of the Eumenides, and mad Discord, who With blood-stained fillet wreaths her snaky locks. (6.274–84) But Virgil’s manifest purpose is to lead Aeneas to the shade of his father, Anchises, who utters the imperishable prophecy of Roman greatness that comprises the heart of the book—and which Virgil deliberately confounds at the end of the epic, when Aeneas savagely kills the suppliant enemy Turnus, thereby repudiating Anchises’ command to “spare the defeated” (6.853). It becomes evident that Virgil has consciously imitated numerous facets of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld, most notably in Aeneas’ attempt to embrace Anchises (as Odysseus had attempted to embrace the shade of
his mother). Of some interest is Virgil’s account of the different types of shades in the underworld: aborted fetuses, those doomed to die of false accusations, suicides, and so forth. It is, of course, here that Aeneas has his poignant encounter with Dido, the Carthaginian queen whom he had rejected to pursue his fate as founder of Rome, and of whose death by suicide he had been ignorant until he sees her shade. She refuses to speak to him. It has long been known that the plays of Seneca (L. Annaeus Seneca, 4? B.C.E.–65 C.E.) were a dominant influence on Elizabethan tragedy, in spite of the heavy debt they themselves owe to their Greek originals. Seneca, whose chief work is a succession of distinguished if somewhat rhetorically florid works of Stoic philosophy, made bold to rewrite a number of tragedies by the most celebrated Greek playwrights, infusing them with a degree of over-the-top flamboyance that would have been unimaginable to Aeschylus or Sophocles. But in so doing, he made some interesting emendations of the myths that enhance their supernaturalism. It is instructive to compare Seneca’s treatment of the Herakles/Deianira story, in the play Hercules Oetaeus (Hercules at Oeta; translated in a recent edition as A Cloak for Hercules), with that of his apparent source, Sophocles’ Trachiniae. While the basic outlines of the story are followed, Seneca provides a radically different motivation for some of the central figures. Deianira, in particular, is portrayed as not merely enraged that Hercules has taken Iole as a paramour, but as manifestly wishing to kill her husband with a “spell” (cantus, 469). A Nurse, who figures as a very minor character in Sophocles’ play, takes on a significantly larger role, and in fact presents herself as endowed with supernatural powers: I made the trees leaf out in winter snow and jagged lightning freeze in its sizzling course. I’ve made heavy seas on a calm day and caused fresh springs to rise from desert rocks. I’ve opened wide hell’s gates,
bid spirits speak and Cerberus keep silent, while midnight saw the sun, and day sank, toppled by darkness. Earth and its waters, heaven and Tartarus do my bidding. Nothing holds sway before my chanting; we will break him! My spells will find the way and cause him to bow down. (453–63) In this version, Hercules and others describe in even more gruesome detail the pain he is suffering (“The toxin decomposes / the skin, and the fabric merges with it” [830–31]; “my liver is being scraped dry; persistent fever saps / my blood” [1222–23]; and so forth). The play is of immense length, and it appears that it was expanded at a later date by some other hand. Seneca adheres somewhat closer to his Euripidean model in his version of Medea; but he takes occasion to expand considerably on Medea’s supernatural powers. A Nurse expresses fear that Medea is reciting spells that will harm Jason or Creusa: She prays to Horror to accept her worship, bless her, inspire. Smoke and sulphur rise up from the ground: she breaks them in as if they were purest mountain breezes in Spring, and her exhalations are dreadful. Curses and coughs punctuate one another, and yet she thrives, blossoms, looks much younger, and shines with a beauty that terrifies more than it pleases. (680–90)
Medea, for her part, engages in an invocation to the “gods of the underworld” and the “suffering ghosts of Tartarus” (740–42) as part of an elaborate ritual that will apparently endow the “gifts” (the coronet and robe) she intends to bestow upon Creusa. Significantly, however, the Messenger does little but bluntly report the prompt death of both Creusa and Creon: it is as if Seneca were aware that he had no chance of duplicating the horrific brilliance of the Messenger’s speech in Euripides. Seneca’s Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules) in general follows the plot of the Euripides play, but with different emphases that make it more pertinent to our concerns. In the first place, Seneca underscores the hatred of Juno (the Roman version of Hera) for Hercules by summoning up the “secret horrors of the damned” (95–96) from the underworld to battle her nemesis. Seneca also dwells at considerable length on Hercules’ plucking of Cerberus from the underworld, providing a vivid glimpse (probably derived at least in part from Virgil) of the archetypal horrors to be found there: Beyond the Lethe, lies the foul Cocytus, River of Tears, motionless as a swamp, Where starving vultures and the mournful owl Shriek overhead their prophecies of pain. Here in the branches of a black-leafed yew Sits drowsy Sleep, while desperate Famine lies Writhing on the ground, stretching her wasted jaws. Here futile Shame averts his burning face, Always too late, and thin Anxiety Stalks nervously, pursued by dark-eyed Fear. Here is gnashing Pain and black-robed Sorrow,
Trembling Disease and iron-vested War, And, last of all, Old Age, his staff in hand, Tottering forward step by painful step. (679–96) Seneca’s Thyestes is not based upon an extant Greek original, but plays on this theme among both Greek and Latin playwrights surely existed prior to his work. We are here dealing with one of the most gruesome episodes in Greek myth: Atreus, enraged that his brother Thyestes had seduced his wife Aerope, contrives to feed Thyestes a meal consisting of the flesh of his own sons. In the version of the myth that Seneca is following, this hideous event is the result of a familial curse, in that Tantalus—the grandfather of Atreus and Thyestes, and, as we have seen, one of the celebrated victims of punishment in the underworld—once fed the gods a similar meal made up of the flesh of one of his own sons. In Seneca, the Ghost of Tantalus emerges from the underworld to deliver a plaintive monologue before being chased back to Hades by a Fury. It is to be expected that Seneca dwells with the loving attention of a splatterpunk writer on the grisly feast that Atreus prepares for his wayward brother. Seneca’s Agamemnon is an explicit sequel to Thyestes. Here we are introduced to the Ghost of Thyestes, who seeks vengeance against the house of Atreus, including Atreus’ son, Agamemnon. The Ghost again provides an extensive description of the underworld, but otherwise plays no role in the actual action of the play. But Thyestes has his revenge in any case, for Agamemnon is murdered by Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes by his own daughter Pelopia. The Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass) of Lucius Apuleius (2nd century C.E.) is, at least in its title, a deliberate echo of Ovid, although it deals chiefly with only a single metamorphosis—that of a man named Lucius into an ass. Possibly the plural was used because this metamorphosis is preceded by accounts of several other bizarre events, one in particular performed by the female magician (saga) Meroe, who is said to have changed a lover into a beaver, another person into a frog (1.9), and so on. This story is told to Lucius by a traveller named Aristomenes, who goes on to recount the even more bizarre tale of one Socrates, whom Meroe and other witches or magicians killed with a sword wound to the neck, whereupon Meroe
plucked out his heart and sealed up the wound with a sponge. Later Socrates is seen alive, but presently his body gives out, the wound opens, the sponge falls out, and he is dead for good. It should be noted that a companion of Aristomenes immediately expresses scepticism of this outlandish story (“Verily there was never so foolish a tale, nor a more absurd lie than this” [1.20]), but Lucius swallows it (“I think nothing impossible” [1.20]). Lucius is, manifestly, attracted to the bizarre: he has expressly chosen to travel in Thessaly because it is the “birthplace of sorceries and enchantments” (2.1). Later, he is staying with a man named Milo whose wife, Pamphile, has the reputation of being a witch. Lucius, for his part, finds the situation fascinating (“I . . . was curious and coveted after such sorcery and witchcraft” [2.6]). A slave girl, Fotis, with whom Lucius has been carrying on a sexual dalliance expounds Pamphile’s witcheries at length and at one point tells him of an elaborate incantation she once uttered. Lucius now wishes to watch Pamphile in action, and he and Fotis presently see Pamphile turn herself into an owl. Lucius states that he wishes to be turned into an owl; but Fotis anoints him with the wrong ointment, and he turns into an ass instead. The rest of the novel becomes an adventure story in which Lucius is constantly attempting to eat some roses (although it is never explained that doing so will change him back into a man) while being beset by all manner of difficulties. At long last, after praying to Isis, he eats some roses offered by a priest and resumes his own form. The fact that, in the very first paragraph of the novel, we are told that this is a “Milesian tale” transparently indicates the self-parodic (or, at the very least, comic and even buffoonish) nature of the narrative. The phrase “Milesian tale” (a tale putatively originating in the city of Miletus, in Asia Minor) was used throughout the Graeco-Roman world for a story of unbelievable and probably deceitful character, and its use at the very outset of the Metamorphoses is Apuleius’ tip of the hat that his tongue is being held firmly in his cheek in the entirety of his engaging novel.
iii. The Middle Ages and the Elizabethans With the demise of classical civilisation in the fifth century C.E., our interest must necessarily turn to the barbarian conquerors of Rome. Not much is known about the pre-Christian paganism of the German tribes, especially given that Christian influence began to make itself manifest almost immediately upon the German invaders’ sacking of Rome. Accordingly, the chief literary document of the early medieval period—the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (8th century C.E.)—proves to be an illuminating glimpse at a dark period. Our interest in Beowulf is focused on the creation of Grendel, a manifest invention of the Beowulf-poet. The entity is described as a descendant of Cain, making his relevance to Christian myth immediately obvious. The poet goes on to remark: “From him [Cain] sprang all bad breeds, trolls and elves and monsters—likewise the giants who for a long time strove with God” (3), a conception that has no particular biblical authority but exhibits the degree to which Cain had by this time become the source of all evil. Curiously enough, in spite of the fact that Grendel is variously described as “evil,” a “monster,” a “hell-demon,” and an “enemy of mankind,” no physical description is offered of him. Midway through the text it is stated fairly planly that both Grendel and his mother—who at one point is called a “monster-wife” (23)—are roughly humanoid: [Hrothgar speaks:] “I have heard landsmen, my people, hallcounselors, say this, that they have seen two such huge walkers in the wasteland holding to the moors, alien spirits. One of them, so far as they could clearly discern, was the likeness of a woman. The other wretched shape trod the tracks of exile in the form of a man, except that he was bigger than any other man. Land-dwellers in the old days named him Grendel.” (24) It is, however, stated that the mother has “claws” (27). Manifestly, both are of immense size, since Grendel is able to eat a man whole (13); moreover,
when Grendel’s mother is killed by Beowulf and his comrades, “Four of them had trouble in carrying [her] head on spear-shafts to the gold-hall” (29). Grendel himself, who is said to be “at war with God” (15), is himself mortally wounded by Beowulf and drags himself back to “his joyless home in the fen-slopes” (15), a marvellous image that foreshadows a long tradition in supernatural literature of finding horror in the untenanted wilderness. There are other horrific creatures in Beowulf, such as some watermonsters (25) and a dragon or two. The latter, “which on the high heath kept watch over a hoard [of treasure]” (39), “flies at night wrapped in flame” (40). It is killed by Beowulf and a colleague; but Beowulf himself is mortally wounded in the fight and dies. Beowulf is a fascinating product of the fusion of Christianity and paganism; the battles with Grendel and the dragon are apparently of Scandinavian origin. It is believed that the poem describes an era about two hundred years before the date of writing. It has also been maintained that Beowulf’s battles with the various monsters can be interpreted allegorically, as embodying various Christian principles; but many of these interpretations are highly strained, and it is probably safest to follow R. E. Kaske in asserting that Beowulf, as a literary figure, chiefly embodies the heroic ideal, and that Grendel represents “external evil, or violence,” while the dragon represents “the greatest of internal evils, the perversion of the mind and will” (126). There is certainly no fusion of traditions in Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1314), for he is clearly working within the Christian tradition and indeed seeking to convey the truth of that tradition; and while some of the particulars of his envisioned universe—notably the nine circles of hell in the Inferno—are likely to be of his own invention, they are all so subordinated to his Christian philosophy that it is impossible to regard them as independent expressions of his literary imagination. Dante is the prototypical instance of the dangers of regarding a literary work, or any part of it, as “supernatural” when the notion of supernaturalism cannot be said to have been well established: all the horrors of his Inferno are manifestly the product of the God in whom he so fervently believes, and even their nine levels are paralleled by the nine heavenly spheres that lead to Paradise. And yet, the pungency of some of his descriptions cannot be gainsaid. Canto 18 introduces us to Malebolge (literally, “evil pouches”), a “baleful
space” in the middle of which “yawns a pit of great breadth and space” (227). It is populated with a variety of sinners, and “horned demons with great whips [were] lashing them cruelly behind” (229). In the remarkable Canto 25, a serpent seizes upon a hapless sinner and actually fuses bodies with him: “then, as if they had been of hot wax, they stuck together and mixed their colours and neither the one nor the other appeared now what it was before” (309). It is significant that the narrator prefaces this remarkable transformation (probably derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) with the cautionary words: “If, reader, thou art now slow to credit what I shall tell, it will be no wonder, for I who saw it scarcely admit it to myself” (309)—a suggestion that, even in the mysterious realm of Hell, incidents of a quasisupernatural cast can occur that strain the credulity even of those who witness them. All this leads to the depiction of Satan in Canto 34: The Emperor of the woeful kingdom stood forth at mid-breast from the ice, and I compare better with a giant than giants with his arms. . . . Ah, how great a marvel it seemed to me when I saw three faces on his head; one in front, and that was red, the two others joined to it just over the middle of each shoulder and all joined at the crown. The right seemed between white and yellow; the left had such an aspect as the people from where the Nile descends. Under each came forth two great wings of size fitting for such a bird, sails at sea I never saw like these; they had no feathers but were like a bat’s, and he was beating them so that three winds went forth from him by which all Cocytus was kept frozen. With six eyes he was weeping and over three chins dripped tears and bloody foam. In each mouth he crushed a sinner with his teeth as with a heckle and thus he kept three of them in pain; to him in front the biting was nothing to the clawing, for sometimes the back was left all stripped of skin. (421, 423) As John D. Sinclair notes in his translation, “The figure of Satan is taken in the main from the common stock of medieval iconography” (429). Dante’s Inferno overall owes much to Graeco-Roman literature, notably Aeneas’ descent into the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid. Peter S. Hawkins laments that “It is a great pity that Inferno is the only portion of the Commedia most
people read, because the rest of the work serves to melt the Inferno’s deep freeze, to give a sense of hope” (47); but, as with a wide array of literary works both in and out of the Christian tradition, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, it is the horrific parts that have captured the imaginations of centuries of readers and writers, and it is these that continue to colour our views of the literary works and the authors who generated them. The degree to which, in the entire late mediaeval and early modern period, the suspicion of baleful quasi-supernatural forces, chiefly induced by Christian orthodoxy—witches with awesome powers, the Devil and his legions of demons lurking in the shadows and occasionally possessing the bodies of hapless individuals—was accepted even by the educated classes can scarcely be overemphasised. The fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, in both Catholic and Protestant countries, were the heyday of the witchcraft persecutions, and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children— mostly women—were tried and put to death. It should be recalled that the orthodox belief was that witches had entered into an explicit pact with the Devil, so that their “crime” was not the mere practice of witchcraft but the offence of heresy. It is in the context of this widespread belief in spectres that we should regard the work of the Elizabethan playwrights. These writers—influenced in part, as noted earlier, by the blood-and-thunder of Seneca—enthusiastically made use of both natural and supernatural horror in their plays, but only a few central works need be treated here. The plays of John Webster (1580?–1634?), especially The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614), have long been notorious for their gruesomeness, but that gruesomeness is of a purely physical sort without the slightest suggestion of supernaturalism, so their relevance to us is quite limited. The White Devil certainly contains more than its share of murder, madness, false imprisonment, and other elements that would become the stock-in-trade of the Gothic novels, but aside from a pseudo-supernatural trick—one character appears to rise from the dead, although it is quickly revealed that the gun that purportedly killed him was loaded with blanks—it features nothing unearthly. The Duchess of Malfi, for its part, is an even more lurid revenge tragedy, containing liberal doses of murder, blasphemy (a cardinal, aside from having a mistress, murders the Duchess with a poisoned Bible), a suggestion of incest, and so forth.
In the end, it is most productive to focus on the supernaturalism found in two of the leading playwrights of the period—William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Amidst the multitude of supernatural or fantastic phenomena in Shakespeare—the realm of pure fantasy that is the Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the enigmatic monster Caliban in The Tempest, the ghost of Caesar in Julius Caesar, and the like—our chief emphasis must remain focused on the celebrated appearances of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in Hamlet and Macbeth. Indeed, the most striking thing to observe is the stark differences in the ghostly manifestations in these two plays. There seems no question but that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is meant to be interpreted, in the context of the play, as a real occurrence. In the first place, we are told at the outset that the ghost has appeared twice before (1.1.25), and by both Bernardo and Marcellus, even though Horatio dismisses it as “but our fantasy” (1.1.23). When the Ghost then appears, Horatio not only sees it but attempts to speak to it; but it disappears without utterance. At a later appearance, the Ghost again disappears, and Bernardo remarks: “It was about to speak when the cock crew” (1.1.147). It is at this point that Horatio informs Hamlet of the existence of the Ghost, and Hamlet realises that he must speak to it, so he chooses, not the approach of dawn, but midnight for his vigil; as Horatio remarks, “It then draws near the season / Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk” (1.4.5–6). Again the Ghost enters, and both Hamlet and Horatio see it; later Hamlet and the Ghost appear by themselves, and this time the Ghost speaks, telling the story of his poisoning at the hands of his brother Claudius. It is barely conceivable (as W. W. Greg suggested long ago) that the appearance of the Ghost is a purely psychological phenomenon—a kind of collective hallucination engendered by the superstitiousness of Bernardo and Marcellus, who claim to have seen the Ghost in the first place. But this interpretation is highly strained, for it is difficult to credit how Hamlet could have come by the news of his father’s murder if the Ghost had not told him of it. Moreover, the fact that Horatio, when first seeing the Ghost, states that “It harrows me with fear and wonder” (1.1.44; my emphasis) suggests that a genuinely supernatural phenomenon is taking place, for Horatio clearly believes that ghosts do not and cannot exist, and yet he is confronted with manifest evidence that contradicts his presuppositions (a point that leads to Hamlet’s celebrated utterance, “There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” [1.5.166–67]). It is of some interest to note that the Ghost appears not because, as in so many works of Graeco-Roman literature, it was not given a proper burial—for Shakespeare emphasises that Hamlet’s father was in fact buried in an orthodox Christian rite—but merely because it was the victim of murder. The Ghost itself remarks that it must “walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burned and purged away” (1.5.10–13). Indeed, part of Hamlet’s hesitation to act upon the ghost’s pleas for revenge rests upon his uncertainty as to whether the ghost is a real phenomenon or either a hallucination or a devil sent to trick or deceive him. When we turn to Macbeth, we are in a very different realm. Shortly after Macbeth has Banquo killed by hired assassins, his Ghost appears—but it is seen only by Macbeth. This is made plain when, at the banquet where the Ghost appears, other characters express puzzlement at Macbeth’s speech and actions: “Here, my good lord. What is’t that moves your Highness?” (3.4.47), Lennox asks in bafflement when Macbeth refuses to sit in the seat designated as his, where Macbeth believes the Ghost is sitting; and Lady Macbeth chides him harshly: “O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear” (3.4.60–61). It is plain, therefore, that Macbeth is so consumed with guilt at his murders (he has by this time already killed Duncan as well) that he is envisioning ghosts and goblins pursuing him—a scenario repeated time after time in the subsequent history of supernatural fiction. Presently, Lady Macbeth also appears to suffer hallucinations created by a guilty conscience: her fantasy that her hands are continually stained with blood (“Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” [5.1.47–48]) leads a Doctor of Physic to lament the “great perturbation in nature” (5.1.9) that is afflicting her. The true supernaturalism in Macbeth is, of course, embodied in the three witches. In their initial appearance, they do nothing more than predict that Macbeth will be king—whereupon they “vanish” (stage direction after 1.3.78). In a sense we can consider this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, for (forcefully urged by his wife) Macbeth immediately undertakes the murders that lead both to his attaining the kingship and to his ultimate downfall. Even here, however, Macbeth himself speaks of “supernatural soliciting” (1.3.130) in reference to the witches’ prophecy. But the second appearance of the witches (4.1) is of considerably greater interest. Here they
acknowledge that Hecate is their mistress (although the actual apperance of Hecate at 4.1.39–43 is regarded as an interpolation) and, more pertinently, make various cryptic prophecies—such as that “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him” (4.1.92–94)—that Macbeth believes only enhances his position, for they seem contrary to nature and therefore of no effect. It should be noted that the actual playing out of these prophecies does not involve any supernaturalism (the one about Great Birnam Wood refers merely to soldiers that have disguised themselves with tree branches, so that it looks to Macbeth as if the wood itself is approaching him), but the witches’ knowledge of these future events is clearly supernatural. Some sidelights on Shakespeare’s distinctive use of the supernatural can be gleaned from a study of his sources. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet probably between 1600 and 1602. The Hamlet story was derived from Saxo Grammaticus’ Historiae Danicae (a treatise in Latin first published in 1514); but this story had no ghost in it. The ghost appears to have been introduced in an anonymous play called Hamlet (now referred to as the UrHamlet) performed no later than 1594. In addition, plays featuring ghosts urging a character toward revenge can also be found in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1592) and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (c. 1600; published 1602). In spite of all these antecedents, Shakespeare’s use of the ghost is both more dramatically effective and more convincing than that of his predecessors, who occasionally descended into implausibility or even buffoonery in the presentation of their spectres. As for Macbeth (performed no later than 1606), the story was derived from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which indeed featured the witches—referred to, in a phrase borrowed by Shakespeare, as the “Weird Sisters,” a locution that points to their function as indicators of destiny (the noun weird meaning, in this context, one’s personal fate or destiny)—but no ghost, either supernatural or psychological. Overall, it is difficult to ascertain Shakespeare’s own attitude toward ghostly phenomena or witchcraft. There is evidence that he read both James I’s treatise Daemonologie (1597), which asserted the existence of witches with supernatural powers, and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which cast a highly sceptical eye on the witchcraft phenomenon and chastised the (Catholic) church for its persecution of purported witches. The presentation of ghosts and witches in Hamlet and Macbeth is manifestly designed to heighten the dramatic effect
of the action, and little regarding Shakespeare’s own beliefs can be derived from it. Influential as Shakespeare’s plays were upon the subsequent supernatural tradition, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (probably first performed 1592; published 1604) by Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) might have been even more influential. The simplicity of the scenario— Faustus sells his soul to the Devil for unlimited knowledge, comes to regret his decision (especially his decision to reject God and take the side of the Devil), and ends up in Hell—does not diminish the grim power of the several supernatural episodes. The frequent accusation, made during and after Marlowe’s day, that he was an atheist (even if that term were interpreted as meaning his refusal to accept orthodox Christian theology) certainly falls to the ground in Dr. Faustus, which emphatically endorses the Christian notion of sin and punishment and thereby casts a wide influence on much subsequent literature dealing with temptation, forbidden knowledge, and related issues. And yet, to the degree that the play contains faint hints of sympathy for Faustus and a fascination with the unholy knowledge he has obtained, Dr. Faustus also looks forward to the many Faust figures in supernatural fiction who, at a minimum, elicit our respect and awe if not our admiration. In a thunderstorm, Faustus utters an incantation to summon Lucifer and other devils; they (including Mephistophilis) appear, whereupon Faustus acknowledges his worship of them: So Faustus hath already done, and holds this principle: There is no chief but only Beelzebub, To whom Faustus doth dedicate himself. This word “damnation” terrifies not me, For I confound hell in elysium. (1.3.55–59) Not long thereafter, Faustus signs over his soul to Lucifer by signing his name in blood:
Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s, Chief lord and regent of perpetual night. View here the blood that trickles from mine arm, And let it be propitious for my wish. (1.5.53–58) Lucifer later shows Faustus the seven deadly sins, each of whom delivers a brief monologue emphasising its baneful character. Faustus, however, ends up frittering away the twenty-four years he has been given by Lucifer to gain unholy knowledge and to utilise Mephistophilis as his servant. As the time for his inevitable damnation approaches, Faustus begins expressing regrets for his decision: Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years, oh would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book. And what wonders I have done all Germany can witness, yea all the world, for which Faustus hath lost both Germany and the world, yea heaven itself, heaven, the seat of God, the throne of the blessed, the kingdom of joy, and must remain in hell for ever. Hell, oh hell for ever. Sweet friends, what shall become of Faustus, being in hell for ever? (5.2.46–55) But of course it is too late. Throughout the play, the characters of the Good Angel and the Evil Angel appear, acting respectively as Faustus’ conscience and, as it were, his imp of the perverse. The latter now reveals Hell to him: Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare Into that vast perpetual torture-house.
There are the furies tossing damned souls On burning forks. Their bodies broil in lead. There are live quarters broiling on the coals That ne’er can die. This ever-burning chair Is for o’er-tortured souls to rest them in. These, that are fed with sops of flaming fire, Were gluttons, and loved only delicates, And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates. But yet all these are nothing. Thou shalt see Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be. (5.2.126–37) The devils carry Faustus down to Hell. Dr. Faustus might be said to be the only Elizabethan tragedy whose very foundation is supernatural. It is true that, in their varying ways, the supernatural episodes in Hamlet and Macbeth are catalysts for the subsequent action, but supernaturalism does not occupy the forefront of the action in those works as it does in Dr. Faustus. The source of the Faust story is a matter of some controversy; evidently Marlowe derived it from a German work (now apparently lost) that served as the basis for an English translation entitled The English Faust Book (1592). But whatever the source, Marlowe has written a gripping play of overreaching and punishment that, however closely it may be tied to religious orthodoxy, set an example for countless supernaturalists of subsequent centuries to follow. iv. Milton and the Eighteenth Century The later seventeenth century, in England and the Continent, was not notable for the production of even proto-supernatural literature: the dominance of Puritanism in England spelled the demise of the thriving
Elizabethan drama, and no one is likely to consider the various monsters populating John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84)— most notably the fiend Apollyon—as anticipating any significant trends in weird fiction, since these entities are so plainly tied to Christian tradition. Much the same could be said for the one undeniable literary classic of seventeenth-century England, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); but, just as in the case of Dante’s Inferno, the force of Milton’s imagination allowed his Christian-based visions to cast a much broader shadow over subsequent literature, weird and otherwise, than Bunyan’s. Our interest is almost entirely restricted to Book 2, the detailed description of Satan and his imps in Hell. Let it pass that Milton’s theology departs from Scripture in significant regards; taking a few hints from Revelation and later Protestant tradition, Milton has fashioned an image of Hell that permanently entered the pictorial imagination of Western culture. What strikes us about his depiction is the degree to which it is indebted, for many facets of its imagery, to the monsters of classical antiquity, notably as found in Homer and Virgil—a point that is suggested even in Book 1, with the introduction of Satan and his crew: Thus Satan talking to his nearest Mate With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes That sparkling blaz’d, his other Parts besides Prone on the Flood, extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den By ancient Tarsus held . . . (1.192–200)
The pattern continues in Book 2, where the vision of Hell melds with that of Hades: Thither by harpy-footed Furies hal’d, At certain revolutions all the damn’d Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce, From Beds of raging Fire to starve in Ice Thir soft Ethereal warmth, and there to pine Immovable, infixt, and frozen round, Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire, They ferry over this Lethean Sound Both to and fro, thir sorrow to augment, And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe, All I one moment, and so near the brink; But Fate withstands, and to oppose th’ attempt Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards The Ford, and of itself the water flies All taste of living wight, as once it fled
The lip of Tantalus. (2.596–614) The powerful bleakness of Hell is patent even to those who do not ascribe to Milton’s theology: A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire. (2.622–28) Milton himself would probably have been appalled to think of himself as some kind of antecedent of supernatural literature, for, in spite of its vivid colouring, his Hell was to him a real and therefore natural place; but with the decline of religious orthodoxy in the eighteenth century and beyond, his frankly lurid painting of the underworld could be relished for what in fact it is—an unfettered exercise of the imagination. As for “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” (1706) by Daniel Defoe (1660– 1731)—or, to give it its full (and significant) title, “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal”—there is (as in the case of Phlegon above) some reason to question its inclusion in a study of supernatural fiction, because it is evident that Defoe did not consider it a work of fiction at all. (There is, incidentally, some small doubt whether the tract, published anonymously, even is by Defoe, but the general consensus is that it is.) This simple, straightforward account of a revenant—Mrs. Veal, the day after she died, comes back from the dead and spends two hours with her friend Mrs. Bargrave, whom she has not seen in two and a half years; Mrs. Bargrave, presumably not knowing of Mrs. Veal’s death, talks to her in a normal fashion and only later learns that she has been speaking with a dead person
—became immensely popular in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chiefly for the bland and deadpan manner of its narration; but a consideration of Defoe’s other works on the same general theme makes it quite clear that he himself was attempting to pass it off as a true account. What is more, Defoe himself did not invent any of the details or characters in the story. Rodney M. Baine, in his admirable (if somewhat credulous) study Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (1968), points out that various accounts of the “apparition” had appeared in newspapers in late 1705, well before Defoe’s pamphlet appeared, and there is no reason to think that Defoe has embellished any part of the account. Moreover, in spite of the fact that Defoe himself (assuming that the first-person narrator of the account is he) states that “I can avouch for her [Mrs. Bargrave’s] Reputation . . . and I can confirm the Good Character she had from her Youth, to the time of my Acquaintance” (134), there is no evidence that Defoe himself interviewed Mrs. Bargrave or derived the account of Mrs. Veal other than at second hand. One hopes that the long-discredited belief that Defoe fabricated the entire story as a means of selling an English translation of Charles Drelincourt’s Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death (1675) can finally be put to rest. It is true that Defoe mentions Drelincourt on three separate occasions in his little screed, and it is also true that the work was used as a preface to later editions of Drelincourt; but that is the extent of the connexion with the French theologian. And yet, as Baine points out, Defoe himself clearly sympathised with Drelincourt’s overall message and may well have found in the account of Mrs. Veal a means of combating the growing scepticism in regard to revenants and other such phenomena—a scepticism that Defoe, in his cultural conservatism, appears to have regarded as tantamount to atheism. In the preface to his account he states plainly that “The use which we ought to make of it is, to consider, That there is a Life to come after this, and a Just God, who will retribute to every one according to the Deeds done in the Body” (134). The first part of this statement—assuming the Mrs. Veal story to be true—may be sound enough, but the second does not seem to follow, for it is difficult to ascertain how Mrs. Veal has gained any kind of posthumous reward or punishment for her actions in life. A quick glance at Defoe’s other works on the same general subject —“Vision of the Angelick World” (1720), about the presence of angels in
human history and their role in human affairs; the twin treatises The Political History of the Devil (1726) and A System of Magick (1726), about the Devil and fallen angels, which Defoe regards as unquestioned realities; and, most pertinently, Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), on apparitions found both in Scripture and in more recent human history—make it quite clear that Defoe was, to be frank, a highly credulous believer in such anomalous phenomena and therefore found the story of Mrs. Veal appealing on more than one level. In the end, it appears that Mrs. Bargrave either invented the story of Mrs. Veal’s apparition herself, or perhaps actually believed that she had been so visited. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Samuel Johnson—himself a man of serious, even tormented piety who longed to believe in an afterlife that would mitigate his terrors of death—maintained that “I believe the woman [Mrs. Bargrave] declared upon her death that it was a lie” (quoted in Baine 94); this does not appear to be the case, and Johnson is recording the view at second-hand. In any event, Defoe clearly believed Mrs. Bargrave and hoped that her account was true. “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal,” for all its celebrity, is a poor piece of work even if regarded as purely fictional; for Defoe’s account is so excessively circumstantial, and narrated in such a sober-faced manner, that it fails to develop any emotional resonance. Henry Fielding, in Tom Jones (1749), ridiculed the Mrs. Veal story in passing, and his depiction (Book VII, ch. 14) of Tom Jones himself pretending to be a ghost is merely meant to poke fun at the hapless wight who is taken in by Jones’s charade. The first chapter of Book VIII purports to be a learned disquisition on “the marvellous,” and its main point (“I think it may very reasonably be required of every writer that he keeps within the bounds of possibility” [346]) would, if carried out, mean the effective demise of supernatural literature. Fielding does, however (granting that his entire discussion is cloaked in flippancy) make the important point that actual gods (in the pagan tradition) or God (in the Christian tradition) should not be evoked frivolously, or perhaps at all; instead, “The only supernatural agents which can in any manner be allowed to us moderns are ghosts; but of these I would advise an author to be extremely sparing” (347). That last bit of advice is certainly sensible, although it required Poe and his successors to carry it out. In the one other passage in the eighteenthcentury British novelists that has been singled out—the visit by Renaldo, count de Melvile, to the grave of his beloved, Monimia, at midnight (ch. 62
of Tobias Smollett’s Count Fathom [1753])—there is not even the hint of supernaturalism, although an effective atmosphere of gloom is created. The age was not welcoming of the supernatural: the commencement of empirical science heralded by the establishment of the Royal Society in 1662, the philosophy and physics of Locke and Newton, and the hardheaded rationalism of Dr. Johnson rendered the early and middle eighteenth century stony ground for ghosts and goblins; the same can be said of the Continent, where the philosophes’ aggressive clearing away of the supernatural foundations of the Christian religion may have dissuaded creative artists from using ghosts and goblins even as literary symbols. Some literary historians have argued that the school loosely termed the “graveyard poets” had an influence on subsequent supernatural literature, but the best that can be said of this movement is that it represented a kind of bridge between the Christian supernaturalism of Milton and the romanticism of the later eighteenth century. The poets of this school (if it can really be said to be a school), obsessed in some degree with the phenomenon of death, emphasised the melancholy or moral aspects of death rather than its dreadful of fearful aspects. As Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted in her important study of eighteenth-century supernatural poetry, Milton was, at least early in the century, a significant influence on many minor poets of the period, as in, say, Elizabeth Rowe’s “The History of Joseph.” The few noteworthy supernatural poems of this era— John Gay’s “A True Story of an Apparition” (1720), which contains some splendid horrific imagery; David Mallet’s ballad “William and Margaret” (1730), a powerful fusion of love and death; William Collins’s “Ode to Fear” (1746), heavily indebted to classical literature for its images—do not, cumulatively, amount to much. And the two most noteworthy instances of graveyard poetry, Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts (1742–45) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), have little or nothing of the horrific about them. It is, accordingly, not a little surprising that, even in the wake of James Macpherson’s “Ossianic” poems of the 1760s—prose translations or paraphrases of ancient Gaelic poetry, full of wild imagery just on this side of supernaturalism—a humble little book published on Christmas Day of 1764 would initiate a literary genre that would ultimately gain immense popularity and, on occasion, produce works of substantial merit; but such are the vagaries of literary history.
III. The Gothics
i. Types of Gothic Fiction In the second edition (1765) of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole subtitled his novel “A Gothic Story.” Although it is difficult to deny that Walpole did, after a fashion, give birth to the Gothic novel, we should be aware of a number of caveats surrounding this conventional assertion. Firstly, as James Watt reminds us (Contesting the Gothic 3), most novels under consideration here did not refer to themselves as “Gothic” novels but as “romances,” reflecting a desire to segregate themselves from the realistic novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Moreover, Gothic fiction took its own time in developing; Walpole’s work did not suddenly impel a legion of imitators. In Frederick S. Frank’s definitive listing of 422 Gothic novels (1762–1826) in Marshall Tymn’s Horror Literature (1981), we can gain a good idea of how quickly the Gothic novel proliferated; broken down in roughly five-year intervals, the rate of production is as follows: 1764–1770: 4 1771–1775: 6 1776–1780: 3 1781–1785: 7 1786–1790: 30 1791–1795: 47
1796–1800: 107 1801–1805: 71 1806–1810: 64 1811–1815: 26 1816–1820: 38 1821–1826: 5
(The total excludes a certain number of titles that are undated.) It can be seen from this breakdown that the true explosion of Gothic novels did not begin until the late 1780s, probably through the simultaneous influence of Ann Radcliffe and the founding in 1790 of William Lane’s Minerva Press, which was consciously designed to capitalise on the burgeoning interest in Gothic fiction, with the result that it published some of the worst drivel ever seen in English literature. What, exactly, does it mean to refer to a work as a “Gothic novel”? Linda Bayer-Berenbaum provides a compact definition of the term:
The word Gothic originally referred to the Northern tribes that invaded Europe during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. The term was later applied by Renaissance critics to the style of architecture that flourished in the thirteenth century, because these critics thought that the style had originated with the Goths. This architecture was held in low esteem during the Renaissance, and the word Gothic therefore developed pejorative connotations suggesting the uncouth, ugly, barbaric, or archaic. It implied the vast and the gloomy, and subsequently denoted anything medieval. Later the word indicated any period in history before the middle or even the end of the eighteenth century. Gothic loosely referred to anything old-fashioned or out of date. The ruins of Gothic cathedrals and castles were naturally termed Gothic, and soon any ruins—the process of decay itself—became associated with the Gothic as did wild landscapes and other mixtures of sublimity and terror. (19) It is because, among many other reasons, the Gothic novels almost always drew upon the mediaeval past—with the exception of Frankenstein and a few others—that the term “Gothic” should be restricted to the works of this period and not extended to the entire range of supernatural, horrific, or weird fiction. It is, moreover, inaccurate and misleading to speak of “The Gothic Movement” as if it were a monolithic entity. Even though the great majority of the immense number of Gothic novels produced during this period (1764–1820) were crass imitations of a handful of illustrious exemplars, the movement (if it can even be called that) quickly fragmented into a number of discrete subgenres that had relatively little to do with one another. Even if a few of the leading figures of Gothic fiction made a token acknowledgement to The Castle of Otranto as the fons et origo of their own work, it becomes clear that several writers, especially Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, consciously departed from the model established by Walpole and worked in very different directions; by the end of the period (roughly coinciding with the emergence of the greatest of Gothic novels, Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820), Walpole’s absurd little novel had largely been forgotten as a model, even if it continued to be reissued and read. By around 1795, indeed, Radcliffe in turn had become
both the pinnacle of Gothicism and the springboard for still further deviations from it, especially in the work of M. G. Lewis and, later, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and Maturin. We can, therefore, identify the following types of Gothic fiction: 1) The pure historical novel set in mediaeval times; 2) The mingling of the historical novel with the supernatural tale; 3) The “explained” supernatural, where the supernatural is suggested only to be explained away (usually implausibly) as the result of misconstrual or trickery; 4) The Byronic Gothic—a shorthand term not intended here to suggest any direct connexion with Byron, and featuring a focus on a hero/villain who seeks to transcend human bounds; 5) What I would call the Christian supernatural, where supernaturalism is manifested in a specifically Christian mode, either by the utilisation of the actual figure of the Devil, or of demons in league with the Devil, or subordinate entities (evolving out of Christian theology, even if their ultimate origin predated Christianity) such as witches and vampires. Of these schools, I will have nothing to say of (1)—whose pioneering work was Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–85)—and relatively little of (2), since I maintain that these works had a very slight influence on the progress and development of subsequent supernatural literature, or even the nonsupernatural literature that might conceivably be considered horrific. Indeed, it is worth noting that, of the 422 works cited in Frank’s list, only 106 can be clearly identified as supernatural. It is true that Frank’s idea of what constitutes “Gothic romance” is rather generous, including everything from Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (but, oddly, excluding Faust) to the pornographic novels of the Marquis de Sade to the early historical novels of Sir Walter Scott to Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangeureuses, but
nevertheless the relative paucity of actual supernaturalism in the fiction of this period is noteworthy. The Gothic novel has been the subject of an immense amount of scholarly and critical work—far out of proportion, in my judgment, to its merits on abstractly aesthetic terms. This work ranges from largely historical accounts—including the pioneering studies by Edith Birkhead (The Tale of Terror, 1921) and Eino Railo (The Haunted Castle, 1927)—to those utilising every conceivable sort of theoretical presupposition, including recently even that of queer theory (see Haggerty, Queer Gothic). Of this work I intend to say little, as the great majority of it is not germane to my overriding purpose of establishing the nature, purpose, and function of the supernatural in literature. There is, perhaps, some justification in the critical obsession with this period, since the Gothic novel really was a dominant branch of prose fiction during this time and is therefore of significance to the overall literature and culture of Europe and the United States; but the single-minded focus on this period, conjoined with the deliberate ignorance of subsequent strains of supernaturalism that are of immensely higher literary calibre, makes one seriously doubt the critical judgments of the scholars involved. I shall have more to say about their theorisings about the nature and direction of Gothic fiction at the end of this chapter; for now it may be more productive to gain some idea of the particulars of the leading instances of Gothic fiction before offering some theoretical proposals of our own.
ii. The Historical Supernatural What led Horace Walpole (1717–1797) to write The Castle of Otranto, self-published at his “Gothick” castle at Strawberry Hill on Christmas 1764 (although the first edition bears the date of 1765), under the pseudonym Onuphrio Muralto, is not entirely clear, in spite of the massive amounts of documentary evidence that Walpole himself left, chiefly in the form of correspondence, that would presumably allow an understanding of his chameleonlike and perhaps contradictory personality. Son of the prime minister Robert Walpole, he himself failed at politics and so devoted himself to being a wealthy dilettante, an occupation he practised with verve. His literary tastes can be gauged more from what he disliked than from what he liked; his letters are filled with somewhat captious criticisms of the novels of Fielding and Richardson, and also of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. His disdain for Pope, the icon of eighteenth-century classicism, does suggest a certain fatigue with rationalism unenlivened by imagination. Even Walpole’s building of Strawberry Hill is not without its paradoxes and ambiguities. He did not begin fashioning it into a neo-Gothic castle until around 1750; and prior to this date he can still be seen expressing approval of Palladian classicism in architecture and using “gothic” as an epithet. Moreover, Walpole cannot be said to have invented or initiated the taste for Gothic architecture: as James Watt reminds us, the Gothic revival had really commenced as early as the 1740s (Contesting the Gothic 15). But the decade and a half of work on his castle prior to writing The Castle of Otranto does appear to have had some effect in casting Walpole’s mind to the mediaeval past and in seeing in that past a fruitful source for literary composition. His canonical utterance on the matter occurs in a letter to Horace Mann when he first conceived the idea of building the castle: “I am going to build a little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. If you can pick me up any fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything, I shall be excessively obliged to you. I can’t say I remember any such thing in Italy, but out of old châteaus I imagine one might get it cheap, if there is any” (10 January 1750). Three years later he followed up on the idea:
I thank you a thousand times for thinking of procuring me some Gothic remains from Rome; but I believe there is no such thing there: I scarce remember any morsel in the true taste of it in Italy. Indeed, my dear Sir, kind as you are about it, I perceive you have no idea what Gothic is; you have lived too long amidst true taste, to understand venerable barbarism. You say, ‘you suppose my garden is to be Gothic too.’ That can’t be; Gothic is merely architecture; and as one has a satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth [sic] of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house, so one’s garden on the contrary is to be nothing but riant, and the gaiety of nature. (Letter to Horace Mann, 27 April 1753) There is much of interest here—notably the notion that Gothic was inherently barbaric in contrast to the “true taste” of the Georgian era—but it may be worth focusing on Walpole’s blandly dogmatic utterance that Gothic could apply only to architecture. Manifestly, in the course of the next fourteen years he came to realise that Gothic could be a literary mode also —hence The Castle of Otranto. There is little need to rehearse the plot of this well-known work. It features the attempts of Manfred, the usurper of the noble line of Otranto and occupier of the eponymous castle, to preserve his ill-gotten gains either by fostering the marriage of his son, Conrad, or (when Conrad is supernaturally killed) by himself marrying in order to produce an heir that will retain the castle and title. The would-be bride, Isabella, stoutly refuses, thereby becoming the first in a drearily long line of Gothic heroines whose chief aim is to preserve their chastity. The topos of the nobleman in peasant garb is also introduced in the figure of Theodore, who predictably enough turns out to be the true heir of Otranto. He haunts the dank underground chambers of the castle and seeks a way to topple Manfred; but the job is done for him by the ghost of Alfonso (the father of Theodore and the man whom Manfred had killed to gain the castle and title), who spectacularly destroys the castle at the end and declares Theodore’s title to the line. Where exactly Theodore is to exercise his newly found noble lineage, now that his castle is in ruins, is a matter left for another day. In many ways, Walpole’s two prefaces to the novel—the first appearing with the original (pseudonymous) edition, the second added to the edition
of 1765, when Walpole admitted his authorship—are considerably more interesting than the text itself. The first preface is, in essence, designed to foster a hoax. Here Walpole maintains that the novel that follows is a document printed in 1529 but written sometime between the period 1095 and 1243 (these dates being chosen on the grounds that the incidents in the novel must have occurred between the first and second crusades, “or not long afterwards” [39]). Walpole goes on to say that “The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity” and that the original Italian author meant to “confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions” (39). This is all very clever; for what Walpole is doing, manifestly, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. At the very time that he is exhibiting incidents of the wildest improbability (chiefly by reason of the implausible supernatural manifestations that occur throughout the novel) he is simultaneously stepping back and declaring that only the deluded ignoramuses of the Middle Ages could have believed them—at least, in a literal sense. Walpole concludes this preface by declaring: “I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth” (42)—but it is not entirely clear what element of “truth” Walpole sees, or intends the reader to see, in the work. If the “moral” of the work, at least on a surface level, is thought to be the comforting adage that usurpers to noble titles (and property) never prosper, then perhaps Walpole is assuming—at least as a gesture to readers who might be inclined to doubt that a tale of such bizarre supernatural occurrences can have any “truth” to it at all—that the core of the tale, shorn of its supernaturalism, can still retain aesthetic validity by the moral soundness of Manfred’s ultimate overthrow and the reinstatement of Theodore to his ancestral estates. There is only one problem with this formulation: it is in fact impossible to make any sense—aesthetic or moral or otherwise—of The Castle of Otranto except by reference to its supernaturalism. Indeed, the one thing that can be said for the novel is that its supernatural manifestations are strictly in accord with its moral (or, perhaps more precisely, social) purpose. The very first such incident—the much ridiculed appearance of the gigantic helmet that kills Manfred’s son Conrad—is an instance of this; for this event causes the unscrupulous Manfred to seek to marry Isabella himself and thereby preserve his lineage—and his control of the castle—by the production of a presumably legitimate offspring. But at the very moment when Manfred utters this plan to the horrified Isabella, another supernatural
incident occurs: “At that instant the portrait of his grandfather, which hung over the bench where they had been sitting, uttered a deep sigh and heaved its breast” (59). Again, when Manfred threatens to execute Theodore, the plumes of the gigantic helmet shake. And, of course, in the climactic scene when the ghost of Alfonso emerges and destroys the castle, he speaks balefully to Manfred, “Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso!” (145). In effect, every supernatural occurrence is intended only secondarily for a moral purpose; its prime motivation is the aristocratic aim of preserving the legitimacy of succession at Otranto. All this makes one see the truth of Sir Walter Scott’s passing comment regarding Walpole’s “respect for birth and rank” (Lives of the Novelists, 191). The question of what led Walpole to write this curious little novel in the first place may cast some light on the central question of his attitude toward his work, and specifically toward the supernatural phenomena featured in it. It seems obligatory to cite the dream that Walpole maintained—several months after the novel was published—inspired the work: I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it . . . (Letter to William Cole, 9 March 1765) This, quite frankly, does not tell us much of value; indeed, it is not at all clear what the strange phrase “Gothic story” could refer to. It may not even refer to literature, for it is not certain what previous literature Walpole could have read to inspire the dream. At this point we may as well discuss Thomas (or John) Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance (1762), which some overzealous historians and critics claim is the true founding work of the Gothic novel. But while Longsword is of some interest as perhaps being the first British historical novel—it is set in the time of Henry III—its influence on subsequent Gothic literature appears to be minimal. As K. K. Mehrotra wrote long ago, Longsword “was
surprisingly negligible as a stimulating and inspiring force” (52). There is, in fact, not a single mention of Longsword in any of the tens of thousands of surviving letters written by Walpole. Aside from the fact that there is nothing supernatural in Longsword, the mere fact that it deals with a usurper to a noble title who is ultimately overthrown does not seem sufficient to serve as a central influence on The Castle of Otranto. The editor of a recent edition of the novel, John C. Stephens, writes with charitable enthusiasm that “virtually all of the stock romantic devices—that would be repeated ad nauseam in the Gothic tales of terror—are present in more or less prominence in Longsword” (xviii), but, as Mehrotra points out, the fact that the novel was not reprinted until 1831, after the Gothic movement had already fizzled out, makes one doubt its direct influence on any writer aside perhaps from Clara Reeve, who consciously acknowledged a debt to it. We are still no nearer to Walpole’s motivations in writing The Castle of Otranto, and perhaps they can never be known. But Walpole’s casual mention in the original preface to the novel that supernatural phenomena “are exploded now even from romances” may offer a clue. This idea is picked up in an important passage in the second preface: It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion. (43) Here again one can sense Walpole’s attempt to have his cake and eat it too. It is, however, difficult to imagine how he is adhering to the canons of “modern” romance, except by his assertion (and that is all it is) that he is attempting a faithful, “realistic” depiction of life in the mediaeval era. But Walpole is manifestly responding to those many critics who, in the wake of
the realistic novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett (all of whose works he disliked), condemned the use of anything fantastic or supernatural as beyond the pale. Samuel Johnson was prototypical in this regard: The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind. . . . Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in deserts, nor lodge them in imaginary castles. (Rambler No. 4 [31 March 1750]) This could have been written as a review of The Casle of Otranto, and indeed many reviews of the novel took exactly this tack in criticising it. But the importance of Walpole’s statement in the second preface is precisely in his vaunting of “imagination” over mundane reality; for in this way Walpole makes clear that, for him, the supernaturalism in his novel was manifestly meant to serve a variety of aesthetic purposes and that neither he nor his readers were expected to take it literally. This is exactly the perspective from which genuine weird literature has been, and must be, written: as I have already stated, the supernatural (in literature) cannot exist without a concrete conception of the natural. And Walpole was, by all accounts, exactly the sort of hard-headed eighteenth-century rationalist who, on the surface, would be least likely to write a supernatural novel. But in fact it was his hard-headed rationalism that led him to write it as a gesture of imaginative liberation. It may also be worth pointing out that Walpole was likely influenced by Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), which not only attempted a defence of the Middle Ages as something other than an era of dense ignorance and religious obscurantism but also sought to interpret the supernaturalism of mediaeval literature symbolically—seeing giants, for example, as representative of oppressive feudal lords, savages as their
hapless dependents, and so forth. Whether Walpole wished a directly Hurdian interpretation of the supernaturalism of The Castle of Otranto is unclear, but his comment on the underlying “truth” of his scenario seems to point in this direction. From this perspective, it is highly interesting to learn, as E. J. Clery has shown, of Walpole’s interest in the so-called Cock Lane ghost of 1762. This nine-days’ wonder—a ghost that purportedly made rattling noises in the room of a young woman who had died there—enthralled London for a time, and many notables took occasion to investigate the matter for themselves. Walpole was one of them, but he did so purely as a lark, in the hope that witnessing the ghostly phenomena might provide him with transient amusement. He wrote with bland cynicism in a letter: The house, which is borrowed, is wretchedly small and miserable; when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people, with no light but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering there by inches in such insufferable heat and stench. At the top of the room are ropes to dry clothes—I asked, if we were to have rope dancing between the acts?—we had nothing; they told us, as they would at a puppet-show, that it would not come that night till seven in the morning—that is, when there are only prentices and old women. We stayed, however, till half an hour after one. (Letter to George Montagu, 29 January 1762; quoted in Clery 25) Those “prentices and old women” are exactly analogous to the people of the “darkest ages of Christianity” who, in Walpole’s mind, would have swallowed the surface events of The Castle of Otranto. (There is a further irony in all this, in that the religiously tormented Samuel Johnson desperately hoped that the Cock Lane ghost was a real phenomenon, since he among others hoped it might counteract the spread of religious scepticism that he found so baleful. Alas, the Cock Lane ghost was revealed to be a hoax about a month after its announcement.) Does The Castle of Otranto actually amount to much, judged purely as an aesthetic entity? Perhaps it is unfair to gauge it in light of the subsequent
supernatural tradition that it helped to foster, although this seems to be exactly what H. P. Lovecraft did when he urged a friend in 1927: Have you read The Castle of Otranto? If not, don’t! Let the summary in [Eino] Railo[’s The Haunted Castle] continue to give you a “kick”, for the original certainly won’t! Walpole was too steeped in the classical tradition of the early 18th century to catch the Gothic spirit of the latter half. His choice of words and rhythms is the brisk, cheerful Addisonian one; and his nonchalant and atmosphereless way of describing the most prodigious horrors is enough to empty them of all their potency. Thanks to the secondhand way in which you received it, you have become the first reader to get a genuine shiver from Otranto since the days of Sir Walter Scott! (Selected Letters 2.231–32) There is some truth to this, especially as regards the “cheerful, Addisonian” prose; but no doubt Lovecraft would have agreed that the spareness of the novel’s prose led to a compactness and absence of floridity that more prolix writers like Francis Lathom, Charlotte Dacre, and even M. G. Lewis could not have imagined. The great drawback of most Gothic novels—The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, and a very few others excluded—is their appalling length; even the greatest of them, Melmoth the Wanderer, is nearly crippled by this failing. What Lovecraft complained of was Walpole’s unwillingness—it is an open question whether it was an inability—to lay the emotional groundwork for the supernatural. The events simply happen, coming quite literally out of thin air. The immediate effect upon the reader is presumably startlement and wonder, but repeated doses of this kind of thing merely lead to incredulity: whatever sense of reality the novel may initially have had— and it cannot have had much—breaks down rapidly. Walpole, of course, has covered himself by his elaborate preface whereby he has himself eschewed belief in the supernatural manifestations, but this is a feeble aesthetic excuse that cannot conceal the implausible plethora of supernaturalism in a work of scarcely 40,000 words. Walpole’s other creative works need not detain us long. The Mysterious Mother (1768) is a non-supernatural and rather unpleasant drama about
mother-son incest, while the six (or seven) stories that make up Hieroglyphic Tales (1785?) are all very amusing parodies of the Arabian Nights and fantastic romance in general; but as the volume was only privately published in a minuscule number of copies, its influence on subsequent weird fiction was nil. Although The Castle of Otranto was popular—there were three editions in the first two years of its publication—it did not, as I have stated, immediately inspire widespread imitation; a point emphasised by the fact that a full sixteen years passed between the third edition of 1766 and the fourth edition of 1782. Walpole is explicitly and cordially mentioned in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s essay “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (1773), but the “fragment” that she appends to the essay as an instantiation of its basic principles, “Sir Bertrand,” seems to owe little to The Castle of Otranto. This potent bit of supernaturalism is a pure nightmare in which Sir Bertrand stumbles into an apparently deserted “antique mansion” (46), is startled by all manner of bizarre occurrences— including a blue flame that recedes as he approaches it—and then, when the flame is suddenly extinguished: “A dead cold hand met his left hand, and firmly he grasped it, drawing him forcibly forwards—he endeavoured to disengage himself, but could not—he made a furious blow with his sword, and instantly a loud shriek pierced his ears, and the dead hand was left powerless with his” (47). This scene remains effective today, and is not deflated by the rather curious ending (if it can be called that) where Sir Bertrand comes upon a sumptuous banquet tended by nymphs. The overall effect of this work is really that of a fairy tale or folktale; if De Quincey had written it, we would have called it a drug-delirium. A later work did indeed draw upon Walpole, although not in a manner that pleased him. I refer, of course, to Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue (1777), retitled in the 1778 edition as The Old English Baron. The original title in fact more faithfully reflects the character of the work, for it is heavily moralistic and its one (or two) supernatural episodes only seek to underscore its moral message. To the extent that Walpole’s own supernaturalism does very much the same thing, Reeve can be considered a genuine disciple of him; but Reeve and Walpole each avowed a mutual dislike of the means that the other used to achieve their effects. In her preface to the second edition, Reeve announces that her novel is indeed “a literary offspring of the Castle of Otranto” (3) and, alluding to its
subtitle (“A Gothic Story”), calls it “a picture of Gothic times and manners” (3). But she goes on to deliver a gently worded but no less severe condemnation of the excessive supernaturalism in Otranto: . . . the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge of probability, the effect had been preserved, without losing the least circumstance that excites or detains the attention. . . . When your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. I was both surprised and vexed to find the enchantment dissolved, which I wished might continue to the end of the book; and several of its readers have confessed the same disappointment to me. The beauties are so numerous, that we cannot bear the defects, but want it to be perfect in all respects. (4–5) This is really quite remarkable—particularly her taking up Walpole’s term “imagination” and using it against him. Walpole had his revenge, at least in private correspondence, when he wrote: “I cannot compliment the author of The Old English Baron, professedly written in imitation, but as a corrective to The Castle of Otranto. It was totally void of imagination and interest; had scarce any incidents; and though it condemned the marvellous, admitted a ghost—I suppose the author thought a tame ghost might come within the laws of probability” (letter to William Cole, 17 August 1778). In all honesty, both Reeve and Walpole are largely correct—Walpole especially so. The Old English Baron does not read well, largely because Reeve’s flaccid prose and heavy-handed moralism never allow the tale to come to life. Set in the “minority of Henry VI” (7)—i.e., around 1422—it duplicates The Castle of Otranto in having a tyrannical usurper (Sir Walter Lovel), a man of evidently low birth who is in fact the rightful heir to the castle (Edmund Twyford), and sundry other features that are clearly meant to recall Walpole’s novel. Where Reeve apparently prided herself was in restricting herself to a single supernatural episode, in which the ghost of the original owner of the castle, Lord Lovel, appears to Edmund as he has taken up the challenge of
spending three nights in the deserted wing of the castle where, it turns out, Lovel was murdered. Actually, this supernatural phenomenon is presented in the form of a dream that Edmund experiences during his first night in the deserted wing—but of course, if it is thought to have been a dream rather than an actual apparition, the dream itself could be considered supernatural in its prophetic quality. This entire episode is cleverly prepared for by a previous incident in which Lady Lovel, after being told by Sir Walter that her husband had been killed in battle, later “broke out into passionate and frantic exclamations; she said, that her dear Lord was basely murdered; that his ghost had appeared to her, and revealed his fate: She called upon Heaven and earth to revenge her wrongs; saying, she would never cease complaining to God, and the King, for vengeance and justice” (34). For her pains she is herself killed by Sir Walter after she refuses to marry him; this, in fact, is why the wing is deserted: Soon after [the death of Lady Lovel], it was reported that the Castle was haunted, and that the ghosts of Lord and Lady Lovel had been seen by several of the servants. Whoever went into this apartment were terrified by uncommon noises and strange appearances; at length this apartment was wholly shut up, and the servants were forbid to enter it, or to talk of any thing relating to it: However, the story did not stop here; it was whispered about, that the new Lord Lovel was so disturbed every night that he could not sleep in quiet; and, being at last tired of the place, he sold the Castle and estate of his ancestors, to his brother-in-law the Lord FitzOwen, who now enjoys it, and left this country. (34–35) So, in reality, there are several supernatural incidents, even if they all stem from the central crime of the murder of Lord Lovel; for the appearance of his ghost to his wife is manifestly supernatural and not merely the product of mental perturbation as a result of her grief; and the servants’ witnessing of the ghosts of the two of them is also clearly suggested to be real and not delusional. It is worth noting that, as Eino Railo long ago pointed out, the one innovation in The Old English Baron is the introduction of the deserted wing of section of a castle, and its subsequent haunting.
Walpole’s and Reeve’s novels inspired any number of imitations, adaptations, and so on; but by the late 1780s a new force emerged that would take the Gothic novel in a very different direction.
iii. The Explained Supernatural It might seem on the surface that the reduction of Walpole’s plethora of supernaturalism to Reeve’s single supernatural element would lead naturally to the entire elimination of the supernatural in the work of the most influential of Gothic writers, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823); but it is by no means clear how or why Radcliffe devised her “explained” supernatural, in which bizarre phenomena are repeatedly suggested only to be resolved by natural means, chiefly as the result of misunderstanding on the part of the character viewing the phenomenon or some kind of trickery on the part of the villain engendering it. In the near total absence of documentary evidence regarding Radcliffe’s literary purposes or influences, we are left with the texts of her six novels and not much else; and of these, several can be dispensed with as being irrelevant to the development of weird fiction. Her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), is a pure historical tale about the feuding of two Scottish clans. A Sicilian Romance (1790) introduces the dubious and implausible trope of the nuptial prisoner —a hapless woman who, because she refuses to die, prevents her husband (or, in this case, a ruthless and violent woman who seeks to replace her) from remarrying. Charlotte Brontë’s employment of the trope in Jane Eyre is made only slightly less ridiculous by her literary artistry. Radcliffe hit her stride with The Romance of the Forest (1791), in many ways her most satisfactory—or, at any rate, enjoyable—novel. The number of elements borrowed from Walpole and Reeve are almost too numerous to tally. The topographical focus of the novel is not a castle but an abbey, where La Motte, a fugitive from justice, holes up with his family. He has a chance encounter with a young woman, Adeline, who is the presumable focus of the reader’s sympathy and the first of Radcliffe’s put-upon virgins; the threat to her virtue coming not from La Motte, but from Marquis de Montalt, who is using the abbey as the focus of a ring of robbers. The curious thing is that Adeline appears to have a succession of prophetic dreams regarding underground passages, a young man imprisoned in a deserted room, and so forth: it is difficult not to interpret these dreams other than supernaturally, for in the course of time we are shown exactly such
passages, including a hidden room with a trunk containing a skeleton and a crumbling manuscript, and at last a personable young man, significantly named Theodore, who ultimately rescues her. It is true that the pseudo-supernatural incidents in The Romance of the Forest are few and far between, but they are ably handled. And yet, perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel is the degree to which Radcliffe— in a deeper echo of the sceptical Walpole than she was perhaps aware of— systematically distances herself from the superstitiousness that leads some of her characters to suspect supernaturalism where there is none. La Motte declares at one point: “Stories of ghosts and hobgoblins have always been admired and cherished by the vulgar” (367), and similar sentiments of eighteenth-century rationalism are peppered throughout the work. Adeline herself, early on, expresses disdain for the life of a nun—“Too long I had been immured in the walls of a cloister, and too much had I seen of the sullen misery of its votaries, not to feel horror and disgust at the prsopect of being added to their number” (290)—that emphatically underscores the religious scepticism of her day and serves as a striking anticipation of the grim working out of this theme in Denis Diderot’s La Réligieuse (1796). Of Radcliffe’s most celebrated novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), it is difficult to speak charitably. It is rare to encounter a literary work so undeserving of its fame, for this is a virtually unreadable novel that highlights all the worst features of Radcliffe’s work—a mincing, languid prose style that is utterly incapable of generating tension or suspense; a perennial harping on the woes of the virginal heroine that borders on selfparody; and a prodigious, appalling verbosity that is more horrifying than anything she actually puts on stage. Even if this tale of Emily St. Aubert’s struggles with the tyrannous Montoni were a half or a third its length, it would fail to be compelling, for the Gothic novel had already become so stereotyped that the ultimate defeat of Montoni and Emily’s reuniting with her lover, Valancourt, are foregone conclusions. Even Radcliffe’s supposed skill at portraying the natural landscape (a landscape that, as far as the southern Italian scenes are concerned, was purely a product of her imagination and not the result of first-hand experience) and in suggesting the sublime is much exaggerated. What we find instead is Radcliffe’s repeated dropping of the word “sublime” as if that alone would be sufficient to create the sensation in the reader. We have already seen this in The Romance of the Forest, when La Motte, upon first
seeing the abbey and its interior, “felt a sensation of sublimity rising into terror—a suspension of mingled astonishment and awe!” (265). But the preceding description of the abbey does not seem sufficient to have engendered such a sentiment. Similarly, in Udolpho we read of Emily’s first glimpse of the castle: 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. (226–27) But again, we are being told what to feel, rather than being given the elements of landscape and architecture that would allow us to feel these emotions for ourselves. In any case, Radcliffe’s portrayals of “gothic greatness” (whatever that might exactly be) after a time become so conventionalised, and her prose style in describing them is so flat and stereotyped, that they cease to have any effect on the reader. The Italian (1797) is probably Radcliffe’s most artistically finished work; but here there is rarely even the pretence of any pseudosupernaturalism, and the novel is strictly one of star-crossed lovers (Vincentio de Vivaldi and his beloved, Ellena Rosalba) and an evil monk, Schedoni, whom Vivaldi’s mother commissions to keep the lovers apart. The novel contains what are probably the two most striking scenes in Radcliffe’s work (the notorious “black veil” incident in Udolpho not excepted): Vivaldi’s torments at the hands of the Inquisition and Schedoni’s creeping into Ellena’s bedroom to kill her, only to find that she wears a locket containing a picture of . . . himself (he is, unbeknownst to either of them, her father). On occasion Radcliffe attempts to imbue the Inquisition scenes with a certain supernatural menace, as when Vivaldi has a dream in which he sees a monk whom he believes to be Schedoni, but it proves to be someone he has not seen before:
Vivaldi at the first glance shrunk back;—something of that strange and indescribable air, which we attach to the idea of a supernatural being, prevailed over the features; and the intense and fiery eyes resembled those of an evil spirit, rather than of a human character. He drew a poniard from beneath a fold of his garment, and, as he displayed it, pointed with a stern frown to the spots which discoloured the blade; Vivaldi perceived they were of blood! He turned away his eyes in horror; and, when he again looked round in his dream, the figure was gone. (318) Not bad. But moments like this are—apparently by design—very rare in this novel. It seems reasonably clear that the Schedoni figure was inspired by that of Ambrosio in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), while the Inquisition scenes may well have influenced Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer—although in that regard Maturin would have had plenty of other examples to draw upon. The one moderately interesting point in Radcliffe’s work is the increasing recency of the settings of each successive work. Whereas The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne is clearly mediaeval in its temporal setting, A Sicilian Romance is definitively dated to 1580, The Romance of the Forest to 1658, The Mysteries of Udolpho to 1584, and The Italian to 1758 —a date less than fifty years prior to the publication of the novel, and not by any stretch of the imagination mediaeval or “Gothic” in an historical sense. True enough, the Inquisition scenes in the novel may create the effect of mediaeval religious tyranny (or, more likely, reflect an anti-Catholic bias that comes to full flower in the work of Charles Robert Maturin), but nevertheless even the pretence of appealing to “Gothic” superstition (a pretence that was, in any case, feeble in the entire lack of convincing tokens of mediaevalism in her other novels) has by now been dropped. The point is of significance in the sense that, once the supernatural (not merely the pseudo- or explained supernatural) is manifested in something approximating the contemporary world, the charade that it is meant to convey merely the crude beliefs of a barbaric period must be dropped and attempts must be made to portray that supernaturalism convincingly. Gigantic helmets dropping irrationally out of the sky would no longer be feasible.
I have referred to Radcliffe as the most influential of the Gothic writers; but her influence was strictly circumscribed to the Gothic period itself. Her brand of explained supernaturalism was quickly seen as an aesthetic dead end; as early as 1811, Sir Walter Scott delivered a fitting epitaph upon it. His manner of expressing his criticism on this point is so much shrewder than I or anyone else could manage that it is worth quoting in extenso: Mrs. Radcliffe, a name not to be mentioned without the respect due to genius, has endeavoured to effect a compromise between those different styles of narrative, by referring her prodigies to an explanation, founded on natural causes, in the latter chapters of her romances. To this improvement upon the Gothic romance there are so many objections, that we own ourselves inclined to prefer, as more simple and impressive, the narrative of Walpole, which details supernatural incidents as they would have been readily believed and received in the eleventh or twelfth century. In the first place, the reader feels indignant at discovering he has been cheated into a sympathy with terrors which are finally explained as having proceeded from some very simple cause; and the interest of a second reading is entirely destroyed by his having been admitted behind the scenes at the conclusion of the first. Secondly, the precaution of relieving our spirits from the influence of supposed supernatural terror, seems as unnecessary in a work of professed fiction, as that of the prudent Bottom, who proposed that the human face of the representative of his lion should appear from under his masque, and acquaint the audience plainly that he was a man as other men, and nothing more than Snug the joiner. Lastly, these substitutes for supernatural agency are frequently to the full as improbable as the machinery which they are introduced to explain away and supplant. The reader, who is required to admit the belief of supernatural interference, understands precisely what is demanded of him; and, if he be a gentle reader, throws his mind into the atitude best adapted to humour the deceit which is presented for his entertainment, and grants, for the time of perusal, the premises on which the fable depends. But if the author voluntarily binds himself to account for all the wondrous occurrences which he introduces, we are entitled to exact that the explanation shall be
natural, easy, ingenious, and complete. Every reader of such works must remember instances in which the explanation of mysterious circumstances in the narrative has proved equally, nay, even more incredible, than if they had been accounted for by the agency of supernatural beings. For the most incredulous must allow, that the interference of such agency is more possible than that an effect resembling it should be produced by an inadequate cause. (“Introduction to The Castle of Otranto” 10–11) To this very little need be added, save that it seems a striking anticipation of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” (for which see the next chapter). It will become evident that Radcliffe’s influence in general, and her use of the explained supernatural in particular, did not extend much beyond the heyday of the Gothic novel itself. Non-supernatural horror fiction did indeed flourish, but in very different forms—either through the horror engendered by psychological aberration (Poe, Bierce, and their followers) or in the realm of psychological suspense, which really did not gain a foothold until well into the twentieth century and of course did not look back to Radcliffe as a forerunner. One writer who did consciously acknowledge a debt to Radcliffe, but whose own working out of the explained supernatural topos proved to be very different and much more aesthetically viable, was the American Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810). As America’s first professional writer Brown has some claim to historical significance—a claim that might be a bit more difficult to make on the basis of his actual work, which is uneven at best. But Brown is perhaps more interesting for what he tried to do than for what he actually accomplished; for, while adopting the “explained supernatural” of Radcliffe, he did nothing less than to set the stage for the profounder studies of psychological aberration that we find in Hawthorne and, especially, Poe. The busy reader would probably be excused for reading nothing but Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), for it is by far the most compelling of Brown’s novels. Its relation to the fragmentary novella “Carwin the Biloquist” (written in the summer of 1798 just as Brown was completing Wieland, and published by him serially in the Literary Magazine in 1803– 04) is complex and need not concern us; but it is of interest to note that the basic plot of Wieland was clearly based upon an actual incident—a case in
1796 in Tomhannock, New York, where a man named James Yates killed his wife and four children, and attempted to kill his sister, under the influence of religious mania. Brown used this incident as the basic framework of Wieland, although inserting as a backdrop the quasi-Byronic hero Carwin, the ventriloquist, who (apparently) causes Theodore Wieland to hear voices that instruct him to kill his wife and children. In his “Advertisement” to the novel, Brown states that his novel “aims at the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man” (3), a locution by which Brown manifestly intends to suggest a psychological analysis of all the characters involved—Wieland himself, his sister Clara, who emerges as a remarkably strong figure of dogged rationalism in the face of horror and tragedy, and the enigmatic Carwin—by means of lengthy monologues, either written or spoken, that occupy much of the novel. The setting in rural Pennsylvania is much more effective than any of Radcliffe’s concocted portrayals of Italy, but far more compelling are the portrayals of character. Each of the central figures emerges crisply and vividly, chiefly by their own words. It should be pointed out that the entire novel purports to be a testament (or testimony) written by Clara to clarify in her own mind the tragedies befalling her family, and perhaps to purge herself of their horrific potency. Her father, himself a religious fanatic, died in spectacular fashion from spontaneous combustion; Brown is careful to add a footnote appealing to journals in France and Italy attesting to the reality of this phenomenon, so that we are clearly not to take it as a supernatural occurrence. But its baneful effect upon Clara’s brother is evident: His father’s death was always regarded by him as flowing from a direct and supernatural decree. It visited his meditations oftener than it did mine. The traces which it left were more gloomy and permanent. This new incident had a visible effect in augmenting his gravity. He was less disposed than formerly to converse and reading. When we sifted his thoughts, they were generally found to have a relation, more or less direct, with this incident. (35) As the novel progresses, a large proportion of space is given to the fundamentally irrelevant recounting of the falling out between Clara and
Pleyel (Wieland’s brother-in-law) over his suspicions that she is in league with Carwin. But after Wieland’s horrible murder of his wife and children, attention refocuses on him, and we are given his lengthy written account of the voice he heard (which he believes to be the voice of God) instructing him to commit these dreadful acts. The common assumption, made both by Clara herself and by the great majority of readers and scholars of the novel, is that Carwin, the “biloquist,” managed to throw his voice in such a way as to lead Wieland to his crimes. But, when Clara confronts him at the novel’s conclusion, he explicitly denies responsibility in the matter: “Catherine [Wieland’s wife] was dead by violence. Surely my malignant stars had not made me the cause of her death; yet had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no controul, and which experience had shewn me was infinite in power? Every day might add to the catalogue of horrors of which this was the source, and a seasonable disclosure of the truth might prevent numberless ills. . . . “I have uttered the truth. This is the extent of my offences. You tell me an horrid tale of Wieland being led to the destruction of his wife and children, by some mysterious agent. You charge me with the guilt of this agency; but I repeat that the amount of my guilt has been truly stated. The perpetrator of Catherine’s death was unknown to me till now; nay, it is still unknown to me.” (215–16) What I believe Carwin means is this: his reference to “set[ting] in motion a machine” alludes, apparently, to the fact that he did in fact throw his voice on one occasion early in the novel, when both Wieland and Pleyel heard it, as Pleyel notes: “‘Well,’ said he, at length, ‘What do you think of this? This is the self-same voice which I formerly heard; you are now convinced that my ears were well informed.’ “‘Yes,’ said I, ‘this, it is plain, is no fiction of the fancy.’” (44)
At this point we are in fact led to suspect the supernatural, but the moment we learn of Carwin’s ventriloquist abilities (75), it becomes plain that his was the voice that Wieland and Pleyel heard. But what Carwin is asserting to Clara at the end is that he was not responsible for the voice that urged Wieland to kill his wife and children; and, in fact, there seems much truth in the assertion. Indeed, Wieland had himself already made clear that he had been given to “hearing voices” well before Carwin ever emerged on the scene. Carwin apparently is maintaining that the one occasion when he made Wieland hear a disembodied voice aggravated Wieland’s religious mania to the point that he heard a voice (one generated by his own mind, it is needless to add, not by a supernatural force) that instructed him to kill his wife and children. The point is perhaps not of overwhelming significance, but it frees Carwin from at least a certain share of guilt in the whole affair. Indeed, Carwin is by no means the toweringly evil Byronic or Montonian villain of early Gothic fiction; his characterisation—especially in his exculpatory remarks to Clara—is far more complex than that. While he does admit to “a passion for mystery, and a species of imposture” (201)—what Pleyel had earlier referred to scornfully as an “imp of mischief” (123)—he portrays himself as more sinned against than sinning (“My life has been a life of hardship and exposure” [203]). And, when Wieland breaks in on their conversation and threatens to kill Clara, Carwin uses his ventriloquism to save her, whereupon Wieland kills himself. For all its power as an exhibition of the baneful effects of religious mania, Wieland does not contain quite enough psychological analysis of its central figure to qualify as the first genuine novel of psychological terror. The palm for that probably remains with James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). But the work does represent a significant, and positive, shift from the absurd Radcliffian convention of suggesting the supernatural and accounting for it lamely by human contrivance. The phenomenon of ventriloquism had been used at least twice in previous works of Gothic fiction—Elizabeth Bonhote’s Bungay Castle (1796) and Eliza Parsons’s The Mysterious Warning (1798), the latter often assumed to have inspired Brown; but in Wieland the device becomes, in reality, only a minor component of the novel and does not detract from the psychological aberration that in fact led Wieland to commit his crimes. In this sense, Carwin’s exculpation from guilt in those crimes gains aesthetic
significance, for had Wieland really been led to kill his family merely by the contrivance of a thrown voice, rather than from the madness that afflicted his mind, then the phenomenon would indeed have come across as a cheap trick. As it is, Wieland’s madness becomes the genuine efficient cause of his actions; and if there had been greater emphasis on the particulars of that madness—something we do not, curiously, find even in his own written testament—then the novel would have a good claim to be considered a work of psychological terror. The other novels by Brown are less impressive. Arthur Mervyn (1799) seeks to find horror in a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Ormond (1799) uses the yellow fever epidemic as a backdrop for a brutal tale of murder and seduction. Edgar Huntly (1799) is somewhat more interesting in its attempt to draw upon the phenomenon of sleepwalking as a substitute for the supernatural. Opening strikingly with the tableau of a sleepwalker digging a hole in the woods, the novel tells of the protagonist, Huntly, learning the tale of Clithero Edny, a servant of a “musing and melancholy deportment” (25) who both walks and talks in his sleep. Clithero tells a long story of being befriended by a Mrs. Lorimer, then inadvertently killing her brother in self-defence and, in an access of madness, almost killing Mrs. Lorimer herself. He flees into a cave—an obvious metaphor for the dark recesses of his own disordered mind. Much later Huntly, who himself becomes afflicted with somnambulism, expostulates: “How little cognizance have men over the actions and motives of each other! How total is our blindness with regard to our own performances!” (278). Evidently sleepwalking is the metaphor that putatively instantiates this proposition, but in reality the phenomenon of sleepwalking is not treated extensively enough in the novel to hammer the point home, nor (again) is there sufficient psychological analysis of either Clithero or Huntly to see in Edgar Huntly a genuine novel of psychological terror. Of Ann Radcliffe’s other disciples, still less need be said. No one would pay the least attention to Francis Lathom (1777–1832) had Jane Austen not mentioned his Midnight Bell (1798) in Northanger Abbey. This novel, although crippled by excessive length and absurdly implausible coincidences, does create a moderately effective sense of supernatural mystery around whether a spectral force could be tolling a bell at midnight in the tower of a haunted castle; and the ultimate naturalistic revelation— that the tolling is being done by the wife of the castle’s owner, a count, who
mistreated her—is not as fatally disappointing as many analogous moments in Radcliffe’s own work. Lathom, who worked in the theatre as both an actor and a playwright, found it to his taste to lay the horror on thick. He was active as a writer for more than forty years, and it has been said that some of his historical Gothics may have influenced Sir Walter Scott. But not one of them is worth reading in its own right, as his entire corpus of work is largely imitative of Radcliffe, Lewis, or other luminaries. The Marquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796) had the distinction of being cited in both Northanger Abbey and in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, but it is a nearly unreadable, interminable, and preposterous piece of work. In its telling a convoluted tale of a secret society of Illuminati it perhaps had some influence on the almost equally unreadable novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Still less need be said of other Radcliffe imitators such as Eliza Parsons, Eleanor Sneath, and Sarah Wilkinson.
iv. The Byronic Gothic The cardboard villains of Walpole and Radcliffe—Manfred, Montoni, Schedoni, and the rest—however influential they may have been, are in fact testaments to the literary deficiencies of their authors. As we have seen, Brockden Brown’s Carwin is a much more complex figure, to such an extent that he can scarcely be called a “villain” at all, but Brown’s influence on subsequent Gothic, especially the British school, was minimal. The figure of the towering colossus of a man (it is almost always a man) who seeks more-than-human control of life, knowledge, and society is of course not specific to the Gothic novel, and its roots can be traced to the hubristic characters of Graeco-Roman tragedy and elsewhere. But some of the Gothic novelists lent a particular distinction to the figure by bestowing supernatural powers upon him. We might start our discussion of this figure with William Beckford’s Vathek (1786/1787), if only because there seems no other place to fit this anomalous work into the history of Gothic fiction. The publication history of this short novel is well known. Beckford (1760–1844), an even more wealthy, dilettantish, and architecturally ambitious Englishman than Horace Walpole—his construction of an immense Gothic tower at his palatial residence at Fonthill Abbey exceeded even Walpole’s dallyings with Strawberry Hill—wrote Vathek in French in 1782, shortly after his twentyfirst birthday. He later appointed the scholar Samuel Henley to translate the work, with the understanding that the French text would be published first; but a scandal involving Beckford and his cousin’s wife led him to depart for the Continent, and Henley, understandably worried that his translation would never be published, issued it himself in the summer of 1786, full to the brim with his learned and ineffably pompous notes. Henley attempted to maintain that the work was a translation from an actual Arabic manuscript. Beckford, not pleased with this turn of events, hastily arranged for the publiction of the French work in Lausanne at the very end of 1786 (dated 1787); a more polished edition appeared in Paris in 1787. Given that Beckford worked closely with Henley on the English translation, and
especially given that he made numerous revisions to it in the edition of 1816, the translation has rightfully been taken as definitive. That this “Arabian tale” (conte Arabe) bears little relation to the entire corpus of Gothic fiction is clear; its influences hark back to the Arabian Nights, to Voltaire’s “philosophical tales,” and perhaps to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (1759). Indeed, by making its protagonist, the Caliph Vathek, a grandson of Haroun al-Raschid (151), Beckford consciously connects his work not only to the Arabian Nights but to the historical record. (Vathek was in fact an historical figure.) But by today’s standards the work would be considered a fantasy: even in those scenes (the novel has no chapter divisions) prior to Vathek’s descent into halls of Eblis (the Islamic hell, presided over by Eblis, the Islamic devil), the supernatural is not portrayed realistically. It would seem that Vathek’s punishment is the result of impiety. The curious entity labelled the Giaour manifestly becomes a tempter figure when he intones to Vathek: “‘Wouldst thou devote thyself to me? adore the terrestrial influences, and abjure Mahomet? On these conditions I will bring thee to the Palace of Subterranean Fire. There shalt thou behold, in immense depositories, the treasures which the stars have promised thee; and which will be conferred by these Intelligences whom thou shalt thus render propitious’” (169). Vathek’s own mother, the sorceress Carathis, declares that her purpose is to “obtain favour with the powers of darkness” (183). And Beckford is careful to add a solemn moral at the very end: “Thus the Caliph Vathek, who, for the sake of empty pomp and forbidden power, had sullied himslef with a thousand crimes, became a prey to grief without end, and remorse without mitigation” (234–35). The problem with this is that the account of Vathek’s “crimes” has been narrated with such sly irony and humour, and with such an obvious sense of relish at the immensity of Vathek’s appetite for perversion, that the tackedon moral comes to seem unconvincing. At the same time, one cannot quite believe that Beckford intended us to regard the “moral” parodically, for the novel does develop a sense of dark and forbidding terror in the memorable scene in the halls of Eblis, shedding entirely the at times buffoonish humour of the earlier portions. It is perhaps best to consider the only “purpose” of Vathek as an exercise of Beckford’s fantastic imagination—and, perhaps, for his skill at incorporating facets of his own life and circumstances into the work. His
friend Cyrus Redding quotes Beckford as saying to him, in regard to the hall of Eblis: Old Fonthill house had one of the largest halls in the kingdom, lofty, and loud echoing, whilst numerous doors led from it into different parts of the building, through dim, long, winding passages. It was from that I formed my imaginary hall—the Hall of Eblis being generated out of that in my own house. Imagination coloured, magnified, and invested it with the Oriental character. All the females mentioned in Vathek, were portraits of those in the domestic establishment at Old Fonthill, their imaginary good or ill qualities exaggerated to suit my purpose. (Memoirs of William Beckford 1.244) Beckford scholars have busily traced many other features of the text to his wide-ranging readings in Oriental and pseudo-Oriental literature; indeed, the most celebrated image in the novel—the denizens of the hall of Eblis, with their hearts encircled by an inextinguishable flame—was borrowed from Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s Mogul Tales (1736) (see Mahmoud, “Beckford, Vathek and the Oriental Tale” 73). Beckford also borrowed from himself. He had written a text entitled The Long Story when he was seventeen (it was published in 1930 as The Vision), and it clearly contains numerous anticipations of some of the elements and themes of Vathek. While Vathek is an eccentric masterpiece par excellence, I cannot see that it had the least influence on any subsequent weird writing for a century or more. This judgment appears to be confirmed by Roger Lonsdale, editor of the Oxford edition of the novel, who writes: “. . . there was nothing in Vathek which obliged the [original] reviewers to connect it with contemporary ‘Gothic’ tendencies. Although later literary historians have frequently resorted to the assertion that such a relationship exists, it is not easy to see that Vathek sets out to exploit the imaginative terror, the suspense or psychological shock tactics which were entering the English novel at about this time” (“Introduction” to Vathek xxv). Of course, Vathek was written at a time when the Gothic movement had barely begun, and some scholars have maintained that the later popularity of Ann Radcliffe and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Gregory Lewis eclipsed Beckford’s mode
of exotic fantasy. There seems to be some truth to this, for the novel itself was certainly not very successful: there were no editions in English between 1786 and 1809, and the latter edition was in large measure made up of unsold sheets of the earlier edition. Frederick S. Frank, however, has made a case for the much greater relevance of Vathek to the Gothic tradition (see Frank’s “The Gothic Vathek”). His argumentation occasionally falls into the class of special pleading, but I believe his contention that the novel’s exemplification of the “Gothic villain” had a significant influence on subsequent Gothic literature can be accepted—with some reservations. Scholars have traced the degree to which Beckford himself identified with the figure of Vathek as representing a kind of emancipation from the bounds of social convention that he himself sought in his life, so that it can hardly be maintained that Beckford intended us to be unequivocally disapproving of Vathek’s mission. Nevertheless, aside from Beckford’s influence on Byron (who championed Vathek in the 1810s and manifestly borrowed from it in his poetic dramas, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos), Southey, Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), and Disraeli (Alroy), it is difficult to trace Vathek’s direct influence on the Gothic novel. As for the Episodes of Vathek—three appallingly long and not very compelling tales of love and damnation—perhaps Beckford was wise in omitting them from the text, as they seriously weaken the final scene of the novel. The tales were lost for nearly a century and a half until they were rediscovered by Lewis Melville in 1909, who arranged for an English translation of the French text and published it in 1912. William Godwin (1756–1836) added to the Byronic villain topos with St. Leon (1799). Of his other novel generally considered Gothic, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), we need not be concerned, for it is a programmatic work designed to illustrate Godwin’s theories of social justice in its tale of a lowly servant, Caleb Williams, who acts as a kind of detective to prove his aristocratic master, Falkland, a murderer but ends up being pursued himself and is finally thrown into a dungeon. The novel is not ineffective, but in the entire absence of supernatural machinery it can at best be called a tale of psychological suspense, and perhaps even one of the earliest detective novels, although its intellectual substance is far greater than that designation would suggest.
St. Leon is a somewhat different matter. Godwin announces at the outset that his purpose in the novel is to “mix human feelings and passions with incredible situations” (xxiii). The implication is that we are in for some supernaturalism, and sure enough we are. The novel is a searching treatment of the elixir of life, although more in its effects than in its essential nature. Beginning in the year 1520, it tells of Reginald de St. Leon, who is so beset with a succession of misfortunes that he and his family are reduced to penury. In the year 1544 a man bearing the name Francesco Zampieri encounters St. Leon and tells him that he is endowed with great powers. As St. Leon sums it up apocalyptically: The talent he possessed was one upon which the fate of nations and of the human species might be made to depend. God had given it, for the best and highest purposes; and the vessel in which it was deposited must be purified from the alloy of human frailty. It might be abused and applied to the most atrocious designs. It might blind the understanding of the wisest, and corrupt the integrity of the noblest. It might overturn kingdoms, and change the whole order of human society into anarchy and barbarism. It might render its possessor the universal plague or the universal tyrant of mankind. (135) That power is, of course, the “art of multiplying gold, and the power of living for ever” (160), and once Zampieri has bestowed it upon St. Leon, he can die in peace—and does so. In relating the knowledge that Zampieri has passed on to him, St. Leon appears to be a bit coy (“The detail of these secrets I omit; into that I am forbidden to enter” [160]), but probably no amount of mystical or alchemical mumbo-jumbo could have convinced even the most credulous of late eighteenth-century readers that St. Leon actually had such a power. As it is, the novel’s chief purpose is to reflect upon that power’s effects; for it becomes quickly evident that, although the ability to make gold lifts St. Leon’s family out of poverty, the mystery of his sudden acquisition of wealth creates a variety of other difficulties that, as the plot twists and turns over many chapters, lead to the death of his wife, Marguerite, his confinement in the Inquisition for twelve years, and the threat of his destruction in an auto da fé (although presumably he would
somehow survive the punishment). Escaping, he manages to return to his ancestral estates—but before he does so, he takes the elixir of life to rejuvenate himself, and the effect is transformative: Yesterday I was fourscore; to-day I was twenty. Yesterday I was a prisoner, crippled in every articulation; to-day I was a citizen of the world, capable of all its delights. . . . What was most material, my mind was grown young with my body. Weary of eternal struggle, I had lately resigned the contest, and sunk under the ill-fortune that relentlessly pursued me. Now I felt within me a superfluity of vigour; I panted for something to contend with, something to conquer. My senses unfolded themselves to all the curiosity of remark; my thoughts seemed capable of industry unwearied, and investigation the most constant and invincible. (352) This, really, is the one genuinely supernatural moment in the novel. But presently St. Leon realises the true nature of his situation: “I possessed the gift of immortal life; but I looked on myself as a monster who did not deserve to exist” (363). St. Leon is a by no means ineffective piece of work, although it is handicapped by excessive length and excessive moralising. The overall influence of Godwin can be seen in the work of Charles Brockden Brown, but perhaps more directly upon his own daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There is not much reason to waste time on what H. P. Lovecraft rightly referred to as Percy Shelley’s “schoolboy effusions” (S 33), Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811). Zastrozzi is a drearily florid, overwritten, hysterical, and confused bit of rubbish about the titular figure, a giant, whose sole mission in life appears to be to pursue his normally sized halfbrother, Verezzi. This work, more than any other, announces the wretched death of Dr. Johnson’s century. St. Irvyne also features a giant, in this case Ginotti, the leader of a band of robbers who happens to have the secret of eternal life. He needs to pass it on to someone else in order to die in peace, but his chosen victim, Wolfstein, refuses to renounce the Creator as a precondition of obtaining the secret. (Let us recall that in the very year this novel was published, its youthful author issued the pungent essay The Necessity of Atheism.) The novel is only minimally redeemed by its climatic
underground scene, where Ginotti is incinerated by a bolt of lightning but will nevertheless continue living—“a dateless and hopeless eternity of horror” (199). It is just as well that Shelley stuck to poetry hereafter. His wife, Mary (1797–1851), did a rather better job with Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). This richly complex tale fully justifies the mountains of commentary it has inspired, especially in recent decades; the aesthetic failures of the great majority of the imitations it has spawned should surely not be held against it. The apparent inspiration of the work needs little rehearsal. In 1816 the two Shelleys, along with Byron and Dr. John Polidori, gathered at the Villa Diodati, a chalet on the banks of Lake Geneva, and proceeded to have a ghost-story writing contest after reading Fantasmagoriana (1812), a French translation of some German ghost stories. All four claimed to have ideas, but Percy Shelley ended up writing nothing, Byron wrote only a small fragment, and Polidori eventually wrote the novelette “The Vampyre.” Only Mary wrote a work of length and substance. The difficulties in interpreting Frankenstein begin with its subtitle. What does it mean that Dr. Victor Frankenstein is deemed a “modern Prometheus”? On the whole, the figure of Prometheus—the demigod who brought fire to humanity, thereby incurring the wrath of Zeus, who condemned him to eternal punishment—is a positive figure in his benevolence toward humankind, his symbolic quest to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and his defiance of tyranny. One could imagine Mary Shelley sharing this view, especially in light of her husband’s manifestly sympathetic portrayal of Prometheus as a figure of moral perfection in Prometheus Unbound (1820), a work he wrote in 1818–19, apparently just after Mary completed Frankenstein. And while Mary Shelley makes no secret that her novel has a general moral purpose (Frankenstein himself declares, “I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale” [285], although he neglects to specify what that moral is or should be), she explicitly denies taking a stance one way or the other, as she states in the original preface to the work: “The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind” (268). Perhaps this means nothing more than the elementary principle that the sentiments expressed by her
characters—whether Frankenstein or anyone else—should not be unthinkingly attributed to herself; but we shall discover that identifying where Shelley’s sentiments do lie is a singularly difficult business. The crux of the issue—made quite clear in the subtitle—is Frankenstein’s usurpation of the role of God as creator. Although it is unclear whether Mary Shelley was an atheist, like her husband, she probably had some tendencies in that direction; but the course of the novel itself strongly suggests that Frankenstein has exceeded his moral status as a human being by the creation of another human being. A standard feminist reading of Frankenstein, found so early as Robert Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (1972), declares that Dr. Frankenstein is to be held culpable because he has usurped the woman’s role as childbearer, and that the various misfortunes of the creature (I will not call him a “monster,” as Shelley herself never does so) are a result of his lack of a mother. I will frankly say that there does not seem to be anything explicit in the text to justify this intrepretation, although that by itself does not mean it is erroneous. But what the text does declare, repeatedly, is that Frankenstein has taken over the role of God in his scientific pursuits. The portrayal of Frankenstein is, indeed, singularly complex. Robert Walton, the ship captain who comes upon him in the Arctic ice, initially has nothing but praise for his moral virtues: “He excites at once my admiration, and my pity to an astonishing degree. . . . How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief?” (283). At the outset, however (although we must bear in mind that the scene with Walton occurs toward the chronological end of the story), Frankenstein is full of warnings against the dangers of knowledge. When Walton expresses the belief that “One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought” (283), Frankenstein snaps back: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!” (284). As Frankenstein tells his story, the reasons for his outburst become clear. While at university, he finds himself attracted to the “forgotten alchemists” (306). (He had earlier expressed an enthusiasm for Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.) In a sense, this appeal to the mediaeval alchemical philosophers is an attempt to tie Frankenstein to the Gothic tradition, although in virtually every other regard it is a radical departure from it. But
Frankenstein’s tutor, Professor Waldman, inspires him with the wonders of modern science: “The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.” (307) This passage is of the highest importance, for it explicitly signifies Shelley’s departure from her Gothic predecessors’ reliance on mediaeval superstition as the source for terror. It is now the findings of modern science that hold both wonders and terrors—a point that justifies one in regarding Frankenstein as a landmark in the protohistory of science fiction. And that glancing reference to “unlimited powers” also hints at the dangers that Frankenstein is about to bring upon himself. For his goal is nothing less than this: “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?” (311). It may perhaps be a bit of a disappointment—even a copout—that Frankenstein stumbles upon it so quickly (“I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” [312]), and even more so that he fails to tell it to Walton and, therefore, to the reader (“listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject” [313]); but, as with St. Leon’s similar coyness in regard to the elixir of life, any technical or pseudo-scientific enunciation of the point was bound to be unconvincing. In any case, Frankenstein’s rueful censure of the man “who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (313) looks forward to his moral condemnation of himself, both for devoting attention to science while ignoring all other human concerns (“I seem to have lost all soul or sensation
but for this one pursuit” [315]; and again: “I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed” [316]), and his blasphemous usurpation of the function of God, made most explicit in his thundering statement: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source” (314). It is of note that Frankenstein is, at this early juncture, already envisioning the production of an entire race of creatures rather than just a single entity. At this point it is worth jumping ahead to the conclusion of the novel, where Frankenstein, after telling the long story of his own confrontation with the creature and his ultimate refusal to build the creature a female that would keep him company and might bear him offspring (which Frankenstein refers to as “a race of devils . . . who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” [435–36]), provides a self-justification for his acts. He states: “During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blameable. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He showed unparalleled malignity and selfishness in evil; he destroyed my friends; he devoted to destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom; nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end.” (490) This is of intense interest. Frankenstein clearly absolves himself of guilt in the central issue at hand—the seemingly blasphemous creation of a “rational” creature—and only faintly admits culpability in failing to “assure” the creature “his happiness and well-being.” And his motive for refusing to allow the creature to propagate his kind rests upon a striking enunciation of the utilitarian doctrine of “the greatest happiness of the
greatest number” that Jeremy Bentham was only then in the process of formulating. But the crux of the issue is Frankenstein’s refusal to acknowledge any hubris in the actual creation of the entity—a point underscored by Walton’s characterisation of Frankenstein as “noble and godlike in ruin” (484). The great merit of Frankenstein, of course, is the extensive selfjustification provided by the creature himself for his own acts, with the result that the creature’s outward hideousness is mitigated by a sense of his moral complexity. The creature, indeed, has much to answer for; how can he justify his killing of Frankenstein’s brother William, his fiancée Elizabeth, and his close friend Clerval? It is a tall order, and it is not entirely clear that the creature fully turns the trick. His chief assertion rests upon the fact of his loneliness and the wretchedness that his isolation from the rest of humanity has engendered; as he puts it succinctly, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” (364). But the creature damages his own case both by his murder of William (and, more so, by his conniving to implicate the nurse Justine as the perpetrator, with the result that she is tried and convicted) and by making veiled threats to Frankenstein of further destruction if the latter does not bring him “relief” by the creation of a female being. (It is at this point, incidentally, that Frankenstein becomes fully aware of his own responsibility toward the creature: “For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness” [366]. But Frankenstein’s later use of the utilitarian calculus renders this point moot.) In the creature’s long story of his “life” following his creation, there are a few paradoxes. Why, for example, should the creature revert to the intellectual status of a baby, being unable to speak and knowing nothing of the world? Frankenstein had, after all, endowed him with the brain of an adult human being. But this is manifestly a rhetorical device that allows the creature to see the world from a naïve point of view similar to that, say, of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), so that the frequently absurd and irrational conventions of life that we take for granted can be highlighted. In any event, at the end of his narrative, and after Frankenstein has initially refused to make a mate for him, the creature again enunciates his moral status with simple eloquence: “I am malicious because I am miserable” (412).
The question is whether this is in fact so. Perhaps Shelley does not expect us to come to any definitive conclusion; the posing of the query is sufficient for her purposes. But at the end of the novel, after Frankenstein has died and the creature comes to look at his corpse, he makes some extraordinarily compelling remarks. Perhaps overcome by his emotions, he actually asks forgiveness of his creator (“Oh, Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me?” [492]) and, after Walton chides him for his “diabolical vengeance” (493), the creature continues with a long self-justification. He first states that his own agonies have been far greater than Frankenstein’s and that he gained no pleasure out of the murders he committed; but he could not endure to see Frankenstein attain happiness (through his impending marriage with Elizabeth) while he remained in misery. And so he killed her: “‘Yet when she died! Nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my daemoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!’” (493). That casting off of all feeling relates the creature directly to Frankenstein himself, who also admitted to putting aside “all that related to my feelings of affection” while constructing the creature. Frankenstein is an inexhaustibly interpretable novel; it may be the sole genuine contribution of Gothic fiction to the great literature of the world. The issues it raises—the proper role of knowledge; the quest for the secrets of creation; the need for human sympathy; the moral responsibility to our fellow creatures—are of eternal validity, and Shelley is wise in providing no simple solutions, instead letting her characters express their perspectives and leave it to the reader to gauge their effectiveness and validity. In the history of weird fiction, the novel is crucial in withdrawing terror from the remoteness of the Middle Ages and placing it fully in the contemporary world. More significantly, Shelley herself attests that her prime motive is the creation of fear and the exercise of imagination. Even though, in her original preface, she declares, “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors” (267), she reverses herself in the preface to the 1831 edition, stating that her goal was to fashion a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the
blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (262). To be sure, there is far more in Frankenstein than mere shudders; and Shelley’s triumph is in eliciting fear in the very act of posing the moral conundrums implicit in her story. As she herself states in the 1831 preface: “Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject; and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it” (262). The descent from Frankenstein to Polidori’s “Vampyre” (New Monthly Magazine, April 1819) is indeed a precipitous drop; but that harmless little tale is not without its charms. It is by now well known that the central figure in the story, the vampire Lord Ruthven, is a rather unkind portrayal of Lord Byron, as this passage alone would suffice to demonstrate: “[Lord Ruthven’s] character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society” (291). It is of some interest to note, in this first significant vampire tale in English, that Lord Ruthven’s victims are exclusively women—a point that emphasises the importance of the vampire figure as a symbol of seduction and rape, and something that Bram Stoker was not shy in adopting. Otherwise, the tale is slight and uneven. Polidori fails to lay down any of the constricting features of a vampire’s life (inability to walk in the daytime, allergy to garlic, and so forth), these all being Stoker’s inventions. Ruthven walks about like any other human being, his only departure from normality being his requirement of blood to maintain his anomalous life-in-death.
v. The Christian Supernatural One might suppose that any literary work produced in a Christian society would exhibit Christian elements and perhaps even be founded on Christian presuppositions; but, as we have already seen, the degree to which a specifically Christian metaphysic is at play in the Gothic novel varies widely from work to work. The Manichean nature of the Christian mythos, with the frightening presence of what seems to be a nearly all-powerful Satan and a legion of minions, would seem tailor-made for the production of horror literature, as we have already seen in an indirect fashion in the work of Dante and Milton; so it is not surprising that two of the more noteworthy works of Gothic fiction are explicitly founded on Christian myth. The first such work is, of course, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s notorious The Monk (1796). If not of the highest literary quality, it is perhaps the most enjoyable to read of the Gothic novels—at least by current standards, if its liberal doses of sex and blasphemy are taken into consideration. It may be a guilty pleasure, but it is indeed a pleasure. Lewis (1775–1818) is of more than passing interest in his own right. His early voyage to Germany in 1772, where he became well-versed in the language and actually met Goethe, was no doubt central to his becoming a writer, and we shall have to assess the degree to which The Monk is influenced by German sources. He wrote his novel in a period of ten weeks (by his own testimony) in 1794, when he was only nineteen. A letter written to his mother at this time is of some importance: I have again taken up my Romance, and perhaps by this time Ten years I may make shift to finish it fit for throwing into the fire. I was induced to go on with it by reading “the Mysteries of Udolpho,[”] which is in my opinion one of the most interesting Books that ever have been published. I would advise you to read it by all means, but I must warn you, that it is not very entertaining till St. Aubert’s Death. His travels to my mind are uncommonly dull, and I wish heartily that They had been left out, and something substituted in
their room. I am sure, you will be particularly interested by the part when Emily returns home after her Father’s death; and when you read it, tell me whether you think there is any resemblance between the character given of Montoni in the seventeenth chapter of the second volume, and my own. I confess, that it struck me, and as He is the Villain of the Tale, I did not feel much flattered by the likeness. (Letter to his mother, 18 May 1794; quoted in Peck 208–9) This tells us a number of things: that Lewis had already begun The Monk before reading Radcliffe’s novel; that, therefore, The Mysteries of Udolpho can at best have inspired Lewis to continue his novel rather than constituting the actual motivation to write it; and that any parallels between Lewis’s Ambrosio and Radcliffe’s Montoni (or, at any rate, the specific parallel that Lewis cites) are likely to be accidental. And the fact that Lewis found large parts of Udolpho “dull” suggests that he was intent to write a book that would sedulously eschew that characterisation. The novel could well be called “The Evils of Superstition”—or perhaps even “The Evils of Religion.” In this sense, the novel appears to embody the essence of Christian supernaturalism only to subvert it, at least partially. Throughout the work, the focus is on the harm that religion can cause. On the very first page we learn that Madrid—“a city where superstition reigns with despotic sway” (9)—is the setting of the tale. In our very first introduction to its central figure, Ambrosio, the abbot of the Capuchin monastery, he is referred to with obvious sarcasm as “the man of holiness” (16). At this point it is uncertain whether we are dealing merely with the well-known strain of anti-Catholic bias that peppers much of English Gothic fiction, especially in those ubiquitous Inquisition scenes (for this issue see Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition), or more generally with a satire against Christianity in general or even religion in toto. What is made clear, however, is that Ambrosio’s guise of piety is a fraud. After giving a noble sermon that enraptures his listeners, he is described as follows: “He was no sooner alone than he gave free loose [sic] to the indulgence of his vanity. When he remembered the enthusiasm which his discourse had excited, his heart swelled with rapture and his imagination presented him with splendid visions of aggrandisement. He looked round him with exultation; and pride told him loudly that he was superior to the rest of his fellow-creatures” (34). This is not noteworthy for its subtlety, but
the revelation that the sin of pride is one of Ambrosio’s flaws is important for Lewis to establish. Lewis also displays with relish the other crippling sin that will lead to Ambrosio’s demise—the sin of lust. This becomes immediately evident when his faithful servant, Rosario, turns out to be a woman, Matilda, who has donned the disguise to be close to him. In a passage that would probably have made Ann Radcliffe faint dead away, Matilda reveals herself in every sense: As she uttered these last words, she lifted her arm, and made a motion as if to stab herself. The friar’s eyes followed with dread the course of the dagger. She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half-exposed—and, oh! that was such a breast!—the moonbeams darting full upon it enabled the monk to observe its dazzling whiteness. His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb: a sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight; a raging fire shot through every limb: the blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination. (55) Hot stuff! In all seriousness, the idea that “a sensation till then unknown filled his heart” suggests, perhaps implausibly, that Ambrosio had never had such lustful thoughts before, but that his one glimpse of a beauteous white breast has effected a radical change in his character so that it now becomes the driving motivation for his subsequent acts. At this point Lewis’s anti-religious diatribe could be interpreted merely as a revelation of hypocrisy: the fact that Ambrosio cannot or will not live up to the highest ideals of religion need not imply a condemnation of the principle of religion itself. It is perhaps not too early to bring in a much later passage that sheds further light on this issue. We are now presented with the thoughts of Lorenzo, who has been striving to free his sister, Agnes, from “the horrors of a convent” (120). He ponders the situation: He had long observed with disapprobation and contempt the superstition which governed Madrid’s inhabitants. His good sense had pointed out to him the artifices of the monks, and the gross
absurdity of their miracles, wonders, and superstitious relics. He blushed to see his countrymen the dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to free them from their monkish fetters. . . . He resolved . . . to set before the people, in glaring colours, how enormous were the abuses but too frequently practised in monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit. (275) This passage delicately treads the line between condemning merely the hypocrisy and superstitiousness of individual religious believers (especially those who proclaim their piety by living in convents and monasteries) and condemning all religion as superstition. At any rate, it is likely that some of the opprobrium that descended upon the youthful author was some readers’ sense that Lewis’s screed was uncomfortably close to the attacks of the deist Voltaire and perhaps even of the atheist Diderot. Indeed, the whole story of Agnes’s attempts to free herself from the convent, her love for Don Raymond, and the efforts of Lorenzo on her behalf really add nothing to the overall narrative and merely serve to take the focus away from its true protagonist, Ambrosio. As the novel progresses, Ambrosio’s lustfulness and savagery become almost megalomaniacal. After a dalliance with Matilda (“As she spoke, her eyes were filled with a delicious languor: her bosom panted: she twined her arms voluptuously around him, drew him towards her, and glued her lips to his” [180]), who eventually tells him that he really doesn’t stand a chance with her, Ambrosio’s focus turns to the innocent Antonia, who had come to hear the sermon with which the book opens. For a time it seems as if his feelings for her are genuine love rather than crude lust; but he quickly confounds this idea by groping her (“He fastened his lips greedily upon her, sucked in her pure delicious breath, violated with his bold hand the treasures of her bosom, and wound around him her soft and yielding limbs” [210]). Her mother, Elvira, interrupts this tender scene. It is at this point that Matilda comes close to revealing her true status and power: she claims that she can help Ambrosio gain possession of Antonia through black magic. She speaks obscurely of a “guardian” (213) who can help in the enterprise. Not only does she present to Ambrosio a magic talisman that shows Antonia bathing (during which “a tame linnet flew towards her, nestled its head between her breasts, and nibbled them in wanton play” [217]), but,
after descending into a sepulchre, she actually performs the ceremony as he watches. The “guardian” appears: It was a youth scarcely eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: a bright star sparkled upon his forehead, two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders, and his silken locks were confined by a band of manycoloured fires, which played round his head, formed themselves into a variety of figures, and shone with a brilliancy far surpassing that of precious stones. Circlets of diamonds were fastened round his arms and ankles, and in his right hand he bore a silver branch imitating myrtle. His form shone with a dazzling glory: he was surrounded by clouds of rose-coloured light, and at the moment that he appeared a refreshing air breathed perfumes through the cavern. (221) This is, indeed, one of the more effective supernatural scenes in Gothic fiction, and we are not surprised to find that this is Lucifer, whom Matilda calls by name. The strange thing is that Matilda herself threatens Lucifer into giving up the myrtle, as if she had greater power than he. For the time being, we understand that Matilda has bestowed upon Ambrosio some mysterious powers to effect his purposes. He again goes to Antonia’s room and is interrupted by Elvira, whom he kills. If Ambrosio’s moral fate has not been sealed before (and, in point of fact, up to this point he had been guilty only of certain minor peccadilloes, if his actual conduct and not his mental state is considered), it certainly is now. Ambrosio now gives Antonia a drug that simulates death and buries her in a tomb. Later he wakes her and—not to mince words—rapes her. There is no need to quote the passage in question (304–5), which still carries the power to shock and appall. But the worst part of it is that, now that she has been, as it were, tainted, she can no longer have any viable function in the narrative. Lorenzo had been in love with her, but of course she is now off limits. She flees from Ambrosio but he inflicts fatal wounds on her. Another young woman, Virginia (whose name says it all), is now attracted to Lorenzo; and Lewis is even so tactless as to say that, “the unhappy girl [Antonia] being effectively
out of the way” (317), Lorenzo was now at liberty to pursue her and forget all about Antonia. But Ambrosio’s fate is not yet determined. He and Matilda are captured, put on trial, and tortured. Matilda then comes to him, saying that she has renounced all hope of salvation in exchange for freedom; will he not do the same? Reluctantly, Ambrosio agrees: he himself summons Lucifer and signs a parchment in his own blood. At this point Lucifer, in triumph, tells Ambrosio the truth: it was he who threw Matilda in his way to lure him to his soul’s destruction; through her machinations, Ambrosio has killed his own sister (Antonia) and mother (Elvira). He is condemned to eternal punishment. The subnarrative about Agnes is of only minimal interest, but it does contain the celebrated passage about the Bleeding Nun. Agnes tells Raymond, with peculiar jocularity, the story of this nun who noisily haunts the castle of Lindenberg (“According to the tradition, this entertainment commenced about a century ago. It was accompanied with shrieking, howling, groaning, swearing, and many other agreeable noises of the same kind” [113]), although there is no explanation for why the nun is haunting the place. Later, Raymond actually sees the Bleeding Nun; stricken with terror, he brings in a mysterious figure called the Great Mogul to lay the ghost. In spite of his Islamic-sounding name, the Great Mogul uses explicitly Christian means to rid the castle of the Bleeding Nun, employing a crucifix, a Bible, and other such devices in the solemn ceremony he conducts. We learn shortly thereafter that this person is the Wandering Jew. It is possible that the greatest merit of The Monk lies not in its literary virtues (if any), nor in its (ultimately inconclusive and hardly profound) reflections on religion, but in its mere existence. In spite of Lewis’s acknowledgement of the influence of Ann Radcliffe, the novel presents as stark a contrast to the well-bred tameness of her work as could possibly be imagined; and its emphasis on flamboyant supernaturalism, even if a bit grotesque and extreme, was vital to the subsequent course of weird fiction. Its popularity showed that readers would welcome the over-the-top horrors it embodied as enthusiastically as they did the tight-lipped heroine-in-peril scenarios that Radcliffe would peddle for the rest of the decade. I have mentioned that Radcliffe’s The Italian appears to be influenced by The Monk; but, in reality, it is a rebuke of its flamboyance and an attempt to rewrite it in her prim, non-supernatural manner. Edith Birkhead, whose
sympathy for the Radcliffean school over that represented by Lewis and Maturin is evident, stated that Radcliffe “saved the Gothic tale from an early death” (38), but that distinction could better be bestowed on Lewis; and although he himself made no further efforts to capitalise on the book’s popularity by way of another novel of the same or similar sort, others—like Charlotte Dacre, whose central figure in Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806) turns out to be Satan—were not slow in doing so. As for Lewis himself, he turned his attention to horrific and supernatural drama, although his only real success, at least from a literary perspective, is The Castle Spectre (performed 1797; published 1798), and even that success is a rather modest one. The play is pretty clearly derived from The Castle of Otranto (as a footnote by Lewis in the published version all but admits) and other works dealing with the usurper of a noble title and castle and his eventual downfall. From the outset, it is evident that Earl Osmond has killed Earl Reginald and his wife Evelina to gain possession of the castle; at the same time, he wishes to wed his own niece, Angela, the daughter of Reginald and Evelina, to seal his victory. The play features not only the actual appearance (twice) of the spectre of Evelina, but both deliberate and unwitting instances where characters pretend to be spectres, thereby achieving a kind of clumsy union between Walpolian supernaturalism and Radcliffean explained supernaturalism. And yet, perhaps the most effective scene in the play is Ormond’s account of the hideous dream he has experienced: . . . ’twas a dream of such horror! Did such deams haunt my bitterest foe, I should wish him no severer punishment. . . . [The ghost of Evelina appears to him.] Her infected breath was mingled with mine; her rotting fingers pressed my hand, and my face was covered with her kisses!—Oh! then, then how I trembled with disgust!— And now blue dismal flames gleamed along the walls; the tombs were rent asunder; bands of fierce spectres rushed round me in frantic dance!—Furiously they gnashed their teeth while they gazed upon me, and shrieked in loud yell—“Welcome, thou fratricide!— Welcome, thou lost for ever!”—Horror burst the bands of sleep; distracted I flew hither:—But my feelings—words are too weak, too powerless to express them. (66–67)
Quite impressive, even if it is only a relatively conventional expression of guilt and remorse. Of Lewis’s other supernatural plays, Adelmorn the Outlaw (1801) is an uninspired rehash of The Castle Spectre, while The Wood Daemon (1807) has moments of effectiveness in its account of a peasant who makes an evil bargain with a wood demon to gain handsomeness and military prowess in exchange for a murder he must commit as a sacrifice; when he fails to commit the murder, furies in league with the wood demon snatch the peasant up and bear him off. Like The Castle Spectre, this play must have been impressive if properly staged. Other plays are less central to the horror tradition, but of some interest nonetheless. Alfonso, King of Castile (1801) is a blank verse tragedy with plenty of blood and thunder, but no supernaturalism. The Captive (1803) is a tour de force of sorts—a short dramatic monologue with only a single speaker, a woman thrown into a dungeon (other characters appear only in pantomime). It is an interesting attempt to display madness on stage. Lewis also wrote a four-volume set of Romantic Tales (1808), largely translations or adaptations from the German. It is odd that Lewis did not attempt to write another novel that would recapture the success of The Monk. Possibly he was deterred by the notoriety of the novel and its wide condemnation among reviewers and readers for “immorality”—a point augmented by the fact that he was a member of Parliament at the time the novel appeared. Evidently, the conclusion of the novel, where Ambrosio gets his religiously orthodox comeuppance, was an insufficient balance to the shocking obscenity of the earlier parts of the narrative. Lewis’s turning to drama was, if nothing else, generally successful commercially: he gained £18,000 from the early performances of The Castle Spectre, although his other plays were much less profitable. In 1812, upon the death of his father, he felt obliged to tend to family estates in Jamaica, and he died in 1818 of yellow fever while on board a ship returning to England. If The Monk is merely a light entertainment, the hulking novel that culminates both the “Christian supernatural” mode of this period and the Gothic novel as a whole is a very different matter. I refer, of course, to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780?–1824). Of Maturin’s other novels very little need be said. The only work of any relevance is his first novel, The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), which, in spite of Sir Walter Scott’s charitable review, deserves
Lovecraft’s dismissal of it as a “confused Radcliffian imitation” (S 31). When one has said that it is a non-supernatural work featuring a monk named Schemoli, one has said all one needs to say. Maturin was a Protestant Irish clergyman (a fact of some importance, as we shall see presently) who, in spite of his long friendship with Scott and some successes as a playwright (notably the non-supernatural Gothic play Bertram), was so persistently concerned about impending poverty that his relatively short life seemed largely to be lived in misery. One begins to wonder, then, to what degree he drew upon his own mental and psychological state in some of the more gripping scenes of his best and most enduring novel. The remarkable thing about Melmoth the Wanderer is that, although it is manifestly based on a supernatural premise—John Melmoth, who has sold his soul to the Devil for eternal life, must find someone to take the bargain off his hands, lest he be doomed to eternal torment—the means that Maturin uses to set up the confrontations between Melmoth and his successive would-be victims are such that the novel becomes a systematic display of torture, cruelty, and misery; for Melmoth believes that only the most wretched and desperate would give up their immortal souls to take up his bargain, and so Maturin spends the great bulk of the text in portraying the dismal fates of the hapless individuals (or, in some cases, whole families) whose increasing misfortunes might—at least in Melmoth’s mind—lead them to consider his offer. As a result, the entire novel is, really speaking, a kind of enormously extended conte cruel. This is not by any means a criticism, for Maturin’s handling of these episodes of degradation are masterful and terrifying; indeed, it is such scenes that make as good a case as could be made for considering at least some exemplars of nonsupernatural horror to be legitimately within the realm of weird fiction. Consider the opening tableau, when Stanton, who is haunted by the figure of Melmoth in England, Spain, and elsewhere, is locked in a madhouse. Melmoth comes to him and delivers an incredible lecture about the horrors of such a place: “. . . where be your companions, your peaked men of countries, as your favourite Shakespeare has it? You must be content with the spider and the rat, to crawl and scratch round your flock-bed! . . . How delightful to have vermin for your guests! Aye, and when the
feast fails them, they make a meal of their entertainer! . . . A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbours near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them.” (55–56) There is much, much more of this, but this should suffice. There is really nothing like this in all Gothic fiction, and it looks forward to the psychological intensity of Poe and Bierce. Then there is the case of Alonzo Monçada, who is the scion of a wealthy family but is nonetheless placed against his will in a monastery. Aside from allowing Maturin to engage in much anti-Catholic polemic, the scenario also offers him great potential for scenes of psychological torture. With the help of his brother, Juan, Alonzo attempts to escape, but is caught and placed in a dungeon. His battles with the horrible reptiles infesting the place lead to this reflection: “‘I do assure you, Sir, I had more to do in my dungeon than in my cell. To be fighting with reptiles in the dark appears the most horrible struggle that can be assigned to man; but what is it compared to his combat with those reptiles which his own heart hourly engenders in a cell, and of which, if his heart be the mother, solitude is the father’” (146). This is followed by a remarkable tableau in which Juan and Alonzo enlist the services of a hideous person, a parricide who is never given a name, who promises to help Alonzo escape but in the end betrays them; inevitably, Alonzo is sent to the Inquisition. It is here that Melmoth appears to him. Maturin slyly alludes to Melmoth’s preternatural age by Alonzo’s remark, “He constantly alluded to events and personages beyond his possible memory,—then he checked himself” (228). Alonzo, like all the others, resists Melmoth’s blandishments and ultimately manages to escape when a fire breaks out in the place (in the course of which the parricide is torn apart by a mob). In spite of the fact that Melmoth himself keeps to the background except at those moments when, in his belief, his chosen victims are at their lowest psychological ebb and therefore amenable to his offer, he nonetheless dominates the novel from beginning to end. The moment he is referred to (by Stanton) as a “tempter” (57), his function as a stand-in for Satan is confirmed. Adonijah, the father of a Jewish man with whom
Alonzo takes refuge, elaborates upon the point, speaking of a “rumour” of “a being sent abroad on the earth to tempt Jew and Nazarene, and even the disciples of Mohammed, whose name is accursed in the mouth of our nation, with offers of deliverance at their utmost need and extremity” (269), and even referring to him as “the evil one” (269). A later character considers Melmoth’s bargain: “He has offered, and proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity could thirst for, on the condition that—— I cannot utter! It is one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it!” (427). Curiously enough, it is only at this point that the first explicit indication of the nature of Melmoth’s bargain is provided: “what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (429). As for Melmoth himself, he defends himself after a fashion, chiefly in the long digression (although perhaps the term has no meaning in a novel that is really nothing but digressions, or at any rate relatively discrete episodes) about the East Indian princess Immalee, who is in fact a Spanish woman named Isadora. To her Melmoth paints a portrait of the evils of religion and the wretchedness of (civilised) humanity in a manner perhaps meant to be reminiscent of Milton’s Satan. In making a simple-minded explanation of the nature of a Supreme Being, Melmoth states, in the manner of the Enlightenment philosophers: “It is right . . . not only to have thoughts of this Being, but to express them by some outward acts. The inhabitants of the world you are about to see, call this, worship,—and they have adopted (a Satanic smile curled his lip as he spoke) very different modes; so different, that, in fact, there is but one point in which they all agree —that of making their religion a torment;—the religion of some prompting them to torture themselves, and the religion of some prompting them to torture others.” (290) That parenthetical aside gives the game away. And yet, lest one assume that Maturin is being a kind of ancestor to Richard Dawkins, he comes through with his patented anti-Catholicism (Immalee: “. . . and when they brought me to a Christian land, I thought I should have found them all Christians.”—“And what did you find them,
then, Immalee?”—“Only Catholics” [344]), but he goes on to utter, through the mouth of Immalee/Isadora, the ultimate characterisation of Melmoth’s psychological plight: “He who is without a God must be without a heart!” (514). And yet, it is earlier stated of Melmoth that, rather like Frankenstein’s creature, “His sarcastic levity bore a direct and fearful proportion to his despair” (352). In spite of the appalling prolixity of the novel—it must be in excess of 150,000 words, and there are all kinds of episodes and segments that have little bearing on the central premise, especially the “Lovers’ Tale” (444f.) toward the end—there is something in the text that keeps the reader wellnigh hypnotised. Perhaps it is nothing more than the intensity of Maturin’s vision, and his consequent use of highly flamboyant and picturesque language to express it. (For those who decry the floridity of Poe, Lovecraft, and others in the weird tradition, the final line of Melmoth the Wanderer is worth remembering: “Melmoth [the Wanderer’s descendant] and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home” [542].) The structural anomalies of the novel—the fact that the bulk of the text is presented as the narrative of Monçada, even though the novel opens as the narrative of John Melmoth, descendant of the Wanderer—must be forgiven, as must the tiresome anti-Catholicism, the unconvincing love affair between Melmoth and Immalee, and many other flaws that could be pointed out in the text. There is something of genuine greatness in Melmoth the Wanderer, and its prodigious length, even if it is engendered merely by successive accounts of the pathetic wretches whom Melmoth hopes to tempt, nonetheless give the novel an epic grandeur that is sadly lacking in, say, The Mysteries of Udolpho and certainly in the shilling-shocker, The Monk. It is worth discussing the extent to which both The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer may have been influenced by German literature. Many of the earlier reviewers of the former, including Coleridge, contended that Lewis was merely aping a variety of German Gothic works in his novel. Syndy M. Conger has written the definitive work on this subject, and she concludes that Lewis, during his visit to Germany in the early 1790s, appears not only to have read Goethe’s early published version of Faust, titled Faust: Ein Fragment (1790), but also some other sections of the work in manuscript. Other works, including Schiller’s unfinished short novel Der Geisterseher (1789; The Ghost-Seer) and J. K. Musäus’s “Die Entführung” (1782–86;
The Abduction), and Veit Weber’s “Die Teufelsbeschwörung” (1791; The Devil’s Oath), played a role in various details of The Monk; but beyond mere details, Conger concludes persuasively that German literature had the effect of transforming the novel from romance to tragedy—although to some extent this transformation remains incomplete because of Lewis’s fatal temptation to descend to over-the-top and at times nearly obscene flamboyance. If any work truly transformed Gothic romance to the true status of tragedy, it is Melmoth the Wanderer, and Conger has demonstrated that it too was significantly influenced by German sources. It appears that Maturin read Faust largely as filtered through Madame de Staël’s discussion and partial translation of it in her work, De l’Allemagne (1813), translated into English that same year as Germany. Maturin was also influenced by Bürger’s “Lenore” and Schiller’s Geisterseher, but Faust was the chief influence, with the result that Melmoth himself becomes a kind of amalgam of Mephistopheles (as tempter) and Faust himself (as quester for forbidden knowledge). The broader question of the place of early German Gothic literature in the development of the supernatural is difficult to treat in small compass. Schiller’s little novel is not supernatural, although it suggests it in the enigmatic figure of the Armenian, who plagues the protagonist with apparent displays of sorcery; but these displays are then systematically exposed as frauds. Schiller was not in fact interested in the supernatural, or even the explained supernatural, as a component of literature; rather, the purpose of his work was largely political and moral: at the beginning of the novel he makes note of “the way the human mind can be deceived and go astray” (5). Christian Heinrich Spiess’s Das Petermännchen (1791–92), about an evil spirit, and Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold’s Der Vampyr (1801), the first known vampire novel, are of some note, although it is difficult to trace their influence upon subsequent literature—especially since no copy of the latter has come to light. German weird writing of this period, including the work of Hoffmann, Tieck, and La Motte Fouqué (to be considered in the next chapter), tended to draw more upon folklore than its English counterpart, and at times its distinction from the actual folktale becomes problematical.
vi. The Theory of the Gothic It is remarkable how quickly writers and critics began to theorise about the nature, scope, direction, and purpose of Gothic fiction, and specifically (what is our prime concern here) the role of the supernatural in fiction. I have already cited passages from prefaces to some of the major novels— including the earliest, those by Walpole and Reeve—that not only provide glimpses of the author’s aesthetic goals but also shed light on their understanding of the role of supernaturalism as an element of literature. A number of reviews of these works indirectly raise the same points, but as they were not primarily designed to be theoretical, they shall not be studied here. Some theorising occurred even before the Gothic period got underway. I refer, chiefly, to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which I have already suggested was an influence on the work of Ann Radcliffe. As far as what he refers to in several chapters as “terror,” Burke’s conclusions are perhaps overly schematic; in any event, his reflections largely pertain to the emotions of fear and terror in real life, and their application to literature must be inferred only by implication. But what is significant is Burke’s linkage of these emotions to the sublime (“Whatever . . . is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too” [57])—indeed, he goes on to say that “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (58). Perhaps the most significant feature of Burke’s treatise, from our perspective, is his mere inclusion of the emotions of fear and terror within the scope of a treatise on aesthetics, suggesting thereby that these emotions are indeed amenable to literary treatment. Then there is Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s essay “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (1773), which preceded her fragment, “Sir Bertrand.” It would be interesting to know if the essay was written first and the story afterward, as an instantiation of the essay’s chief points, or if the story was written first and the essay written later as a kind of abstraction of its essence. I suspect the former. In any case, Barbauld makes some striking points. While the overall tenor of her short essay clearly owes a debt to
Burke’s theories of the sublime, she advances the argument a bit further— especially in regard to the critical issue (one that remains unresolved today) of why readers would willingly subject themselves to the (presumably unpleasant) experience of being frightened. In real life, after all, fear is an emotion that we seek to avoid. What is it about the fear induced by literature that renders it pleasurable (if, indeed, it does so)? Barbauld’s answer is twofold. She first declares that one phase of the problem can be accounted for by pointing to “the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity” (82): once we have enmeshed ourselves in a narrative, even one that involves putatively unpleasant or frightening elements as ghosts or villains, we are so driven by curiosity to see how the issue is resolved that we willingly endure the “pain” of the emotions raised. This might be considered a truism; what is more, the notion of satisfying curiosity is not restricted to weird literature, since there is a certain “pain” (or, at any rate, irritation) felt by the failure to satisfy curiosity on any subject, whether weird or not. Barbauld in fact goes on to say: “This solution, however, does not satisfy me with respect to the well-wrought scenes of artificial terror which are formed by a sublime and vigorous imagination” (83). In these cases, she states, “the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects” (83) triumphs over the pain induced by fear. In other words, the weird work (at its best, presumably) stimulates the exercise of the imagination and becomes, indeed, a venue for imaginative liberation—a point that Walpole himself had come close to making in his prefaces to The Castle of Otranto and that many later theoreticians, including Lovecraft, would endorse. Barbauld does not quite come out and say so, but her essay clearly awards the palm to supernatural as opposed to non-supernatural horror. As instances of “new and wonderful objects” placed before the reader, she cites the Arabian Nights and Otranto, countering these with the scene of “mere natural horror” (83) found in Smollett’s Count Fathom. That “mere” is the giveaway, and the fact that her fragment, “Sir Bertrand,” is emphatically supernatural (even though she states that it works in “both these manners” [i.e., supernatural and non-supernatural]) clearly betrays her preference. It would seem that Nathan Drake’s two essays, one on supernatural and the other on non-supernatural horror, found in the first volume of his Literary Hours (1798) are a direct response to Barbauld, especially given that the latter, “On Objects of Terror,” not only echoes the title of
Barbauld’s essay but is followed by a (rather dull) fragment called “Montmorenci.” Neither essay is of much interest, and the essay on supernaturalism, “On Gothic Superstition,” maintains that supernaturalism is justified because of the “common feelings of humanity” (145)—i.e., the fact that a majority of readers might actually accept the literal existence of ghosts, spectres, and other supernatural manifestations, so that such literature as involves them would in fact be a species of realism. I have already stated that I believe this point of view is erroneous—that supernatural literature becomes a distinct genre only when both readers and writers acknowledge, by and large, the very impossibility of the supernatural phenomena being displayed—except insofar as a vestigial belief in ghosts and such can be utilised by writers to induce the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Drake’s essay gains interest only in his observation that supernatural literature must draw upon phenomena distinct from the standard mythologies of the world. The essay “On Objects of Terror,” although chiefly concerned with non-supernaturalism, makes one interesting point of technique: Terror thus produced requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure. Unaccompanied by those mysterious incidents which indicate the ministration of beings mightier far than we, and which induce that thrilling sensation of mingled astonishment, apprehension and delight so irresistably [sic] captivating to the generality of mankind, it will be apt to create rather horror and disgust than the grateful emotion intended. (354) It is, perhaps, difficult to deny that liberal doses of “horror and disgust” enter into the very fabric of even the greatest of supernatural literature, and that even the most elevated writers have occasionally sought to employ mere physical revulsion as one tool among many to inspire the emotion of horror or terror; and Drake’s sensible words could apply just as well to such debased forms of the weird as slasher films and splatterpunk as to the actual examples (Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Shakesperare’s Titus Andronicus) he actually cites.
Ann Radcliffe’s celebrated essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry”— posthumously published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826 and also as the preface to her final, purely historical novel Gaston de Blondeville (1826)—is similarly disappointing. It is, indeed, curious that Radcliffe, the pioneer of the explained supernatural, would even trouble herself to write an essay on the supernatural, since she never employed it; and its meandering inconclusiveness (partially the result of its construction as a philosophical dialogue) suggests that she herself had no clearly formed ideas on the subject. Its only point of interest, indeed, is its landmark distinction between terror and horror: 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 Shakspeare 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 the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (149–50) Radcliffe’s distinction seems sound, although it becomes unclear how it could be applied to her own work: if her goal was to inspire terror, the mere “obscurity” of the source of fear, if it is known to be non-supernatural (i.e., the equivalent of an axe-murderer), would seem insufficient to the purpose. Radcliffe might respond that her fake supernaturalism might be productive of terror, but its subsequent non-supernatural resolution would have the effect of a deflation that would threaten to condemn the entire work to the level of a cheap trick. As it is, Sir Walter Scott remains the most insightful and penetrating analyst of the weird during this period, even though some of his writings might, from a chronological standpoint, be considered post-Gothic. In such things as his review of Maturin’s Fatal Revenge, his introduction to an 1811 reprint of The Castle of Otranto, the biographies of Walpole, Reeve, and Radcliffe in Lives of the Novelists (1825), and his long essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition” (1829) a wealth of interesting
matter can be found. (His review of Frankenstein is disappointingly devoted largely to plot summary.) I have already cited Scott’s pungent criticism of Radcliffe’s explained supernatural. The “Fictitious Composition” essay, written as a lengthy review of Hoffmann’s tales, has much sage advice regarding the technique of writing supernatural tales. He also makes a valuable and still valid distinction between supernaturalism and “the fantastic mode of writing”— in which the most wild and unbounded license is given to an irregular fancy, and all species of combination, however ludicrous, or however shocking, are attempted and executed without scruple. In the other modes of treating the supernatural, even that mystic region is subjected to some laws, however slight; and fancy, in wandering through it, is regulated by some probabilities in the wildest flight. Not so in the fantastic style of composition, which has no restraint save that which it may ultimately find in the exhausted imagination of the author. (281–82) If theorising about the Gothic occurred at a surprisingly early stage, then so did parodies of it—which, in a sense, can count as criticisms (in several senses of the word) in their own right. The first such work appears to have been John O’Keefe’s comic opera The Banditti; or, Love in a Labyrinth (1781), followed some years later by James Cobb’s play The Haunted Tower (1789), later made into an opera. The focus of both works is not the supernatural as such but what the authors evidently regarded as the already hackneyed use of a haunted or otherwise sinister castle, replete with secret passageways, strange lights, and peculiar noises. Eaton Stannard Barrett’s novel The Heroine; or, The Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813) is a somewhat broader satire and much more vicious than the two operatic works, and its focus (as its subtitle suggests) is on the poor taste and naiveté of the (generally female) sentimental reader who is so easily taken in by tales of heroines in peril and villainous villains. Dennis Lawler’s play The Earls of Hammersmith; or, The Cellar Spectre (1814) is in fact supernatural, and it could be said that its focus is the convenient use of the supernatural to point a moral or to advance the plot. Here the triteness of the sainted hero (Sir Walter Wisehead) and the
scheming villain (Lord Bluster) is evident in their very names. Sir Walter, accepting the challenge to spend a night in a haunted chamber (à la The Old English Baron), is warned by a spectre not to marry his beloved, Lady Margaret Marrowbones, because (so the spectre declares) she is his grandmother. Later, Sir Walter’s father is discovered imprisoned in a dungeon (à la The Castle Spectre). It is all good fun, and quite on the mark. The best-known of Gothic parodies, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1819), was written as early as 1803; it famously cites seven novels (which have come to be called the “Northanger novels”) that were all published between 1793 and 1798. But it is noteworthy that none of these novels are supernatural; for of course Austen’s main target is the “heroine in peril” topos, which even Mother Radcliffe was unable to present in other than a ludicrously hackneyed manner. There is, in fact, only the barest hint of a suggestion that Northanger Abbey (which is somewhere in Gloucestershire) is haunted: Mr. Allen, transparently playing up Catherine Morland’s fears of being imprisoned in the place, emphasises its gloominess rather than any supernatural manifestations she will experience: “But you must be aware that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy the ancient housekeeper up a different staircase. And along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can you stand such a ceremony as this? Will not your mind misgive you, when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber—too lofty and extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size—its walls hung with tapestry exhibiting figures as large as life, and the bed, of dark green stuff or purple velvet, presenting even a funereal appearance. Will not your heart sink within you?” (164–65) And so on and so forth. Only when Allen mentions that the housekeeper “gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted” (165) do we have any hint of a parody of supernaturalism; for of course the whole point of the joke is that Northanger
Abbey is a clean, modern, well-lit facility where such things can exist only in a mind, like Catherine’s, overwrought by excessive reading of Gothic novels. Northanger Abbey is, in fact, a kind of one-trick pony; its fundamental device is simply that of comic deflation, as every instance where Catherine thinks something sinister is occuring proves to be something quite ordinary. And Austen’s insufferable decorum never allows the humour to rise above that of polite laughter. Her overall point—that Catherine, her mind full of imaginary horrors, is unable to deal with real tragedy or misfortune (the misfortune, to wit, that her friend Isabella Thorpe has broken off her engagement with her brother James and decided to marry another)—is hammered home a bit too obviously at the end: That room, in which her disturbed imagination had tormented her on her first arrival, was again the scene of agitated spirits and unquiet slumbers. Yet how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been—how mournfully superior in reality and substance! Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability; and with a mind so occupied in the contemplation of actual and natural evil, the solitude of her situation, the darkness of her chamber, the antiquity of the building were felt and considered without the smallest emotion; and though the wind was high, and often produced strange and sudden noises throughout the house, she heard it all as she lay awake, hour after hour, without curiosity or terror. (225) Of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) something more, but not much, may be said. The thrust of the satire in this mildly engaging novel is the gloom-and-melancholy school of poets of Peacock’s own acquaintance—Shelley, Coleridge, Thomas Moore, and their lesser imitators. In only a single passage do we have any discussion of the Gothic novel or of supernaturalism; but it is moderately interesting: It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is hag-ridden. . . . That part of the reading public which shuns the solid food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual
adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons . . ., till even the devil himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became too base, common, and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness . . . (50–51) The most pertinent aspect of this passage is that it is written in the past tense; for Peacock rightly saw that Gothicism had, through the sheer surfeit of mediocre and hackneyed contributions, played itself out even among those readers who, in the heyday of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis, could not seem to get enough of the stuff. Melmoth the Wanderer was the greatest of the Gothics and virtually the last, even though such dogged professionals as Francis Lathom and Sarah Wilkinson dutifully ground out novels for some years thereafter. In this sense, the rise and fall of the Gothic novel strikingly parallels the horror “boom” of, approximately, 1971 to 1990, when a motley crew of hacks and imitators attempted to seize upon the popularity (and profits) of such things as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and the successive blockbusters of Stephen King and ended up only driving the reading public away and forcing horror to return to where it has always belonged, the small press and a small coterie of devoted readers. As for the Gothic novel, it collapsed not only because of its own mediocrity but because of the superlative mastery of some of its successors: the historical phase of the Gothic novel (never a strong point except as a gesture to the remoteness of mediaevalism) was shattered by the authentic historicism of Sir Walter Scott, and the element of terror (whether supernatural or natural) was wholly eclipsed by Poe.
vii. The Nature of Gothic Fiction What, then, can we say of the Gothic school, if school it was? One of the standard affirmations is that it is a subset of the Romantic movement or that it is somehow “pre-Romantic.” I believe we have learned enough of the particulars of some of the leading Gothic novels—and, more relevantly, the stated goals of some of the leading novelists—to make one have at least a few reservations on this point. If we maintain that the fundamental characteristics of Romanticism are 1) its repudiation of classical didacticism, 2) its expression of high or extreme emotion unfettered by classical restraint or reason, 3) fragmentation of the narrative flow by abandonment of classical “unities” and other elements of rigid formalism, and 4) a general appeal to irrationalism (in this case signalled by a wallowing in mediaevalism), then we can quickly conclude (as Elizabeth R. Napier has shown in her pioneering study, The Failure of Gothic) that Gothicism adopted these traits only sporadically and tentatively. Even if Walpole consciously eschewed classicism when writing The Castle of Otranto, he seems to have done so largely out of a spirit of boredom with the mundane realism of Fielding and Smollett, and we have seen that his repudiation of classical rationalism is ambiguous at best; the very fact that he adopted a mediaeval setting for his work allowed him to preserve the rationalism of his own age. And there is, as Napier has demonstrated, plenty of didacticism of a largely classical sort in the work of Walpole, Reeve, and Radcliffe, and we can see heavy-handed moralism also at work in the major novels of Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Maturin. The narrative fragmentation that we find in some of the novels of the period— especially those that, like Reeve’s The Old English Baron, purport to be mediaeval manuscripts—is frequently on a relatively superficial level, and even these novels generally conform to classical notions of unity and closure. In the end it may be undeniable that the Gothic novel is indeed some kind of subset of or antecedent to Romanticism, but its relationship to the leading Romantic works and authors is tangential at best. In a very real sense, the Gothic novel is just as much an “anticipation” of the true history of the supernatural in literature as the works I discussed
in the previous chapter; for, as I will argue in Chapter V, the genre genuinely commenced only with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The reasons for this are many, and in large part have to do with the embarrassing absence of literary merit in the works in question. Napier has forthrightly exhibited the many aesthetic deficiencies of even the leading Gothic novels, especially in regard to issues such as the convincing portrayal of history and the depiction of character. In reality, there are very few memorable characters in Gothic fiction, even among the great villains like Manfred, Montoni, or Schedoni; indeed, it is a fundamental mistake to believe that the Gothic novel made any serious attempt to explore the complexity of human character on a psychological level. Long ago, Robert Kiely stated that “It is one of the pervading characteristics of all Gothic fiction—and initially one of its failings—that individual personality is subordinated to physical setting” (The Romantic Novel in England 41), and Eino Railo had largely made the same point even earlier, showing that the Gothic castle was a more impressive “character” than any of the actual figures placed within it. At the same time, it becomes difficult in many instances to see the Gothic castle or abbey as somehow symbolic of mental or psychological states. The standard assertion that the ruined castle stands for the fragmented nature of the disturbed protagonist’s psyche sounds good on paper but is hard to apply in specific instances. With the exception of Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer, and a few others, psychological analysis was not a strong suit with the Gothic writers. In regard to supernaturalism, the resolute anthropocentrism of even the most imaginative of Gothic scenarios should be noted. Everything revolves around the human characters on stage. There are, strikingly, no genuine “monsters” in Gothic fiction: even Frankenstein’s creature is merely a humanoid creature made up of disparate human parts. The threshold of death is, indeed, the most significant supernatural element utilised in those Gothic novels that are in fact supernatural, and in many that are not, whether it be the quest for eternal life exemplified by Godwin’s St Leon or Maturin’s Melmoth, or the death-in-life of Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, or the real or fake revenants of Reeve, Radcliffe, and many others. Perhaps it was not to be expected that the early Gothic novelists would extend their supernatural imaginations beyond the human form, but in this aspect as in so many others it was Poe who proved to be the pioneer.
As I have stated, the Gothic novel expired through surfeit and mediocrity. Indeed, it was the very fact that so many writers attempted— and, by and large, failed—to create horror in the space of a novel that led to their downfall; for, as Sir Walter Scott noted in “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” “it is evident that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief, [and] indistinct” (273)—a formula that reduces the Gothic novel (at least of the supernatural variety) to an oxymoron. Since the emotion of terror is difficult or impossible to maintain over the length of a novel, the works in question (as so many others in later years, down to our own day) devolve into suspense novels with occasional supernatural interludes; only rare works like The Monk, Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer contain a supernatural idea with sufficiently complex ramifications as to require a novel for its execution. By the early nineteenth century, it appears that a number of writers began to come to a realisation of the truth of this axiom, and as a result they increasingly explored supernaturalism in both poetry and in short fiction. It is to these predecessors of Poe that we turn our attention.
IV. Interregnum The novel was not the only literary mode in which the Gothic operated. Both during the Gothic period itself and in what I call the “interregnum”— that period of the 1810s and 1820s prior to the emergence (in the United States) of Edgar Allan Poe—a number of writers found horrific inspiration in poetry and the short story. This utilisation of short forms for the exhibition of weirdness appears to have been due both to aesthetic disenchantment with the plodding verbosity of most of the Gothic novels and to such market factors as the establishment of quarterly or monthly periodicals that welcomed poems and tales rather than novels. In any event, some striking literature was generated, fostering a certain broadening of supernatural themes and motifs. At the same time, several post-Gothic writers in England, Europe, and the United States sought to build upon the work of their predecessors and to employ the supernatural as a catalyst for a wider array of moral, social, and even political messages.
i. Supernaturalism in the Romantic Poets One of the most striking phenomena of the Gothic period was the extent to which both German and British writers expressed weird conceptions in poetry. We have seen that supernatural verse prior to The Castle of Otranto was sparse and insignificant; but, perhaps in part as a result of the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), supernatural poetry came to a sudden flowering in the 1770s and continued with some notable specimens for several decades thereafter. One of the earliest and most celebrated items, Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore” (1773), consciously draws upon the Scottish ballad “Sweet William’s Ghost” from the Percy collection. This poignant tale of a woman who comes to the slow realisation that her lover, who is paying her a nighttime visit, is in fact a ghost was immensely influential in both England and the Continent; six different English translations of it, including one by Sir Walter Scott (as “William and Helen”), appeared during the 1790s. Another immensely popular ballad is “The Erl-King” (1782) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), an extraordinarily moving account of a father who rides madly to save his son from the Erl-King (the king of the elfs) but fails: The father now gallops, with terror half wild, He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child; He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread— The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead. (115) But this is by no means the only one of Goethe’s short poems that deserves study here. “The Dance of Death” (1813) tells of corpses emerging from their graves to dance and features tremendous funereal imagery. And the celebrated “Bride of Corinth” (1797), written in a contest with Schiller in ballad-writing, is avowedly derived from the tale of Philinnion and
Machates in Phlegon, but Goethe has transformed this harmless story of a revenant into a searching rumination on the conflict between love and death as well as on that between paganism and Christianity: “From my grave to wander I am forc’d, Still to seek The God’s long-sever’d link, Still to love the bridegroom I have lost, And the life-blood of his heart to drink; When his race is run, I must hasten on, And the young must ’neath my vengeance sink.” (150) Curiously, Goethe’s Faust (1808–32), although we have seen that influenced some Gothic writing even before it was published, is itself less central to the weird tradition than one might think. The actual “compact” between Faust and Mephistopheles (Part I, Scene 4) is handled in a surprisingly subdued fashion, and aside from a few early scenes in Part I the poem is generally lacking in supernatural manifestations. Naturally, the Faust theme has been a dominant one in supernatural litrature, but it does not seem to owe many of its details to Goethe’s epic. The “Tam o’Shanter” (1793) of Robert Burns (1759–1796) is a potent horrific specimen of a wild midnight ride, although manifestly under a Christian perspective (“That night . . . / The Deil had business on his hand” [ll. 77–78]). Much the same can be said of James Hogg’s “The Witch of Fife,” written in a nearly impenetrable Scots dialect and telling the story of a woman who reveals herself to be a witch and speaks of attending a witches’ sabbath in Lapland. The poem is more concentratedly supernatural than the more celebrated “Kilmeny,” whose Scots dialect has been mercifully tempered; but this account of a woman who is kidnapped by the fairies would nowadays be classed more as fantasy than supernatural horror. Both poems are in The Queen’s Wake (1813).
Nearly all the British Romantic poets, with the notable exception of Wordsworth, indulged in the supernatural to varying degrees. (Wordsworth did produce “The Thorn,” a paraphrase of Bürger’s non-supernatural poem of a vicious child-murder.) The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772– 1834) is replete with horrific imagery. As with Lovecraft a century later, he may have been initially inclined toward the weird by his childhood reading of the Arabian Nights; indeed, much of his weird work falls on either side of the line demarcating fantasy and supernatural horror. Such poems as “Melancholy” (1797) and “The Dungeon” (1798) are replete with Gothic imagery; the opening lines of the former tell the whole story: Stretch’d on a moulder’d Abbey’s broadest wall, Where ruining ivies propp’d the ruins steep— Her folded arms wrapping her tatter’d pall, Had Melancholy mus’d herself to sleep. (73) Of course, Coleridge’s greatest contribution to the weird—and, it is safe to say, the greatest weird poem ever written—is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). It is difficult to write briefly about this imperishable and richly interpretable 625-line poem, but what strikes us immediately is the degree to which it relies on a Christian worldview. While the poem can be read secularly as a simple case of cosmic revenge—the cruelty of the Mariner in his irrational killing the albatross results in the tragic destruction of his crew and in his continual telling of his lamentable tale—the specific language of Coleridge’s poem makes unmistakably clear that the albatross, white in its purity, is a Christ-figure. This becomes apparent in the crew’s first glimpse of the creature: “As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in God’s name” (ll. 65–66). When the Mariner kills the albatross he is aware that “I had done a hellish thing” (l. 91), and one gains the impression that the adjective is meant literally. Fastened to the Mariner’s neck, the albatross only falls off (after his crew has all died) when he “blessed” (l. 285) God’s creatures. At this juncture the crew comes to life: Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsmen steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up-blew; The mariners all ’gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools— We were a ghastly crew. (ll. 329–40) The relation of the albatross to Christ now becomes explicit: “Is it he?” quoth one, “Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low The harmless Albatross.” (ll. 398–401) It is difficult to convey the supernatural richness of the Ancient Mariner: the encounter with a ghost-ship (ll. 171f.), the hideous revivification of the dead crew as they cheerlessly go about their mundane
tasks, and numerous other details create an imperishable amalgam of supernaturalism and religious morality. Coleridge has skilfully used the contemporary popularity of the ballad to create a weird tale in verse that carries the reader along from one horrific scenario to the next. After the Ancient Mariner, anything else by Coleridge would seem a disappointment. The unfinished Christabel (written in 1797–1800, published 1816) is also multilayered; on one level it can be seen as a metaphor for lesbianism, and on another (as John Beer has noted) it explores “the relationship between the world of everyday prudential reasoning and the world of romance” (76). In this scenario, the former is represented by the virginal Christabel, the latter by the strange figure of Geraldine, whom Christabel comes upon in a forest and who claims to have been kidnapped by unspecified warriors. From the start, there seems something not quite right about Geraldine: “Again she [Christabel] saw that bosom old, / Again she felt that bosom cold, / And drew in her breath with a hissing sound” (ll. 457–59). That “hissing sound” is a clever stroke, for it is Geraldine who ultimately reveals herself as an amalgam of woman and snake: A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy; And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, At Christabel she looked askance! (ll. 583–87) But the poem ends soon thereafter, with the matter unresolved. “Kubla Khan” (written 1798 [not 1797, as Coleridge states in the prefatory note to the poem]; published 1816) is a pure fantasy and hence strictly outside the domain of supernatural horror, but it is so celebrated that it is difficult to pass it over. It is now well known that the 54 lines of the poem were all that Coleridge could recollect of the “two or three hundred lines” (296) that he dreamed after falling asleep over a discussion of Kubla Khan in Purchase His Pilgrimage (1626). The “stately pleasure-dome” (l.
2) of Kubla Khan can be seen, among many other things, as a symbol for the untrammeled fantastic imagination. The writing of these poems led Coleridge to enunciate one of the most celebrated dicta regarding the supernatural in literature—but it should be emphasisewd that his remark was made specifically in the context of supernatural poetry. In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge recounts how he and Wordsworth conceived the plan to write Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800): the latter would write poems that would underscore “the truth of nature,” while Coleridge would write poems that would suggest “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination” (168). This would be achieved by poetry in which “the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural”— yet the task would have to be done in such a manner “as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (168–69). No clearer statement on the symbolic value of the supernatural to convey “truth” could be found; but it is important to note that the “willing suspension of disbelief” is conceived to be a function specific to poetry. It could be argued that that disbelief may in fact be a trifle easier to achieve in poetry than in prose, since expectations of realism in the former are perhaps not quite as rigorous as in the latter; but Coleridge’s general point that the supernatural, if convincingly portrayed, can underscore truths about human life in a manner not always possible to other modes of writing is of great significance. One of Sir Walter Scott’s first books was not a novel but a slim collection of poetry, Apology for Tales of Terror (1799) (in spite of its title, there is no prose discussion of the supernatural in poetry or prose). It includes a number of his translations from the German, including two of Bürger’s poems and Goethe’s “Erl-King,” along with sundry poems by Matthew Gregory Lewis and Robert Southey. But Scott’s most notable original weird poem is “Glenfinlas” (1801), a splendid ballad of supernatural seduction with surprisingly grisly imagery (“And last, the lifeblood streaming warm, / Torn from the trunk, a gasping head” [ll. 243–44]). This sets the stage for Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (dated 1801 but issued in late 1800), a substantial anthology of weird verse whose occasional excesses led to a parodic volume, Tales of Terror (1801), which many later
readers and scholars also believed to have been edited by Lewis, even though it included such obvious buffooneries as “The Scullion Sprite; or, The Garret Goblin” and “The Mud-King; or, Smedley’s Ghost.” Matters were not helped by the fact that Tales of Terror was sometimes dated to 1799—a result of its confusion with Apology for Tales of Terror, one copy of which in fact bore the title Tales of Terror. I am not sure it is known who assembled the parodic Tales of Terror, but some of the poems in Tales of Wonder do leave themselves open to charges of over-the-top luridness— exactly what one would expect from the author of The Monk. Consider Lewis’s wild supernatural revenge ballad “Osric the Lion”: . . . the demons their prey flocked around; They dashed him, with horrible yell, on the ground, And blood down his limbs trickled fast; His eyes from their sockets with fury they tore; They fed on his entrails, all reeking with gore, And his heart was Ulrilda’s repast. (120) On the other hand, the volume does contain such noteworthy items as Lewis’s “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene” (from The Monk), a powerful supernatural revenge ballad in which a skeleton drags Imogene away on her wedding night. Lewis in fact wrote his own parody of this ballad, “Giles Jolleys the Grave, and Brown Sally Green,” directly following “Alonzo the Brave” in Tales of Wonder. “The Grim White Woman” is another effective ballad. Lewis also made his own translation of Goethe’s “The Erl-King” and also published an anonymous burlesque of it, “The Cinder-King.” Brief note can be taken of Robert Southey’s entertaining ode “To Horror” (1797), which, although full of pleasantly shuddersome imagery, seems to have no particular message of consequence. The explicitly weird poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley seem confined to juvenilia, as for example the engaging “Ghasta; or, The Avenging Demon!!!” (1810; I have no idea
what the three exclamation marks are meant to convey), announced by the author as a paraphrase from “a few unconnected German Stanzas” (853), or the various poems included in St. Irvyne (1811), some of which appear to have been written as early as 1808. As florid exercises in shuddermongering they are transiently engaging; otherwise, they don’t amount to much. The Lamia (1820) of John Keats (1795–1821) would seem to owe something to Christabel, for here again we are concerned with a snakewoman. Hermes took a snake and turned her into a woman, and she promptly seduces the young philosopher Lycius and marries him; but the older philosopher Apollonius recognises her as a lamia or snake-woman, and she vanishes from the wedding feast. Lycius dies, his marriage robe turned into a shroud. The basic scenario was derived from an anecdote in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The symbolism of the poem is difficult to interpret; are we to see Lamia as the embodiment of fantastic romance, banished by the excessive rationalism of Apollonius? Whatever the case, the poem seems to end a bit abruptly, its frisson of horror rapidly dispelled. Many other of Keats’s poems touch upon the supernatural in varying degrees, but none so concentratedly as Lamia. The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), now better known for his letters and journals and for his recollections of his more distinguished contemporaries than for his own poetry, was once immensely popular, but little of his verse lives today. Much of it is laced with fantasy and the supernatural. The long poem Lalla Rookh (1817) is an instance of the Mogul (Muslim) tale and features some elements of Persian fantasy. Then there is the curious situation surrounding the fragmentary poem “Alciphron.” It was evidently written before the short novel based upon it, The Epicurean (1827), but the latter was published first. Miriam Allen deFord is correct in describing the poem as evidence of “Moore’s lifelong interest in theological speculation” (52), and she is equally right in declaring that it is “talky and exceedingly dull” (53). The novel is a little less so. The basic thrust of the story is the desire of Alciphron, an Epicurean philosopher in Athens, for eternal life (let it pass that this is an utter violation of the core tenets of Epicureanism, which saw in death a state of blissful oblivion) and his voyage to Egypt in quest of it. The work is set in the year A.D. 257. Reaching Alexandria, Alciphron (who tells the story in the first person) realises that he must go “beneath the Pyramids” (13) to find
the soul of the real Egypt. Along the way, he becomes infatuated with a woman he sees in a procession. The underground scene is really a triumph of the imagination, and it creates a sense of pseudo-supernaturalism that lingers even after the phenomena are explained naturalistically: At every step the noise of the dashing waters increased; and I now perceived that I had entered an immense rocky cavern, through the middle of which, headlong as a winter-torrent, the flood, to whose roar I had been listening, poured its dark waters; while upon its surface floated grim, spectre-like shapes, which as they went by sent forth those dismal shrieks I had heard,—as if in fear of some awful precipice towards whose brink they were hurrying. (66) But the novel rapidly suffers a letdown thereafter, as the narrative becomes consumed with the conflict between Alciphron’s inamorata (Alethe, who is a priestess of Isis but wishes to become a Christian) and a high-priest, Orcus, who wishes to convert Alciphron to the Egyptian religion. Nevertheless, as one of the earliest excursions into Egyptian horror it remains notable. The readiness with which Moore transformed his poem into a prose work suggests that the bountiful weirdness in the poetry of the English and German Romantics—much of it in narrative forms such as the ballad—was becoming a kind of pendant to the Gothic novel. But even in its lengthiest instances, such as the Ancient Mariner, these poems were considerably shorter than the standard Gothic novel and, because of their intensity of expression, carried a far greater emotive impact. They were, in effect, versified short stories at a time when the short story did not exist as a stable or consistent prose medium. The precise degree to which this weird verse influenced the actual emergence of the supernatural short story is a subject worth considerable study. The fact that so many early practitioners of the short story—Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and, culminating and eclipsing them all, Poe—were themselves poets is more than suggestive.
ii. German Grotesque The first German supernatural writer of any significance is Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822), whose promising career, both as a writer and as a composer, was cut short by an early death. Hoffmann himself may be of greater importance as an inspirer of art than as an artist himself: his work was the basis—partial or complete—of such musical works as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, and Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger. Hoffmann’s own work, indeed, tends toward the grotesque and extravagant to such a degree that it can seem freakish, unfocused, and confused. And there is, in many of his works, a genuine doubt as to whether the supernatural actually comes into play. His extensive interest in what would later become the fields of psychology and psychiatry—especially as found in such early theorists as Johann Christian Reil and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert—causes many of his tales to flit uneasily between supernatural and psychological horror, especially when the element of dreams (a particular focus of Schubert’s work) is involved. The great majority of Hoffmann’s weird work is confined to his two principal story collections, Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier (1814–15; Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner) and Nachtstücke (1816–17; Night Pieces), and the first of his two novels, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–16; usually translated as The Devil’s Elixirs). The latter, as the most sizeable of Hoffmann’s weird works, may be taken as typical of both his virtues and his failings. It would be cumbrous to trace the plot of this convoluted, and at times confused, novel. Suffice it to say that it focuses on the life and thoughts of Medardus, a monk whose intense sexual urges—especially as directed toward a young woman, whom he once sees half-naked, and whom he perversely identifies with a portrait of St. Rosalia found in his monastery —leads him to a life of dissipation and even murder. The ostensible trigger of his actions, however, is his imbibing several bottles of an elixir purportedly offered by the Devil to St. Anthony, the celebrated ascetic of early Christianity. Medardus, ordered to guard this elixir, fails to resist the urge to open the bottle and partake of the contents. Its effects—as he tells of
them in his own words—are instantaneous: “Scarcely had I taken a single nourishing draught when a fiery glow poured through my veins and filled me with a feeling of indescribable good health. I drank once more, the joy of a new and wonderful life rising within me” (31). Of course, this—as well as his supposed glimpse of the Devil himself a little earlier—can be interpreted psychologically, as the flaring up of the guilty conscience of a tormented soul. Indeed, throughout the novel there does not seem to be a single episode that can be construed as genuinely supernatural—unless it be the surprising appearance of several doppelgängers who look precisely like him, some of whom are accounted for by their being near or distant relatives of Medardus’s fiendishly complex family line, full of both legitimate and illegitimate offspring. Medardus, at any rate, is convinced that he is the “plaything of some dark power which hurls [me] this way and that, driving [me] to commit ever more despicable crimes” (184). But we never receive any definitive confirmation of this supposition. Perhaps the only genuinely weird passage in this rambling, unfocused novel is a scene toward the end when Medardus, having confessed his various crimes, is confined to the dungeon of a monastery near Rome where he both undergoes torture (as penance) and experiences fantastically bizarre dreams in which his previous victims appear to plague him. But even here the effect is a piquant fusion of physical and psychological horror, and there is not the slightest suggestion of the supernatural. This passage in particular betrays the influence of earlier Gothic fiction, as indeed the overall scenario of the corrupt and irreligious monk does so even more emphatically. (Lewis’s The Monk is cited by name at one point [203].) But overall, The Devil’s Elixirs is a novel that tries the reader’s patience in its seeming incoherence and lack of aesthetic rigour. Much the same could be said of many of Hoffmann’s short stories and novellas. A number of these are pure fairy tales (Märchen) that would now be classified as fantasy, although one of them—“Der goldne Topf” (“The Golden Flower Pot”; in Fantasiestücke) has a number of interesting supernatural elements. Here again the plot is quite complex, but generally focuses upon a student, Anselmus, who becomes involved with an elemental spirit, posing as the Archivist Lindhorst, who wishes to marry off his three daughters—who alternately appear in the form of snakes or beautiful young women—so that he can resume his true form, which is evidently that of a salamander (the representative of a fire elemental). Early
in the tale, Anselmus appears to be beset by supernatural phenomena in which Nature itself becomes animate; he can only conclude that he is mad. Ultimately, Anselmus marries one of Lindhorst’s daughters, Serpentina, and ends up in Lindhorst’s kingdom in Atlantis. The fairy-tale atmosphere of the story does not detract from several powerful scenes of (apparent) supernaturalism. “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”; in Nachtstücke) is no doubt Hoffmann’s most celebrated weird tale; its fame was augmented by the fact that Freud used it as the springboard for his discussion of “The Uncanny.” No doubt Freud was fascinated by the prospect of an infantile fear having baleful, even deathly, consequences in later life: the protagonist, Nathanael, remembers the chilling tales that his nurse told him in early childhood about the horrible creature known as the Sandman, who comes to wicked children: “Oh! he’s a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes out with them.” After this I formed in my own mind a horrible picture of the cruel Sand-man. When anything came blundering upstairs at night I trembled with fear and dismay; and all that my mother could get out of me were the stammered words “The Sand-man! the Sand-man!” whilst the tears coursed down my cheeks. Then I ran into my bedroom, and the whole night through tormented myself with the terrible apparition of the Sand-man. (185) Very Freudian, indeed. The end result of this childhood trauma is that, as a boy, Nathanael thinks that the lawyer Coppelius, a friend of his father, is the Sandman, and indeed Nathanael blames Coppelius for the death of his father in an explosion: “Coppelius, you atrocious fiend, you’ve killed my father” (190). Much later, Nathanael comes to believe that a pedlar named Coppola is Coppelius, and he proves to be correct. Along the way, Nathanael becomes fascinated with a young woman named Olimpia,
apparently the daughter of one Professor Spalanzani; Olimpia for a time takes Nathanael’s attention away from his betrothed, Clara—but Olimpia turns out to be an automaton. At the story’s conclusion, Nathanael and Clara ascend a high tower where Clara points out a “strange little gray bush” (213) that proves to be Coppelius. In an access of madness, Nathanael attempts to hurl Clara from the tower; but her brother, Lothair, comes to her rescue and saves her, pummeling Nathanael in the process. Nathanael himself then jumps to his death. It is, in all honesty, difficult to make sense of “The Sandman” as a coherent narrative; once again, its seeming randomness and lack of focus defy any attempt at harmonising its incidents, or even its symbolism, into a unity. Overall, the crippling influence of childhood terror is clearly evident, but the precise role of other elements of the story—in particular the function of Olimpia the automaton—is by no means evident. “Das Majorat” (“The Entail”; in Nachstücke) is worth some discussion —not intrinsically, but because of its influence on a later masterwork, as shall become evident in the next chapter. In itself it is almost intolerably verbose and meandering. We are here concerned with a nobleman, Baron Roderick von R——, who dwells in a dismal, unfinished castle and dreams of an “evil spirit” that is haunting the castle. His wife, the baroness, believes that “there is some dark family secret locked within these walls” (264). But this promising scenario is confounded by a long, prolix history of the family, involving murders, questionable inheritance, and so forth, so that the supernatural elements in the story—if, indeed, they are genuinely there—have no chance to develop. Other tales by Hoffmann are much more clearly within the domain of the supernatural than The Devil’s Elixirs or “The Sandman.” “Ignaz Denner” (in Nachtstücke) is the hideous tale of a man who uses the blood of children to maintain eternal life and youth. It was considered so grisly that Hoffmann’s publisher excluded it from the Fantasiestücke, and it had to be relegated to his later collection. “Vampirismus” (“Vampirism”; in Die Serapions-Brüder, 1817) is an uninspired vampire tale; “Die Automate” (“The Automata”; in Serapions-Brüder) involves both ghosts and automata; “Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht” (“A New Year’s Eve Entertainment”; in Fantasiestücke) involves a man whose reflection is stolen by the Devil. The influence of earlier Gothic literature on these tales is manifest, and Hoffmann has made some advance upon these already conventional themes
by his focus on mental aberration and the inscrutable nature of dreams and hallucinations. On the whole, however, Hoffmann’s work is a bit too erratic and confused to be aesthetically successful, and he will remain significant more for his influence—especially upon Poe, as we shall see—than for the merits of his own writing. The final word on Hoffmann, much to the dismay of his supporters, was written so early as 1827, when Sir Walter Scott, in a lengthy review of several of Hoffmann’s books, entitled “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” uttered a warning that is in some ways truer now than it was when it was written: It was . . . discovered that the supernatural in fictitious composition requires to be managed with considerable delicacy, as criticism begins to be more on the alert. The interest which it excites is indeed a powerful spring; but it is one which is peculiarly subject to be exhausted by coarse handling and repeated pressure. It is also of a character which it is extremely difficult to sustain, and of which a very small proportion may be said to be better than the whole. The marvellous, more than any other attribute of fictitious narrative, loses its effect by being brought much into view. The imagination of the reader is to be excited if possible, without being gratified. If once, like Macbeth, we “sup full with horrors”, our taste for the banquet is ended, and the thrill of terror with which we hear or read of a night-shriek, becomes lost in that sated indifference with which the tyrant came at length to listen to the most deep catastrophes that could affect his house. . . . . . . it is evident that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief, indistinct, and such as may become a being to us so incomprehensible, and so different from ourselves, of whom we cannot justly conjecture whence he comes, or for what purpose, and of whose attributes we can have no regular or distinct perception. Hence it usually happens, that the first touch of the supernatural is always the most effective, and is rather weakened and defaced, than strengthened by the subsequent recurrence of similar incidents. (314–16)
Hoffmann wrote an opera based upon Undine, the short novel published in 1811 by his friend Friedrich Heinrich Karl, baron de La Motte-Fouqué (1777–1843). Although this work is even more in the fairy-tale tradition than “Die goldne Topf,” it is worth discussing as an exquisite example of the supernatural employed to evoke beauty rather than terror. The basic premise of the story is well known: Undine, a water spirit (as her name indicates, unda being Latin for water), marries a human being, Huldbrand, and for a time the couple seems happy; but the marriage deteriorates, and at one point Huldbrand chastises Undine while they are near a body of water —in express contravention of her wishes—and she plunges into the sea. Huldbrand, meanwhile, has been increasingly attracted to a human woman, Bertalda, and when they marry Undine returns to kill Huldbrand. It is precisely because the “rules” governing the story—the notions that Undine, who has no soul, can only get one by marrying a human being; that she must not be scolded while near the water; that Huldbrand must not marry another—are essentially arbitrary that the story becomes a fantasy rather than a tale of supernatural horror, in spite of its manifestly real-world setting. But the element of the supernatural might be considered covertly present, chiefly in the figure of Kühleborn, her uncle, who increasingly dominates the narrative and becomes a kind of demon-figure. While the protagonists are staying at Castle Ringstetten, the appearances of Kühleborn are explicitly stated to resemble the appearances of a ghost in a Gothic castle: . . . the circumstance that most of all disturbed the inmates of the castle, was a variety of wonderful apparitions which met Huldbrand and Bertalda in the vaulted galleries of the castle, and which had never been heard of before as haunting the locality. The tall white man in whom Huldbrand recognized only too plainly Uncle Kühleborn, and Bertalda the spectral master of the fountain, often passed before them with a threatening aspect, and especially before Bertalda; so much so, that she had already several times been made ill with terror, and had frequently thought of quitting the castle. (65) Both the language and the overall imagery are taken directly from the Gothic novel. Kühleborn becomes increasingly threatening, to the point that
Undine must come to the rescue of Huldbrand and Bertalda when Kühleborn attempts to kill them on a voyage down the Danube. Of course, the chief thematic focus of the work is the contrast between paganism and Christianity. At the very outset Undine’s name is considered “heathenish” (17), and considerable attention is devoted to the question of whether she has been baptised. Indeed, when it is decided that Huldbrand and Undine will marry, a priest conveniently appears to conduct the ceremony. (We later learn that Kühleborn had led the priest to show up at the fisherman’s cottage where the couple was staying.) But Undine’s “heathenish” ways increasingly alienate Huldbrand, to such a degree that he makes what proves to be his fatal decision to discard Undine and unite with Bertalda. At that point, Undine can only declare sadly: “they have opened the spring . . . and now I am here, and you must die” (92). In a gorgeous metaphor that underscores her role as a water-spirit, Undine declares at last, “I have wept him to death” (92). None of La Motte-Fouqué’s other works come even as close as Undine to the realm of the supernatural, and certainly not to that of supernatural horror. But if he had written nothing but Undine, he would deserve a place, and a place of no small significance, in the literature of the imagination.
iii. The Weird Short Story Poe is often called the inventor of the short story, and if we are considering the short story as a meticulously crafted aesthetic entity that is certainly the case; but shorter tales did, as we have already noticed sporadically, make their appearance before Poe initiated his career in the 1830s. Whether we are to regard M. G. Lewis’s Romantic Tales (1808) as the first “horror short story collection” is debatable, especially in light of the facts that (a) the stories are all translations or paraphrases from the German, and (b) most of them are hardly short. But short fiction was triggered not by novelists assembling stories in book form but by the emergence, in the early nineteenth century, of periodicals that welcomed short fiction. Chief among them, from our perspective, was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Blackwood’s, founded in 1817, from the outset included a (relatively small) number of “sensational tales” as a means of attracting a wider readership than the relatively few who read their political articles or literary reviews. These tales, clearly deriving their imagery from the Gothic novel, were by no means consistently supernatural, and in fact a good many of them were merely excursions into gruesomeness; but in the course of time their appearance did encourage some of the leading supernaturalists of the period to contribute short fiction to the magazine. Annuals like the Keepsake also contained the occasional supernatural specimen; and because these volumes generally were issued around Christmas, the tradition of the “Christmas ghost story” was born. In this interregnum period, three noteworthy writers began contributing short fiction in some quantity, although from the viewpoint of craftsmanship they remain markedly inferior to Poe. Mary Shelley, after writing Frankenstein (and, incidentally, recovering from the early death of her husband in 1822), wrote more than two dozen tales in the succeeding two decades (the last of them dates, apparently, to the late 1830s), although only a relatively small number of these need concern us here. She made no effort to collect the tales herself, and a posthumous edition, Tales and Stories (1891), although seriously deficient,
had to suffice until Charles E. Robinson’s definitive edition of her Collected Tales and Stories (1976). Perhaps the most notable of these is “The Mortal Immortal” (Keepsake for 1834 [1833]), whose very premise would appear to be supernatural: we are at the outset introduced to a man who claims to be 323 years old. But what is of interest is the degree to which the first-person narrator systematically dispenses with many of the obvious supernatural causations that would account for his anomalous longevity. He first rejects out of hand the notion that he is the Wandering Jew (“certainly not. . . . In comparison with him, I am a very young Immortal” [219]) and then doubts whether he is in fact destined to be immortal. He has, it is true, studied with Cornelius Agrippa, but he pokes ribald fun at the prospect that Agrippa was a kind of Satan-figure who had tempted him to renounce his soul for forbidden knowledge (“In spite of the most painful vigilance, I had never detected the trace of a cloven foot; nor was the studious silence of our abode ever disturbed by demoniac howls” [221]). He similarly doubts whether Agrippa “could command the powers of darkness” (226). He does take an elixir from Agrippa—but this appears to be merely a tonic: “longevity was far different from immortality” (226). Granted, the elixir appears to have given the narrator greater vigour and energy, and it is only gradually that he— along with the reader—determines that it has actually bestowed upon him, at the very least, some kind of extended life: he is mortified to find that at one point he looks twenty years old whereas his wife is fifty. The worldweariness that comes upon him with the passage of years may reflect the influence of Godwin’s St. Leon. Two other stories of elongated life can be noted briefly. “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” (written in late 1826 but not published until 1863) is a pseudo-fictional account of an actual hoax of the time, when one Roger Dodsworth claimed to have been frozen since 1654 and reanimated in 1826. Shelley presents the matter as a scientific phenomenon: Now we do not believe that any contradiction or impossibility is attached to the adventures of this youthful antique. Animation (I believe physiologists agree) can as easily be suspended for a hundred or two years, as for as many seconds. A body hermetically sealed up by the frost, is of necessity preserved in its pristine
entireness. That which is totally secluded from the action of external agency, can neither have any thing added to nor taken away from it: no decay can take place, for something can never become nothing; under the influence of that state of being which we call death, change but not annihilation removes from our sight the corporal atoma; the earth receives sustenance from them, the air is fed by them, each element takes its own, thus seizing forcible repayment of what it had lent. (44) The rest of the tale is merely a political satire, but the gesture toward scientific verisimilitude is of significance. “Valerius: The Reanimated Man” (probably written in 1819; unpublished in Shelley’s lifetime) is similar, but here no explanation whatever is offered in regard to the reanimation of a man from Roman times. “Transformation” (Keepsake for 1831 [1830]) is of some interest in its relation to Frankenstein. Here a hideous-looking dwarf offers money to a handsome young man to exchange bodies with him for a period of three days only. The young man accepts the offer and finds himself in the twisted body of the dwarf; but three days pass, and the man feels he has been betrayed. The dwarf, true enough, has gone to marry the young man’s fiancée, Juliet. It is at this point, as the young man in the dwarf’s body proceeds to Genoa, that the parallels to Frankenstein accumulate: he is forced to proceed covertly, “for I was unwilling to make a display of my hideousness” (131); he has momentary thoughts of carrying Juliet off by force, just as the creature arrives for his baleful purpose on Frankenstein’s wedding night. In this instance, however, the two merely have a tussle, during which both are stabbed and forthwith return to their own bodies. Some attention should be given to Shelley’s very long novel The Last Man (1826), for although it may not strictly speaking be supernatural—it is, if anything, a work of proto-science fiction—it probes issues that would be taken up by later supernatural writers. It opens in the year 2073, at which time the last king of England has abdicated and republicanism has been established. It would be profitless to examine in detail the plot of this prolix, rambling work, told from the point of view of Lionel Verney, a friend of the son of England’s last king; but, after a very slow beginning, the novel does gain power in its account of the spread of a plague—initially emerging out of Egypt, apparently—throughout the whole world.
Eventually, the plague reaches England; after Verney and others battle marauders from North America and Ireland, they are forced to abandon the island. An unfortunate encounter with religious fanatics in France compels them to go to Switzerland, by which time there are only 50 left. Ultimately, this number is reduced to four: Lionel, his friend Adrian, Clara (Adrian’s daughter), and Evelyn (Lionel’s son). It is thought at one point that the plague might have exhausted itself, but then Evelyn is stricken and dies. There may still be a possibility for the revival of the human race, if Lionel and Clara can survive; but, as they make their way to Greece, a storm at sea renders Lionel the only survivor on the planet. The Last Man is crippled by its slow-moving pace and its deficiency in extrapolating technological and other advances a century and a half beyond the novel’s date of writing; and even the sociopolitical implications are relatively undventurous. Many features of the novel, including its conclusion, are clear reflections of events in the life of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nevertheless, the novel does gain a cumulative power in spite of its handicaps. The plague is of course not presented as anything approaching a supernatural phenomenon, but its inexorable progress creates a kind of shuddering terror not found in any previous work of Gothic fiction. It may not stand up well in comparison with M. P. Shiel’s infinitely more skilful novel on the same idea, The Purple Cloud (1901), but it is a commendable feat of the imagination. Two Scotsmen, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and James Hogg (1770– 1835), also fostered the evolution of the supernatural short story. Scott’s weird short fiction consists chiefly of only two stories, “The Tapestried Chamber” and “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (a chapter in Redgauntlet, 1824), but other tales are of ancillary interest, not to mention several of his Waverley novels. Scott, as we have seen, was perhaps the acutest critic of the Gothic tale in his time, certainly among those who were practising fiction writers; and his many historical novels and long poems betray Gothic influences from beginning to end. The Black Dwarf (1816), a somewhat crude and undeveloped early work, is a kind of protoFrankenstein novel in its depiction of a dwarf whose physical repulsiveness embitters him against the human race; but the general effect is more that of a fairy tale than of a Gothic novel. The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) has been referred to as Scott’s most Gothic work from an atmospheric point of view, although it is entirely non-supernatural. But supernaturalism does
enter into The Monastery (1820), set in the reign of Elizabeth and focusing simultaneously on Catholic-Protestant troubles and disputes between the English and the Scots, in which the former are, naturally, portrayed as the villains. A benign spectre, the Lady of Avenel, manifests itself at frequent moments and takes an active hand in the advancement of the plot. A pendant to this novel is The Abbot (1820), a novel centring around the escape of Mary Queen of Scots from her imprisonment in Lochleven Castle. The influence of Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is particularly evident here. But in the end there is little reason to consider Scott as a supernaturalist beyond his several short stories. “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” written entirely in Scots dialect, tells of the temptation of Steenie Steenson to sell his soul to the Devil; its most effective scene is his venturing into a strange castle where he comes upon the revels of a party of dead men restored to life. Although the at times difficult dialect enhances the verisimilitude of the tale, its general effect is that of a bit of folklore, and to that degree it lacks a certain immediacy and potency. That can hardly be said for “The Tapestried Chamber” (Keepsake for 1829 [1828]), an earlier version of which had appeared as “Story of an Apparition” (Blackwood’s, April 1818). This may be the most effective supernatural short story written up to this time. A very simple account of an apparition—that of a woman of the seventeenth century “of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history” (30)—the tale gains strength from the bluff, imposing figure of the protagonist, General Browne, who is staying with his friend Lord Woodville and who clearly reveals himself as no “weak-minded, superstitious fool” (24). The spectre is introduced very gradually; first only a sound of a rustling gown is heard, then an old woman is seen from a distance in the General’s bedroom, and then finally her hideous face is glimpsed: “Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived. The body of some atrocious criminal seemed to have been given up from the grave, and the soul restored from the penal fire, in order to form, for a space, an union with the ancient accomplice of its guilt” (26). This rather curious passage suggests that it is the woman’s moral evil that has rendered her an apparition, not the lack of Christian burial, her death at the hands of a criminal who has escaped punishment, or anything of the sort.
Three other stories are of some interest. In “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” (Keepsake for 1829 [1828]) the wife of Sir Philip Forester, who has gone off to war, consults a Dr. Baptista Damiotti, who claims to have the ability to tell the fates of absent friends. After an elaborate hocus-pocus, Sir Philip’s wife sees in a mirror her husband actually leading a young woman down the altar in a marriage ceremony that is interrupted by a sword-fight. Sure enough, later they hear of a sword-fight in which Sir Philip kills a relative and flees to the Continent. “The Two Drovers” (a segment of Chronicles of Canongate [1827]) is really a mainstream story of the deadly conflict between two drovers, but it features a single supernatural episode, where an “auld Highland witch” (104) makes a baleful prediction to one of the drovers: “There is blood on your hand, and it is English blood” (106). A still uncollected early tale, “Phantasmagoria” (Blackwood’s, May 1818), is an effective short tale of a benign apparition. Scott’s greatest contribution to the weird—aside from his critical essays and the biographical sketches of Gothic writers in Lives of the Novelists (1825)—may perhaps be Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), an exhaustive treatment of witch legendry, told from a markedly sceptical point of view. Although sophistically maintaining that the witchcraft persecutions of mediaeval Europe were derived from a misconstrual of biblical texts (it is hard to know how else to interpret “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” [Exod. 22:18] except in the straightforward manner in which centuries of popes and their underlings did in fact interpret it), Scott nonetheless condemns the ignorance and brutality of the persecutors; along the way, he features interesting discussions of the lore surrounding fairies, elves, ghosts, and evil spirits. The treatise was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and could well have supplied plot kernels for Victorian weird writers on both sides of the Atlantic. In terms of quantity, Hogg wrote the most sizeable body of short weird fiction prior to Poe, with the possible exception of Washington Irving. More than a dozen tales can be said to utilise the supernatural as either the core of the plot or as a significant component of it. These tales appeared variously in Blackwood’s, the Keepsake, Fraser’s Magazine, and elsewhere, and many of the best were gathered in The Shepherd’s Calendar (1829). Hogg clearly drew extensively upon Scottish myth and legendry, with its accounts of elves, fairies, brownies, and evil spirits, and made no secret of his faithful reflections of tradition. “Mary Burnet” begins with an elaborate apology for
presenting the reader with “such antiquated breathings of tradition” (200), going on to say: “I pledge myself to relate nothing that has not been handed down to me by tradition” (200). “The Laird of Cassway,” we are told, is related “wholly from tradition” (199), and Hogg adds, a bit naively, “if the story was not true, the parties believed it to have been so” (199). In a sense, this reliance on tradition to establish verisimilitude is analogous to the Gothic novelists’ bland assertions that they are merely relating the superstitions of the mediaeval era without passing judgment upon their truth or falsity, and Hogg’s tales are rendered the more vivid by his striking evocations of the Scottish landscape and character. From a modern perspective, it could be said that Hogg’s weird tales contain rather an excess of supernaturalism and are not as aesthetically finished as Poe’s tales; several of them tend to meander and take odd turns. “Mary Burnet,” although it has moments of power, is subject to these criticisms. In this tale, John Allanson asks a “witch or fairy” (72) to make Mary Burnet, a woman he fancies, appear to him; she does so, but presently leaps into a loch and drowns. She is, however, later found awake in her bed —or is this in fact merely a “fairy or evil spirit” (80)? From this point on, the tale becomes increasingly bizarre: at one point John, at a hiring fair, meets seven different women who say they are Mary. Later, we are treated to an entire castle that appears and then vanishes. To be sure, as a friend of John’s states, “We are wandering in a world of enchantment” (87). John dies, but years later Mary reappears, stepping out of a lavish chariot. What is striking about this tale is the constant interaction of fairies and brownies with the human characters of the tale—an apparent reflection of rural superstition regarding these enigmatic figures. “The Witches of Traquair” also contains excessive supernaturalism, featuring an entire village full of witches as well as appearances by the Devil (as the “Master Fiend” [234]) and, as a kind of balance, two “damsels” (227) who prove to be Faith and Charity. It does not surprise us to learn that “The tale is a very old one” (223), dealing with Colin Hyslop’s desire to use witchcraft to win over the fetching Barbara Stewart but fearing damnation for so doing. Several of Hogg’s tales hew closely to religious belief, suggesting that the supernatural is a violation or contravention of Christian doctrine. “The Mysterious Bride” tells how the laird of Birkendelly comes upon a lovely woman he has dreamed about (“the laird was very much like one
bewitched” [149]). She proclaims: “My name is Jane Ogilvie and you were betrothed to me before you were born” (152). They exchange rings, but the laird’s sister declares that this is “not a ring befitting a Christian to wear” (154). Ultimately we learn that the woman is the spirit or reincarnation of a woman who had been betrothed to the laird’s grandfather, who had murdered her and married someone else. “The Barber of Duncow—A Real Ghost Story” contains some fascinating bits of primitive superstition. A ghost tells the barber’s wife that her husband has dallied with several women in a nearby village and has had a number of illegitimate children. The wife disappears, but reappears as a ghost to her aunt, saying that she was murdered by two women. The body of the wife is found, and at this point it is decreed that everyone in the community must touch the corpse—evidently the guilt of the culprit or culprits will somehow become manifest by this procedure. However, when the woman accused of the crime touches the body, nothing happens. When the barber himself touches it, it becomes “bathed in a flood of purple blood that streamed from the wound, as if it had been newly inflicted” (178–79). It transpires that the accused woman and the barber had dressed up as two witches, but that the barber himself had done the actual killing. Other tales of Hogg’s are less substantial but contain some striking passages. “George Dobson’s Expedition to Hell” ponders upon the mystery of dreams; in the judgment of the narrator, “they prove to the unlettered and contemplative mind, in a very forcible manner, a distinct existence of the soul, and its lively and rapid intelligence with external nature, as well as with a world of spirits with which it has no acquaintance, when the body is lying dormant, and the same to it as if sleeping in death” (41–42). The tale appears to instantiate this dictum, for the coach-driver George Dobson seems to find himself in Hell, but later believes it to have been a dream— but since we have been told that dreams somehow allow the soul access to other realms of entity, we are not surprised to come upon evidence that the event was real after all. In “The Brownie of the Black Haggs,” the evil Lady Wheelhope is plagued by a wicked servant who may be a brownie. The tale ultimately becomes one of bizarre obsession, as the Lady cannot keep herself away from the servant she loathes. In a striking anticipation of Poe, “Strange Letter of a Lunatic” (Fraser’s Magazine, December 1830) tells of a man plagued by a double to such an extent that he doubts his own identity.
Hogg’s greatest contribution to weird fiction, however, is the bizarre novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). An earlier novel, The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1820), is a rambling and confused work of the explained supernatural, in which a creature thought to be a brownie is ultimately revealed to be a reformer named John Brown. But the Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a tale of a very different order of genius and is clearly the pinnacle of Hogg’s work in the supernatural, if not of his work as a whole. The pecularity of the novel begins with “The Editor’s Narrative,” which takes up more than a third of the text. Here we learn of George Colwan, who had the misfortune to marry a woman who was a religious fanatic. She bore him two sons, George and Robert; but the senior George comes to doubt that Robert is his own son and therefore banishes him from the house. Robert is raised by a fanatical clergyman, Robert Wringim. The two brothers nonetheless meet frequently, clashing constantly. The younger George is then found dead: was he killed by Robert, or by another man named Drummond? The elder George dies soon thereafter, and witnesses eventually come forth to confirm that Robert is in fact the murderer. Robert’s own “confession” now commences. He tells of how he one day met his exact look-alike: is this his brother, or some kind of guardian angel? Gradually we are led to suspect that he is the Devil. The man states that his name is Gil-Martin, going on to say that “It is not my Christian name; but it is a name which may serve your turn” (134). Gil-Martin continues Robert’s indoctrination into religious fanaticism, declaring that it is Robert’s duty to kill a clergyman, Mr. Blanchard, who had criticised him; Robert does so, whereupon Gil-Martin exults: “‘Thou hast done well for once; but wherefore hesitate in such a cause? This is but a small beginning of so great a work as that of purging the Christian world. But the first victim is a worthy one, and more of such lights must be extinguished immediately’” (146). He goes on to add pregnantly: “I never go but where I have some great purpose to serve . . . either in the advancement of my own power or in thwarting my enemies” (149–50). Gil-Martin now declares that Robert must kill his brother and father. Robert attempts to do so on several occasions but fails. Gil now shapes himself in the form of Drummond and provokes an argument with George; Robert appears and (apparently) kills George. It is at this point that Robert, if he has not been so already, becomes a thoroughly unreliable narrator. On several occasions his account of events
clashes with that of the “Editor,” and at the climatic moment of the death of George, Robert openly admits that he is not at all certain what actually happened: I will not deny, that my own immediate impressions of this affair in some degree differed from this statement [i.e., that Robert killed George]. But this is precisely as my illustrious friend [Gil-Martin] described it to me afterwards, and I can rely implicitly on his information, as he was at that time a looker-on, and my senses all in a state of agitation, and he could have no motive for saying what was not the positive turth. (178) Robert has little justification for being so sanguine on the matter; he presently begins to wonder whether Gil is not some kind of “powerful necromancer” (191). As the tale concludes, Gil appears to Robert in the guise of his dead brother, and Robert flees, experiencing various bizarre manifestations along the way. One of the final entries in what has become his diary is as follows: “If the horrors of hell are equal to those I have suffered, eternity will be of short duration there, for no created energy can support them for one single month, or week. I have been buffeted as never living creature was. My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility” (250). In a rather odd conclusion, the “Editor” resumes the narrative, reprinting a letter signed by one James Hogg that appeared in Blackwood’s for August 1823 (as, in fact, it did) giving details on Robert’s apparent suicide. The Editor declares that he now doubts that Robert in fact killed George, leaving us with the implication that Gil-Martin actually did so. In spite of the stilted and at times archaic diction, there is a striking sense of contemporaneousness to the Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It may be one of the earliest genuine examples of the unreliable narrator; but more than that, it is a remarkable anticipation of Poe’s ventures into psychological horror. It is, indeed, the first psychological horror novel ever written, and Robert’s confession has all the gripping power of incipient mania and insanity. But the presence of what is clearly the Devil allows the novel to be also authentically supernatural, and in this sense it represents a rare fusion between these two ordinarily disparate modes. Much more so
than Brown’s Wieland, it tells of the baneful effects of religious fanaticism —Louis Simpson (171–72) suggests that the core of the plot, from this perspective, was derived from an actual religious controversy in Scotland a few generations before Hogg’s time—but its true power rests in its exhibiting to the reader the step-by-step disintegration of an already diseased mentality.
iv. French Supernaturalism I have, up to now, not said much about supernaturalism or Gothicism in France. While it is true that several of the leading—as well as some of the lesser—novels of the Gothic period were translated into French, French writers wrote little in this mode themselves. From the late seventeenth century onward, the French appeared more attracted to fantasy—either as manifested in the fairy tale (Madame d’Aulnoy’s Les Contes des fées, 1697) or in the folktale (Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights, 1704–17)—than in pure supernaturalism. Aside from Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772; The Devil in Love), a humorous tale that seems more a parody of Gothicism than a genuine contribution to it, there is little in French literature during this period that is of direct interest to our study. Some attention should be paid to the work of Charles Nodier (1780– 1844), who not only wrote several late Gothic novels—among them Les Proscrits (1802; The Outlaws) and Les Tristes (1806; The Sad Ones)—that reveal his obsession with death, but also several significant works featuring vampires. He not only collaborated with Ginette Picat-Guinoiseau on a dramatic adaptation of Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” entitled Le Vampire (1820), but also used vampires or vampiric figures in such novels as Smarra (1821) and Trilby (1822). Late work by Nodier is more in the fairy tale tradition and appears to reveal the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Supernaturalism of a very distinctive sort was practised by two French writers, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. The works of both writers attest to the manner in which fantasy and horror can be put to the use of fundamentally mainstream concerns of character portrayal and social commentary. Balzac (1799–1850) wrote a number of pseudo-Gothic potboilers early in his career, in the 1820s, although few if any of these involve the supernatural. By 1829, however, he had commenced his immense series of novels and tales, “La Comédie Humaine,” that would establish his international reputation. One subset of these works was what he termed contes philosophiques (philosophical tales), although it appears that some of the components of this subset were incorporated after the fact. The
unifying thread that links these works is a psychological one: the supernatural (or a suggestion of it) is used as a device to reflect upon the transforming nature of external events upon the human psyche. The most striking work of Balzac’s in this regard is Le Peau de chagrin (1831; variously translated as The Wild Ass’s Skin or The Magic Skin). Here we are introduced to a young man, Raphael, who appears at the end of his rope and wishes to commit suicide. Wandering into a curio shop, he is shown a wild ass’s skin, and the aged owner of the shop claims that it can grant wishes— under certain conditions. The central condition governing the skin becomes immediately evident: although it can indeed grant wishes—making Raphael, for example, instantly and fabulously wealthy—every wish it grants shrinks the size of the skin, and Raphael is told that his own life will be correspondingly reduced. At this point the novel treads close between the borderline of fantasy and the supernatural, seeming more like a modern fairy tale than a work of terror. Balzac’s fundamental interest is the effect of the skin on Raphael: it compels him to behave in a highly unnatural manner, since in order to preserve the skin and prevent it from shrinking, he must rid himself of all desires (for any wish that flits through his mind is immediately granted by the skin, which shrinks accordingly), and in spite of his great wealth he turns into a feeble ascetic, eschewing rich foods, women, and all the other facets of life (especially in one of his station) that one would normally expect. It is manifest that the supernatural or fantastic premise has been fashioned chiefly for the purpose of probing Raphael’s tormented psyche. From our perspective Le Peau de chagrin gains some relevance when a zoologist studies the skin in an attempt to determine its nature and properties. The zoologist presently throws up his hands, forcing Raphael to conclude, “There is certainly something infernal in the thing!” (219). This gesture at a pseudo-scientific “accounting” of the magic skin brings the novel more in line with supernaturalism. In any event, by this time Raphael has, in spite of himself, fallen in love with one Pauline, and his fate is inevitable: he dies in longing for her, as the skin shrinks to nothing. Le Peau de chagrin is a powerful and relentless study of character and, in a sense, comes close to being a novel of psychological terror in spite of its supernatural premise. That premise is, as I say, closer to fantasy than to strict supernaturalism, because (as I have explained in Chapter I) the “rules of the game” have essentially been arbitrarily established by the author
without direct reference to any trope derived from folklore or superstition. Moreover, the supernatural element occupies an almost vanishingly small role in the overall novel, being chiefly a catalyst for the events and for the psychological probing of the protagonist. I hardly need say that this is not meant as a criticism of the novel, merely as an indication of the purposes for which Balzac generally employed the supernatural. Only two other works by Balzac centrally involve the supernatural. The short story “L’Elixir de la longue vie” (Revue de Paris, 24 October 1830; “The Elixir of Life”) is a rather buffoonish narrative in which the dying Bartolommeo Belvidero tells his son, Don Juan, that he has a magic lotion that, when rubbed over his dead body, will bring him back to life. Don Juan, however, would prefer that his father remain dead. Nonetheless, he rubs his dead father’s eye with the lotion—and sure enough the eye opens. Realising the value of the substance, he doesn’t waste it on his father but instructs his own son to do what he failed to do. The son complies, rubbing his dead father’s body with the lotion, and Don Juan is immediately reanimated, running amok in the process. The story reads like a parody of Gothic excesses, and may well be so. This may also be the case with “Melmoth reconcilié” (1835; “Melmoth Reconciled”), a conscious sequel of sorts to Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. A bank cashier, Castanier, encounters John Melmoth at the very time when he is about to embezzle some money: in a sense, Melmoth acts as an embodiment of conscience. But Melmoth is also not shy in expressing his supernatural powers: “Who is strong enough to resist me?” said the Englishman, addressing him. “Do you not know that everything here on earth must obey me, that it is in my power to do everything? I read men’s thoughts, I see the future, and I know the past. I am here, and I can be elsewhere also. Time and space and distance are nothing to me. The whole world is at my beck and call.” (316) Castanier accepts Melmoth’s bargain, allowing Melmoth to die in peace, happy and repentant. Castanier, for his part, not only begins to adopt Melmoth’s mannerisms and attitude to life but also, in a brilliant and chilling touch, his physical characteristics: “There was a change in the cashier’s appearance. A strange pallor overspread his once rubicund
countenance; it wore the peculiarly sinister and stony look of the mysterious visitor. The sullen glare of his eyes was intolerable,; the fierce light in them seemed to scorch. The man who had looked so good-humored and goodnatured had suddenly grown tyrannical and proud” (323). Castanier himself leaves no doubt as to the nature of his alteration: “Castanier felt that he had undergone a mental as well as physical transformation” (326). And, exactly as with Melmoth in Melmoth the Wanderer, Castanier “felt the awful melancholy of omnipotence” (330). This single sentence effectively conveys Balzac’s fundamental message: human character, pliable as it is, can be metamorphosed out of recognition by external circumstance. The rest of the long story—in which Castanier, yearning for heaven, seeks desperately for someone to accept the bargain in his turn, finally finding a hapless clerk to do so—comes close to self-parody, but Balzac has made his basic point. La Recherche de l’absolu (1834; The Quest of the Absolute) focuses on a man named Balthazar who seeks the philosopher’s stone, chiefly the means of making gold out of other substances. The novel has no supernatural elements except one fleeting suggestion of it: when a Polish man tells Balthazar that the Absolute is “One Element common to all substances” (72), his put-upon wife thinks he may be the Devil (“Only the Tempter could have those yellow eyes, blazing with the fire of Prometheus” [74]). Nothing much is made of this, however, and the novel is a relentless probing of the obsession that renders Balthazar a self-absorbed maniac and impoverishes his family. We similarly need spend little time on Balzac’s two novels, Louis Lambert (1832) and Séraphita (1835), both of which seem designed to expound the Swedenborgian philosophy. The latter does focus on a strange, androgynous, and possibly supernatural creature who is first called Seraphitus, then Seraphita, but its tedious didacticism renders it an aesthetic failure. As for Victor Hugo’s curious early novel Han d’Icelande (1823; Han of Iceland), set in the wilds of Norway in the year 1699, there is no genuine supernaturalism at all, even though the enigmatic central figure, Han of Iceland, is referred to variously as the Antichrist (46), a “supernatural being” (52), and “in league with the powers of darkness” (59), and is seen performing such appalling acts as killing a wolf with his bare hands and presenting one Lucy Stadt with the skull of the child they had borne two
decades earlier, when Han had raped her. Early in the novel, Han’s history is supplied: “According to tradition, some Iceland peasants found Han, then a child, wandering in the Bessesled Mountains. They were about to kill him, as Astyager destroyed the lion cub of Bactriana, but the bishop interceded on his behalf, and took the cub under his protection, hoping to make a Christian of the devil. The good bishop made every effort to develop his diabolical intellect, forgetting that the hemlock in the hot-house of Babylon never changed into the lily. This imp of darkness repaid all his care by taking flight one fine night across the sea, in the trunk of a tree, previously setting fire to the episcopal manor to lighten up the way. According to the old women’s tales, this is the way the Icelander reached Norway, and he offers the most complete type of a monster, with all the benefits of a good education.” (51–52) This passage, among many others, suggests that Hugo (or his characters) is laying it on a bit thick as regards Han’s diabolical nature. Indeed, in the course of the narrative, in spite of his atrocious behaviour, he gains a certain modicum of sympathy by the role he plays in the coal miners’ struggle against their tyrannical bosses. Han d’Icelande is aesthetically crude and unpolished, but its protagonist was manifestly an anticipation of the figure of Quasimodo in Nôtre Dame de Paris (1831). The work of Balzac and Hugo is really a kind of prelude to the true commencement of French supernaturalism, which really did not hit its stride until the next few generations, in the work of Gautier, Mérimée, and Maupassant.
v. Anticipations of Poe: Washington Irving With the possible exception of Hoffmann, the most distinguished figure in this interregnum period—post-Gothic but pre-Poe—is Washington Irving (1783–1859). Irving, more than Brockden Brown, deserves the title of Poe’s most noted American precursor, if only because he worked with the supernatural liberally in a manner that Brown appeared disinclined to do. Irving, born in New York but spending much of his life travelling throughout England and the Continent, is emphatically Anglo-American in his style, subject matter, and temperament. As is fitting for an author whose second book publication was A History of New York (1809), Irving was deeply knowledgeable in the Dutch legendry of the American continent; indeed, the frequency of his use of the word legend in the titles of his supernatural tales is of some significance. Given that Irving came to literary maturity during the later stages of the Gothic movement, it is likely that he had absorbed at least the more noteworthy contributions to Gothic fiction. The exact degree of Irving’s familiarity with Gothic is not, to my understanding, known, but on the basis of his tales and sketches it seems undeniable that he was well versed in the work of his predecessors in supernatural terror. The array of Irving’s weird work is impressively large, going well beyond the celebrated tales in The Sketch-Book (1820) and Tales of a Traveller (1824). We find other weird specimens in Bracebridge Hall (1822), The Legends of the Alhambra (1832), the late collection Wolfert’s Roost (1855), and even an uncollected item or two. It is exactly the scattered nature of Irving’s supernatural work that has perhaps robbed him of the credit he deserves as a significant forerunner of Poe. A collection of all Irving’s horror tales would serve a valuable purpose. The degree to which Irving was steeped in Gothic imagery is most clearly evident in a trilogy of linked stories in Tales of a Traveller, “The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture,” “The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Story of the Young Italian.” This rather meandering account focuses upon a purportedly “haunted room” (75) with a curious portrait that (as in Melmoth the Wanderer) appears to follow the occupant of
the room with its eyes. We are then given a long, rambling narrative of an Italian involved in a love triangle, murder, and so forth—all fairly stock Gothic stage properties, but the tale does occasionally generate a powerful atmosphere of terror. In “The Mysterious Chambers” we find a nod to Clara Reeve in the protagonist’s remark, “Here was the haunted wing of the castle” (56). This is not so much a story as, apparently, a first-person narrative by Irving himself in his tour of the “Moorish halls” (56) of the Alhambra. The purportedly haunted nature of the wing is immediately dispelled, but there are nonetheless some vivid spooky effects. In “Legend of the Arabian Astrologer” the astrologer in question appears to use some Egyptian magic to ward off the foes of the Moorish king Aben Hazuz. There is a reference to a “Gothic princess” (114) who, after the astrologer has built a magic palace based upon the mysterious Arabian city of Irem, disappears with Aben Hazuz down a shaft to some underground realm. The long tale “Dolph Heyliger” has a generally Gothic cast also. We are here introduced to the young Dolph, a mischievous boy who is apprenticed to a physician who owns a “haunted” house in the country. As with Clara Reeve’s protagonist, Dolph dares the physician to let him stay there at night. In fact, he stays three nights, during which the ghost of an “elderly man” (477) appears to him, at which point Irving reflects an ancient superstition: “he [Dolph] recollected to have heard it said, spirits have no power to speak until spoken to” (481). The ghost leads Dolph outside to a well, for reasons that are not explained, then disappears. In good Gothic fashion, Irving now indulges in a quite irrelevant digression whereby Dolph boards a ship sailing for Albany and encounters one Antony Vander Heyden, who speaks of “The Storm-Ship”—a story within the story that does little but tell of a strange ship that is seen just before or just after a storm. Eventually we learn that the ghost is that of an old Flemish man who had buried some treasure—in the well. (A later story, “The Haunted Ship,” is another nautical horror tale, dealing with the pranks of a ghostly crew on a ship. The ghosts then attempt to save the ship as it is caught in a tropical storm, but fail.) In The Sketch-Book Irving is attempting—as far as his weird writing is concerned—to establish the young United States as a fecund venue for the supernatural. The difficulty of his task is epitomised by what the prominent
British critic William Hazlitt would say a few years later in reference to Charles Brockden Brown: . . . no ghost, we will venture to say, was ever seen in North America. They do not walk in broad day; and the night of ignorance and superstition which favours their appearance, was long past before the United States lifted up their head beyond the Atlantic wave. . . . In this orderly and undramatic state of security and freedom from natural foes, Mr. Brown has provided one of his heroes with a demon to torment him, and fixed him at his back;— but what is to keep him there? Not any prejudice or lurking superstition on the part of the American reader; for the lack of such, the writer is obliged to make up by incessant rodomontade, and face-making. (“American Literature—Dr. Channing,” Edinburgh Review, October 1829) No doubt Hazlitt exaggerated the freedom from “ignorance and superstition” prevailing in the young nation; but his general point—how do you establish an atmosphere of mediaeval superstition in a nation that did not have a Middle Ages?—is well taken. In Hazlitt’s opinion, Brown failed in his attempt to lodge terror in the human psyche. Irving, for his part, draw upon the legendry of the Dutch—and of the native Americans before them —to create an ersatz mediaevalism that could allow for the full play of superstition. The Dutch presence in the American northeast extended two centuries prior to Irving’s day, and the native American presence uncounted centuries before that. In Irving’s mind, these lengths of time afforded a sufficiency of spectral heritage to develop. It is significant that, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the narrator emphasises the prevalence of ghostly lore in a long-settled region. After recounting several anecdotes of a general sort relating to the older Dutch inhabitants of the area (the Hudson River valley north of New York City), Irving goes on to say: But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered
long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have traveled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established Dutch communities. (309–10) Had this not been written a decade before Hazlitt’s comment, it could have been considered a direct rebuttal of it. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is in fact one of Irving’s most powerful forays into the supernatural—or, perhaps, the pseudo-supernatural. After a tremendous atmospheric build-up in which Ichabod Crane finally encounters the headless horseman, who then throws his head at Crane, knocking him out, we are then given an elaborate naturalistic explanation of the events: the horseman was actually one Brown Bones, Crane’s rival for the affections of Katrina van Tassel; the “head” was in reality a pumpkin; and so forth. Quite frankly, this “explanation” fails to convince; and a postscript that purports to supply the moral of the story—“That there is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures—provided we will take but a joke as we find it” (319)—is so preposterous that it makes us suspect that the story really has no “moral” at all, and no other purpose but to convey terror. Irving’s emphasis, in the passage quoted from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” on the supersitition dominant in the rural regions is of direct relevance to the other celebrated tale in The Sketch-Book, “Rip Van Winkle.” This story—based on a German folktale—has suffered, paradoxically, from being too well-known; by which I mean that the standard conception of it—that Van Winkle merely falls asleep and wakes up twenty years later in a world rendered entirely unfamiliar to him by the rapid social changes that have occurred—overlooks the central reason why (or, rather, how) Van Winkle fell asleep in the first place. At the outset it is told that Van Winkle had met a strange band of people in the Catskill Mountains and was enticed into taking a drink offered by them. This, in reality, is the genuine supernatural component of the story, for Van Winkle’s
falling asleep—really his lapsing into a state of suspended animation—is only a product of the apparent magic potion he has drunk. The exact nature or origin of the strange people he encountered in the mountains is never clarified, but they seem somewhat along the lines of trolls or elves. Irving, regrettably, repeats the tactic of the explained supernatural in what would otherwise be a powerfully atmospheric tale, “The Spectre Bridegroom.” Here a man riding to a castle to meet his fiancée is set upon by robbers and mortally wounded, whereupon his friend pretends to be a “spectre bridegroom” before admitting to the deception. “The Adventure of My Aunt” is similar: the aunt appears to notice that the portrait of her dead husband moves, but it is in fact a man hiding behind the portrait. Wisely, however, Irving eschewed the explained supernatural in a number of his most gripping tales. Perhaps the acme of his work in this vein is “The Adventure of the German Student,” far and away the best horror story in Tales of a Traveller. Set in the midst of the French Revolution, the narrative tells of a student, Wolfgang, who meets a young woman near the guillotine—a woman he had dreamed about. Taking her back to his room (for sexual purposes, as Irving states in an unusually frank manner), Wolfgang is horrified to find that she is a headless corpse, thereby revealing the truth of the dialogue he and the woman had had earlier: “I have no friend on earth!” said she. “But you have a home,” said Wolfgang. “Yes—in the grave!” (70) The student goes mad. This tale features an unwontedly grim atmosphere of terror in contrast to the great majority of Irving’s other works. Rather less effective is “The Bold Dragoon,” in which it is suggested that the “haunting” of a room in an inn where a dragoon is staying—the furniture madly comes to life—was caused by a previous tenant, an epileptic who apparently infected the furniture with his malady. “The Adventure of My Uncle” is a simple tale of an apparition: a woman walks into the tower room where the uncle of the title is staying, and he later comes upon her portrait, which establishes her as long dead. But the woman’s story, especially the crucial point of why she is now a ghost, is
never fully explained. As for “The Devil and Tom Walker,” this is merely a moral sketch with no sense of horror at all, even though the supernatural is obviously involved: Walker, encountering the Devil, becomes a usurer in exchange for great wealth, but the Devil snatches him away the moment he is about to foreclose a mortgage on a friend. The generally light-hearted, genial, whimsical, and even occasionally flippant tone that Irving affects in the great majority of his tales would seem to work against the creation of an effective atmosphere of supernatural suspense; but—as, in a somewhat different manner, with M. R. James a century later—this tone frequently has the effect of causing readers to let down their defences so that the supernatural incursion becomes the more powerful and terrifying. The overall looseness and, at times, needless verbosity of Irving’s narratives contrasts strikingly with the best of Poe; nevertheless, the impressive array of Irving’s supernatural and pseudosupernatural work makes him a worthy predecessor to his distinguished countryman.
V. Edgar Allan Poe The work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) revolutionised and transformed supernatural (and psychological) horror fiction in so profound and multifaceted a way that it could plausibly be maintained that the genre, as a serious contribution to literature, only began with him. In this sense, the entire Gothic movement could be considered a kind of “anticipation” of the true commencement of the field. The keenness with which Poe analysed the psychology of fear; the transcendent artistry of his tales, from construction to prose rhythm to aesthetic focus; the intense emotive power of his principal narratives—these and other elements make Poe not merely the fons et origo of supernatural literature but, in many ways, a figure unsurpassed in the breadth and scope of his work. I intend to say little of Poe’s life, the main outlines of which are sufficiently well known: his birth in Boston to impoverished actors; his early abandonment by his father and the death of his mother in 1811, leading to his adoption and his tortured relationship with his foster father, John Allan; his spotty education in England and the University of Virginia, and his brief enrolment at West Point; his marriage to his child-cousin, Virginia Clemm, and her eventual death from tuberculosis; Poe’s own peregrinations in Richmond, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere; and his own early death in a Baltimore gutter. What is striking about Poe’s literary career is its relative brevity: even counting his early poetic work, beginning with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), it extended scarcely twenty years, while his career as a fiction writer lasted not much more than fifteen. The bulk of Poe’s career was spent as an editor and journalist, and his editorial duties at such magazines as the Southern Literary Messenger (1835–37), Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1839–40), Graham’s Magazine (1841–42), and the Broadway Journal (1845–46) occupied the bulk of his
time and restricted the amount of leisure he could devote to fiction and poetry. Poe spent years attempting to found a journal precisely suited to his taste—first the Penn Magazine and then the Stylus—but the plans came to nothing. Although Poe gained distinction as an acute critic and, at times, a harsh and somewhat intolerant book reviewer, he was manifestly determined to establish himself as a poet and story writer of note. He had published three slim volumes of poetry by 1831; as early as 1833 he began to plan a story collection, Tales of the Folio Club. The collections that did emerge—Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (dated 1840 but released in December 1839) and Tales (1845)—did indeed give Poe some standing in American fiction, but brought him relatively little income. They were preceded by the curious short novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). The ill-health that plagued him in his final years—especially after the death of Virginia in 1847—also diminished his creative fires. But although his entire corpus of fiction can fit comfortably in one large volume in the Library of America (matched by an equally large volume of his essays and reviews), in its aggregate it launched a new era in supernatural and psychological horror that, while drawing to some degree upon its predecessors, was forward-looking in its psychological acuity and aesthetic finish. His work signaled the definitive collapse of attenuated Gothicism.
i. Poe and the Gothics The critical question, from an historical perspective, is the precise degree to which Poe was influenced by his Gothic predecessors. Surprisingly little systematic work has apparently been done on this issue. It has been well established that Poe was significantly influenced, in his early poetry, by such Romantics as Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and Thomas Moore, and we shall presently discuss a central influence of Coleridge in another direction; but the extent to which Poe was influenced—as a poet, short story writer, and critical theorist—by the work of Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Hoffmann, Irving, and many lesser figures of the generations preceding his own is by no means clear and perhaps, by the nature of the existing evidence, can never be clear. As a practising critic and reviewer, Poe had occasion to take note of many books coming off the British and American presses; but, of course, no new works by the leading Gothic writers appeared in the fifteen-year period of his major work as a book reviewer (roughly the years from 1835 to his death). More importantly, the entire Gothic movement was regarded as utterly passé, to the degree that Poe’s own (very different) work in this approximate vein was frequently criticised by reviewers, and even some of his own colleagues, as embarrassingly outmoded. The haunted castle, the terrors of the Inquisition, the perils of saintly heroines—all this was played out, finished; and Poe himself, in some of his passing critical remarks, reflected some of the scorn and ridicule that the Gothic movement was compelled to endure. There are frequent mentions of Horace Walpole in Poe’s existing body of criticism, but not one of them refers to him as the author of The Castle of Otranto. There is not a single reference to M. G. Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, or James Hogg in Poe’s essays and reviews. The only reference to Lewis comes in a late letter (26 June 1849), and it alludes to one of Lewis’s Gothic plays (449–50). There are two scornful references to Charles Robert Maturin, one of which is fairly early (the “Letter to B——,” 1836) and points to what Poe sees as a fundamental improbability in the very construction of Melmoth the Wanderer: “I should
no doubt be tempted to think of the devil in Melmoth, who labors indefatigably through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand” (ER 7). This remark is repeated with little change in a review six years later (ER 189). The “three octavo volumes” comment may also reflect Poe’s early contempt for long works, either in prose or in verse. In regard to Washington Irving, Poe remarks in an 1838 letter that “I can hardly say that I am conversant with Irving’s writings, having read nothing of his since I was a boy, save his ‘[The Conquest of] Granada’” and going on to say, “Irving is much overrated, and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and his surreptitious and adventitious reputation” (111–12). I have said that there are no references to Ann Radcliffe in Poe’s criticism (nor, in fact, in his relatively small body of surviving letters). But there is in fact one citation of her in his corpus—and it occurs, curiously enough, in a story. “The Oval Portrait” (1842) opens as follows: “The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appenines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe” (CW 2.662). The reference is clearly to The Mysteries of Udolpho, set in the Appenines; but the tone of the remark suggests an awareness that the general scenario of a gloomy and forbidding castle had become painfully hackneyed and all but unusable as a literary device. Are there no Gothic writers, then, whom Poe enjoyed? There are tolerably favourable passing mentions of Charles Brockden Brown, one of which (in an 1843 review of James Fenimore Cooper) cites him and several other writers as among the American authors of “more worthy and more artistical fictions” (ER 480). La Motte-Fouqué’s Undine is praised on several occasions, including an extensive 1839 review of a new edition of the work. In this review Poe actually declares the work to be “the finest romance in existence” (ER 257). But we have already seen that Undine is not central to the supernatural tradition, and its relevance to or influence on Poe does not appear significant. From Poe’s perspective, two Gothic writers of the previous generation were worth singling out—William Godwin and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe reviewed Godwin’s late work, Lives of the Necromancers (1834), when it
was first published, and he begins his review with high praise: “The name of the author of Caleb Williams, and of St. Leon, is, with us, a word of weight, and one which we consider a guarantee for the excellence of any composition to which it may be affixed” (ER 259). Much of what he writes about Godwin in this review could be applied just as accurately to himself: [There is] an air of mature thought—of deliberate premeditation pervading, in a remarkable degree, even his most common-place observations. He never uses a hurried expression, or hazards either an ambiguous phrase, or a premature opinion. His style therefore is highly artificial; but the extreme finish and proportion always observable about it, render this artificiality, which in less able hands would be wearisome, in him a grace inestimable. We are never tired of his terse, nervous, and sonorous periods—for their terseness, their energy, and even their melody, are made, in all cases, subservient to the sense in which they are invariably fraught. (ER 259) Burton R. Pollin (“Godwin and Poe”) makes a strong case for the influence of Godwin on Poe in a multiplicity of ways. Godwin’s Caleb Williams— which Poe, echoing a comment he maintained was derived from a letter to him by Charles Dickens, claimed Godwin “wrote . . . backwards” (ER 13) —could well have influenced Poe’s detective stories, which were themselves written (or, at least, conceived) backwards, in the sense that the denouement had to be devised before the mystery plot could be constructed to lead to it. Pollin goes on to say that this general sense of the importance of literary architecture is a significant lesson that Poe could have derived from Godwin, as well as the searching psychological analysis of character that we find in both Caleb Williams and the supernatural St. Leon. I have already noted that there is no explicit mention of Hoffmann in Poe’s entire extant corpus of work; but, as will become evident very quickly, Poe was unquestionably familiar with Hoffmann’s work—at least at second hand. Poe could not read German, so that he was reliant on translations or paraphrases of Hoffmann or criticism or reviews of his work. The very title of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque may have been derived indirectly from Hoffmann. I say indirectly because, more than a
century ago, Gustav Gruener pointed out a provocative phrase in Sir Walter Scott’s celebrated review of Hoffmann (“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition”): “In fact the grotesque in his compositions partly resembles the arabesque in painting” (14). In the preface to that volume (as I shall discuss in greater detail presently), Poe uses the phrase “phantasy-pieces”— a phrase that he wished to use for a collection of his tales that he was planning in 1842. It is likely, as Gruener maintains, that this title alludes to Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke of 1814–15. Some influences of specific Hoffmann tales on Poe’s own stories shall be noted in due course.
ii. Theory and Practice At this point it is essential for us to discuss some aspects of Poe’s critical theory, for in this manner we will be able to ascertain some phases of the influence of the Gothic tradition on Poe that we have hitherto touched upon only briefly. It is well known that Poe’s theory of poetry emphasised the aesthetic impossibility of a “long” poem (one that could not be read at a single sitting) and also stressed a “unity of effect”—the given emotional effect toward which every line, indeed every word, of a poem must contribute. The most concise expression of this latter idea occurs in the relatively late essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), his largely tendentious account of his conception and composition of “The Raven” (1845): “Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect” (ER 14). As for the former: If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to dispense with any thing that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief practical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. (ER 15)
Let us overlook the patent fallacies inherent in some aspects of this formulation—the fallacy, for example, that the “effect” of a work is “destroyed” merely because a few minutes, a few hours, or even an entire day, elapses between readings. In many ways it is a compelling and appealing manifesto, and it is worth noting that Poe here encompasses all literary works, not just poems, within its scope. Floyd Stovall long ago established that the essence of this theory of poetry was derived from Coleridge. Our chief concern at the moment is the “unity of effect” idea. We find the following in Coleridge’s Table Talk: “the great thing in poetry is, quocunque modo, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can’t connect them. There is no fusion,—just as it is in Seneca” (quoted in Stovall 145). In some of his critical writings Poe sometimes uses the phrase “unity of interest,” which he explicitly states is derived from the critical theory of August Wilhelm von Schlegel; but Stovall has convincingly argued that all Poe’s borrowings of Schlegel are likely to have been made through Coleridge. Poe’s theory of short fiction is manifestly adapted from his theory of poetry, both as regards length and as regards the “unity of effect.” Indeed, that phrase is apparently first used in an 1836 review of Dickens’s Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches (ER 205), and is more exhaustively enunciated in Poe’s celebrated 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. After noting acidly that “the ordinary novel is objectionable” chiefly because “it cannot be read at one sitting” and therefore “deprives itself . . . of the immense force derivable from totality,” Poe contrasts the effect of the short story: A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or
indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. (ER 572) There are some fallacies and anomalies here also: it turns the author into some kind of scientist carefully weighing some particular “effect” to be conveyed to the reader; and the idea that some given word might “indirectly” lead to the preconceived end seems to open the way to fairly broad interpretation as to what words, or even whole scenes or episodes, might be said to contribute to the ultimate effect. But these are small points. It is worth noting, however, that the above theory is not specific to the tale of supernatural horror or, indeed, any other genre of tale. How, then, does Poe justify his focus on horror, terror, the supernatural, and what would (much later) be termed psychological suspense? In the first place— as I shall discuss more extensively in the conclusion to this chapter—it cannot be said that most, or even a bare majority, of Poe’s tales are of this type; he had what to many readers and critics (myself included) a lamentable tendency to engage in what Lovecraft quite accurately labelled “his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour” (S 43). In the second place, Poe on a surprisingly few occasions did defend his taste for the macabre, chiefly as a quest for imaginative expansion. In a lengthy footnote to an article on N. P. Willis that constitutes a section of his late essay “The Literati of New York” (1846), Poe first destroys Coleridge’s purported distinction between fancy and imagination (“it is a distinction without a difference—without a difference even of degree”) and goes on to argue for the aesthetic value of works produced under their aegis: Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humour, have in common the elements combination and novelty. The imagination is the artist of the four. From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects such only as are harmonious; the result, of
course, is beauty itself—using the word in its most extended sense and as inclusive of the sublime. The pure imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity [the emphasis is Poe’s], only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as a general rule, partaking in character of sublimity or beauty in the ratio of the respective sublimity or beauty of the things combined, which are themselves still to be considered as atomic—that is to say, as previous combinations. . . . The range of imagination is thus unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test. (ER 1126–27) If this somewhat laborious passage tells us anything, it is the simple fact that horror, terror, weirdness, and the like can in fact be “beautiful” in the hands of a talented artist. Poe’s criticism of what he terms fantasy (whose “votaries . . . delight not only in novelty and unexpectedness of combination, but in the avoidance of proportion. The result is, therefore, abnormal, and, to a healthy mind, affords less of pleasure through its novelty than of pain through its incoherence” [ER 1127]) is, I maintain, directed at Hoffmann; in effect, what Poe is calling fantasy is what we would call the grotesque. But a somewhat earlier credo is much more relevant to our concerns. This is the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (CW 2.473–74). This rather aggressive manifesto begins by declaring that Poe wrote the stories in the collection “with an eye to this republication in volume form, and may, therefore, have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design” (a highly implausible remark—the tales were written over a period of nearly a decade—but one that seeks to extend Poe’s theory of the short story to an entire volume) and seeks to refute criticisms that Poe indulges too frequently in “‘Germanism’ and gloom”: Let us admit, for the moment, that the ‘phantasy-pieces’ now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is ‘the vein’ for the time being. To morrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. . . . But the truth is that, with a single exception [“Metzengerstein”], there is no one of these stories in
which the scholar should recognise the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call German, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German literature have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,—that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results. (CW 2.473) This is probably all we need to establish Poe’s theory of horror. The focus of the discussion is all too obviously Hoffmann, and Poe—whose temperament led him not merely to accuse others wildly of plagiarism but to be excessively sensitive to even the most remote accusations of the same sort as directed toward himself—was seeking to establish his declaration of aesthetic independence from Hoffmann and his predecessors. That pregnant line “I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul” is as precise an indication as anyone could want that Poe was seeking to explore the psychology of fear in his tales of terror, and his ability to do so with the most consummate skill and emotive power is what distinguishes his work from all that went before and a great proportion of what came after. Up to now we have been considering Poe’s theories of poetry and short fiction somewhat abstractly. There is certainly an argument to be made that Poe was merely making virtues out of necessities in his formulations, for not only are his own “long” poems—the early ventures Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf—markedly unsuccessful, but, as I shall examine presently, his longer tales and especially his one “novel,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, are scarcely less so from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Poe’s initial work in the short story dates to 1831, and it came at a particularly low point in his life: he had left the University of Virginia in 1826 after attending only a semester; he had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827 but was discharged two years later; with the help of his foster-parent, John Allan, he enrolled in West Point in 1830, but when Allan remarried and, through his wife’s influence, severed ties with Poe, the latter got himself expelled from West Point in 1831 and moved to Baltimore, where he had trouble finding work and complained of his threadbare clothes. A Philadelphia newspaper, the Saturday Courier, offered a prize for “the best AMERICAN TALE “ (Silverman 88), and Poe submitted five stories, none of which won the
contest but several of which impressed the judges, leading them to publish “Metzengerstein” and others in the paper. There is, then, a very real possibility that Poe took to short story writing at least in part as a means of making money at a critical point in his life, and that his later vaunting of the merits of short fiction and short poetry (it is likely that he absorbed Coleridge on this point in 1831 as well) was a kind of after-the-fact justification for the kind of work he hoped would bring him a steady income. (In this he proved to be in error, and the bulk of Poe’s meagre revenues came from his editorial duties for various magazines.) It should also be noted—as Michael Allen established in his important treatise Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (1969)—that Poe was significantly influenced by the short fiction that had begun to appear in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical that was widely read in the United States in the 1810s and 1820s. Poe himself observed, in his review of Twice-Told Tales, that the emotions of “terror, or passion, or horror” are best treated in prose rather than verse, and that “many fine examples” of such tales “were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood” (ER 573). Of course, Poe was clearly led by temperament to write the kind of supernatural and psychological horror fiction that he wrote; but to the extent that he found suitable models in the “sensational” fiction that Blackwood’s occasionally published, he radically improved upon them by emphasising the “unity of effect” and, to put it simply, by writing infinitely better—more cogently, more skilfully, and with a greater understanding of the psychological effects of the bizarre and the supernatural—than his predecessors or contemporaries. Coming, at last, to Poe’s actual fiction, we can readily identify those stories that most clearly reflect Gothic influence. Poe himself was, as we have seen, aware that “Metzengerstein” (Philadelphia Saturday Courier, 14 January 1832) was one of these. But here, as elsewhere, it would appear that the Gothic influence is manifested largely in the stage properties rather than in the underlying theme. While the general influence of The Castle of Otranto on “Metzengerstein” may be indisputable, as many scholars have maintained, it is noteworthy how few specific parallels to that novel, or any other Gothic novel, can be found in the story; in any case, if The Castle of Otranto is the principal influence, why does Poe refer to the story as “Germanic”? Whatever the case, the supernatural in “Metzengerstein” is used far more rigorously (and sparingly) than in most of its Gothic
predecessors. There are, in effect, three usages of the supernatural in the story. First, after the baron Metzengerstein has set fire to the stables of his rival, Count Berlifitzing, he is appalled to see that a tapestry depicting a horse bending over his erstwhile rider (an ancestor of the count who had been killed by an ancestor of Metzengerstein) has suddenly changed: To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its poisition. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his sepulchral and disgusting teeth. (CW 2.22–23) Truly enough, every word here is carefully chosen. What Poe is wishing to depict (and this is the second supernatural occurrence, assuming it can be logically separated from the first) is the transference of the soul of Count Berlifitzing (who has perished in the flames) to the horse. It is not surprising, therefore, that Metzengerstein becomes fascinated with a white horse that mysteriously appears out of the burning stables—the horse that ultimately plunges, with Metzengerstein on its back, into Metzengerstein’s own castle, now itself ablaze, later in the story. And here the third supernatural manifestation occurs: above the smoking ruins of Metzengerstein castle, “a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct colossal figure of—a horse” (CW 2.29). This is the last line of the story, and it integrates all the events of the tale, supernatural and otherwise, into a flawless unity. The grotesqueries of “King Pest” (Southern Literary Messenger, September 1835) would seem to suggest a Hoffmann influence, although T. O. Mabbott, Poe’s most learned editor, notes influences from several other sources, ranging from newspaper accounts to a scene in Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey (CW 2.238–39). This tale—the first of Poe’s works to produce a genuine (and relatively effective) amalgam of humour and horror—tells, in an almost Dali-esque manner, what happens when two sailors burst in
upon a bizarre gathering in a tavern most of whose members symbolically represent death in some fashion (one of them is wearing a coffin). But the Hoffmann influence is most pronounced on Poe’s most celebrated tale—“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1839). It is not merely the use of the name Roderick for the protagonist that highlights the influence of Hoffmann’s “The Entail,” but the fact that the latter deals, as does Poe’s story, with “some dark family secret locked within these walls” (264). There are, of course, other influences, as Mabbott notes (CW 2.393–94), and, if anything, the Hoffmann story may have served as a kind of horrible example of how not to write a compelling tale of supernatural horror. I say “may have,” because there is not much likelihood that Poe actually read the story, either in German or in English, as it was not translated at that time; rather, he probably derived a sense of the story from Sir Walter Scott’s long summary of it in “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” The “dark family secret” in Poe’s story resides not merely in the suggestion of incest between Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline (as the narrator notes, “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” [CW 2.410]), and not merely in her premature burial, but (as Lovecraft was the first to point out) the fact that the house, Roderick, and Madeline all share a common soul, and that their own dissolution spells the spectacular collapse of the house that concludes the tale. As a result, the title becomes a kind of pun, whereby “house” stands both for the physical structure and the family line. Roderick tips us off to this when he suspects that his own house is animate—a belief that goes well beyond his general view (itself a bit bizarre) “of the sentience of all vegetable things” (CW 2.408). But no analysis of the plot or even of the underlying theme of “The Fall of the House of Usher” can begin to convey its masterful collocation of words, images, and scenes to create a cumulative horror unlike anything that had ever been seen in supernatural literature before and has rarely been seen in the nearly two centuries that have followed. Other Gothic-influenced tales by Poe can be treated in short order. The detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Manuscript, March 1841) finds Dupin and the narrator living in a kind of Gothic castle—“a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate
portion of the Faubourg St. Germain” (CW 2.532). But all this is merely lagniappe, for the very premise of the tale is its explicability on other than supernatural grounds. “The Pit and the Pendulum” (The Gift, 1842) may be the ultimate refinement of the dungeon motif of Gothic fiction; in spite of its non-supernaturalism it is one of Poe’s masterworks in the maintenance of an unrelenting atmosphere of terror and its meticulous attention to the shifting moods and sensations of its hapless protagonist. Two late stories might be said to reveal some Gothic influence in the general setting and background. “The Cask of Amontillado” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, November 1846) is, of course, nonsupernatural; but its setting in Italy, the descent of the protagonists into some catacombs (corresponding to the Gothic dungeon), and its apparent temporal setting in the past (does the use of flambeaux suggest the mediaeval or Renaissance period?) all point to the lingering shadow of Gothicism. Much the same could be said of “Hop-Frog” (Flag of Our Union, 17 March 1849), although the location of the story is left deliberately vague. Some of the costumes worn by the king and his courtiers in the story are apparently derived from a description of a wedding party at the court of Charles VI of France in 1385, as found in Froissart’s chronicles (see Mabbott’s notes, CW 3.1343 and 1355n12), but there is nothing in the text to suggest a French setting. The remarkable thing about Poe’s work, in fact, is the very lack of substantive connexions with the Gothic movement. “Metzengerstein” was published only twelve years after Melmoth the Wanderer, but we are already in another world. It is not merely that Gothic fiction was, in Poe’s day, entirely dead as a popular literary fashion; it is that Poe felt the need to draw inspiration both from the world around him and from the wells of his own fevered imagination, and he did so in a way that permanently rendered Gothicism of the Walpole-Radcliffe-Lewis-Maturin sort a thing of the past.
iii. Death as Threshold The standard view that Poe was fixated on death is true only to the extent that he appears to have contemplated the threshold between life and death with something approaching wonder and horror. Poe’s religious beliefs were highly unorthodox, and there is little evidence that he was ever a Christian in the common understanding of the term; indeed, his late treatise Eureka (1848) makes it evident that, although he believed in some kind of guiding power in the universe, his views on the afterlife were anything but conventional. To be sure, such a work as the gorgeous prosepoem “Shadow—A Parable” (Southern Literary Messenger, September 1835) makes clear the fascination, perhaps the awe, that Poe felt in the face of death; for the Shadow of the title is nothing but an embodiment of death, as he makes clear in his ponderous utterance toward the end, “I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal” (CW 2.191). In this work “shadow” is used alternately—and on occasion simultaneously—in its literal signification and as a synonym for “shade,” as the narrator himself announces at the outset: “Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows” (CW 2.188). Poe’s reputation for morbidity may not be entirely undeserved, if we take “Berenice” (Southern Literary Messenger, March 1835) as representative of his work. This well-known story of a man fixated with his cousin’s teeth—to the point that, upon her death, he opens her tomb and removes them—would be dreadful enough; but there is the further implication that the narrator, Egaeus, performed his impromptu dental work while Berenice was still alive: for why is Egaeus’s hand “indented with the impress of human nails” (CW 2.218) after his graverobbing? Poe is right in declaring, in a letter, that the story “approaches the very verge of bad taste” (L 58), but the malign artistry of the tale simultaneously distracts us from the horror of the scenario through admiration of Poe’s skill and, paradoxically, enhances our loathing through that very skill. The groundwork has been meticulously arranged: Berenice’s tendency to lapse
into a comalike state that feigns death (“a species of elilepsy not infrequently terminating in trance itself—trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution” [CW 2.211]); the narrator’s fixation with Berenice’s teeth (“and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth [Poe’s emphasis] of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view” [CW 2.215]); and, in general, Egaeus’s own inclination toward monomania (“addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation” [CW 2.210])— all of which leads to the spectacular denouement that literally concludes the tale, when Egaeus returns from the tomb with a seemingly innocuous little “box” that “slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor” (CW 2.219). As for “Ligeia” (Baltimore American Museum, September 1838), it is difficult to speak of it save with superlatives. Poe recognized that it was a triumph; in a letter of early 1846 he states unequivocally that it was “undoubtedly the best story I have written” (L 309), while in an anonymous review of his own work he declares that it is “the most extraordinary of his achievements” (ER 869). The tale is nothing more or less than an exposition of the triumph of the will over death, as suggested by the epigraph from Joseph Glanvil (“Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will” [CW 2.310]). The narrator makes clear Ligeia’s unholy, uncanny, preternatural thirst for life: “I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing—it is this eager vehemence of desire for life—but for life—that I have no power to portray—no utterance capable of expressing” (CW 2.317– 18). And she manifests that desire to the extent of reanimating the corpse of her husband’s second wife, the weak-willed Rowena. This climax is, again, subtly anticipated when the narrator sees a “shadow” (CW 2.320) in Rowena’s room, recalling the fact that Ligeia herself once “came and departed as a shadow” (CW 2.311). Possibly the only perplexing issue, at least in terms of plot, is the inclusion in “Ligeia” of the poem “The Conqueror Worm,” originally published separately (in Graham’s Magazine, January 1843) and inserted into a revised version of the tale (New York New World, 15 February 1845). In the story it purports to be a work by Ligeia. Mabbott maintains that the
poem—a magnificent exposition of the omnipresence of death and the futility of human effort—is “a plain indication that the human will was too feeble to enable Ligeia to win” (CW 2.307); but, as a matter of fact, Ligeia does “win” by reanimating Rowena’s corpse—an event that constitutes (once again) the climax and the conclusion of the story. I hardly think we need take any notice of Joel Porte’s belief (as paraphrased by Scott Peeples) that the poem can be read “as Ligeia’s vision not of the plight of ‘man’ confronted by death but of the plight of woman confronted by ‘the conquering male organ’” (Peeples 53), one of the many absurd and preposterous interpretations to which this story has been subjected by overly ingenious critics. My humble feeling is that Poe simply didn’t want to waste this magnificent poem by letting it languish in a magazine or newspaper—although he did include it in The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Slight variants of the “Ligeia” idea can be found in two tales, one preceding and one following it. “Morella” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1835) tells of how the narrator marries the woman of that name, but then grows disenchanted with her. She dies, and the child she bore just before her death is also named Morella. This child also dies, and when the narrator goes to bury her in the family tomb he finds that the original Morella’s tomb is empty. Clearly the first Morella’s soul or spirit survived her death and transferred itself into the body of her own daughter. The identity of the names of the two Morellas somewhat telegraphs the punch; but Poe again ingeniously manages to delay the final confirmation of the supernaturalism of the story (the first Morella’s empty tomb) until the final line. Another case of soul-transference, of a highly unusual sort, occurs in “The Oval Portrait” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1842). Here a man who paints his wife’s portrait finds that she is gradually weakening while the painting is taking shape under his hands. In the end we are led to believe that in some inexplicable process the wife’s life-force has been transmitted into the painting, as the painter cries in the final line: “This [the portrait] is indeed Life itself!’ [and] turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!” (CW 2.666). I think we are to read this tale as symbolising the painter’s preference for his art over his love for his wife. Perhaps even “The Black Cat” (United States Saturday Post [Philadelphia], 19 August 1843) should be considered here, for here again
we appear to be dealing with metempsychosis. This tale brings “Metzengerstein” to mind in suggesting soul-tranference in animals. The protagonist/narrator opens the tale by convicting himself of perverseness (“this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only” [CW 3.852]), and the entire tale is an instantiation of this trait. Why else would he kill (by the particularly brutal means of hanging) a cat who loves him? Why else would he take in another black cat—also missing an eye, thereby duplicating its predecessor, one of whose eyes the protagonist had viciously cut out of its socket in a drunken fit? Why else would he seek to kill the new cat with an axe when it so clearly has affection for him, and why would he end up killing his wife with that axe when she strives to stop the protagonist from committing his act? The sealing up of the wife (and the cat) behind a wall in the cellar is ultimately detected by a police investigation. The numerous supernatural episodes in the story—as carefully worked out as any in Poe’s tales—are worth studying in detail. The first episode concerns the burning down of the protagonist’s house after his killing of the first cat. On a wall of the smoking ruin he sees something bizarre: “I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck” (CW 2.853). That this phenomenon is indeed an actual occurrence and not a figment of the protagonist’s imagination is confirmed by the fact that others see it as well; and the narrator’s own feeble attempts to account for it naturalistically are both physically and morally inadequate, as the protagonist himself unwittingly reveals: “Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience [my emphasis], for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy” (CW 3.853). Of course, the metempsychosis implied by the anomalous similarity of the second cat to the first is the core supernatural phenomenon of the tale; and Poe adds a skilful touch by having a splotch of white fur on the second cat slowly turn into the shape of a gallows—an anticipation of the protagonist’s ultimate fate. I am half inclined to think that the narrator’s unwitting walling up of the cat within the makeshift tomb where he seals up his wife is itself to be regarded as a supernatural event, for it would seem difficult for him not to notice what he has done to the cat. His ultimate selfbetrayal is, however, a result of the perverseness he noted at the outset, for
he would have escaped capture if, in the presence of the police, he had not tapped the wall with his cane in a “phrenzy of bravado” (CW 3.858). Poe’s most thrilling, and appalling, exercise in probing the ambiguous threshold of death is the late story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (American Review, December 1845). Poe was tickled at the fact that the sober narration and pseudo-scientific verisimilitude of the tale caused it to be accepted as the account of an actual event—another, and perhaps the most successful, of the series of hoaxes he perpetrated throughout his career. The story is Poe’s third dealing with the theories of Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), following “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, April 1844), which also involves reincarnation, and “Mesmeric Revelation” (Columbian Magazine, August 1844), in which a mesmeric patient speaks as if he has had some kind of experiential knowledge of God. Although the basic principles of mesmerism were later adopted in hypnotism, the philosophical or physiological basis for the practice, as propounded by Mesmer and his followers, rested upon fallacious views of “animal magnetism,” and Mesmer is now branded largely a charlatan. Poe, however, was fascinated with Mesmer’s conceptions, as witness his favourable comments on Chauncey Hare Townshend’s Facts in Mesmerism (1840; see CW 3.1024–25). Mercifully, the aesthetic effectiveness of “M. Valdemar” does not depend on its pseudoscientific foundations. The notion that a man, near death, can be held in a kind of suspended animation through what would now be called hypnosis is dreadful enough; that such a man could actually profess his own death (“Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead” [CW 3.1240]) is worse; that he could be held in this kind of life-in-death for seven months, at the end of which, when the mesmeric “pass” is lifted, the hapless individual collapses in liquescent horror, is surely the acme of physical horror. The final paragraph deserves to be quoted in full: As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity. (CW 3.1242–43)
(I agree with Lovecraft for preferring Poe’s original reading, “putrescence,” for his late revision, “putridity.”) I am not sure that any great depth of meaning need be read into the story; its succulent grisliness is perhaps the culmination of Poe’s use of the supernatural to expand the boundaries of imaginative fiction and to probe the ever-perplexing threshold between life and death. But Poe’s focus on death—its perplexities and ambiguities, its possible thwarting by the human will or by supernatural or scientific causation— should not mislead us into thinking that his imagination did not extend beyond the bounds of the human psyche. His hackneyed idea that the most poetical subject is the death of a beautiful woman (see ER 19) is as flawed as many of his other theoretical presuppositions (if for no other reason than in the fallacy of thinking that a human woman is necessarily the most beautiful object in all creation); but we need look no further than Eureka— however arid and outmoded its scientific and philosophical speculations may be—to realise that Poe encompassed the universe, and not merely the earth, within his imaginative range. Some of the most cosmic moments occur in poems early and late. Dreams prove to be a pathway to spectacular cosmic voyages beyond the bounds of mundane reality; as he wrote poignantly in the early poem “Dreams” (1827), “I have been happy—tho’ but in a dream” (l. 27). “Dream-Land” (Graham’s Magazine, June 1844) is perhaps the most eloquent and concentrated expression of this idea; its first stanza, familiar as it is, deserves quotation: By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named Night, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an utimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space—out of Time. (ll. 1–8) The late “A Dream within a Dream” (Flag of Our Union, 31 March 1849) uses the contrast of dream and reality to stress the transience and inconsequence of human life: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream” (ll. 10–11). One of Poe’s earliest tales, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Baltimore Saturday Visiter, 19 October 1833), is powerfully cosmic. It may well be the case, as Floyd Stovall has maintained (132–33), that the tale is heavily indebted, in numerous aspects of its plot and imagery, to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it is in no sense merely a prose exposition of that ballad. The supernaturalism of the tale extends in two directions. In the first place is the chilling suggestion that the ship, Discovery, upon which the narrator finds himself is somehow animate. Is it possible that it has grown over the years and centuries as it continues along its seemingly aimless course? The narrator thinks of a Dutch apothegm: “It is as sure . . . as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman” (CW 2.143). And this leads to the second phase of the tale’s supernaturalism; for it is plain that the ship has been at sea, with possibly the same hapless and appallingly aged crew, for centuries. It is here that the cosmicism of the tale truly manifests itself, as the narrator declares toward the end: The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their figures fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. (CW 2.144–45) Superficially similar, but really quite different in its focus, is “A Descent into the Maelström” (Graham’s Magazine, May 1841). Far more
realistic than the half-fantastic “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the story might perhaps be said to display a more restrained and disciplined use of the topographical imagination, but for that very reason it seems to have a somewhat weaker emotive impact than its predecessor. And yet, the first glimpse of the maelström is awe-inspiring: The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far back as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven. (CW 2.580) The subsequent account of a boat that becomes enmeshed in the maelström, hanging on its very edge but never falling into it, is one of Poe’s great excursions into quasi-supernatural suspense. Several of Poe’s most “cosmic” narratives are his prose-poems, in which he imbued natural forces with a kind of philosophical awe by embodying them in pseudo-allegorical figures. I have already noted the personification of Death in “Shadow—A Parable”; less effective, perhaps, is its companion-piece, “Silence—A Fable” (Baltimore Book, 1838), where “the curse of silence” (CW 2.197) expounded by the Demon of the piece appears symbolic of the cessation of consciousness that follows upon death. Somewhat similar, but more effective, is “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1839), one of several philosophical dialogues written by Poe. The subject of this vignette is nothing less than the destruction of the earth (by a comet), and the two spirits of the title refresh their memories on the final days of the planet’s life. Then the cataclysm comes: For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then—let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God!—then, there came a
shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all. (CW 2.461) “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1841) is a somewhat less cosmic rumination on death. But when we turn to “The Masque of the Red Death” (Graham’s Magazine, May 1842), we are in a very different realm altogether. Although the notion of personifying the plague would not seem the most promising of methodologies, Poe’s execution of this conception results in one of his great tales, a sustained prose-poem that somehow transfigures the hapless attendants of Prince Prospero’s ball, furiously seeking merriment while death encompasses them in an increasingly tight vise-grip, into symbols of the fragility of the entire human race when faced with overwhelming power of incurable disease. In this instance, the embodiment of a natural force—the plague—in the figure of a humanlike individual is itself generative of cosmic awe; for Prospero’s attempt to subdue it with a dagger is emblematic of the futility of our race’s flailing attempts to come to terms with the inexorable. And yet, the final paragraph of the tale reveals how much the terror and wonder of this story is engendered merely by the collocation of words: 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. (CW 2.676–77) iv. Supernatural and Non-Supernatural Revenge The notion of supernatual revenge is perhaps the oldest topos in the realm of supernatural horror, and we have already seen that it animates any number of Gothic novels, as it would animate an incalculable number of
novels and tales in the subsequent two centuries. As a means of linking the use of the supernatural to a satisfying moral outcome, the theme has undeniable appeal, however much it may contradict the actual workings of human society, where the guilty all too often escape the punishment that is their due. A substantial number of Poe’s tales utilise this topos, and at least a few of them do so in a way that infuses them with a novel moral and aesthetic element. But what really saves these stories is the high artistry and emotive power with which he expresses the idea in tale after tale. We have already seen that supernatural revenge is the underlying theme of “Metzengerstein”: right from the point when the baron Metzengerstein is called a “petty Caligula” (CW 2.21) his fate is sealed, even if it requires the metempsychosis of his victim to effect it. A far more ingenious, perhaps even paradoxical, use of the supernatural revenge motif can be found in “William Wilson” (The Gift, 1839), for of course the revenge in this imperishable tale of a doppelgänger is effected by the protagonist upon himself—if we assume that the double he encounters throughout his life is merely an aspect of himself. But the greatness of the story rests precisely in our inability to pinpoint the ontological status of this double. Does the fact that the double speaks only in a whisper indicate that he is merely Wilson’s conscience? Does the fact that both men, implausibly, share the same date of birth (19 January 1813—Poe’s actual birthday and four years after his date of birth [earlier texts gave the year as 1809 and 1811]) mean that the double has no independent existence? At the end the protagonist stabs the double with a sword, and the latter, finally abandoning his whisper, declares (the italics are Poe’s): “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me thou didst exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!” (CW 2.448). Now it appears that the protagonist is the double rather than the converse; and his “death” is not literal (for he is still there to tell us the tale of his “unpardonable crime” [CW 2.426]) but, as the second sentence makes clear, moral and social. “William Wilson”—full of provocative autobiographical details, ranging from the description of Poe’s early schooling at Stoke Newington in England to numerous points of character—is a masterwork in its ambiguity, its dancing on either side of the boundary separating supernatural from psychological horror, and in its unwavering progression from beginning to cataclysmic conclusion. Aside from “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of
Usher,” it would be difficult to find a better instance of the “unity of effect” than this tale. Much the same could be said of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Boston Pioneer, January 1843), even though it employs what has now become the hackneyed “first-person insane” trope. But Poe should not be held responsible for the overuse or incompetent use of this trope by clumsier hands; his own handling of it is unexceptionable. The root question in this well-known narrative is: Is this tale psychological or supernatural? That is, does the heart of the old man, whom the protagonist has killed for the most irrational of reasons (even though he “loved the old man,” he finds that “my blood ran cold” [CW 3.792] when he sees the old man’s eye—a reflection, presumably, of the ancient superstition of the evil eye), actually beat to such an extent that the protagonist is forced to pry up the floorboards under which he has buried the murdered corpse? It may all be very well to note that the protagonist’s assertion that “Above all was [my] sense of hearing acute” (CW 3.792), so that his detection of the heart beating, combined with his general mental disturbance, caused him to betray himself to the police. But observe the fact that the police themselves “chatted pleasantly, and smiled” (CW 3.797) at the very time when the heart presumably begins beating louder and louder. The protagonist later declares that “they were making a mockery of my horror!” (CW 3.797), but this is as implausible as the makeshift excuses of the protagonist of “The Black Cat” to account for the presence of the cat-shaped shadow on the wall of his burned house. I think we are obliged to believe that the beating of the heart is in fact in the protagonist’s mind, and that this tale is one of pyschological horror. In this sense, it too—like “William Wilson,” although in a very different manner— is a case of (non-supernatural) revenge perpetrated by the victim upon himself. Poe’s triumph of non-supernatural horror, however, is “The Cask of Amontillado” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, November 1846). I have already noted that, in spite of the relative lateness of this tale in Poe’s corpus of fiction, it appears to betray a residual influence of Gothicism in its Italian setting and its apparent temporal setting in the Middle Ages or Renaissance. The plot of this story is too well-known to require exposition, but perhaps some subtleties in Poe’s handling of the revenge theme have escaped some readers. The crux of the tale is not the unspecified “thousand injuries” (CW 3.1256) Montresor has endured from Fortunato, but whether
in fact the former has committed the “perfect crime” and gotten away with it. It would seem that he has; but then, what do we make of the final paragraph, just as Montresor is about to place the final brick that will seal up Fortunato forever in his makeshift tomb in the catacombs: “My heart grew sick—on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my labor. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!” (CW 3.1263). So Montresor is telling his story fifty years after the fact; but to whom? When he says at the outset, “You, who so well know the nature of my soul” (CW 3.1256), it can scarcely be doubted that he is talking to a father confessor—probably (as the last paragraph suggests), on his deathbed. But it is Montresor, not Fortunato, who has failed to “rest in peace”—not only because he experienced a twinge of remorse at the very time he committed the act (“My heart grew sick”—followed by a patently absurd attempt to account for it), but because, half a century after the fact, he still tells his story in a manner that reveals his own psychological trauma. Here again, the author of revenge has unwittingly bestowed it upon himself. From the mastery of “The Cask of Amontillado” it is a bit of a fall to the crude physical horror of “Hop-Frog,” but the story is not to be entirely despised. Here there is no ambiguity as to why the grotesque dwarf of the title exacted his revenge upon the king and his courtiers. All too obviously they ridiculed him and humiliated him—once making him “swallow this bumper to the health of your absent friends,” even though Hop-Frog “was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness” (CW 3.1347), a matter that Poe knew all too well—although the immediate trigger of Hop-Frog’s plan of revenge is his rage at the mistreatment of his beloved Trippetta, a beautiful female dwarf who had attempted to intercede with the king when Hop-Frog was being forced to consume the wine, whereupon the king “pushed her violently from him, and threw the contents of the brimming goblet in her face” (CW 3.1349). What is more, the king and his courtiers reveal a certain dimwittedness in allowing themselves to be covered with tar and flax in order that they may look like ourangoutangs, allowing Hop-Frog to set them aflame. The symbolism here is very obvious: since the king and his men treated Hop-Frog as somehow subhuman because of his dwarfism and other physical deformities, HopFrog has now returned the favour by reducing them to the level of apes, so
that (in Hop-Frog’s mind, at any rate) there is less moral culpability in killing them. Nevertheless, it can be noted that Poe reinvigorated the already stale motif of supernatural (and non-supernatural) revenge by infusing it with moral subtleties whereby the perpetrator of the revenge became its unwitting victim. The same cannot, regrettably, be said for the great majority of Poe’s successors.
v. Fantasy and Science One of the cleverest ways in which Poe sharpens the horror of his tales is by the very imprecision of their physical and temporal settings. This procedure is in striking contrast to much of the Gothic fiction that preceded him. I have noted that most of the Gothic novels are set in a fairly specific period in the past—purportedly to enhance the plausibility of the supernatural phenomena by placing them within an era and a society in which the widespread superstitiousness of the populace would theoretically render them more credible. But this device was doomed to failure, and on two grounds: first, the notion that our distant ancestors may have regarded a given supernatural event as plausible because of their own credulousness does not necessarily render that event any more plausible to its contemporaneous readers, much less to ourselves; and second, the temporal (and, often, geographical) remoteness of the setting militates against the immediacy of the effect of even the most outlandish and spectacular supernatural incursion. Poe was manifestly aware of these aesthetic difficulties, and he solved them not so much by specificity of time and locale but precisely by a cultivated vagueness, so that the reader’s attention becomes fixated almost exclusively upon the incidents of the tale and, perhaps most importantly, upon the effects of those incidents upon the psyches of its protagonists. This tendency on Poe’s part may have originated in his poetry. Aside from the transparently historical Tamerlane, many of Poe’s poems are set in a realm of his own making and gain a substantial proportion of their power thereby. “The Valley Nis” (1831; later revised as “The Valley of Unrest”) is perhaps the earliest example in Poe’s poetic corpus, introducing us (in the original version) to the valley of the title: There the moon doth shine by night With a most unsteady light— There the sun doth reel by day
“Over the hills and far away.” (ll. 43–46) “The City in the Sea” (first published in Poems [1831] as “The Doomed City”) is tremendously powerful in its imagery stressing the transience of humanity: Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest. ... Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie. So blend the turrets and shadows there That all seems pendulous in air, While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down. (ll. 1–5, 24–29) “The Haunted Palace” (American Museum, April 1839), with its superb transition from happiness to horror in the last two stanzas; “The Conqueror Worm,” the epitome of pessimism and of the futility of human striving; “For Annie” (Flag of Our Union, 28 April 1849), another encapsulation of pessimism with its doleful threnody on “The fever called ‘Living’” (l. 5)— all these and others gain much of their strength from indefiniteness of setting. This lack of specificity is tied indirectly to Poe’s theory of poetry
(and, hence, short fiction writing), in the sense that the paring away of such mundane details of locale clears the way for the intense focus on the literal and symbolic action of the poems. But these poems are all eclipsed by “Ulalume” (American Review, December 1847), regarded by many as Poe’s greatest poem and his most successful venture (not excluding “The Raven,” which in spite of its familiarity retains its emotive power) in the “death-ofa-beautiful-woman” trope. Its first stanza is imperishable: The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crispéd and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere: It was night, in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. (ll. 1–9) Easily parodied as this may be, it is still capable of transporting readers, by a kind of verbal hypnosis, into a never-never-land of the imagination that prepares them for the supernatural incidents to follow. In the fiction, the tendency toward deliberate imprecision of setting, both temporal and topographical, was gradual. In “Metzengerstein” Poe unambiguously states in the second paragraph that the tale is set in Hungary and, while an explicit temporal setting is not noted, the use of noble protagonists leaves little doubt that the narrative purports to relate events several centuries in the past. “MS. Found in a Bottle” adopts the device of geographical remoteness to render the supernatural events plausible. It also utilises what would later be a much-ridiculed means of establishing a partial imprecision of time: “After many years spent in foreign travel, I
sailed in the year 18—, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands” (CW 2.135). But this setting in Indonesia, itself sufficiently remote, is substantially compounded once the protagonist boards the supernatural Discovery, whose ultimate goal or mission is shrouded in deliberate obscurity. The spectacular image of “stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe” (CW 2.145) suggests a descent into the far south, perhaps in the direction of Antarctica; but the ship’s destination is the least interesting feature of the narrative. “Berenice” is an interesting case. There is virtually no indication of either the temporal or geographical setting of the tale, and all we are left with are the manifestly artificial names of the two protagonists, Egaeus and his cousin, Berenice. The fact that, as Mabbott points, out the former is “the name of Hermia’s father in Midsummer Night’s Dream” (CW 2.208) may be of significance, as indicating that we are in some kind of fantasy realm. Berenice, of course, is the name of an historical figure (the wife of King Ptolemy III Euergetes of Egypt [third century B.C.E.]) who was then incorporated into some late Graeco-Roman myths articulated by Callimachus, Ovid, and others; but we are scarcely to think of the tale as being set in antiquity, especially with the citation of a sixteenth-century Italian writer, Caelius Secundus Curio, whose book De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei Egaeus reads. Suffice it to say that the story’s imprecision of setting focuses our attention exclusively on Egaeus’s increasingly frenzied narration of his own shifting emotional state. “Ligeia” is similarly almost wholly lacking in specificity of setting, but the full name of the protagonist’s second wife—“Lady Rowena Travanion, of Tremaine” (CW 2.321)—suggests a mediaeval setting, perhaps fittingly so given Poe’s derivation of the name from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, where a Rowena figures significantly. As for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” its celebrated opening paragraph deliberately fails to establish the house and its locale with any kind of precision, instead opting to stress the imaginative and emotional overtones the house inspires: During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a
singularly dreary tract of country . . . I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows —upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul . . . (CW 2.397) The time of year is autumn because, perhaps, autumn is the prelude of the death of the year, just as the narrator arrives at the House of Usher in the period just prior to its dissolution. It goes without saying that Poe’s topographical vagueness is triggered at least in part by the plain fact that no actual locale could ever feature the collocation of details he wishes to emphasise, in particular the bizarre feature of the “barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (CW 2.400—a detail, however, borrowed in part from Hoffmann’s “The Entail”), a suggestion of the house’s instability that anticipates the cataclysmic denouement. In regard to the temporal setting, however, it is worth noting that, even though the house’s “principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity” (CW 2.400), the fact that Roderick Usher at one point played a “wild air from the last waltz of Von Weber” (CW 2.405) surprisingly places the narrative within a period perhaps no less than ten years prior to its first publication, for the death of Karl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) was a relatively recent occurrence. One could continue the catalogue indefinitely. It is of interest, from this perspective, that “A Descent into the Maelström” is much more precise in its geographical setting—the fjords of Norway—than many of Poe’s fantastic tales, for the obvious reason that the maelström in question is specific to this region. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” conversely, is a tour de force precisely because not a single name or place—not the name of the protagonist, nor that of the “old man” he kills, nor the city or country in which the tale takes place—is cited. The result, again, is an almost unendurable fixation upon the bare events of the narrative—or, more precisely, on the narrator’s unreliable account of those events. Somewhere between these extremes is “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the mention of “inquisitorial voices” (CW 3.681) makes clear that the Inquisition is somehow involved, as does the later citation of “the horrors of Toledo” (CW 3.685), as that Spanish city was a focus of the Inquisition’s activities. But it
is only in the final two sentences that we learn that Toledo has been sacked by the French—an event that occurred in 1808, suddenly thrusting us from what could easily have been a mediaeval or Renaissance temporality to something approaching contemporaneousness. As if to counteract the topographical and temporal imprecision of many of his tales of psychological and supernatural horror (a feature that does not apply to his tales of ratiocination, where specificity of time and place is emphasised), Poe indirectly established the contemporaneousness of many of his narratives by the use of science and philosophy. The point is important as distinguishing Poe from his Gothic predecessors, who rarely placed their narratives in the contemporary world. Although the burden of Poe’s early “Sonnet—To Science” (1829) is that science has impoverished the world by its destruction of myth, Poe was keen on keeping abreast of the latest developments in science and in infusing them into his tales. We have already seen that mesmerism plays a role in several stories. Poe also reveals, in his essays and reviews, a credulous belief in phrenology (see ER 329–32). The late “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (Flag of Our Union, 14 April 1849) is worth studying here, for this story—Poe’s response to the California gold rush of 1849—is his ultimate refinement of the “philosopher’s stone” topos of Gothic fiction. Von Kempelen’s discovery of the secret of making gold from lead is couched, not in terms of alchemy, but in terms of the most advanced science, making the story a kind of protoscience-fiction tale. Dispensing scornfully with the “old chimera of the philosopher’s stone” (CW 3.1363), the narrator blandly quotes what appears to be Von Kempelen’s utterance (the italics are Poe’s) that “pure gold can be made at will, and very readily, from lead, in connection with certain other substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown” (CW 3.1364), but cagily refrains from giving any precise formula. The story, in its excessively sober journalistic narration, is the last of Poe’s hoaxes, and a prose pendant to his poem on the same subject, “Eldorado” (Flag of Our Union, 21 April 1849). In spite of his frequently stated hostility to didacticism, Poe was not immune from the prevailing tendency to regard fiction as somehow frivolous or illegitimate unless it conveyed something in the way of facts, information, or philosophical truth. I refer here not to Poe’s hoaxes—which purport to be true accounts of bizarre, unusual, or fantastic events, and are really a facet of his satirical writing, the object of satire being the
credulousness of his readers—but to a wide array of tales whose ponderous openings seek to establish some broad philosophical axiom of which the narratives themselves are (or implicitly claim to be) exemplifications. His very first published tale, “Metzengerstein,” begins: “Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages” (CW 2.18). Then there is the celebrated opening of “Berenice”: “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform” (CW 2.209). The entire paragraph must be read to perceive the degree of Poe’s expression of hopeless pessimism. But in this and in other instances, there is a question whether the subsequent narratives do in fact constitute a real-world “proof” of the axiom in question. Is Poe here also teasing the reader by enunciating a cosmic truth, only to have the events of the story fail to live up to it? How, really, is the narrator’s obsession with Berenice’s teeth an expression of the idea that “Misery is manifold”? One begins to suspect satire here also—not in the sense that the tale itself is to be regarded as some kind of self-parody, but in the sense that the didactic implications of the opening are confounded by the actual narrative, by the end of which we have in fact forgotten the weighty philosophical axiom with which the tale opened. Entire narratives are essaylike in construction and tone; but here too there are some oddities. Two of the three stories to be considered here —“The Man of the Crowd” (Casket, December 1840) and “The Premature Burial” (Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 31 July 1844)—partly, and no doubt deliberately, subvert their messages by the skilful introduction of anomalies and ambiguities. Both tales deal with what would come to be regarded as one of Poe’s signature achievements as a writer, and specifically as a writer of horror (not necessarily supernatural) fiction—the psychology of fear. While there is no doubt that Poe’s searching examination of this topos is one of his great contributions to the literature of terror, and one that wellnigh revolutionised the subsequent history of the field, these two stories treat the matter in peculiar ways. In “The Man of the Crowd,” the first-person narrator finds himself fascinated by observing, from a comfortable seat in a coffeehouse in London, a man—“a decrepid [sic] old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age” (CW 2.511)—who continually appears in the crowds of passersby and appears to be afraid to be alone. Presently he takes to following the man, finding that the latter appears to have no fixed purpose in his peregrinations: “He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a
wild and vacant stare” (CW 2.513). The narrator follows the man all night, including a venture into “the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime” (CW 2.514); in the end he can only conclude: “This old man . . . is the type and genious of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds” (CW 2.515). It is only at this point that we realise that the man of the crowd has not uttered a word in explanation of his behaviour, and that all the motives and goals attributed to that behaviour have come from the narrator—who could be (and probably is) quite wrong about the man’s motivations, since it is difficult to credit that merely tracking a man for a day and a night, without interviewing him or probing the rationale for any of his actions, could in any way lead to a plausible account of his behaviour. In effect, the narrator is a kind of proto-Dupin (the story was written just before “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), but, unlike that pioneering detective tale, there is no way to confirm that the narrator’s assumptions regarding the man of the crowd are in any sense accurate. As for “The Premature Burial,” the fact that it appeared in a newspaper, and that for the great proportion of its narrative it reads like a sober essay, replete with actual instances of premature inhumation, has apparently led many to believe that Poe is speaking of his own fears. But in fact a (presumably) fictional narrative, and narrator, do emerge toward the end of the story—one in which the narrator, although professing that he took “elaborate precautions” (CW 3.965) against premature burial while travelling, appears to find himself in just such a predicament, only to discover that he is in a very narrow bed on a boat. The result is dramatic: . . . out of Evil proceeded Good; for their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. “Buchan” I burned. I read no “Night Thoughts”—no fustian about church-yards—no bugaboo tales— such as this. (CW 3.968–69; emphasis in original)
This delicious self-dynamating of his own narrative makes one strongly suspect parody. It perhaps cannot be denied that Poe himself was endowed with a fear of premature burial, since it crops up in story after story (most notably “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”), but Poe here is perhaps having a bit of fun at those of his critics who chastised him for dwelling so obsessively on doom and gloom. In effect, he is having his cake and eating it too: his depiction of the fears of premature burial are enough to chill the stoutest hearts— The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes of the damp earth—the clinging to the death garments—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm—these things . . . carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. (CW 3.961) But that self-refuting ending shows Poe stepping back from the horrors of his own creation with a knowing wink and nod. The final essaylike story in the Poe corpus, “The Imp of the Perverse” (Graham’s Magazine, July 1845), is a bit more orthodox. We have seen that Poe had already touched upon the element of perverseness in “The Black Cat.” He here elaborates exhaustively on the subject, spending perhaps twothirds of the story in a searching examination of this psychological malady and only toward the end declaring, in the guise of his first-person narrator, “You will easily perceive that I am but one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse” (CW 3.1224). He goes on to tell how he had planned the perfect murder and executed it, but then must fight the urge to confess—a matter that he explicitly likens to a ghost: “And now my own casual self-suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered—and beckoned me on to death” (CW 3.1225). Of course, in the end he does confess. In this particular context, the imp of the perverse appears to function as the result of a process of socialisation that impels one to feel guilt at the commission of a crime, and so to confess
it; but Poe’s psychological acuity in identifying this trait—the fact that we “perpetrate [certain actions] merely because we feel that we should not” (CW 3.1223)—is undeniable. If I have not spoken sufficiently about what may well be the most signal attribute of Poe’s work, either in supernatural or psychological horror—the meticulous, painstaking, and actually horrifying analysis of the disturbed psyches of his most noted protagonists, from Egaeus to Roderick Usher to the unnamed narrators of “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—it is because this trait is singularly difficult to analyse without a line-by-line study of the given narratives. On occasion Poe’s narrators will assert an initial rationality that will be progressively undermined as the tale progresses (“MS. Found in a Bottle”: “Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of the truth by the ignes fatui of superstition” [CW 2.135]); in other cases, as we have seen in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator’s grasp of sanity and reality seems at the very outset to be severely in question. Poe augments this subversion of his protagonists’ psyches by a manner of story construction whereby the climax of the tale occurs simultaneously with the protagonists’ psychological collapse, a feature that renders both his supernatural tales and his tales of psychological terror the more powerful and credible. It is facile to say that Poe drew his portraits of disturbed psyches chiefly or even largely from his own mental instability— an assumption that perhaps deliberately seeks to minimise the manifest artistry of Poe’s analysis of the conclave of eccentrics he puts on stage.
vi. The Longer Tales Poe’s hostility to the long poem (and, by implication, to the novel) did not prevent him from writing the occasional novella or even short novel. We are here dealing with three items—“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1835), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine, January–June 1840). All three are variously unsatisfactory. The first is a broad parody of the tale of “extraordinary adventure,” although Poe makes determined efforts to convey the scientific plausibility of the Dutch protagonist’s voyage from Rotterdam to the moon, where he first comes upon “diminutive habitations” (54) and then the occupants of those habitations: “a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable, or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance, but stood, like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo” (55). But although Pfaall spent a full five years on the moon, he provides only the most fleeting hints of the culture and civilisation of the people he encountered there, promising further revelations at a later date. Poe gives the game away at the end by noting that “Hans Pfaall himself, the drunken villain, and the three very idle gentlemen styled his creditors, were all seen, no longer than two or three days ago, in a tippling house in the suburbs, having just returned, with money in their pockets, from a trip beyond the sea” (57). And the fact that, at the beginning of the tale, we are informed that Pfaall’s balloon was made of “dirty newspapers” (13) suggests at the very least a parody of flamboyant newspaper writing. It is all very amusing, but manifestly inferior to “The Balloon Hoax” (obviously not titled as such in its first appearance—[New York] Extra Sun, 13 April 1844), a much more skilful satire on both journalism and science. As for “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” it is perhaps the most disappointing tale in the entire Poe corpus, and for that reason has been largely, and on the whole justly, ignored. One would scarcely have thought Poe the author of this tiresome and unimaginative work had he not admitted
it himself in a letter: “I can give you no definitive answer (respecting the continuation of Rodman’s Journal,) until I hear from you again” (L 132). This letter was written to William Burton, the owner of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, who had just fired Poe as editor but wanted Poe to continue the serialisation of the novel or novella; obviously, Poe declined. Even with the understanding that the work is a fragment, there is very little to say about it; it seeks merely to capitalise on the interest in western exploration by maintaining that Rodman had travelled across the Rocky Mountains in 1791–94, years before the Lewis and Clark expedition. But what Rodman saw on his travels is unremarkable—not surprisingly, since Poe himself never travelled west of the Mississippi River and was heavily reliant on earlier travel accounts for the details of the Rodman expedition. And now we come to Arthur Gordon Pym. This work certainly has its devotees and has inspired a substantial amount of analysis from critics who continue to be drawn to its “enigmatic” features, but it is difficult to declare it anything but an aesthetic failure. Although it is tangential to our study because it contains no explicit elements of the supernatural (except perhaps toward the end), it is worth studying in some detail. Set in 1827, the short novel recounts the unplanned voyage taken by Pym, who with his friend Augustus Barnard boards the Grampus only to be caught up in a mutiny, during which Pym, Barnard, and one Dirk Peters take charge of the ship. After various horrifying (but purely physical) episodes, including cannibalism, the survivors are picked up by the Jane Guy, which is making its way to Antarctica. But this ship also suffers a sad fate, captured by bloodthirsty natives, leaving only Pym and Peters as survivors. These two manage to escape in a canoe. They enter a “region of novelty and wonder” (236), but very shortly thereafter the work ends, and an editor’s note declares that Pym died before completing his narrative. If assessed as a straightforward adventure story, Pym has numerous flaws. First and foremost is the fundamentally incomplete nature of the narrative. Not only does the novel end abruptly, but no explanation is provided as to how Pym managed to get out of the clutches of the vicious natives and return to civilisation. Pym’s convenient death allows Poe to forego the effort to tie up a number of loose ends and, more significantly, to draw the narrative together into some kind of thematic unity. The exact date and manner of Poe’s composition of the work have never been satisfactorily explained and perhaps cannot be, in the absence of documentary evidence.
Two instalments of the novel appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (January and February 1837), but these take us only into the middle of chapter 4 (out of 25 chapters); it is unclear how much more Poe had written by this time, but I doubt that he had written the entirety of the work. (Poe’s one comment on the story in surviving correspondence is his offhand comment that Pym was “a very silly book” [L 130].) There is reason to think that Poe, wishing to establish himself as a writer of fiction, hastily completed the work and rushed it into print (it was published by Harper & Brothers in July 1838) after the failure of his attempt to land Tales of the Folio Club, which had been rejected by a Philadelphia publisher in 1835. The novel certainly lacks anything approaching a “unity of effect”: at times it adopts the crudest manner of extending a narrative—the diary (also used in “Hans Pfaall” and “Julius Rodman”)—then abruptly drops that device for orthodox narration. It is entirely lacking in thematic focus. Some commentators have maintained that the concluding portions, where Pym and Peters first encounter a realm where everything is black, then one where everything is white, is meant to reflect on the issue of slavery; but even if this is the case, what position we are to assume Poe takes on the question, and what bearing this has on the overall thematic coherence of the novel, are by no means clear. To be sure, individual passages in the novel are striking and horrific— although, as I have noted, in a purely physical manner. At the outset, Pym, a stowaway, is enclosed in a very narrow space to conceal his presence aboard the Grampus; but this makeshift womb, from which a theoretically “new” Pym might be born, quickly comes close to being a tomb, as the mutiny on deck prevents any food or other aid to come to him, resulting in a near-death experience. The cannibalism scene is pretty dreadful, but it is artfully anticipated by the Grampus’ encounter with a Dutch ship (clearly a kind of Flying Dutchman) whose crew and passengers are all dead; in one particularly loathsome touch, a seagull drops a morsel of human flesh on board the Grampus. The one means of saving Pym from aesthetic condemnation is to declare that it is a parody of some sort; and, indeed, a compelling case can be made for such, although I am not entirely convinced that it will cause us to elevate our opinion of the novel significantly. The fact is that the novel is full of details that make no sense—but the grisly nature of the overall scenario prevents our awareness of the fact until we have had time to reflect
on the novel’s paradoxes and inconsistencies. To take a single example: At one point during Pym’s confinement in the hold of the Grampus, he comes upon a note, written by Barnard in his own blood: “I have scrawled this with blood—your life depends upon lying close” (92). Pym manages to read a portion of this note in the dark, although he had previously fallen into despair because, looking at the reverse of the paper, he ascertained that it was blank. Later, however, we are informed that the paper was “a duplicate of [a] forged letter” (91), so that its reverse could not have been blank. There are countless such instances—far too many to assume that Poe, the most meticulous of writers, could have failed to notice them. We are left, then, with the assumption that Pym is another of Poe’s deadpan hoaxes and satires—a hoax because, as its lengthy title page laboriously declares, it purports to be a true narrative by Pym, and a satire on careless readers whose emotions are so overwhelmed by its hideous accounts of mutiny, death, cannibalism, and savagery that they fail to notice its manifest internal contradictions. Nevertheless, even if this reading of Pym is sound, it fails fully to rescue the work from its aesthetic deficiencies. Poe was wise to stick to short stories from this juncture forward.
vii. Conclusion Certain fastidious critics, from Henry James to Harold Bloom, have questioned the greatness of Poe, both as a poet and as a fiction writer, chiefly because of their apparent distaste for his occasionally florid, flamboyant, and seemingly artificial prose style. On this question much may be said beyond the obvious fact that the enjoyment of or displeasure in this kind of Asianic style is largely a matter of temperament. But it is of interest to see what Poe himself said of his own prose. We find this remarkable assessment in his anonymous review of his Tales (1845): The style of Mr. Poe is clear and forcible. There is often a minuteness of detail; but on examination it will always be found that this minuteness was necessary to the development of the plot, the effect, or the incidents. His style may be called, strictly, an earnest one. And this earnestness is one of its greatest charms. A writer must have the fullest belief in his statements, or must simulate that belief perfectly, to produce an absorbing interest in the mind of his reader. That power of simulation can only be possessed by a man of high genius. It is the result of a peculiar combination of the mental faculties. It produces earnestness, minute, not profuse detail, and fidelity of description. It is possessed by Mr. Poe, in its full perfection. (ER 873) Let us overlook the no doubt tongue-in-cheek self-flattery of the passage. It is not likely that many readers (especially hostile ones) will conclude that Poe’s style is “clear and forcible,” but as a matter of fact the overall thrust of his remarks is that the style is meant to suit the subject-matter, and this it does flawlessly, even triumphantly. All Poe’s critical writing on the craft of poetry or fiction indicates that his prime goal was to create a powerful emotional impact upon his readers; and his manipulation of language was his chief means of effecting that end. The gradual accretion of cumulative power is one of the hallmarks of his prose narratives; Poe early mastered
the ability to modulate the emotional cadence of his prose to create an overwhelming crescendo of horror. “Ligeia” is perhaps the most notable accomplishment in this regard—consider a portion of the final paragraph, where the narrator finally comes to the realisation that the corpse of Rowena has been reanimated by the spirit of Ligeia: Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the wings of the midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. “Here then, at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA!” (CW 2.330; italics and small capitals in original) Lurid and overwritten as this appears to be out of context, it is exactly suited to the cataclysmic conclusion that Poe has so artfully orchestrated. That final sentence, with its telling use of polysyndeton and anaphora, point to the careful use of prose-poetic devices to augment the emotive effect of his climaxes. The prose rhythms of such tales as “Morella,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Silence—A Fable,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are unsurpassed in their aesthetic polish. Not a word could be changed or displaced without spoiling the entire narrative. Moreover, as Michael Allen has pointed out (141f.), Poe modified the floridity of his style in the last decade or so of his career, so that such narratives as “The Descent into the Maelström,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and even “The Tell-Tale Heart” are written with something approaching the spareness of Swift or Hemingway. Poe was possibly responding to criticisms of his earlier prose manner; but whatever the case, the evolution of his style from flamboyance to concision should be noted. We now have to return to an anomaly we noted at the outset of this chapter—the fact that Poe’s tales of supernatural and psychological horror (even including his detective tales) comprise probably less than half of his collected output of fiction; the balance are comic and satirical tales, nowadays generally little read. The matter is not, strictly speaking, of direct
relevance to the history of supernatural fiction, or even to the understanding of Poe’s supernatural work; but it may be of interest to determine whether Poe in fact saw all his fictional work as a unity, and, if so, how he did so. Perhaps a single comment in his essay on N. P. Willis—which we have already seen is one of the few occasions where Poe attempts to provide an aesthetic justification for weird fiction—might suffice: “Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humour, have in common the elements combination and novelty” (ER 1126). The point is made somewhat more amply in his anonymous review of his Tales: The evident and most prominent aim of Mr. Poe is originality, either of idea, or the combination of ideas. He appears to think it a crime to write unless he has something novel to write about, or some novel way of writing about an old thing. He rejects every word not having a tendency to develop the effect. Most writers get their subjects first, and write to develop it. The first inquiry of Mr. Poe is for a novel effect—then for a subject; that is, a new arrangement of circumstance, or a new application of tone, by which the effect shall be developed. And he evidently holds whatever tends to the furtherance of the effect, to be legitimate material. Thus it is that he has produced works of the most notable character, and elevated the mere “tale,” in this country, over the larger “novel”—conventionally so termed. (ER 873) The succulent pun on the two senses of “novel” is delightful. “Novelty” may be a somewhat vague and imprecise conception on which to base a theory of fiction, but in its way it seems to have served as the foundation for much of Poe’s work. The novelty of Poe’s restricting supernatural (and psychological) horror to the intense and condensed mode of the short story; his virtual invention of the genre of the detective story; his radical departure from the thematic and tonal conventions of Gothicism—all these and other elements justify Poe’s self-praise for novelty and originality. The idea of “novelty” is not, in spite of Poe’s comment above, in itself sufficient to account for his extensive use of humour, parody, and satire in a broad spectrum of tales that have not been studied here. One manner of accounting for it may come from a study of his abortive story collection,
Tales of the Folio Club. In a letter Poe described the broad outline of the volume, which by 1836 had evolved into seventeen stories: “They are of a bizarre and generally whimsical character, and were originally written to illustrate a large work ‘On the Imaginative Faculties’” (L 103). Here again the concepts of imagination, strangeness, and humour are fused, as if they are all outgrowths of the same aesthetic stimulus. The framework of Tales of the Folio Club was explained by Poe as follows: I imagine a company of 17 persons who call themselves the Folio Club. They meet once a month at the house of one of the members, and, at a late dinner, each member reads aloud a short prose tale of his own composition. The votes are taken in regard to the merits of each tale. The author of the worst tale, for the month, forfeits the dinner & wine at the next meeting. The seventeen tales which appeared in the Mess are supposed to be narrated by the seventeen members at one of these monthly meetings. As soon as each tale is read—the other 16 members criticise it in turn—and these criticisms are intended as a burlesque upon criticism generally. (L 103–4) That final remark has been taken by some critics as suggesting that even Poe’s grim tales of supernatural and psychological horror are themselves meant parodically. I do not believe we are forced to this conclusion: even though G. R. Thompson (Poe’s Fiction) has made a compelling case for an extensive use of Romantic irony in the horror tales, Michael Allen has countered that the most we can conclude from the inclusion of such tales as “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “Berenice” in the Tales of the Folio Club schema is an indication of Poe’s “tortured uncertainty” (124) about the value of such “sensational” narratives, at least at this early stage of his career. His horror tales are written with such a sense of conviction, and such a sense of their “unity of effect,” that they must be taken largely at face value as excursions into the darker regions of human consciousness and the terrors of the external world. The fact is that many of Poe’s humorous tales are parodies—and parodies of other literary works, especially those appearing in Blackwood’s. This applies not only to such obvious send-ups as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” or “Loss of Breath” (subtitled “A Tale Neither In nor
Out of ‘Blackwood’” [CW 2.61]), but many others. What this means is that these stories are, in effect, an extension of Poe’s work as a literary critic— especially as pertains to his harsh condemnations of plagiarism, verbosity, triteness, and the many other literary flaws he found, or thought he found, in the books that crossed his desk. In employing the element of “novelty” he strove to avoid these gaffes, even at the risk of producing work whose unprecedented intensity of horror and gruesomeness evoked criticism of its own from the squeamish. I repeat that Poe’s work is the true beginning of weird literature. In his day most of the Gothic novels had already become hopelessly passé, and by the end of his creative life he had given them a fitting burial by showing that horror can be conveyed with infinitely greater force and impact by a careful analysis of the psychology of terror, a structure that leads inexorably from the first word to the cataclysmic conclusion, and a “novelty” of subject-matter that puts in the shade the stilted Gothic villains or chainclanking ghosts or hackneyed devils of Gothicism. The true novelty of Poe’s work comes from the innovative supernatural elements found in his greatest tales—the animate ship of “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the psychic vampire of “Ligeia,” the soul shared by house and inhabitants in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the supernatural cat in “The Black Cat,” the hideous life-in-death of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and so forth. And Poe should also be given credit for avoiding what were by then the already hackneyed ghosts, vampires, and demons of the earlier Gothic movement. The tales of psychological terror are no less original—the bizarre monomania of “Berenice” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the mental aberrations hinted at in “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Premature Burial,” the paradox of revenge in “The Cask of Amondillado.” But Poe’s greatest novelty—and the one facet of his work that his would-be successors and disciples have found the greatest difficulty in duplicating—is the excellence of his output. His greatest tales are imperishable contributions to the literature of the world as they are towering landmarks in the literature of terror. The psychological acuity of his stories and their impeccable concision and unity set a model and a standard that few have equalled and none have surpassed. In their totality they constitute all that is needed to justify the tale of terror as a distinctive and viable branch of literature.
VI. Mid-Victorian Horrors The influence of Poe was by no means quick to manifest itself, even though his works were widely disseminated in the English-speaking world during and after his lifetime, with Baudelaire contributing significantly to his European reputation with skilful translations beginning in 1852. In large part, however, the supernatural writing in the middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an extension of Gothicism that harked back to the novels of the early part of the century. Increased venues for short story writing on both sides of the Atlantic did lead to a substantial increase in supernatural work in short form, especially in the United States, but many writers embodied the supernatural in novelettes or novellas that ill conceal their verbosity and absence of tight construction. We will see some slight influence of contemporary scientific developments upon the weird work of this period: it was, let us recall, in 1859 that Darwin unwittingly created an intellectual revolution with The Origin of Species. Indeed, a passage in an otherwise undistinguished work by Amelia B. Edwards, “The Phantom Coach” (1864), betrays the extent to which some supernatural writers were forced to go on the defensive because scientific advance was making conventional ghosts and goblins increasingly implausible and even the butt of jest: “The world,” he said, “grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief in apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon
the minds of men so long and so firmly? . . . The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces is condemned as a a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool.” (67) There is no need to point out the fallacies of this position if taken as a straightforward intellectual utterance. What is significant is the degree to which scientific advance was requiring supernatural writers to become ever more subtle and indirect in their display of “apparitions” and other weird phenomena, and to imbue those phenomena with symbolic significance in order to justify their appearance in a tale that claimed aesthetic value.
i. Christian Supernaturalism It is no surprise that supernatural writing that was based on explicitly Christian premises actually increased in this and a later period at the exact time when religious scepticism was leading to the radical increase, especially in England, of agnosticism and outright atheism. Writers who endorsed Christian notions of dualism, the efficacy of religious symbols and ritual, and the like found in supernatural fiction a means to validate their beliefs even if it meant invoking the terrors of Satan and his accompanying demons; for the defeat of these evil forces could then be shown to be a triumph of the religion they supported. Two of the most prominent writers of this sort were Captain Marryat and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. There is no question of the Christian orientation of The Phantom Ship (1839), the chief supernatural work of Captain Frederick Marryat (1792– 1848), and a fairly conventional retelling of the “Flying Dutchman” legend. The basic thrust of the legend, faithfully reported by Marryat, is the impiety of Philip Vanderdecken, as he attempts to round the Cape of Good Hope. His wife remembers what he told her: “‘For nine weeks did I try to force my passage against the elements round the stormy Cape, but without success; and I swore terribly. For nine weeks more did I carry sail against the adverse winds and currents, and yet could gain no ground; and then I blasphemed—ay, terribly blasphemed. Yet still I persevered. The crew, worn out with long fatigue, would have had me return to the Table Bay; but I refused; nay, more, I became a murderer— unintentionally, it is true, but still a murderer. A pilot opposed me, and persuaded the men to bind me, and in the excess of my fury, when he took me by the collar, I struck at him; he reeled; and, with the sudden lurch of the vessel, he fell overboard, and sank. Even this fearful death did not restrain me; and I swore by the fragment of the Holy Cross preserved in that relic now hanging round your neck, that I would gain my point in defiance of storm and seas, of
lightning, of heaven, or of hell, even if I should beat about until the Day of Judgment.” (10–11) The upshot is that Vanderdecken can only be absolved if he expresses contrition on that holy relic. All this, in essence, is backstory. The bulk of the actual narrative is taken up with the not particularly compelling story of the attempt by Vanderdecken’s son, also named Philip, to track down his father and present him with the holy relic (one of the seemingly infinite fragments of the Cross that seem to survive here and there) that will lead to Vanderdecken’s absolution. In actuality, this quasi-supernatural premise is merely the makeshift catalyst for a variety of nautical adventures that was the real focus of much of Marryat’s work. Along the way, we meet a particularly insipid heroine, Amine Potts, whom Philip has married, along with all kinds of eccentric nautical characters, among them the one-eyed pilot Schriften, who himself seems not entirely human (Amine says of him: “That creature must be supernatural” [206]). Philip, for his part, believes that Schriften “has his part to play in this wondrous mystery” (246), and, of course, proves to be correct. That The Phantom Ship is nothing more than a post-Gothic pastiche is signified by, among other things, Amine’s seizure by the Inquisition, since she at one point practises a kind of magic (learned from her mother) in order to learn the fate of her husband. Philip spans the globe—or at least a wide arc around the Cape, from Madagascar to Goa—in search of his father. The one effective scene in the novel is the actual encounter of the Flying Dutchman by Philip’s ship, the Utrecht. The two ships seem to be on a collision course: [Philip] said no more; the cutwater of the stranger touched their sides; one general cry was raised by the sailors of the Utrecht—they sprang to catch at the rigging of the other vessel’s bowsprit, which was now pointed between their masts—they caught at nothing— nothing—there was no shock—no concussion of the two vessels— the stranger appeared to cleave through them—her hull passed along in silence—no cracking of timbers—no falling of masts—the foreyard passed through their mainsail, yet the canvas was unrent—
the whole vessel appeared to cut through the Utrecht, yet left no trace of injury—not fast, but slowly, as if she were really sawing through her by the heaving and tossing of the sea with her sharp prow. (215) Philip actually catches sight of his father on board the phantom ship—but, alas! we have many more chapters to go, so the predictable denouement is put off yet again. In the end the elder Vanderdecken, by forgiving his enemy Schriften, thereby “conformed to the highest attributes of Christianity” (349) and is absolved; the Flying Dutchman crumbles to dust. The Phantom Ship has a celebrated episode (ch. 39) that has been printed as a separate narrative entitled “The Werewolf.” This is itself an orthodox werewolf story of no particular distinction, and its sole purpose is to show that one Krantz, a ship captain encountered by Philip, has a legitimate reason for credence in the supernatural. Otherwise, the novel is an aesthetic disaster—appallingly prolix, and written in a stiff, cumbersome style that reads like a bad translation from a foreign language. The Phantom Ship is actually the central component of a loose trilogy of novels by Marryat. The first is Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837), one of the most unintentionally comic titles ever devised, and dealing with a ship captain named Vanslyperken who is accompanied by a particularly vicious dog whom the crewmen believe to be a demon of some kind. These two novels are set in the late seventeenth century, and they are followed by The Privateersman (1846), a non-supernatural historical novel that carries the action forward into the early eighteenth century. That such an accomplished writer as Joseph Conrad (see “Tales of the Sea,” Outlook, 4 January 1898) found some merit in Marryat’s work will, I suppose, keep it alive after a fashion. A far more polished craftsman and prose stylist than Marryat, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) wrote, among his prodigal output, two immense supernatural novels that today make pretty sad reading, along with a masterful short story that will be read as long as supernatural literature remains of compelling interest to the literary public. Of Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (serialised in All the Year Round, 10 August 1861–8 March 1862; book publication 1862) there is no need for laborious discussion. Curiously enough, in spite of the widely varying scenes, characters, and events in the two books, they are united by a single thread—the perceived
need to combat atheism and freethought. Bulwer-Lytton, himself deeply learned in occultism and mysticism, found himself increasingly out of step with the growing scientific materialism of his age, and he used these novels to wage a rearguard attack upon what he believed to be the increasingly dismissive attitude of scientists and philosophers in regard to Christian notions of God, soul, and the afterlife. On the surface, the battle against atheism does not seem to be at all what is at stake in Zanoni, an elaboration of a novella, “Zicci,” that had appeared in 1838. In an introduction the author maintains that the work is a romance, but that it is “a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot” (xvi)—in other words, that the wild, histrionic, and supernatural events of the tale can be read merely as sensationalism by the ignorant, but as divine truth by the initiated. The novel chiefly revolves around a love triangle between Zanoni, a mysterious figure who appears to have discovered the elixir of life; Clarence Glyndon, a young Englishman who yearns for occult knowledge (one of his ancestors, we are told, had been an alchemist [75]); and Viola Pisani, an Italian woman with whom both Glyndon and Zanoni are in love. BulwerLytton’s overall agenda is not slow in manifesting itself. The conflict of science and occultism (which Bulwer-Lytton sees as some kind of higher truth) is stated bluntly: Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny. While we hear, every day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of Alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher’s Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by Alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher’s Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present century has produced. Man cannot contradict the Laws of Nature. But are all the Laws of Nature yet discovered? (93–94) The reasoning here is of some interest: in effect, Bulwer-Lytton is appealing to science itself to refute science—or, at least, to show that future scientific
discovery may triumphantly reveal that the alchemists and other occultists were right all along. The vehicle through which Bulwer-Lytton makes his point is Rosicrucianism. This movement, emerging out of Germany in the early seventeenth century, was a confused mixture of alchemy, astrology, cabbalism, and much else, and was taken seriously by a wide array of thinkers, including Descartes. Bulwer-Lytton seizes upon the notion of the Rosicrucians as a secret society, maintaining that Zanoni and his colleague (or teacher), Mejnour, are the last remaining members of a society that originated, according to Zanoni, in the classical period with the Neoplatonists. Zanoni portrays the society as wholly benevolent—they are seekers after knowledge and also of “the Fount of Good” (347), whatever that may mean. Mejnour, for his part, wishes to create a race of beings that will be “the true lords of this planet” (174)—a plan that sounds sinister enough but is ultimately portrayed as quite the reverse. The secret of extending life is itself depicted as a kind of benign medical knowledge. The danger in all this, as Zanoni warns the eager Glyndon, is the possibility of encountering “the terrible Dweller of the Threshold” (221). What kind of an entity is this? Glyndon finds out: in his impetuous haste to gain “preternatural knowledge” (158), he unwittingly summons the Dweller after imbibing the elixir of life: By degrees, this object shaped itself to his sight. It was as that of a human head, covered with a dark veil, through which glared, with lurid and demoniac fire, eyes that froze the marrow of his bones. Nothing else of the face was distinguishable—nothing but those intolerable eyes; but his terror, that even at the first seemed beyond nature to endure, was increased a thousand-fold, when, after a pause, the phantom glided slowly into the chamber. . . . Its form was veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female; yet it moved not as move even the ghosts that simulate the living; it seemed rather to crawl as some vast misshapen reptile . . . All fancies, the most grotesque, of Monk or Painter in the early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone. (232–33)
All this is quite effective as a horrific set-piece, but it is plain that BulwerLytton intends it symbolically. But what is the Dweller a symbol of? Evidently we are to regard him (or it) as a kind of punishment inflicted upon Glyndon because he drank the elixir merely for the purpose of extending his life, without gaining sufficient wisdom to use that extension prudently. In this sense, the Dweller is a symbol of hubris. The fact that the novel is set in the Reign of Terror is no accident. Bulwer-Lytton has chosen this setting to underscore his point that rampant atheism (which he conceives to be the ultimate root of the French Revolution) can only lead to horror and bloodshed; in essence, the Reign of Terror is a kind of political Dweller of the Threshold. It is significant that Zanoni banishes the Dweller—which has been haunting Glyndon incessantly ever since he summoned it—by an appeal to his religious faith: “Rejoice, then!—thou hast overcome the true terror and mystery of the ordeal. Resolve is the first success. Rejoice, for the exorcism is sure! Thou art not of those who, denying a life to come, are the victims of the Inexorable Horror. Oh, when shall men learn, at last, that if the Great Religion inculcates so rigidly the necessity of FAITH, it is not alone that FAITH leads to the world to be; but that without faith there is no excellence in this—faith is something wiser, happier, diviner, than we see on earth!—the Artist calls it the Ideal—the Priest Faith. The Ideal and Faith are one and the same. Return, O wanderer! return. Feel what beauty and holiness dwell in the Customary and the Old.” (350) If this somewhat incoherent message signifies anything, it is that smug British attitude of the post-revolutionary period (embodied as well in Burke) that the pieties and political conservatism embodied in British Christianity are superior to the wild radicalism of the philosophes. Glyndon also engages in a rather grotesque attempt to kill Robespierre, failing miserably; but Zanoni succeeds, inciting Robespierre’s enemies to kill him. And in a final act of altruistic piety, Zanoni summons the “Evil Omen, the dark Chimera” (361), who tells him that Viola, now in prison and about to be guillotined, will be saved only if Zanoni sacrifices himself for her. In a final lecture Zanoni tells her “of the sublime and intense faith from which
alone the diviner knowledge can arise—the faith which, seeing the immortal everywhwere, purifies and exalts the mortal that beholds—the glorious ambition that dwells not in the cabals and crimes of earth, but amid those solemn wonders that speak not of men, but of God” (379). If Zanoni is marred by its longwindedness and by Bulwer-Lytton’s fatal penchant for schoolroom lecturing, A Strange Story is still more crippled by dragging verbosity. Its religious and philosophical agenda is even clearer. Its protagonist is Allen Fenwick, a physician who settles in a small English town. His philosophical orientation is announced at the outset: “I had espoused a school of medical philosophy severely rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was that of stern materialism” (7). The tone of this passage makes it plain that Fenwick is due for an intellectual fall. Fenwick is, in some sense, a mere observer in the conflict between a curious figure named Margrave, who shows up in the town, and Sir Philip Derval, a mystic and occultist who wishes to “discover and to bring human laws to bear upon a creature armed with terrible powers of evil” (138)—presumably Margrave. One of the few virtues of the novel is the effective portrayal of Margrave as a being both subhuman and superhuman. At one point he exclaims: “Man! man! could you live but an hour of my life you would know how horrible a thing it is to die!” (102)—can this mean that Margrave himself has found the elixir of life? This turns out to be the case, but the real thrust of the remark is a metaphysical one: the denial of the immortality of the soul leads to unbearable horror at the thought of extinction, which then pollutes and corrupts life itself. One of the major foci of the novel is to convince the reader that the immortal soul actually exists, and Bulwer-Lytton performs the task in a particularly crude manner: Fenwick, who has expressed doubts as to whether the soul is distinct from the mind, conveniently goes into a trance and sees the tripartite essence of Margrave (body, mind, soul, each in a different colour). Well, I guess that settles that! Derval—who had declared that “there is truth in those immemorial legends which depose to the existence of magic” (152)—is found murdered, and a steel casket containing certain “medicines” is missing. Fenwick is actually arrested on suspicion of murdering Derval; evidently he has been framed by Margrave. Margrave’s “Shadow” comes to Fenwick in the prison, declaring that he can free Fenwick upon his agreeing to certain conditions. Fenwick agrees and is released. At this point Julius Faber, the physician whom Fenwick replaced, returns to the scene. Although Faber
presents a convincing case that all the seemingly supernatural phenomena that Fenwick has experienced can be accounted for psychologically, Faber himself spends much time expressing his own belief in God, the soul, the afterlife, and so forth. Fenwick, however, is not yet ready to accept this aspect of Faber’s teaching. Many of Fenwick’s actions are inspired by his love for Lilian Asheigh. She is a relatively colourless creature who serves merely as the catalyst of certain phases of the novel’s action. After Fenwick has married Lilian, she receives a poison pen letter from someone in the community accusing her of moral improprieties of various sorts. Incredibly, she goes mad as a result, and much of the rest of the novel is spent in Fenwick’s increasingly harried attempts to cure her. (A woman in the town later admits to writing the letter —under Margrave’s influence.) Fenwick then decides to take Lilian away from England, joining Faber in Australia. The motive for this action will become evident in due course. Faber delivers a ponderous lecture: “. . . whenever I look through the History of Mankind in all ages and all races, I find a concurrence in certain beliefs which seems to countenance the theory that there is in some peculiar and rare temperaments a power over forms of animated organization, with which they establish some unaccountable affinity; and even, though much more rarely, a power over inanimate matter.” (329–30) This is presented as a kind of pseudo-scientific accounting for some of the seemingly supernatural phenomena associated with “magic,” as well as with mesmerism and witchcraft. In effect, Bulwer-Lytton is reverting to the idea expressed in Zanoni that “magic” may simply be a kind of science whose laws orthodox science has not yet discovered. What relevance this has to the overall thrust of the novel is not entirely clear. In any event, Margrave suddenly appears on the scene, declaring that he has discovered the “elixir of life” (371), stating later that his “faculties . . . are given to all men, though dormant in most” (394). As Lilian is now dying, Fenwick agrees to help Margrave make more of the elixir, which is running short, so that he can continue life and also so that Lilian can be saved. Gold is needed, it would appear—hence the transparency of the need to shift the locale to Australia, where an abundance of gold can be had with little
difficulty. Unfortunately, after laborious attempts to collect the gold and fashion the elixir, a stampede of animals fleeing a fire causes most of the elixir to be spilled. This seemingly lamentable eventuality proves, however, to be Fenwick’s salvation. He now reflects on the situation: he had (in his earlier stance as a materialistic physician) tried reason; he had just now tried magic; but both had failed. “Where yet was Hope to be found? In the soul” (430): “All my past, with its pride and presumption and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling for pardon before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine. And, sure now, in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that the Dead do not die forever, my human love soared beyond its brief trial of terror and sorrow. Daring not to ask from Heaven’s wisdom that Lilian, for my sake, might not yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain.” (431) But never fear: in a contrived happy ending, Lilian recovers. A Strange Story is, in some senses, an impressive achievement, but its philosophical agenda is too plain to make it a convincing weird tale in its own right. The narrative is so relentlessly symbolic—down to its characters, each of whom merely represents not much more than an intellectual idea— that the supernatural is not, and cannot be, regarded as significant in itself. Marie Roberts maintains that “A Strange Story presents a powerful philosophical argument for the immortality of the soul” (189), but in fact Bulwer-Lytton’s arguments are quite unconvincing and easily refuted. What is remarkable in all this is that Bulwer-Lytton, in one instance, did finally get down from his hobby-horse (and also reined in his habitual prolixity) and produced a gem of the supernatural in “The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain” (Blackwood’s, August 1859), possibly the single most reprinted story in the history of supernatural fiction. If nothing else, as an aesthetic accomplishment the tale would be difficult to excel. In announcing his intention to explore a reputedly haunted house (based on an actual house in Berkeley Square), the first-person narrator not only makes an elaborate protestation of scepticism but treats
the whole adventure as a lark: he speaks to his servant with delighted relish, “From what I hear there is no doubt that something will allow itself to be seen or to be heard—something perhaps excessively horrible” (287). The gradualness with which the supernatural phenomena manifest themselves— first, the footprints of a child appear; then a chair moves; then the servant flees the house, crying, “Run! Run! It is after me!” (294)—creates a powerful sense of cumulative horror. At this point the narrator anticipates what Allen Fenwick would say in A Strange Story: Now, my theory is that the supernatural is the impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost rises before me, I have not the right to say, “So, then, the supernatural is possible,” but rather, “So, then, the apparition of a ghost is, contrary to received opinion, within the laws of nature, namely, not supernatural.” (295–96) This is all very clever, and this time it is not dynamited by subsequent events, but rather confirmed by them. The narrator goes on to say—again in anticipation of A Strange Story—that a ghost is not the soul of a dead person, but “the eidolon of the dead form” (305). In the end, we learn that the ghostly phenomena were brought on by a former tenant who, with her husband, murdered her brother and nephew for inheritance money. But this somewhat mundane “explanation” is further augmented by a subsequent passage—one inexplicably omitted from many printings of the story, even though it validates the subtitle—that the true origin of the phenomena is the mesmeric influence of a preternaturally aged individual (the “brain” of the subtitle). Whether William Harrison Ainsworth (1802–1882) is worth discussing in this context, or any context, is an open question. Amidst his appalling array of dreary and unreadable historical novels we find occasional ghosts, curses, and the like, but they all amount to nothing. The Lancashire Witches (1849) still retains some vestige of a reputation, but it is an entirely nonsupernatural historical account of a seventeenth-century witch trial.
ii. High and Low It is somewhat uncanny that four novels, all published in 1847, embraced the supernatural in a multitude of manners and degrees. It is also of interest that two of these manifestly appealed to highbrow readers while the other two consciously sought to attract the masses, whose taste for the weird and flamboyantly supernatural had already been whetted by the penny dreadfuls, which had commenced in the 1830s. It is no surprise that the latter two considerably outsold the former two, but it is similarly no surprise that the latter would never have been rescued from the oblivion that was their due had they not featured the supernatural, and therefore caught the attention of the diligent scholars who have combed both the highs and the lows of our literary patrimony for specimens of their chosen field. Of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818–1848) it is difficult to speak in small compass, and even a discussion of its specific supernatural manifestations requires some study of the book’s overall scope and purpose. The degree to which Wuthering Heights itself is a kind of Gothic castle may perhaps have been exaggerated by critics; Brontë very likely did absorb Gothic novels in her youth, but aside from random touches such as Nelly Dean’s offhand remark “I could not half tell what an infernal house we had” (65), not a great deal of emphasis is placed on the house’s supernaturalism, either potential or actual. More might be made of the demonic qualities of Heathcliff himself, although in the end much of the turmoil he causes is either a result of his flouting of Victorian social conventions or, more pertinently, of his carefully planned and ultimately successful quest to secure the Earnshaw/Linton property for himself as vengeance for his scornful treatment by these families and, especially, for Catherine’s refusal to marry him. Indeed, when Catherine Earnshaw writes a letter to Nelly asking, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (136), it is not entirely clear what led her to make such a statement, just as it is not entirely clear whether the emotional unity of Catherine and Heathcliff (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff” [82], Catherine says at one point) has been thoroughly established by the actual course of the narrative. Heathcliff, for his part, once accuses Catherine herself of being “possessed
with a devil” (159) and later, after Catherine dies, states flamboyantly that he wants Catherine to haunt him: “You said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on earth” (167). That last statement is augmented by Heathcliff’s much later remark that “I have a strong faith in ghosts” (289). Supernaturalism presumably enters at the very end of the novel, when Heathcliff hears a sigh when he madly attempts to dig up Catherine’s grave, and then, after his own death, when rumours begin to emerge that both a male and a female ghost are seen around the graves. But the most striking supernatural incident is at the very beginning, when the man who hears the entire tale from Nelly Dean, Mr. Lockwood, hearing a tapping on the window, stretches out his hand to investigate: “my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!” (23). It is Catherine, of course. Lockwood first dismisses the incident as a nightmare, but later admits that “the place was haunted . . . it is—swarming with ghosts and goblins!” (25). The striking physicality of the ghost is not the least of its remarkable features. The supernatural is even more fleeting in the most celebrated work, Jane Eyre, of Emily’s sister, Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855). And yet, what is of interest, from our perspective, is how Brontë stresses, especially in regard to Jane Eyre’s youth and upbringing, the degree to which she is sensitive to incursions of the supernatural. Consider her reaction when, as a child, she read “Bewick’s History of British Birds,” especially some of the pictures in the book, described as follows: The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So was the black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. (9) Not long thereafter, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, she sees the following:
the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming up out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. (14) And finally, in the celebrated passage when young Jane is incarcerated in the dreaded “red room,” she reflects on what might ensue, given that her harsh aunt, Mrs. Reed, was not following her dead husband’s orders to treat Jane as one of her own children: . . . as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls— occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror—I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode—whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed—and rise before me in this chamber. (16–17) The general implication is that this penchant for seeing ghosts and goblins —shared by Jane and others—is a product not only of the ghostly stories her nurse and others had told her as a child, but of the oppressive Christian environment that induces a belief in spirits around every corner. The tendency continues as Jane matures. As she first comes to Thornfield Hall to take up her occupation as governess, she wonders whimsically “if there were a ghost at Thornfield Hall,” to which the sober Mrs. Fairfax replies: “None that I ever heard of” (107). In her first encounter with Edward Rochester she momentarily takes him for a goblin (113). The passing remark that Rochester spends little time at Thornfield because “he thinks it gloomy” (129) at once evokes the Gothic castle of Radcliffean provenance—a connexion that Brontë was well aware her readers would make.
Of course, there is no actual supernaturalism in the core “mystery” of Thornfield Hall—the incarceration, in the attic, of Rochester’s mad first wife, Bertha. There are fleeting attempts at suggesting (purely metaphorically) that Bertha is a kind of supernatural entity: at one point Jane hears a “demoniac laugh” (149); and much later she sees a “fearful and ghastly” (286) face. She elaborates to Rochester: “It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!” “Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.” “This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed; the black eye-brows wildly raised over the blood-shot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?” “You may.” “Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.” (286) This entire passage is of consuming interest in suggesting the readiness with which even educated persons of the period resorted to supernatural causation in explaining anomalous phenomena. But supernaturalism does enter into Jane Eyre at a critical moment at the end. After she has left Thornfield in the wake of discovering Rochester’s still-living wife, she comes (by one of the most whopping coincidences that ever disfigured a great novel) to the home of the man who proves to be her first cousin, the clergyman St John Rivers. As St John relentlessly presses her to marry her and go with him on a missionary jaunt to India, she is on the point of yielding when she hears Rochester’s voice calling “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (424). At this point we are almost prepared to think that Brontë has engineered another whopping coincidence—but it quickly becomes apparent that Rochester is not there. So then are we to assume that the cry was merely a hallucination on Jane’s part—perhaps a psychological trick that her mind engendered, since she clearly does not wish to marry Rivers? It seems likely . . . until Rochester, now blinded and
crippled following the burning of Thornfield and the death of Bertha, admits that he himself made such a cry at the exact time when Jane must have heard it (429). Jane observes: “The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed” (453). This telling use of the supernatural is clearly designed to underscore the psychic unity of Jane and Rochester—a unity that is, in many ways, far more convincing than that of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Rochester, indeed, is a kind of Heathcliff Lite—brooding, irascible, and occasionally violent, but nothing like the demon that Emily Brontë makes of her changeling; and there is reason to believe that Charlotte Brontë, who read Wuthering Heights in manuscript while writing Jane Eyre, picked up a few tips in characterisation from her sister. The novel has, of course, suffered perhaps the most catastrophic posthumous fate ever visited upon a noble work of literature by serving as the ultimate fount of the tens of thousands of wretched “women’s gothics” of our own day. With Varney, the Vampyre we are in a different world altogether. This staggeringly immense shambles of a novel—running, by my count, in excess of 950,000 words—is the most celebrated example of the “shilling shocker”: it was in fact sold in “parts,” like Dickens’s novels, that sold for a shilling, although these “parts” actually postdate the three-volume book publication. I am hardly concerned with the debate as to whether Thomas Preskett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer was the actual author; E. F. Bleiler’s argument, in the preface to the 1972 Dover edition of the work, has convinced most scholars that Rymer is the author, but whether the one hack or the other wrote it is of no consequence. There is no doubt that the author—let us assume it is Rymer—wished to spin out his tale as long as he could purely for the added revenue it would bring. The novel has no structure, no focus, no direction, and almost nothing to recommend it. That it is somehow regarded as a “classic” of vampire literature only testifies to the relative mediocrity of most vampire literature, Dracula not excepted. As with Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, the author of Varney is clearly unaware either that Poe exists or that the Gothic movement is dead as a doornail. The temporal setting of the novel is not entirely clear, but it eventually becomes more or less clear that we are in the early eighteenth century: Sir Francis Varney, who was apparently born in the reign of Charles I (1625–49), admits to being 180 years old (771). The great majority of the action takes place in England. One of the first scenes in the book is Sir Francis Varney
invading the bedroom of a young woman, Flora Bannerworth, and sucking her blood—a sexual element that, after a fashion, shapes the entire work. Much, much later, Varney laments that “I have not been able to obtain the consent of one that is young, beautiful, and a virgin; I might then for a season escape the dreaded alternative” (686). This statement is itself unclear: it appears to account for Varney’s increasingly desperate attempts not merely to victimise a succession of young, beautiful, and (presumably) virginal women, but also to marry one of them; but what then? If some young woman were to marry him, would she voluntarily allow him to suck her blood from time to time? How is this any less awful than the “dreaded alternative” of sucking someone’s blood by force? Indeed, the central issue of how Varney became a vampire is never properly clarified. At one point he tells the tale of his early life, stating that he had once been addicted to gambling, had lost a considerable sum of money to a professional gambler, and had then killed that person. He was subsequently tried for his various crimes and hanged. At this point he is resurrected galvanically by a surgeon named Chillingworth. Later Varney meets a Hungarian nobleman who tells him about vampires, and Varney becomes convinced that he is one. But it is by no means clear whether he is or isn’t, and Rymer never explains how being revived galvanically can turn one into a vampire. Varney does introduce some curious “powers” of the vampire that the subsequent literary tradition either ignored or jettisoned. Varney experiences no difficulty in going about by day or night. Although he claims that his “horrible nature . . . forbade him any nourishment but human blood” (772), there are a few occasions where he appears to partake moderately of food and drink. But the most curious feature of all, in this regard, is Varney’s ability to be revived by moonlight—a feature that Rymer apparently lifted from H. A. Marschner’s German opera Der Vampyr (1828). One character maintains that a vampire is “tangible and destructible” (48), unlike other supernatural entities, and this indeed appears to be the case. On several occasions Varney is in fact killed—but the moonlight revives him. This is, indeed, a rather effective touch, and one of the few powerful moments in the novel is an episode where Varney is placed in a mausoleum, seemingly dead, and is slowly brought to life as the moonlight gradually creeps over him.
Otherwise, Varney, the Vampyre is a wretchedly confused and incoherent work. Its characters are all stereotypes—most notably Flora Bannerworth, the very image of the insipid Gothic heroine, who can do nothing but faint and requires her menfolk to come repeatedly to her rescue —and the novel’s dragging prolixity destroys anything remotely akin to a cumulative denouement. Varney’s increasing disgust for his anomalous condition finally leads him to commit the spectacular suicide of jumping into Mt. Vesuvius, but by this time we have lost all interest in his condition or his fate. Marginally better, at least from the standpoint of prose style and construction, is Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf by George W. M. Reynolds (1814– 1879), serialised in Reynolds’s Miscellany (6 November 1846–24 July 1847) before appearing in book form. The novel is, in an insignificant sense, a sequel to Reynolds’s earlier supernatural work, Faust: A Romance of the Secret Tribunals (serialised 1845–46; book publication 1847), a relatively straightforward retelling of Goethe’s Faust its depiction of Wilhelm Faust, who is granted twenty-four years of supernatural power by the Devil, who at the end tosses him into Mt. Vesuvius—whence the everresourceful James Rymer pillaged the culminating scene of Varney. In Wagner, Faust (not named until several chapters into the book) comes to Fernand Wagner, a ninety-year-old man leading a wretched life, and persuades him to accept an offer to become a werewolf in exchange for regained youth, power, and wealth. Wagner does so by drinking a potion. It is unclear what earlier werewolf literature or tradition Reynolds was following, but one of the curiosities of Wagner’s transformation is that it has nothing to do with the moon; rather, he becomes a werewolf on the last day of the month at sunset, so that it is the sun rather than the moon that is the governing element of his metamorphosis. This point is never explained or elaborated, merely accepted. The first time Wagner is so transformed (ch. 12) is indeed an effective and virtually self-standing horrific episode—more effective, indeed, than the corresponding chapter in Marryat’s Phantom Ship—but the fact that Wagner kills an innocent child while in his wolfish state creates a moral dilemma for readers and renders him an unwittingly unsympathetic character. But the overriding flaw in Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf is simply that, even more so than Faust (in which the central character merely engages in a succession of non-supernatural adventures, including an affair with Lucretia
Borgia), the overwhelming bulk of the action is not supernatural and has nothing to do with Wagner’s condition. Most of the work revolves around the efforts of Nisida, a determined and ruthless young woman who falls in love with Wagner, to prevent her brother, Francisco, Count of Riverola, from marrying Agnes, Wagner’s granddaughter. There is also an ancillary story of the Countess of Arestino and her affair with one Manuel d’Orsini. The end result is that Wagner and the supernaturalism inherent in his state become a virtual side issue in the dynastic fortunes of the noble families at the centre of the action. Reynolds, too, writes as if the Gothic novel were a thriving rather than a hackneyed and passé tradition. There is the obligatory dungeon scene—this time with Agnes, seized at the behest of Nisida and thrust into a convent— and the obligatory band of robbers, generally coming to the aid of the countess and her lover. Then there is the odd episode where Agnes’s brother converts to Islam and becomes the grand vizier for the Arabian Sultan. The Devil appears to Wagner on a few occasions, but to no particular effect. Wagner and Nisida are for a time stranded on an uninhabited island, creating a bizarre Crusoe-like effect. Reynolds’s prose is, to be sure, infinitely superior to that of Varney, and his talent for story construction—albeit of a slick, almost machine-made sort—is evident; but it is clear that supernaturalism as such was not his interest. His final supernatural novel, The Necromancer (serialised 1851– 52; book publication 1852), is heavily reliant on Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in its story of a man granted the boon of 150 years of power, who can reclaim his soul if he persuades six virgins to give up theirs; but here too the thrust of the action is sensational adventure and political machinations. It has long been lamented that the werewolf theme has never produced a canonical literary work, and Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf does not come close to filling the bill.
iii. Occasional Supernaturalism A host of mid-Victorian writers in England, chiefly known for mainstream work of a very different sort, chose to dip into supernatural or non-supernatural horror in the course of a short story or a novella. The mere fact that not one of them—including the two most notable figures of the group, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins—felt the inclination to write a full-scale supernatural novel is in itself instructive: in a significant sense it constitutes an implicit repudiation of the aesthetic of the Gothic novel, which many novelists of the post-Gothic period must have recognised was seriously flawed in its attempt to engage an intrinsically fleeting emotion— the emotion of fear—over the length of a novel. While it is unclear to what extent these writers actually read the Gothic novels, their restriction of the terror tale to the short story would have long-lasting ramifications, extending in truth to the horror “boom” of the 1970s. In the case of Dickens (1812–1870)—as we have already seen in the case of Poe—this reliance on the short story for supernatural terror was in a sense making a virtue of necessity, for the increasing magazine markets for short stories of all kinds—especially the periodical he himself founded and edited, Household Words (1850–59), later All the Year Round (1859–70)— provided a ready source of income for a resolutely professional writer. And yet, it is of interest that one of Dickens’s first ghost stories (virtually all his supernatural tales are ghost stories in the strictest and most literal sense) is a parody. “The Lawyer and the Ghost” (Pickwick Papers, 1837) tells of a clever lawyer who, when encountering a ghost in his chambers, engages in disputation with the entity, pointing out the folly of returning “exactly to the very places where you have been most miserable” (35) and thereby causing the ghost to withdraw. The scepticism of ghostly phenomena that this tale implies speaks volumes for the increasing rationalism of the age. In several tales Dickens deliberately plays with the possibility that the ghostly manifestations are the result of hallucination, error, or other naturalistic causes. For example, in “The Queer Chair” (Pickwick Papers; also titled “The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle”) the protagonist, Tom Smart, staying at an inn, appears to see a chair turn miraculously into an old man—
but the narrative has made it abundantly clear that Smart has imbibed a considerable amount of alcohol and that his vision may simply be a drunkard’s dream. But the supernatural is confirmed when, through the ghost’s intercession, Smart finds a letter that shows that a man who is wooing the widow innkeeper is already married. Dickens was, indeed, not averse to using tried-and-true Gothic formulae for his own purposes, but on occasion his handling of them was not entirely sound. Consider The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). This very long story tells of a ghost who comes to an old man, Mr. Redlaw, who gradually realises that it may well be the “evil spirit of myself” (167). The ghost offers to wipe Redlaw’s memory of all the misdeeds of his past, but on condition that he must pass on this dubious gift to another if his soul is to rest in peace. This manifest borrowing of the Melmoth the Wanderer scenario plays out in a conventional manner; moreover, the story is so staggeringly verbose, and so full of inessential details and episodes, that the overall effect is severely weakened. In other instances, Dickens chooses a supernatural framework for a conception that would probably have profited from a non-supernatural treatment. “The Ghost Chamber” (Household Words, October 1857) supplies a powerful portrayal of the brutalisation of a young woman by her tyrannical husband, who repeatedly orders her to die (he cannot be put to the trouble of actually killing her): Shut up in the deserted mansion, aloof from all mankind, and engaged alone in such a struggle without any respite, it came to this —that either he must die, or she. He knew it very well, and concentrated his strength against her feebleness. Hours upon hours he held her by the arm when her arm was black where he held it, and bade her Die! (252) The wife does die, and the husband is ultimately brought to justice and dies; but then Dickens drags in some ghostly phenomena that have no real bearing on the narrative, with the result that the grim depiction of marital hostility is diluted. As for the celebrated novella A Christmas Carol (1843), I fear the only way to salvage this work aesthetically is to assume that it is a parody—a
parody, specifically, on all the sentimental boobs over the decades who have swallowed this narrative as a pious moral exemplum. For the satire on poor Ebenezer Scrooge is so broad (“Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster” [90]), and the portrayal of the Cratchit family so preposterously saintly, that one would desperately like to see some hint of self-parody in the tale. But, alas! it is all too plain that Dickens took the tale seriously and wished others to do so. What is striking about A Christmas Carol is the extraordinarily mundane and materialistic nature of its moral. Dickens makes it clear that Scrooge’s miserliness derives from the fact that he himself was haunted by the spectre of povery in his youth; and Scrooge makes a shrewd point on this subject: “‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world!’ he said. ‘There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!’” (113). The irony is that this is very much Dickens’s own apparent position, at least as far as this tale is concerned: the loving description of the bountiful Christmas dinner that the Cratchits enjoy focuses entirely on the abundance and variety of the foodstuffs; nowhere is there the faintest appreciation of the religious nature of the holiday (aside, of course, from Tiny Tim’s formulaic “God bless us every one!” [125]). And the only thing Scrooge can do, after he has seen the various ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future, is to give Cratchit a larger turkey—and this is portrayed as some kind of moral transformation on Scrooge’s part. After reading this wretched piece of sentimentalism, one is heartily inclined to agree with Ambrose Bierce’s fiery remark in a letter: How I hate Christmas! I’m one of the curmudgeons that the truly good Mr. Dickens found it profitable to hold up to the scorn of those who take such satisfaction in being decent and generous one day in 365. Bah! how hollow it all is! Always on Christmas, though, I feel my own heart soften—toward the late Judas Iscariot. (A Much Misunderstood Man 59) Toward the end A Christmas Carol descends into transparent allegory (“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want” [134]), a fittingly trite
conclusion to a story that is an aesthetic débâcle. But, crude and blundering as it may be, the tale does suggest as clearly as any in the history of literature how the supernatural can be used to point a moral. While it is conceivable that the visions shown by the ghosts of Christmas past and present could have been narrated non-supernaturally, the scenes revealed by the ghost of Christmas future—notably Scrooge’s own death—would have been difficult to encompass in a conventional mimetic manner, especially if these visions are, as here, meant as a means for a revision of Scrooge’s moral compass. A Christmas Carol has an obvious, and no less sorry, antecedent in “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” (Pickwick Papers, 1837), where goblins show a sexton various allegorical scenes for his own spiritual regeneration. The moralism here is just as heavy-handed as in its successor: “. . . he saw that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of a world after all” (78). But Dickens should be judged by his best, not his worst, specimens. Two late items stand out: “The Trial for Murder,” a.k.a. “To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1865 [not cowritten with Charles Allston Collins, as frequently believed]), an effective tale of a murdered man whose ghost haunts the trial of his murderer; and, especially, “The Signalman” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1866), a poignant account of a spectral figure who appears to a railroad signalman and predicts three train disasters in succession—the third constituting the signalman’s own death. Dickens’s contemporary and sometime collaborator Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) dabbled in both supernatural and non-supernatural horror throughout his long career. Collins is, justifiably, better known for the pioneering and extraordinarily clever detective novel The Moonstone (1852) and the post-Gothic thriller The Woman in White (1860), but his ventures into terror in short form are not to be despised. It may well be the case that the best of them—“A Terribly Strange Bed” (Household Words, 24 April 1852), a compelling account of a man who, after winning a fortune at gaming, unwisely stays overnight in the gaming house and is nearly killed by a four-poster bed whose top inexorably descends upon him; “The Dead
Alive” (All the Year Round, December 1873), a clever detective story set in the United States—are non-supernatural, but others are of some interest. Two of the most effective of these fall into the category of ambiguous horror tales, where it is impossible to determine whether the supernatural has come into play or not. In “Mad Monkton” (Fraser’s Magazine, November–December 1855) we are presented with a seemingly deranged individual, Alfred Monkton (his family, as the narrator makes abundantly clear, has had a history of hereditary insanity), engages in a desperate attempt to find the body of his uncle, who had died in a duel in Italy. Only after the narrative has progressed apace do we understand the reason for this desperation: Monkton is following a family tradition whereby all members of his family must be buried at his estate, Wincot Abbey, lest the line die out. The narrator falls in with Monkton’s quest and finds the body in the outhouse of a convent; but the ship taking the body back to England springs a leak, causing it to be abandoned by the crew. Monkton wished to stay on board and go down with the ship (and the corpse), but he is saved against his wishes and forced into a lifeboat. Sure enough, he later dies in England without issue, ending the Monkton line. We are left with the unanswerable puzzle: Is the family legend (or curse) true? Moreover, was there some supernatural hand guiding the entire series of events, including the sinking of the ship? Is it the purpose of some supernatural force or entity to extinguish the Monkton family? Collins leaves these questions deliberately unanswered. As for “The Dream-Woman” (Temple Bar, November–December 1874), one might suspect that the numerous coincidences upon which this tale is built would be implausible unless the supernatural is brought into play, but again Collins refuses to tip his hat one way or the other. A man, Isaac Scatchard, at an inn seems to fancy (perhaps it is a dream) that a woman attacks him with a knife while he is lying in bed; but the next morning, the sheets are not torn, the locks are not broken, and he himself is uninjured. His mother, hearing the tale, tells him that the incident must have occurred on the anniversary of the very moment of his birth. Years later Isaac meets a woman, Rebecca Murdock, and marries her. The moment his mother meets her, she recognises her (from descriptions Isaac had given of his dream or hallucination) as the “dream-woman.” The marriage gradually deteriorates, and sure enough Rebecca attempts to stab her husband with a knife—on his birthday, exactly as in the dream. He leaves her, but is subsequently haunted
by the thought of her returning, ending his life emotionally shattered. This is a powerful tale of domestic infelicity, augmented by the possibility of supernaturalism. Other of Collins’s tales descend to Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural.” “The Dead Hand” (Household Words, 10 October 1857) tells of a man, Arthur Holliday, desperately looking for a room for the night and agreeing to stay in a room occupied by a dead man (a guest who had apparently died the previous day). While there are some effective passages dealing with the age-old human fear of close proximity with the dead, and at one point the corpse’s hand appears to move of its own accord, it is later revealed— deflatingly—that the fellow was not in fact actually dead. Collins compounds his error by making the erstwhile dead man the illegitimate half-brother of Holliday, an astounding coincidence that even the supernatural would be hard-pressed to account for. The short novel The Haunted Hotel (Illustrated London News, Christmas 1877) has occasional points of effectiveness but, overall, does not quite justify the space it occupies. Lord Montbarry marries a Countess Narona, about whom much is whispered to her discredit. While staying in a villa in Venice, he dies of bronchitis, leaving his fortune to his widow. Insurance investigators studying the case seem to find no hint of foul play; but neither they nor others can account for the sudden disappearance of one Ferrari, a courier in the lord’s employ. The villa is later turned into a hotel, and relatives of the lord staying there seem to have bad dreams and experience other possible supernatural manifestations. The countess has arranged for an old flame of the lord’s, Agnes Lockwood, stay in the exact room where the lord died. At night she sees a horrible sight—a severed head seemingly hanging in mid-air: The flesh of the face was gone. The shrivelled skin was darkened in hue, like the skin of an Egyptian mummy—except at the neck. . . . Thin remains of a discoloured moustache and whiskers, hanging over the upper lip, and over the hollows where the cheeks had once been, made the head just recognisable as the head of a man. Over all the features death and time had done their obliterating work. (113)
There is quite a bit more of this. It is an effective scene while it lasts—but it doesn’t last long. Very quickly it is shown that the severed head—that of Lord Montbarry—is a makeshift contrivance to terrify the occupants of the room. The full story is soon revealed: the countess’s brother, Baron Rivar, had desperately needed money for his alchemical experiments (the specifics of which the narrative never makes clear), and he had urged the countess to marry Lord Montbarry. They had killed him and substituted the body of Ferrari in his place. But what of the bad dreams that the relatives had suffered while in the hotel? These are casually brushed off as “delusions” (147) by Montbarry’s brother. There are, as I say, moments of power in The Haunted Hotel, and there is an emotional intensity in the narrative that contrasts with much of the rest of Collins’s work; but here, as elsewhere, even in his short stories, there is a nagging suggestion of prolixity that weakens the overall effect. Collins is manifestly more comfortable with scenarios involving crime, suspense, and adventure, and his handling of the supernatural is shaky at best. Dickens’s great contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811– 1863), dabbled in the weird far more sporadically than Dickens and Collins. Possibly his inveterate tendency toward humour and satire rendered him unwilling (it would be impertinent to suggest he was unable) to engage in the atmospheric intensity required for success in supernatural or nonsupernatural horror. It is, therefore, not surprising that what few weird tales there are in Thackeray’s repertoire are generally of a comic or deflationary type. Consider “The Painter’s Bargain” (Fraser’s Magazine, December 1838). Here a painter, trapped in an unhappy marriage, whimsically summons the Devil to escape his predicament (“Let me . . . sell myself to the Devil, I should not be more wretched than I am now!” [81]). An anomalous creature suddenly appears: “When first born he was little bigger than a tadpole; then he grew to be as big as a mouse; then he arrived at the size of a cat; and then he jumped off the palette, and, turning head over heels, asked the poor painter what he wanted of him” (83). It is significant that the painter remarks, “To tell the truth, I did not even believe in your existence” (83)—a sceptical sentiment no doubt shared by many of the educated class of the 1830s. The upshot of the story is that the painter urges the Devil to spend half a year with his wife, to see how much he likes it; at the end of that time, the Devil is happy to release the man from his contract. It is all very amusing, and the scepticism is significantly augmented by the
Devil’s casual dismissal of a document by the Pope absolving the painter from all sin (“though the Pope’s paper may pass current here, it is not worth twopence in our country” [93]). Not much is changed by the final twist that it was all a dream. “Bluebeard’s Ghost” (Fraser’s Magazine, October 1843) is a clever instance of the “explained supernatural”: Bluebeard’s widow, thinking of marrying again, is confronted by the ghost of her redoubtable husband—but this proves to be one of her suitors in disguise. The lengthy story “The Notch on the Ax” (Cornhill Magazine, April–June 1862) is full of varied supernatural phenomena, but the overall effect is insubstantial. Even George Eliot (1819–1880), whose densely written novels of domestic life would seem the polar opposite of the supernatural, indulged in the weird on at least one occasion—the lengthy novella “The Lifted Veil” (Blackwood’s, July 1859). The protagonist, a boy named Latimer, appears to have not only visions of the future, but the ability to read other people’s minds; as he memorably puts it, thoughts from others “would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect” (269). He is attracted to Bertha, who is engaged to his hated brother Alfred; and although this vision depicts Bertha as married to himself and being shrewish and bitter, he nonetheless continues to long for her. Sure enough, Latimer’s brother dies in an accident and he marries Bertha; their marriage deteriorates. The novella takes a somewhat awkward turn into pseudoscience when a friend, Charles Meunier, performs an experiment on Bertha’s maid that involves reviving her after her death by an influx of blood and other procedures; she revives, accuses Bertha of planning to kill Latimer by poison, and dies again. This grim tale, told with all the skill in character portrayal and psychological insight that distinguish Eliot’s novels, shows what a competent novelist can do with a supernatural subject. Two other women who dallied with the supernatural in this period are worth a little—but only a little—notice. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) wrote a handful of ghost stories and mystery tales, chiefly at the urging of Dickens, but few of them amount to much. “The Old Nurse’s Story” (Household Words, Christmas 1852) is the only unequivocal supernatural tale in Gaskell’s oeuvre, and although it promises much it fails to deliver. When the old nurse who tells the story comes with her young charge, Miss Rosamund, to Furnivall Manor upon the death of Rosamund’s parents, she
hears some mysterious organ playing and is told that it is the (dead) “old lord”—for the organ itself is “broken and destroyed inside” (26). But the relation of this phenomenon to the spectral young girl who leads Rosamund out into the snow, where she almost dies, is never clarified. In the end we are given a laborious “explanation” of the supernatural events with a mechanical and twice-repeated moral tacked on: “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” (38). Other of Gaskell’s tales are still sorrier specimens. “The Ghost in the Garden Room” (Household Words, Christmas 1859) is a long, tedious story about a son who returns to rob his own family; but it contains an extraneous supernatural prologue that has nothing whatever to do with the actual narrative. This prologue was evidently added (and possibly written) by Dickens, who was planning a story cycle entitled “The Haunted House” in the Christmas 1859 issue of Household Words. The story has been reprinted without the prologue as “The Crooked Branch.” “Lois the Witch” (in Lois the Witch and Other Tales, 1861) is another long and tiresome story about the Salem witchcraft trial, focusing around a young Englishwoman who leaves Warwickshire to come to stay with relatives in Salem and is eventually tried and hanged as a witch. Gaskell follows the facts of the witchcraft panic faithfully enough, changing names (the Indian woman Tituba becomes Hota, and one Prudence Hickson is one of the teenagers who accuses Lois Barclay of being a witch), and along the way Gaskell utters the fairly routine sentiments of a now rationalist age regarding the appalling superstitiousness and hysteria of the Puritans; but the tale overall has little to recommend it. “Curious If True” (Cornhill Magazine, February 1860) is of slightly greater interest in suggesting that the protagonist’s dreams of coming upon a chateau in France point to his having travelled back in time. But Gaskell telegraphs the punch by an early mention of “M. de Retz” (223), which any astute reader could puzzle out as the notorious fifteenth-century nobleman Gilles de Retz. Gaskell’s work contains some fine descriptions of the rural countryside, and her interest in familial interrelations—the subject of Cranford (1853) and her other novels—is manifest; but her handling of the supernatural is clumsy and laborious, and its use in pointing elementary morals is unadventurous.
Not much more can be said of a much more significant—or, at any rate, prolific—dabbler in the supernatural, Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892), who is of much greater interest to literature and culture by her fascination with Egypt in the 1870s, resulting in several pioneering books of Egyptian exploration. Although she spent much of her literary career writing the occasional weird tale, few rise above the level of routine ghost stories. Among these can be quickly cited such works as “An Engineer’s Story” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1866), about the ghost of a man who returns from the dead to prevent his murderer from wrecking a train as vengeance against the man who had married the woman he and his victim had fought over; and “The New Pass” (Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1870), a tale of ghostly warning. Some of Edwards’s tales are not even well thought-out or conceived. Consider “The Four-Fifteen Express” (Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1866), another train story. The narrator sees both the ghost of a dead man (John Dwerrihouse) and the ghost of a living person (Augustus Raikes) on a train and on the station platform. Later it is ascertained that Raikes had killed Dwerrihouse. It is never clarified how a living person can have a ghost associated with him; but since Edwards sees no reason to account for the ghost of a dead person, it seems she has no trouble envisioning the other kind of ghost. This same scenario occurs in “Was It an Illusion?” (Arrowsmith’s Magazine, Christmas 1881), where the ghost of a living person (a cleric) and the ghost of a dead person (a small boy) are manifested: the cleric had murdered the boy, his illegitimate son. Nor should much attention be devoted to the novella Monsieur Maurice (1873). The ghostly phenomenon here is the appearance of a “brown man” (251) who turns out to be the spirit of an Arab who acts as a kind of guardian or protector of M. Maurice, a state prisoner staying at the house of Johann Ludwig Bernhard. The chief focus of the tale, indeed, is not on the supernatural but on the engaging friendship of Maurice and Bernhard’s nine-year-old daughter, who narrates the tale in her old age. Only two stories by Edwards can be said to be noteworthy—and it is not insignificant that both of them eschew the already hackneyed ghost story formula. “The Discovery of the Treasure Isles” (Every Boy’s Magazine, March–July 1864) tells of the captain of a ship heading to Jamaica who hears of fabulous wealth obtainable in a mysterious realm called the Treasure Isles. Locating the island, he finds pearls, gold, and
much other wealth; but then comes upon the old wreck of his own ship. He ages twenty years in a day. The captain’s slow realisation of the true state of affairs is genuinely chilling; and his return to England, his fabled wealth turned to sand and rock, his friends and family old or dead, is quietly poignant. Even more striking is “The Recollections of Professor Henneberg” (in Miss Carew, 1865). A German professor is convinced that he has been reincarnated. Later he stumbles upon the manuscript of an old book written in his own handwriting by a German who died on the day of his birth. (It is not likely that Lovecraft borrowed this ending for “The Shadow out of Time,” since it is extremely improbable that he ever read Edwards’s story.) Edwards’s work is noteworthy only in its vivid depictions of the topography of continental Europe. The great majority of her tales are set on the Continent, and she displays a fine sense of the customs and culture of France, Germany, and especially Italy. But her handling of the supernatural is unadventurous, and her narrative skills, like those of Elizabeth Gaskell, are not up to the task of engendering a genuine sense of supernatural terror.
iv. The Americans If any writer in the nineteenth century typifies what could be called the backward-looking perspective of weird fiction—the perspective that draws its inspiration from myth, legend, and primitive superstition—it is Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Born during the Napoleonic wars and dying as the American Civil War was coming to an end, he lived through a period of increasing industrialisation and modernisation; and yet, his focus was chiefly directed to the past, both historically and morally. I wish to emphasise that this is not a criticism, but Hawthorne’s outlook does contrast to a notable degree with that of his great contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, whose interest in contemporary science and philosophy orients him more toward the future than many writers of his generation. I am not aware that any research has been done on Hawthorne’s reading of the Gothic novels, but it would be difficult to imagine that he was not exposed to at least some of the more notable examplars of Gothicism during his adolescence and early manhood, for the tales in all his major collections —Twice-Told Tales (1837), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow-Image (1852)—are replete with Gothic imagery and motifs. Much the same could be said, in lesser degree, of all his novels, although only one of them—and even that one in a highly problematical manner—is actually supernatural. His very first novel, the anonymous Fanshawe (1828), has been called a Gothic romance, although it is so chiefly by virtue of its use of the already hackneyed “woman-in-peril” motif and by the fact that one of its chief characters is a Dr. Melmoth, the origin of whose name is scarcely in question. Especially in his short stories, Hawthorne mastered the technique of creating a subtle, complex, multilayered narrative that said little and implied much, using the supernatural as a symbol for the moral, religious, and social concerns with which he was perennially concerned. On occasion his tales come close to allegory or parable; indeed, the latter term is explicitly used to characterise “The Minister’s Black Veil” (The Token, 1836), in which a minister suddenly and inexplicably dons a black veil that renders him “ghostlike from head to foot” (TT 57). While there is nothing
openly supernatural in this scenario—which, as many scholars have contended, is very likely taken from the celebrated black veil in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho—Hawthorne creates an enormously potent sense of moral dread by this seemingly elementary device: in death the minister testifies that “I look around me, and lo! on every visage a Black Veil!” (TT 69), a particularly plangent evocation of the “we are all sinners” trope. The dominance of the notion of sin is evident in such a tale as “The Ambitious Guest” (New-England Magazine, June 1835), which I am more than a little inclined to regard as Hawthorne’s masterwork of weird fiction, although even here the supernatural is manifested—if manifested at all—in a highly ambiguous fashion. A man comes to a tavern run by a family, nestled in the lee of a towering mountain; he fervently wishes to make his mark in the world, but these ambitions are put to naught by an avalanche that kills both him and the family—while leaving the house undamaged. The cosmic awesomeness of the climax is matchless outside the pages of Lovecraft: The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage, and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot— where, in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had quitted their security, and fled right into the pathway of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain, in a cataract of ruin. (TT 373–74) The sense of human insignificance in the face of all-powerful nature is indelible. This story is, in my judgment, much more successful than the somewhat comparable “Ethan Brand” (Boston Weekly Museum, 5 January 1850), since the latter is more strictly tied to Christian dogma and therefore has less of an impact upon those for whom the dogmas carry no weight. Brand’s search for the “Unpardonable Sin” (SI 478) leads him to conclude that he has found it in the exercise of intellect at the expense of the heart, rendering him in the most literal sense an outcast from his own species: “He had lost his hold on the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy . . . Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend” (SI
495). The supernatural is manifested not so much in Brand’s purported encounter with Satan—for, as Brand himself declares scornfully, “what need have I of the Devil?” (SI 484)—but in his horrific death, whereby he plunges into a lime-kiln, with the result that his heart is seen to be made of marble. This conclusion may be just a tad too allegorical to be properly supernatural, but it underscores the moral message of the story as emphatically as one could wish. If anything could testify to Hawthorne’s conflicted attitude toward to the scientific developments of his time, it is in his numerous tales of scientists and experimenters seeking to expand the bounds of human knowledge—and to utilise that knowledge for self-aggrandising ends. These figures seem in part to be modern-day advocates of chemical and biological advance and in part a recrudescence of the mediaeval alchemists of stock Gothic imgery; but they are saved from triteness by the heavy moral symbolism with which Hawthorne endows their every act. In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1837) we are at once introduced to Heidegger’s “book of magic” (TT 260), but the actual elixir he has produced—one that purportedly rejuvenates its imbiber—appears to be chiefly the product of chemical manipulation. In any event, when four old friends drink the elixir, they do appear to be revivified—but are they really? As they begin dancing madly in their suddenly energised youth, we glimpse the following in a mirror: “Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the duskiness of the chamber, and the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is said to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam” (TT 268–69). This magnificently pungent undercutting of the supernatural scenario is found repeatedly in Hawthorne, with the result that a number of his tales and novels fall into the class of the ambiguous weird tale, where it is impossible to determine whether the supernatural has come into play or not. “The Birthmark” (Pioneer, March 1843) appears less ambiguous, for there is no question that the scientist who wishes to erase a birthmark on his wife’s face that he finds displeasing—it actually afflicts him with “horror” (M 50)—ends up killing his wife in the process. This extraordinarily complex tale—one that speaks simultaneously of the objectification of women, the hubris of science, and perhaps even of the evils of racism—also deals bafflingly with the relationship of magic and science. At the very time
that Aylmer, the scientist, is associated with mediaeval alchemy (“He gave a long history of the long dynasty of the alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and base” [M 58]), he also shows himself an exemplar of cutting-edge science. Georgina, his wife, finds in his study “many dark old tomes” that constituted “the works of the philosophers of the Middle Ages,” but “Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought” (M 60–61). Already by the middle of the nineteenth century, the results of scientific advance had come to appear, in the minds of laymen, scarcely distinguishable from magic. The trope comes to full fruition in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (United States Magazine and Democratic Review, December 1844), one of the masterworks of weird fiction in the nineteenth century. Although the moral is stated at the outset a bit bluntly—Rappaccini, the botanist, “cares infinitely more for science than for mankind” (M 116)—the execution is flawless. Rappaccini, interested in “vegetable poisons” (M 117), has planted an entire garden of such poisonous plants—the moisture from one kills a lizard instantly—but his daughter, Beatrice, is able to handle the plants without apparent harm. She has, of course, been raised among those plants since birth. Through long association with her, her lover Giovanni has slowly become infected with the deadly poison: he breathes on a spider and watches in horror as it dies. When Bagnioli, a rival of Rappaccini, fashions (somewhat conveniently) an antidote to the poison, Giovanni compels her to take it; she does so and dies, crying at the end: “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (M 147). Once more, many layers of meaning are imbedded in this tale, chief of them is the inability of Giovanni to accept Beatrice for what she is and his ultimately fatal desire to transform her into something more to his heart’s desire. Toward the end of his life Hawthorne became obsessed with the elixir of life motif, which fused with two other conceptions he had long attempted to embody in fiction—the quest of an American to claim lands belonging to him in England, and the potentially bizarre notion of a man who, having committed murder, leaves a bloody footprint wherever he goes. These latter two ideas were never properly worked out; the former is found in the novel
Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (1883) and the latter in a rough draft or series of notes entitled “The Ancestral Footstep” (1883), but the elixir of life motif did find expression in a fine, if nominally unfinished, novella, Septimius Felton (1872). In Septimius Felton the protagonist of the title bitterly laments the shortness of human life (“We live so little while, that . . . it is little matter whether we live or no” [233]), and he wishes to live forever, chiefly for the sake of knowledge (“It is none too long for all I wish to know” [234]). It transpires—as a witch-figure, Keziah, tells him—that an elixir of life can be manufactured from the flowers that grow out of a grave of a person whom one has killed; and Septimius has conveniently killed a British soldier (the novella is set during the American Revolution) who while dying conveniently hands him a manuscript that appears to contain the formula for the elixir of life. There is some faint hint that the manuscript has actually been written by the Devil (284), but not much is made of this. Septimius’s conflict is humanised by his complex relations with two women—Rose Garfield, his fiancée (in later portions of the text she becomes his sister), who seeks to reconcile him to the ordinary bounds of life and death, and Sibyl Dacy, the fiancée of the man Septimius killed. Intermingled with this triangle is the story of the bloody footprint—an English nobleman had sought (by science) to live forever, but he realised that in order to do so he would have to cause someone else’s death every thirty years—and the ongoing attempt by Septimius to decipher the manuscript. There is some doubt as to whether the manuscript tells of a simple formula to make the elixir, or is merely a kind of guide to ascetic living in order to prevent the bodily wear-and-tear that will lead to death. At one point it is stated that the manuscript chiefly consists of “certain rules of life” (337), and in the outlining of these rules it becomes evident that the extension of life in this manner will in reality rob life of all its human pleasures—to such an extent that one can scarcely call oneself human. And in spite of the fact that Septimius’s friend, Robert Hagburn, now a distinguished soldier in the war, provides a striking counter-philosophy to Septimius’s thirst for eternal life—“If there were to be no death, the beauty of life would be all tame” (393)—Septimius continues on his quest. He appears to have devised the formula—but Sibyl snatches it from him and drinks it herself. She declares that there are two elixirs, one the elixir of life, the other a poison; she has secretly helped Septimius to make the latter, and
drinks it because she is convinced that the quest for the true elixir of life is a mockery. She dies. This conclusion is not entirely satisfactory, but overall Septimius Felton is as noteworthy as any Gothic novel’s working out of the immortality motif. Toward the end there are some remarkably cosmic reflections on the visions one might see if one were to live forever (“New vistas will open themselves before us continually, as we go onward. How idle to think that one little lifetime would exhaust the world! After hundreds of centuries, I feel as if we might still be on the threshold” [410]). And, although there was earlier a suggestion that an earlier experimenter had “sold himself to Sathan” (395) to secure the elixir, Septimius emphatically takes an opposite view: This means that we have discovered of removing death to an indefinite distance is not supernatural; on the contrary, it is the most natural thing in the world,—the very perfection of the natural, since it consists in applying the powers and processes of Nature to the prolongation of the existence of man, her most perfect handiwork; and this could only be done by entire accordance and co-effect with Nature. (411–12) It is not entirely clear that we are to take this rather sophistical view at face value, but it lends intellectual weight to the work. The peculiarly historical orientation of Hawthorne’s mind compelled him to return again and again to what he must have considered a kind of American original sin—the Salem witch trials, the chief black mark on the very town of his birth. The irrationalism and Puritan fanaticism that, in Hawthorne’s mind, led to the judicial massacre of a score of accused “witches” were in such stark contrast to the sedate Protestantism that apparently constituted his own religious outlook that he could only look upon it with horror as a kind of national birthmark that could never be obliterated. It need not be emphasised here that it was Hawthorne himself who changed the spelling of his name in youth, so as to distinguish himself from the John Hathorne who was one of the most notorious of the Salem witchcraft judges.
A wealth of documents could be brought to bear on this topic, but our direct concern is with only a few key items. Of The Scarlet Letter (1850), set in seventeenth-century Salem, it is unnecessary to speak, as there is nothing supernatural in it nor any direct allusion to the witch trials, which presumably occurred after the events of the novel. Of somewhat greater relevance is “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” (International Monthly Magazine, 1 February 1852), an unwontedly whimsical story about “one of the most cunning and potent witches in New England” (M 253–54) who fashions a scarecrow that smokes a pipe, speaks, and walks. But this halfcomic tale is little more than an obvious social satire. Of “Young Goodman Brown” (New-England Magazine, April 1835) it is again difficult to speak in small compass. The critical issue, for our purposes, is twofold: who is the stranger whom Goodman Brown meets on his trek through the dark forest, and are the visions he sees real? The first point seems pretty well settled when Hawthorne refers to the stranger as “he of the serpent” (M 91). Brown himself cries out at one point, “With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” (M 98)— Faith being his wife, and this line constitutes one of the many puns on her name. For of course Brown is heading toward a meeting of witches—a matter that Hawthorne makes unusually clear at the outset in referring to his “evil purpose” (M 90)—and yet, he is himself horrified at seeing so many of his seemingly upright townspeople congregating at the same meeting, culminating with the vision of his own wife. And in the end the Devil delivers the verdict: “Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness” (M 104). So in the end, the question Brown asks himself—“Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (M 105)—becomes irrelevant, for he is blighted by the very possibility that those whom he took to be pious pillars of the community are themselves loathly sinners like himself. The extraordinarily brooding texture and atmosphere of “Young Goodman Brown,” where the darkness and wildness of the forest serves as a chilling echo of the spiritual darkness of Brown’s own mind, are imperishable features of a strikingly potent masterwork. And now we come to The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Whether we agree with Lovecraft that it is “New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature” (S 48), we can perhaps agree that it is a remarkable novel in that it is a work whose very foundation is (presumably) supernatural but
whose working out is, except in incidental moments, as far from terrifying as it is possible to be. Whether we are to assume that what Hawthorne calls “Maule’s curse”—the dying curse of Matthew Maule (“God will give him blood to drink” [21]), executed for witchcraft at the urging of Colonel Pyncheon, who sought Maule’s land—is real is an open question. (The curse was actually uttered by one of the accused Salem witches, although not directed at John Hathorne.) It is true that Colonel Pyncheon himself dies unexpectedly as soon as his house is completed, and it is true that the rest of his line appears blighted in various ways. Indeed, Hawthorne’s provocative remark that “the ghost of a dead progenitor . . . is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family” (36) makes one wonder whether the house is haunted by the ghost of Maule or by that of Colonel Pyncheon. And yet, close to the end of the novel we are suddenly given a rationalistic account of the “curse,” when the artist Holgrave (who proves to be a descendant of Maule) declares that the entire Pyncheon line is subject to the kind of malady (never specified, but apparently some kind of stroke or apoplexy) that killed both Colonel Pyncheon in the seventeenth century and Judge Pyncheon in the nineteenth: “Old Maule’s prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race” (359). Whether this is a credible explanation, and whether Hawthorne intends us to swallow it, is a matter of debate. Even aside from all this, the actual supernatural elements in The House of the Seven Gables are fleeting and perhaps tangential. There is, firstly, the ambiguous figure of Alice Pyncheon, the great-granddaughter of Colonel Pyncheon who, if anyone, can truly be said to haunt the house. Her spectral harpsichord playing manifestly signals death—more clearly, perhaps, than the strange cat whose appearance anticipates the death of Judge Pyncheon. Holgrave tells the story of how Matthew Maule (grandson of the “wizard”) once placed her under a mesmeric trance in a failed attempt to learn the whereabouts of a key document sought by the Pyncheon clan; through this trace, the spirits of other dead Pyncheons appear. But the true acme of horror in the novel is, of course, the tour de force that constitutes chapter 18, “Governor Pyncheon.” For this is nothing less than Hawthorne’s bitter and satirical address to Judge Pyncheon himself, sitting dead in his own house, with blood all down his shirt. The very title is a pungent irony, for Pyncheon’s unbounded vainglory had envisioned his ascent to the governorship as his power and influence continued to grow.
And what we are to make of this remarkable aside, when Hawthorne urges the judge to drink a glass of Madeira to rouse himself: “It would all but revive a dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?” (323). I know of nothing like this chapter in the entire range of horror literature, before or since: there is, to be sure, nothing supernatural about it, but this hectoring of a dead man is just about the last thing one would have expected from the mild-mannered customs officer of Salem. We have by no means exhausted the tally of Hawthorne’s supernatural works. “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July 1838) again fuses horror and history in its powerful depiction of a portrait that looks balefully down upon a lieutenant governor who signs an order to let the British army enter Boston; “Drowne’s Wooden Image” (Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, July 1844) may or may not be supernatural in its account of a man who carves a figurehead for a ship that perhaps comes to life; “The Snow-Image” (in The Snow-Image, 1852) exhibits benign supernaturalism as snowmen become animated. The frequency with which Hawthorne returns to the supernatural in novels and tales throughout his career points to the extent to which the other world haunted his mind and imagination; and his expression of Gothic tropes in several imperishable literary works will give him as high a place in the canon of supernatural literature as it does in the realm of general literature. Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–1862), born (in Ireland) a full generation after Hawthorne, has come to be regarded as an American author, chiefly by virtue of his ten-year residence in New York City and his vivid evocation of that metropolis in the relatively modest corpus of tales he published prior to his early death while serving in the Union army in the Civil War. His arrival in the United States in 1852, shortly after his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin, seemed almost providential in its heralding of a replacement for Edgar Allan Poe. O’Brien is by no means as intense or powerful a writer as Poe, nor is he likely to have become so even if he had lived; moreover, his work is generally devoid of the textural complexity and understanding of the American character that distinguish the novels and tales of Hawthorne. But, if nothing else, he can be considered the first fully post-Gothic American writer—one who has entirely left behind both the motifs and the methodology of the Gothic novelists.
The chief point of difference with Hawthorne rests in O’Brien’s treatment of science, the focus of his two most celebrated tales, “The Diamond Lens” (Atlantic Monthly, January 1858) and “What Was It?” (Harper’s, March 1859). It is true that, in the former, the wonders of the microscope are compared to the Arabian Nights (“The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments” [2]), but O’Brien, whose knowledge of hard science was substantially superior to that of Hawthorne and probably that of Poe as well, knew whereof he spoke, even though the protagonist of “The Diamond Lens” abjures “scientific thirst” and vaunts the “pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed” (3) as the driving force of his interest in the tiny worlds revealed through the microscope. The story is vitiated by two missteps: first, the fact that the unnamed first-person protagonist, although manifestly learned in science, seeks out a medium to summon the spirit of Leeuwenhoek (!) to aid him in making scientific discoveries; and second, after the spirit tells him to secure a 140-carat diamond to make a lens more powerful than any yet created, the protagonist murders a French Jew who conveniently happens to have such a lens. It is remarkable that O’Brien was unaware how damaging this act would be to the reader’s sympathy for his character, and one hopes it is not merely an indication of the author’s prejudice. (But, given the fact that in another story, “My Wife’s Tempter” [Harper’s Weekly, 12 December 1857], he seeks to create horror at the mere thought of a woman converting to the Mormon faith, one’s doubts are substantially augmented.) In any event, the upshot is that, through the wondrous lens he manufactures, he sees—and falls in love with—an infinitesimally small female creature he sees in a drop of water. Without explicitly saying so, O’Brien plangently uses the supernatural—for the scientific implausibility of the story cannot truly make it a proto-science-fiction tale—to emphasise that all-too-human longing for the unattainable, and this becomes the final impression we take from the narrative, as the creature slowly dies with evaporation of the water. Of the immensely influential “What Was It?” we can remark that its success in depicting an invisible monster—perhaps the first such tale on record, or in any event the first one of any note—rests, at least at the outset, on its lightness of touch, as the occupants of a New York apartment building that has had a history of being haunted find amusement in the scenario:
Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No. — than we began to expect the ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. . . . I found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had once written a story the foundation of which was a ghost. (193) The bantering tone clearly suggests that ghost stories—and, more significantly, accounts of “real” ghosts—had long been regarded with a scepticism bordering on cynical incredulity by all but the most ill-educated individuals. But the atmosphere of the story turns suddenly grim when the monster—a roughly humanoid entity, something like a teenage boy, who can be felt but not seen—manifests itself and engages in a grotesque tussle with the narrator. A scientific explanation of sorts is indeed provided by the narrator’s friend Hammond, who (rather implausibly) suggests a parallel with glass and goes on to say that the phenomenon “is not theoretically impossible” (205); but in the end no true explanation for the origin of this creature, and why it chose to appear in an apartment building in a crowded metropolis, is provided. Other of O’Brien’s tales are less distinguished. “The Wondersmith” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1859) tells of a gipsy, Herr Hippe, who seeks to unleash an army of monsters by infusing the souls of demons into tiny soldiers he has made; he seems to succeed in doing so, but his plan of killing “Christian children” (52) goes awry when the soldiers attack him. The generally whimsical tone of the narrative suggests a fairy or folk tale rather than a story of the supernatural. “The Lost Room” (Harper’s, September 1858) is a mad narrative of a man who comes back to his apartment one night and finds it peopled by a bizarre and motley array of individuals, then, when he leaves, cannot even find the door of his room. It is a hypnotic account, but its purport eludes me. “The Pot of Tulips” (Harper’s, November 1855) is a routine tale of an apparition. “The Golden Ingot” (Knickerbocker Magazine, August 1858) may be of some significance: a man who claims to be an alchemist and desperately seeks to make gold seems to have discovered the formula to do so—but we then learn that the gold ingot he has apparently produced was surreptitiously
placed among his chemical apparatus by his daughter, who felt that he would die of frustration and disappointment if he did not think he had succeeded in his futile quest. The tale is poignant if somewhat clumsily told, and perhaps signals the final demise of the Gothic trope of the philosopher’s stone. In subsequent “mad scientist” tales, the quest is for something far more interesting—and, usually, more baleful—than the manufacture of gold. A few words should perhaps be said about the vaguely weird trilogy of novels by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). The first in particular has developed a reputation as an excursion into the fantastic, but it is really nothing of the kind. All three novels are so heavily didactic— specifically, they are expressions of Holmes’s views on pre-natal influence and moral responsibility—that they rarely develop any independent aesthetic impetus; they are too clinical and heavy-handed. The premise of Elsie Venner—a woman develops snakelike qualities (although these are more mental or metaphorical than literal) after her mother was bitten by a snake while pregnant—might have made an effective novel that could have involved actual shapeshifting, but Holmes is not interested in that kind of work. The protagonist of The Guardian Angel, also a young woman, exhibits bizarre traits because she is descended from a princess of India. There is here not even the pretence of anything supernatural in the scenario. A Mortal Antipathy is merely about a man who develops a “mortal antipathy” to women because of a childhood trauma. The minor novelist George Lippard (1822–1854) is worth consideration for two works in the Gothic mode. The early The Ladye Annabel; or, The Doom of the Poisoner (1844), is a non-supernatural novel set in mediaeval Florence, featuring a sorcerer, Aldarin, who attempts to gain control of the city. Full of death, torture, alchemical experiments, and other Gothic stageproperties, it reveals both Lippard’s strengths (fertile imagination, frenetic narration, a thirst for blood-and-thunder) and his weaknesses (repetitiousness, haste in writing, and lack of focus in plot). Lippard’s friend Edgar Allan Poe, in a letter to him (18 February 1844), although finding flaws in the work, praised it as “richly inventive and imaginative” (L 243). Lippard’s literary characteristics are on full display in his best-known work, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monks Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (first published in 10 parts [1844–
45], then as a book [1845]). This wildly histrionic novel is also nonsupernatural but suggests the supernatural at various points. The plot is based on an actual court case that had been tried in 1843, when a Philadelphia man had been acquitted of murdering another man who had seduced his sister. Lippard transmogrifies this scenario into a Golgotha of horror, sex, and perversion: Byrnewood Arlington, finding that his friend Gus Lorrimer has seduced his own sister, hunts him down and kills him. The focus of the novel is a pseudo-Gothic castle, the mansion Monk’s Hall, the secret haven for lascivious assignations by prominent Philadelphians. It is run by a hideous one-eyed man named Abijah K. Jones, nicknamed Devil-Bug—“a wild beast, a snake, a reptile, or a devil incarnate” (106). The closest the novel comes to supernaturalism is in various bizarre or prophetic dreams on the part of the numerous characters—visions of delirium, hallucinations, drug- or alcohol-induced nightmares, and especially a cosmic vision that Devil-Bug has of the Philadelphia of 1950, when the sky is illuminated with the words “WO UNTO SODOM!” (377). Massively verbose, carelessly written, and lurid beyond belief, The Quaker City nonetheless proves to be an enormously powerful work fueled by Lippard’s ardent quest for social justice, his anticlericalism, and his feminism. It was the best-selling novel in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
v. French and German Supernaturalism The work of Balzac, Hugo, and others in the early nineteenth century spelled only the tentative beginnings of a supernatural tradition in France. It was only in the middle decades of the century that several significant writers emerged to lay the groundwork for a substantial and self-sustaining pattern of weird writing. Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) wrote a number of works on the borderline of the weird, but none of them amount to anything except “La Vénus d’Ille” (Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 May 1837; usually translated as “The Venus of Ille”). This tale alone, however, would be sufficient to ensure its author a worthy place in the canon of supernatural literature. The core of the plot appears to be based upon an anecdote in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in which a man becomes unwittingly engaged to a statue after putting a ring on her finger. This is exactly what the protagonist of “The Venus of Ille” does. It is the worse for him that the copper statue of Venus that is excavated near the town of Ille reflects “malice verging on viciousness” (192) on its metallic features. Some of the supernatural touches are uncommonly fine; when the man tries to get the ring off the statue’s finger and finds himself unable to do so, he states harrowingly, “she has bent her finger” (213). The narrator, the man’s friend, is horrified to find the man killed on his wedding night: “One would have said he had been squeezed in an iron ring” (217). The bride, now driven insane, claims that the statue killed him. There is perhaps no overarching message in this tale—it is a simple account of supernatural revenge—but the skill of its execution is unmatched. Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) could be said to be the first French author who actually concentrated on the weird and supernatural. Although his best-known work is the landmark mainstream novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), he engaged in le fantastique throughout his career in works of widely varying styles, themes, and subject matter. English-speaking readers have perhaps been unduly focused on certain tales, to the detriment of others, as a result of Lafcadio Hearn’s stylish translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882), which in fact
contains tales that are not truly weird and omits others (probably on the grounds of length) that are, so we must cast a somewhat wider net in assessing the full range of Gautier’s supernatural work. Two dominant themes can be said to infuse these works—love (whether physical or spiritual) and time-defiance. The latter comes to the fore in a number of tales short and long. While—as Albert B. Smith (Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic 56), the most exhaustive commentator in English on Gautier’s weird work, rightly contends—it is an exaggeration to say that “Une Nuit de Cléopâtre” (Presse, 29 November–6 December 1838; “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”) is in any sense weird, it may well have contributed its mite to subsequent writers’ focus on Egypt as a locus of aeon-old horror. The tale is exactly the sort that a high Romantic like Gautier would find appealing: Cleopatra, bored by the sameness of her illustrious life, is captivated by a commoner who expends great effort to show her that he loves her, and she invites him to spend one night of lovemaking (although much of the time is apparently spent in a lavish banquet) before she lets him take poison and kill himself. Cleopatra’s sense of the horror of Egypt is vividly etched: “. . . this land is truly an awful land; all things in it are gloomy, enigmatic, incomprehensible. Imagination has produced in it only monstrous chimeras and monuments immeasurable; this architecture and this art fill me with fear; those colossi, whose stone-entangled limbs compel them to remain eternally sitting with their hands upon their knees, weary me with their stupid immobility; they trouble my eyes and my horizon.” (16–17) There is much more of this, but this will do. Later writers seized upon the notions here expressed of a land obsessed with death and crushed by the weight of the centuries. Egypt is also the focus of “Le Pied de la momie” (Musée des Familles, September 1840; “The Mummy’s Foot”), a more light-hearted tale in which a man who obtains a mummy’s foot in a shop as a paperweight finds that not only it comes to life but that its owner, an Egyptian princess, materialises and takes him back to ancient Egypt. He wakes up from what appears to be a dream—but then finds a replacement paperweight that the princess had given to him. The narrator’s expression of
irritation at his moving paperweight is amusing: “I became rather discontented with my acquisition, inasmuch as I wished my paperweights to be of a sedentary disposition, and thought it very unnatural that feet should walk about without legs, and I commended to experience a feeling closely akin to fear” (233). “Arria Marcella” (Revue de Paris, 1852) again looks to the ancient world as a source of wonder and terror. Here, three contemporary Frenchmen wander through Pompeii; one of them—named, with fairly obvious significance, Octavien—finds himself so captivated by the figure of a lava-covered woman (the actress Arria Marcella) that he goes back in time to when Pompeii was flourishing; she makes the cryptic remark, “Your desire has restored me to life” (207), as if she already knows her future. In any case, their attempt to marry is met with opposition by her father, a Christian, who “performs an exorcism” (212) and restores her to a cinder. “Le Roi Candaule” (Presse, 1–5 October 1844; “King Candaules”), which Hearn also included in his collection, is still less a weird tale than “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” being nothing more than an artful retelling of the ancient account (found most notably in Herodotus) of the Lydian captain Gyges who, having been allowed by King Candaules to see his wife naked, is compelled by her to kill Candaules and assume the throne himself, with the queen as his bride. It is evident from the above that the themes of love and time-defiance are frequently intertwined in Gautier’s work, and it is only a matter of emphasis that allows us to distinguish them. A number of stories that focus on physical and spiritual love, however, abandon any attempts at time-travel and focus on other supernatural phenomena. The short novel Avatar (Moniteur Universel, 29 February–3 April 1856) is perhaps the most striking of these. Here, Gautier broaches—decades before Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911) or H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933)—the notion of personality exchange. Octave de Saville is dying of love for a Polish countess; he approaches an unscrupulous doctor who, having travelled to India and absorbed from the yogis the secret of separating the soul from the body, successfully transfers Octave’s soul into the body of the Polish count. But the countess senses the change in her purported husband at once, especially when he fails to respond after she speaks to him in Polish. At one point the count (in Octave’s body) shows up with the dramatic cry, “Thief, brigand, rogue, give me back my body!”
(149). An extraordinary duel follows in which each contestant realises that the body he is seeking to kill is his own. Octave, realising that the countess will never love him no matter what body he occupies, agrees to undergo a reversal of the soul-body switch; but when the time comes, Octave’s soul, “instead of rejoining its own [body], rose, rose as if glad to be free, and appeared indifferent to its prison” (167). The doctor, whose own body is giving out, thrusts his soul into Octave’s body. Gautier fully realises the bizarrerie of the scenario, and this novel may perhaps be the summit of his work in supernatural horror. Another tale of what might be called a detached soul is Spirite (Moniteur Universel, 17 November–6 December 1865), although terror is largely absent in the narration of the scenario. Here, Guy de Malivert senses an immaterial presence in his room. His friend, the Baron de Feroë, who appears to have a wondrous knowledge of the supernatural, states that he “had recently been visited by a spirit, or at least that the invisible world was seeking to enter into relations with you” (68). It transpires that the spirit, who is “sympatheitc, kindly, and loving” (72), is that of a young woman who admired Guy from afar but died of unrequited love in a convent. Spirite (as Guy names her) implausibly dictates this account to him in several lengthy sessions. Up to this point, the tale is really a love story that uses its supernatural premise as a not entirely convincing motivator of the plot. The only supernatural incident of any consequence is a memorable scene in which Guy sees Spirite in a sleigh—and then is horrified and amazed when the sleigh passes through a carriage crossing its path. But as the narrative proceeds, Gautier emphasises the degree to which Guy, now entirely in love with Spirite, finds his entire worldview altering (“Nature now appeared to him only in a vague, misty, splendid distance that served as a background to his fixed thoughts. The world was for him only the landscape of Spirite, and he thought even the finest prospects unworthy of this function” [240]). Spirite had prevented Guy from committing suicide, for this would separate them forever (by taking him to Hell, so we are led to believe). But when he is killed by bandits in Greece, Guy’s soul can finally unite with Spirite. The tale is intermittently effective, but perhaps not enough time is spent on a full analysis of the anomalous relations between a physical man and the immaterial spirit of a lovely young woman. Much time is also occupied by a satirical portrait of the countess d’Ymbercourt, a woman who is herself in love with Guy but whom he scorns.
If spiritual love is sufficient for Guy de Malivert, it is very much otherwise with the protagonist of “Omphale” (Journal des Gens du Monde, 7 February 1834; “Omphale: A Rococo Story”). Here the figure of the mythological Omphale detaches itself from a tapestry to become a fleshand-blood woman. She announces herself as the Marchioness de T——, the original of the figure in the tapestry. In the course of the story she makes love to the protagonist before the tapestry is taken away by his uncle and sold. There is more carnality, and much more actual terror, in “La Morte amoureuse” (Chronique de Paris, 23 and 26 June 1836; translated as “Clarimonde,” “The Dead Leman,” “The Vampire,” and other titles), a pioneering vampire tale. The narrator of the tale, a priest, speaks in anguished tones about the fascination that Clarimonde exercises over him, to the point that he almost refuses to become a priest at his ordaining ceremony. Later, when he is taken to her deathbed, he continues to be enthralled: “My arteries throbbed with such violence that I felt them hiss through my temples, and the sweat poured from my forehead in streams, as though I had lifted a mighty slab of marble” (116). He wonders whether she is a “ghoul, a female vampire” (123). After her death, she comes to him from he tomb; they go to a great castle, where Clarimonde, in failing health, avidly drinks the priest’s blood after he cuts his finger. Later, her coffin is dug up and holy water sprinkled upon it, whereupon “her beautiful body crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frighful mass of cinders and half-calcined bones” (148). There is much made of the conflict of religion (specifically Christianity) and Clarimonde as the representative of the infernal powers; at one point she cries, “Ah, how jealous I am of that God whom thou didst love and still lovest more than me!” (128). But it is, of course, doubtful whether the priest really does love God more than he loves Clarimonde, and the tale is an effective parable of temptation and spiritual weakness. The short novel Jettatura (Moniteur Universel, 25 June–23 July 1856) is worth some discussion. In this story of a Frenchman, Paul d’Aspremont, his fiancée Alicia Ward, and the Count d’Altavilla, who also loves Alicia, the evil eye is apparently brought into play. At any rate, the count is convinced that Paul has the evil eye—but is this merely a means of scaring Alicia away from him? Paul himself comes to believe that he has the evil eye and looks back upon various incidents in his past that appear to confirm it. The work ends spectacularly: Paul and the count have a duel in which the
count is killed; Paul blames himself for the death and undertakes the horrible act of blinding himself; but when he comes to Alicia, he finds that she is dead, so he tosses himself into the sea. In the end, the matter of whether Paul actually had the evil eye is never confirmed, so this tale must remain one of ambiguous supernaturalism. The extensive array of Gautier’s writings in the supernatural—which to this day remain scattered (at least in English translation) over a number of volumes, many of them long out of print—is a testament to its perennial fascination for him. Gautier had a pretty broad understanding of what he meant by le fantastique, as Albert B. Smith notes after examining Gautier’s numerous articles and reviews: When Gautier uses fantastique in a general sense, it may have one of three meanings: unreal, designating either supernatural or imaginary phenomena; real, but unusual, unwonted, or exaggerated; capricious, designating a certain cast of mind or products or conduct inferred to be derivative from such a mind. He frequently qualifies as fantastique an apparently supernatural aspect which objects or situations may have. (21) For our purposes, only the first and perhaps the third are of relevance. It is also of note that Gautier did not always interpret the supernatural as a source of terror, which is largely absent in such works as Spirite. The flamboyance of Gautier’s style and imagery, typical of the Romanticism of his own temperament and of his era, even makes such non-weird specimens as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” close cousins of his actual supernatural work. A brief discussion of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) is warranted here. I say “brief,” not because Baudelaire isn’t worth ample study and analysis from a number of perspectives, but because his actual contribution to the literature of the supernatural is not as extensive as his reputation suggests. The dominant themes of Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868) appear to be—beyond, or through, their probing of the multifarious themes of love and death—the transcending of boundaries, especially the moral and social boundaries that led Baudelaire to be afflicted with unutterable weariness with the conventionality of the Parisian society of his day. That
said, Baudelaire does employ the supernatural to convey his message, as when, in “Le Revenant” (The Phantom), a lover proclaims that he will return from the dead to make love to his beloved; but he concludes, “Let others reign by love and ruth / Over thy life and all thy youth, / But I am fain to rule by fear” (127). Perhaps Baudelaire’s most concentrated horrific poem is “Les Métamorphoses du vampire” (The Metamorphoses of the Vampire), in which a seductive female vampire, “kneading her breasts against her iron stays,” tempts the narrator with lascivious words and then “suck[s] all the marrow from my bones” (291). It is no surprise that this was one of the poems that led to the book’s banning in 1857. Baudelaire, as the stylish translator of Poe and as a leading founder of the Decadents, played a role in the development of supernatural literature, but his own contributions to the form are modest. As Gautier and Baudelaire were winding down their careers, another French writer—or, rather, a pair of them—came to the fore in the writing of supernatural fiction, although it was only a relatively small segment of an output that chiefly featured historical novels. I speak of Emile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890), who, as “ErckmannChatrian,” produced a surprisingly interesting array of weird fiction in the 1860s. To call them French writers is something of an oversimplification, for by birth they were the products of the disputed province of Alsace, which was a political and military football between France and Germany both before and during their lifetimes; much of their weird work is set in Germany and clearly draws upon the German Gothic fiction of the generations that preceded them. Erckmann-Chatrian’s chief weird work is the able werewolf novella “Hugues-le-loup” (in Contes de la montagne, 1860), usually translated as “The Man-Wolf.” The focus of this work is the Count of Nideck, the name of whose ancestor, Hugh Lupus, would seem to make it pretty clear why he became a werewolf. But we are led to believe that his transformation is the result of a witch known in the locality as the Black Pest. The first manifestation of his lycanthropy is of interest: “That low receding forehead, that sharp-pointed face, that foxy-looking beard, bristling off both cheeks; the long meagre figure, the sinewy limbs, the face, the cry, the attitude, declared the presence of the wild beast half-hidden, half-revealed under a human mask!” (89). This description is careful to specify that the count has not been fully metamorphosed into a wolf, but merely that he now bears
certain outward, and perhaps superficial, characteristics of a wolf. Indeed, throughout the work sympathy is extended toward the count, who is presented as a kind, honourable nobleman; and it is no surprise that, as the novella proceeds, the focus of our interest shifts to the Black Pest, who is pursued by the protagonists in a suspenseful climactic scene. Even here, though, we are told that “she is near [my emphasis] to the nature of the wolf, and some great mystery overshadowed her being” (124). In the end it is not entirely clear whether a supernatural transformation, either of the count or of the witch, has taken place. Erckmann-Chatrian’s shorter works reveal an admirable originality of conception that is not quite matched by skill in execution. A certain obvious but not ineffective moralism runs through many of these narratives, as in “L’Oreille de la chouette” (in Contes fantastiques, 1860; “The Owl’s Ear”), in which a man devises a wondrous invention—a “microacoustic ear trumpet” that acts upon the hearing as a microscope does upon the sight— but kills himself from discouragement; “L’Heritage de l’oncle Christian” (in Contes fantastiques; “Uncle Christian’s Inheritance”), a ghost story that underscores the transience of humanity and the vanity of covetousness in its portrayal of a succession of ghosts who claim ownership of a house that the protagonist has just inherited from his uncle; and “La Reine des abeilles” (Contes du bord du Rhin, 1862; “The Queen of the Bees”), a touching tale of benign supernaturalism in which a blind girl gains sight by sympathetic union with the thousands of bees she keeps. At times Erckmann-Chatrian’s tales can become quite grim. “L’Oeil invisible” (L’Artiste, 1857; “The Invisible Eye”) is the gripping tale of an old woman who appears to induce the occupants of a room in a tavern to suicide through the “evil eye” until the narrator turns the tables on her and induces her to commit suicide herself. In “L’Esquisse mystérieuse” (in Contes fantastiques; “The Mysterious Sketch”) an artist, for no reason that he can understand, draws a sketch of a woman being murdered—only the face of the perpetrator is not filled in. It transpires that just such a woman was murdered, and the artist himself is arrested for the crime after the police see the sketch; but later the artist, coming upon the actual perpetrator, is compelled to fill in that person’s face in the sketch, and the murderer is arrested and confesses. Finally, “Le Cabaliste Hans Veinland” (in Contes du bord du Rhin, 1862) tells of a professor of metaphysics who, having killed a man in a duel, flees to Paris, where he falls into poverty and misery, gaining
thereby a furious hatred of the entire human race. He then casts his astral body into the body of an Indian (with whom he shares a soul) and brings back cholera to France, which kills thousands. This last tale is particularly powerful—or would be if the development were not quite so clumsy. As for “L’Araignée crabe” (in Contes fantastiques; “The Crab Spider” or “The Waters of Death”), it has gained celebrity in recent years, but it is simply the unremarkable tale of a giant spider. As I say, the power of ErckmannChatrian’s work rests upon its novel conceptions rather than the effective working out of those conceptions; but it is, at any rate, refreshing to see work of this period extending well beyond the already hackneyed ghost or revenant. For decades Erckmann-Chatrian’s work was difficult to find in English, but Hugh Lamb remedied the problem with the compilation The Best Tales of Terror of Erckmann-Chatrian (1991), revised as The Invisible Eye (2003). Some note should be taken of the work of Paul Féval (1816–1887), although he specialised chiefly in sprawling crime and adventure novels, such as the celebrated Mystères de Londres (1844). But in two other works, La Vampire (1856) and La Ville-vampire (1875), Féval effectively made use of the vampire myth. The former anticipated Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” in its depiction of a female vampire, while the latter even more impressively anticipated Stephen King (’Salem’s Lot, 1975) and other recent writers in depicting an entire city populated by vampires. But since these novels were not translated into English until very recently, their influence upon Anglophone literature has been minimal. The only German writer of this period who need concern us is Wilhelm Meinhold (1797–1851), whose Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe (1843; usually translated as The Amber Witch) is—apparently—non-supernatural but of considerable interest. Set in the Thirty Years’ War and purporting to be a fragmentary chronicle narrated in the first person by Pastor Schweidler, Maria’s father, the novel is in essence the account of a love triangle: Maria is loved by both the ruthless Lord Wittich and the gallant Rüdiger of Nienkerten. Beneath this trite scenario, however, is the persistent fear of witchcraft among a credulous and religiously indoctrinated populace. The pastor blandly states at one point that “Witchcraft began in the village” (154) when a cow becomes sick; later a woman gives birth to what she calls a “devil’s imp” (154). When Rüdiger doubts the existence of witchcraft, the pastor thinks he is an atheist!—as, indeed, he would be if the Bible is
regarded as an infallible document. Maria herself believes in witchcraft, but pleads her innocence in vain as she is increasingly looked upon with suspicion and finally arrested, questioned, and on the verge of being tortured. This last scene is probably the most powerful in the book, evoking any number of earlier Gothic works where sadistic religious figures abuse a helpless and terrified victim: She shook like an aspen leaf when he bound her hands and feet; and when he was about to bind over her sweet eyes a nasty old filthy clout wherein my maid had seen him carry fish but the day before, and which was still all over shining scales, I perceived it, and pulled off my silken neckerchief, bgging him to use that instead, which he did. Hereupon the thumb-screw was put on her, and she was once more asked whether she would confess freely [!] . . . (205) She does in fact confess before the torture begins. Rüdiger saves Maria at the end; but the supernatural may enter in the account of another woman, Lizzie, who admits that she is a witch and was the cause of the various sicknesses that had beset the town and caused suspicion to fall upon Maria —or, rather, Lizzie claims that she has a familiar called Dudaim, who alternately appears in the form of a woodpecker, a cat, and other shapes. Possibly we are to understand all this as a hallucination on Lizzie’s part, but it is not entirely clear that all the events of the novel can be satisfactorily resolved except by appeal to this supernatural entity. Meinhold went on to write an actual supernatural novel, Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847; Sidonia the Sorceress), who is apparently a real witch and must be overcome only by an angel of light. This novel, however, although it was translated in 1849 by Lady Wilde, has not had anything like the influence of The Amber Witch, which for much of the nineteenth century was taken as an actual account of a witch trial.
vi. Irish Gothic: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu For the past three-quarters of a century there has been a kind of languid renaissance of the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). In the fifty years following his death, his work had largely fallen out of print, and he seemed to be on the brink of lapsing into oblivion. But when M. R. James compiled Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories (1923), and Dorothy L. Sayers included “Green Tea” in her pioneering anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928), things eventually turned for the better. In the 1960s E. F. Bleiler assembled Le Fanu’s Best Short Stories (1964) and arranged for a reprint (1966) of Le Fanu’s most celebrated novel, Uncle Silas; in the next decade Bleiler issued another collection of Le Fanu’s short fiction, Ghost Stories and Mysteries (1975). W. J. McCormack wrote what is without doubt the most sophisticated critical study, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (1980), and in recent years a three-volume edition of his short fiction has been published by AshTree Press (2002–05), Uncle Silas has appeared (2001) in Penguin Classics (although I have been told it has sold very poorly), and the story collection In a Glass Darkly has been issued (1993) in the Oxford World’s Classics series. A bibliography by Gary William Crawford appeared in 1995, and two further critical studies were issued in 1987 and 2007. So it would appear that Le Fanu is back on the map. Is it, then, the case that he is a sadly neglected master of supernatural and mystery fiction who has now regained the canonical status he deserves? After an exhaustive rereading of his work, I regret to report that I must answer emphatically in the negative, and I will go on to say that Le Fanu’s tales have been vastly— even grotesquely—overpraised by his partisans. The brute fact is that Le Fanu’s work in the realm of supernatural or non-supernatural horror is staggeringly verbose, largely unimaginative, and unillumined by anything that can be termed distinctive prose, vivid characterisation, or compelling plot development. Le Fanu failed to advance supernatural literature beyond the tired Gothic modes he favoured, as the rapid demise of his work after his death and its corresponding lack of influence upon the subsequent supernatural tradition painfully attest.
There is little need to dwell on Le Fanu’s life. A scion of the Protestant aristocracy of Ireland, he spent the majority of his life in or around Dublin. He published his first short story in 1838, the year after graduating from Trinity College. Shortly thereafter he plunged into journalism, purchasing and editing several magazines—a career that culminated in 1861, when he became proprietor and editor of the Dublin University Magazine, a periodical that, both before and after that date, published the bulk of his short fiction. He also wrote more than a dozen novels. Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett in 1843, and her death fifteen years later reputedly shattered him with grief and turned him into a recluse—a fitting role for a writer of the supernatural. This legend of Le Fanu’s hermitry is a bit exaggerated, as he received many visitors in his Dublin home, including such prominent figures as the novelist Charles Lever. It appears that Le Fanu, following the death of his wife, simply plunged into literary labours, and a substantial proportion of his work appeared in the final decade and a half of his life, including the novels The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864) and the story collections Chronciles of Golden Friars (1871) and In a Glass Darkly (1872). Of Le Fanu’s early work little can—and, out of charity, should—be said. A number of stories are narrated by a country priest, Francis Purcell, who has purportedly collected legends of the Irish peasantry. Several of these contain affecting depictions of the Irish countryside and of the rural denizens inhabiting it, even if on occasion (as in “The Ghost and the BoneSetter” [Dublin University Magazine, January 1838]) Le Fanu’s rendering of Irish dialect is so extreme as to render the story nearly unreadable. Oddly enough, Le Fanu himself made no attempt to collect the Purcell stories— although a few appeared in his first story collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851)—and they had to be assembled posthumously in The Purcell Papers (1880). Very few of the supernatural tales amount to much. One of the most curious is “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh” (Dublin University Magazine, March 1838), which is really two stories in one. By reputation, Sir Robert, who was fond of horse racing, had uncanny luck at choosing winners at the races, and it was suspected that he had received the assistance of the Devil in his bets. But the third-person narrator (presumably Purcell) now tells an entirely different story, one that he claims is derived from first-hand evidence and chiefly relating to the sinister presence of a mysterious valet of Sir Robert’s who may or may not have
been involved in the latter’s death. The extreme disjunction between even the basic thread of the two accounts renders the story incoherent. A substantial proportion of Le Fanu’s tales, early and late, are relatively conventional stories of ghosts and apparitions—such things as “The Drunkard’s Dream” (Dublin University Magazine, August 1838), “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” (Dublin University Magazine, January 1851), “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (Dublin University Magazine, December 1853), and “Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House” (Dublin University Magazine, October 1862), a purportedly “true” narrative—and do nothing but reveal the degree to which such accounts had already become hackneyed and routine. In only a few stories does some originality of motif or treatment present itself. Consider “Schalken the Painter” (Dublin University Magazine, May 1839). Here a Dutchwoman, Rose Douw, is forced by her father to marry a strange man, Wilken Vanderhausen. His appearance is foreboding: . . . but the face!—all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was, consequently, nearly black; and the entire character of the face was sensual, malignant, and even satanic. (B 38) Is he, indeed, one of the undead? Rose implies as much when, fleeing him, she cries, “The dead and the living can never be one” (B 42). The compactness and intensity of this tale render it one of Le Fanu’s rare early successes. Intensity is certainly a term one can use for “The Mysterious Lodger” (Dublin University Magazine, January 1850), one of the more curious specimens in Le Fanu’s body of short fiction. The basic thrust of this tale is religious doubt—and it is an impressive achievement on Le Fanu’s part that he can endow this largely philosophical conception with a powerful element of terror. Le Fanu’s own wife was reportedly beset with such doubts, and it is likely that he had first-hand knowledge of their ravaging effects upon
individual psychology and domestic felicity. “The Mysterious Lodger” is, however, not a success from a purely aesthetic point of view: its random supernatural manifestations fail to cohere, and a concluding attempt to explain the phenomena by appealing to the possible haunting of the house in which they occur weakens the overall message. Another tale that ingeniously combines religion and terror is “Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling” (Dublin University Magazine, April 1864), in which a man’s soul has, by a curse, been enclosed in a holy candle; when it is burned, the revenant lives his entire life in a few minutes: His feet and legs seemed indistinctly to swell, and swathings showed themselves round them, and they grew into something enormous, and the upper figure swayed and shaped itself into corresponding proportions, a great mass of corpulence, with a cadaverous and malignant face, and the furrows of a great old age, and colourless glassy eyes; and with these changes, which came indefinitely but rapidly as those of a sunset cloud, the fine regimentals faded away, and a loose, gray, woollen drapery, somehow, was there in its stead; and all seemed to be stained and rotten, for swarms of worms seemed creeping in and out, while the figure grew paler and paler . . . (G 114–15) “Borrhomeo the Astrologer” (Dublin University Magazine, January 1862) is also worth discussing in this context. The astrologer, as an old man, is given the elixir of life and is promised that he will live a thousand years. He is, however, caught in an act of impiety and sentenced to die horribly (successively by being hanged, impaled, and buried alive)—and, of course, he will live through it all and experience the exquisite pains of a thousand years of torment. There is, however, little that can be said for other of Le Fanu’s short stories and novellas—with two exceptions. Many are seriously marred by prolixity: Le Fanu simply does not have a sufficiently distinctive prose style to carry the reader through the longueurs of the very slow-moving scenarios he generally establishes. In principle, the employment of the novelette or novella for supernatural horror can be highly efficacious: the expansion of compass can engender a powerful sense of cumulative horror while
maintaining the concision and unity that distinguish the short story. But Le Fanu is rarely successful in the form: his novellas spin themselves out far beyond the needs of the plot, as if he is hoping to be paid by the word; and his prose, lacking the manic intensity of Poe or the brooding symbolism of Hawthorne, merely spins itself out in harmless verbosity. “Squire Toby’s Will” (Temple Bar, January 1868) is such a specimen. Not only is the story conventional in basic plot—a younger son, Charles Marston, obtains a family estate illegally and is then hounded by the ghosts of his father and elder brother, so that he commits suicide—but the tale is disappointingly long-winded and unfocused. Much the same can be said of “The Familiar” (In a Glass Darkly; a revision of “The Watcher,” in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery), a story that might otherwise have been of some minimal interest in its exploration of religious doubt and retribution, but is dissipated by unconscionable slowness of development. Le Fanu’s prolixity reaches its height in two staggeringly lengthy narratives, one supernatural, the other non-supernatural. “The Haunted Baronet” (Chronicles of Golden Friars)—an unwise rewriting of “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh”—is merely a windy supernatural revenge tale full of inessential incidents and a glacial narrative pace. “The Room in the Dragon Volant” (In a Glass Darkly) tells the 40,000-word story of an Englishman at Versailles who is the victim of an elaborate attempt to rob him of his money. Even the concluding prospect that he might be interred alive fails to redeem this interminable narrative. The two stories by Le Fanu that genuinely amount of something, although both are flawed in various ways, are “Green Tea” (All the Year Round, 23 October–13 November 1869) and “Carmilla” (Dark Blue, December 1871–February 1872). The former by itself comes close to redeeming nearly the whole of Le Fanu’s other work: it is the one tale of his that unequivocally deserves to survive. It does so, however, not on the basis of its narrator, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a “medical philosopher” (B 186) who is featured in all the tales in In a Glass Darkly. Whether Le Fanu created this figure from the influence of Wilkie Collins’s detective work is unknown; whatever the case, Hesselius already reveals the limitations of the know-it-all detective; and, as we shall see, he comes close to ruining an otherwise haunting and powerful narrative. “Green Tea” is the well-known story of a clergyman, Jennings, who finds himself plagued by a monkey after, apparently, imbibing large
quantities of green tea. Continual glimpses of this creature finally drive Jennings to suicide. This skeletonic outline cannot come close to capturing the extraordinary skill Le Fanu exhibits in the gradual manifestation of this hideous apparition, which only Jennings sees. Some of the touches—as when Jennings sees the monkey on a bus and attempts to touch it (“I poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable—up to it—through it. For through it, and back and forward it passed, without the slighest resistance” [B 194])—are wondrously effective. There is, of course, no resolution as to whether the monkey actually existed or was merely an hallucination inspired by overwork, the tea, or some other factor. The overriding issues are: (1) What does the monkey symbolise? and (2) Did Jennings do anything to deserve the fate of being plagued by such a creature, whether real or imaginary? There is a certain amount of evidence that—in a story written only ten years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species—the monkey represents, from a Christian perspective, the rejection (or at least the potential for the rejection) of God and the entire Christian worldview. From this perspective, it is of interest that Jennings has undertaken a study of pagan religion. Although Hesselius, when Jennings consults with him, notes that this is “a very wide and interesting field,” Jennings immediately responds: “‘Yes, but not good for the mind— the Christian mind, I mean. Paganism is all bound together in essential unity, and, with evil sympathy, their religion involves their art, and both their manners, and the subject is a degrading fascination and the Nemesis sure. God forgive me!’” (B 192). The term “degrading”—especially when one thinks of Christian criticisms of Darwin (then as now) that any relation to the primates would “degrade” human dignity—is of note. Jennings goes on to say that the monkey was “drawing me more interiorly into hell” (B 198) and even that “It won’t let me pray, it interrupts me with terrible blasphemies” (B 200). And yet, I agree with Jack Sullivan who, although to my mind unjustly downplaying the Christian substratum of the tale, declares that Jennings has done little to deserve his fate. His exploration of pagan religion does not seem sufficient to bring on the horrible fate he endures. Sullivan goes on to state: Like Joseph K., Jennings is ceaselessly pursued and tormented for no discernible reason. A persistent experience in modern fiction is a situation in which the main character wakes up one morning on a
tightrope and does not know how he got there. This is precisely the predicament Jennings finds himself in. Although S. M. Ellis calls Le Fanu a “tragic” writer, “Green Tea” is closer to modern tragicomedy. Jennings never experiences even a flash of tragic recognition; on the contrary, he never knows why this horrible thing is happening. There is no insight, no justice and therefore no tragedy. There is only absurd cruelty, a grim world view which endures in the reader’s mind long after the hairs have settled on the back of the neck. (Elegant Nightmares 18) But I think Sullivan, as with many other commentators, is guilty of overlooking some key passages in the text. Why, for example, in chapter 3 does Hesselius examine the works of Emanuel Swedenborg and quote them copiously? We need not be reminded by W. J. McCormack that Le Fanu himself converted to Swedenborgianism late in life; a number of later tales evoke the Swedish mystic and philosopher. There is no need to engage in a detailed examination of Swedenborg’s thought, especially when Le Fanu (at least for literary purposes) may not have conveyed it accurately in “Green Tea” and elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Swedenborg, although convinced that his own thinking was an elaboration of Christian thought, peopled the world with all manner of angels, demons, and other entities who are directly involved in human life. Le Fanu (or, rather, Hesselius) cites such passages (I have no idea whether they are real or fabricated) from Swedenborg as: “There are with every man at least two evil spirits. . . . The delight of hell is to do evil to man, and to hasten his eternal ruin” (B 186). My belief is that we are to interpet these statements (in the context of the story) quite literally: the monkey is one of the demons from hell whose purpose is to destroy Jennings’s hope of heaven; and it does exactly that by inducing him to kill himself. In this sense, Jennings is not morally culpable because he is the victim of an evil outside himself. As such, in contrast to both Sullivan (Jennings is manifestly not “pursued and tormented for no discernible reason”—the reason is the demon’s thirst to send Jennings to hell) and Ivan Melada, who interprets the story purely psychologically (“Jennings, the gentle bachelor and otherworldly student of the religious metaphysics of the ancients, is overcome by a private demon, an unacknowledged lust that breaks through the surface of a cultivated and civilized existence” [96–97]),
it can be seen that “Green Tea” is constructed along the lines of a Christian/Swedenborgian morality tale. And yet, Le Fanu comes close to ruining the story by tacking on a ridiculous “explanation” of the events by Hesselius. It would seem that he is mortified by the failure of his attempt to cure Jennings of his obsession, and so he devises a preposterous theory about fluid in the brain that somehow allows some people to have visions of the spirits that cluster all around us. Hesselius then compounds his folly by an obvious cop-out: Poor Mr. Jennings made away with himself. But that catastrophe was the result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected itself upon the disease which was established. His case was in the distinctive manner a complication, and the complaint under which he really succumbed, was hereditary suicidal mania. Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence. If the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain. (207) This is how the tale ends. I am not quite as confident as Sullivan that “We can reasonably conclude that Le Fanu did not mean us to take this epilogue on the same level of seriousness as Hesselius assumes we do” (28). Sullivan goes on to say, in reference to this final section, “Unless seen as ironic, the ‘Word for Those Who Suffer’ becomes an aesthetic blunder” (28); but Le Fanu has committed many aesthetic blunders elsewhere, and the fact that “Green Tea” is, relatively speaking, largely free of them is no reason to think that he may not have blundered here. It may nor may not be noteworthy that Le Fanu never featured Hesselius in so active a role, either as narrator or as physician, in any other tale. As for “Carmilla,” it has become celebrated as a classic vampire tale and an important precursor to Dracula; and after these things have been noted—along with the fact that the female vampire has marked lesbian tendencies—one has said pretty much all that needs saying. The tale is not notably successful from a purely aesthetic perspective, being dogged by the same prolixity that mars almost all of Le Fanu’s other work. I daresay it will come as no surprise to even the most uninitiated reader that the young
women successively introduced to us under the names Carmilla, Millarca, and Mircalla Karnstein are all one and the same person—a woman who has lived for well over a century and is now a vampire, specifically feeding on women. But the many commentators who have casually discussed this story do not seem to have paid much attention to why Carmilla is endowed with this lesbian tendency. It is certainly no answer to point to Le Fanu’s odd discussion of the origin of vampires: “A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire” (B 338). What circumstances may these be? And why don’t all suicides become vampires? Earlier we read: The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. (B 337) This is not very helpful either. If we are to believe this passage—the apparent paraphrase of the account of a (fictitious) authority on vampires, Baron Vordenburg—then there is no intrinsic reason why Carmilla would not have directed her vampiric tendencies toward a man. The fact that both she and her chosen victim, the nineteen-year-old Laura, had visions of encountering the other in dreams might suggest that they were meant to be attracted to each other; and we do not hear much about any other of Carmilla’s victims, so that it is not possible to know whether she is exclusively lesbian or not. In any case, the likelihood that Le Fanu was inspired in this direction by Coleridge’s Christabel strikes me as fairly strong and even obvious. There is, strictly speaking, no need to discuss any of Le Fanu’s novels, because none of them are supernatural in essence. Several are historical novels or novels about Irish domestic life; others are mystery or suspense
tales. All—even the best of them, Uncle Silas (1864)—are crippled by verbosity. The House by the Churchyard (1863) is a nearly unreadable murder tale with a seemingly incalculable number of subplots poorly harmonised with the central narrative; one segment recounting a series of unremarkable ghost stories has been reprinted as “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” (see B 397–407). Even Uncle Silas, in spite of the nominal unity provided by its first-person narrator, Maud Ruthyn, drags. On the surface we are here concerned with a reprisal of the typical Radcliffian heroinevictim (although none of Radcliffe’s novels are told in the first person— they probably would have been minimally improved had they been), who endures a succession of supposed terrors from an evil governess (Madame de la Rougierre) and, especially, her uncle Silas, who once led a dissolute life and has been accused of murder. Silas, however, is not the customary Byronic villain; he has been crippled by illness and spends most of the novel in his bed. But the plain fact is that Uncle Silas is not in any sense a post-Gothic novel (even though Radcliffe and The Romance of the Forest are cited by name [358]); it is, fundamentally, a domestic melodrama with fleeting interludes of suspense. Le Fanu, of course, attempts to invest an artificial sense of drama and even terror into the proceedings, as in passages like this: Blessed be heaven for that deliverance! An evil spirit had been cast out, and the house looked lighter and happier. It was not until I sat down in the quiet of my room that the scenes and images of that agitating day began to move before my memory in orderly procession, and for the first time I appreciated, with a stunning sense of horror and a perfect rapture of thanksgiving, the value of my escape and the immensity of the danger which had threatened me. (342) What has inspired this hyperventilated response? Maud has, through the terms of her father’s will, been compelled to stay at Bartram-Haugh, her uncle Silas’s estate, and he is clearly pressuring her to marry his uncouth and wastrel son, Dudley; but Maud has just learned that, having been scorned by her, Dudley has married some other woman. So she is free! This is not exactly the stuff of compelling non-supernatural terror. Even if the
novel gains some momentum at the end—Silas, foiled in his attempt to gain Maud’s monetary assets through the marriage with Dudley, now forces Dudley to make an attempt on her life, although Dudley unfortunately manages to kill the redoubtable Madame de la Rougierre instead—the work overall fails to sustain interest. As I have mentioned, the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu did almost nothing to advance the field of supernatural literature. The themes and motifs he utilised were the stock elements of a now attenuated Gothicism, and his use of vampirism in “Carmilla” is made notable only by virtue of its influence on a more prestigious (but itself severely flawed) successor. “Green Tea” is the one story by which Le Fanu deserves to live; it would, indeed, have been a mercy had he written nothing else. The frequent comparisons made to Poe—he is sometimes referred to as the “Irish Poe”— redound entirely to Le Fanu’s disadvantage. Not only—aside from the solitary exception of “Green Tea”—do we find no meaningful or searching analysis of the psychology of his characters, but there is in general simply an absence of depth or interest in his work overall. His stories are nothing but stories, for the most part badly told; it is difficult to find any overarching symbolism or worldview expressed in his work. The effect of religious doubt upon his characters is perhaps the most interesting feature of his tales, and virtually the only one. The fact that he was afflicted with a plodding, verbose, loosely knit prose style—the very opposite of Poe’s concision and intensity—renders his longer works all but unreadable, and even his shorter tales seem plagued by verbosity. For all the enthusiasm of his past and current supporters, Le Fanu seems largely an emperor without clothes. Le Fanu’s niece by marriage, Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920), wrote a dozen or so weird tales over the course of her long literary career, but I fear that not one of them amounts to anything. Some were gathered in Twilight Tales (1879), but others remained uncollected until they were assembled by a diligent Broughton scholar, Marilyn Wood, in 1995. Broughton appears to take pride in recounting what she maintains are “true” accounts of supernaturalism, but this only goes to prove how tiresome and pointless such accounts usually are. For example, “Behold It Was a Dream” (Temple Bar, November 1872) tells of a woman who, while visiting some friends, dreams that her hosts are killed by an Irish labourer; eventually they are. It is one of several stories that seek to demonstrate the precognitive power of
dreams, most notably and tediously in “Betty’s Visions” (1886). That story was published together with another long narrative, “Mrs. Smith of Longmains,” which tells very much the same kind of story as “Behold It Was a Dream.” The upshot of Broughton’s work reveals painfully the playing out of standard supernatural tropes by the latter third of the century —something that only the most exceptional writers on either side of the Atlantic were able to overcome.
VII. The Deluge: British and European Branch The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw an immense outpouring of supernaturalism on both sides of the Atlantic. It may again be suspected that the very advance of science during this period impelled a reaction among those who felt that science was robbing the world of its reserves of awe and wonder. A character in Huysmans’s Là-Bas (1891) declares: “What a queer age . . . It is just at the moment when positivism is at its zenith that mysticism rises again and the follies of the occult begin” (239). It is no accident that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, with French and American branches opening in 1885. And yet, it is symptomatic that these very organisations felt obliged to use the tools of science to combat the metaphysical implications of science—namely, that the standard motifs of supernatural literature (the vampire, the werewolf, the ghost) were becomingly increasingly implausible as science increasingly probed not merely the physical universe but the human psychology that led to their widespread belief in prior ages. I am not here maintaining, in contradiction to my opening argument, that weird writers during this period were asserting the “truth” of their supernatural creations; by and large (with the possible exception of Margaret Oliphant), they were still utilising supernatural tropes for symbolic purposes. But some writers did exhibit a more aggresively hostile stance toward the domination of science as the arbiter of truth, while others (including H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) were using science to extend the bounds of the weird into wider realms, whether it be the remote corners of the world, the depths of space, or the darkness of the human mind. The result is a wealth of horror literature of very wide scope, subjectmatter, and quality. We can touch only upon the highlights here.
i. Ghosts and More Ghosts It is remarkable how the ghost story in its narrow sense—that is, a story with a ghost in it—continued to attract the attention of a wide array of Victorian writers. The ghost remained by far the most common supernatural trope used during this period, and in a distressing number of instances it was used in such an unimaginative and rote manner that it gradually doomed itself to aesthetic oblivion in the following generation, when M. R. James simultaneously raised it to its aesthetic heights and, by that very act, impelled a very different type of ghost story from his successors. Those who remain enthusiastic about the “Victorian ghost story” appear to be allowing their sense of nostalgia to overcome their critical faculty. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) gained celebrity with the publication of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), which Henry James, in a tart review of a later novel, characterised as “a skilful combination of bigamy, arson, murder, and insanity” (“Mary Elizabeth Braddon” [1865], 743). She and Wilkie Collins thus became the initiators of the “sensational novel” of the period—but of course no supernaturalism was involved, or, in general, even implied. Braddon did, however, write at least eighteen actual ghost stories, but only two—the first and the last—are of any consequence. “The Cold Embrace” (Welcome Guest, 29 September 1860) rests upon what had already become a stale premise—the vow of two lovers to return to each other, even after death—but is enlivened by its distinctive present-tense narration. A young woman dies, but her spirit continually gives her erstwhile lover a “cold embrace.” But Braddon’s reputation, if she has any, as a weird writer will rest on the late story “Good Lady Ducayne” (Strand, February 1896). Here a young woman named Bella becomes the companion of an anomalously aged woman, the Lady Ducayne (“I’d put her down at a hundred—not a year less” [267], a parson says). She is “good” because of her financial generosity toward her various servants and companions, even though several of these have died, requiring a constant succession of replacements. When Bella gets what appears to be a mosquito bite, a doctor (apparently in league with Lady Ducayne) states, “What a vampire!” (269)—leading the
reader to wonder, of course, whether he is referring to the mosquito or to some other entity. As Bella feels weaker and weaker, we are led to believe that something dreadful is going on; so too does a young medical student, Herbert Stafford, who ultimately rescues Bella by taking her out of Lady Ducayne’s service and conveniently marrying her. In the end it appears that Lady Ducayne is not a literal vampire, but that her doctor is bleeding Bella —and, presumably, either feeding the blood to Lady Ducayne or injecting it into her in some fashion, although this point is never directly addressed. In this sense, the story is perhaps not strictly supernatural, unless we think of it as one more reprisal of the “for the blood is the life” trope, whereby Lady Ducayne has extended her life unnaturally through ingestion of life-giving blood. Stafford appears to sense something of the sort: The eyes that looked at him out of the face were almost as bright as the diamonds—the only living feature in that narrow parchment mask. He had seen terrible faces in the hospital—faces on which disease had set dreadful marks—but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-lid years and years ago. (275) It might be thought that the events of “Good Lady Ducayne” are a selfevident metaphor for the manner in which the rich victimise the poor, in this case by literally extracting their life-essence, but the progress of the tale seems to throw a few spanners in the works of this facile interpretation. Lady Ducayne really is “good” to her servants in the sense that she pays them well for doing relatively little work; and in the end she lets Bella go without much fuss and actually gives her the remarkable sum of £1000 as a kind of dowry for her upcoming marriage to Stafford. Of considerably greater interest is the supernatural work of Mrs. J. H. (Charlotte) Riddell (1832–1906), a staggeringly prolific Anglo-Irish novelist who alternated between English and Irish settings in both her supernatural work and her other writing. Riddell is, however, handicapped not merely by an unimaginative emphasis upon the ghost as her sole vehicle for supernatural terror, but more specifically by the repeated use of a house that is haunted by a ghost who has had something bad (usually murder)
happen to him or her. In one sense it is surprising how many small variations she can produce on this basic scenario, but in another sense it becomes difficult to tell her work apart after a time. The Uninhabited House (1875) is typical. A house in London is owned by an elderly woman named Miss Blake; her brother-in-law had died in the house, apparently a suicide, and thereupon it became haunted. Numerous individuals see an apparition of a man carrying a wad of money in his hands as he descends the stairs— can this be the dead Robert Elmsdale? To make a long story short, it turns out that Elmsdale did not commit suicide at all; instead, as a moneylender (mercifully, he is not Jewish), he had had trouble collecting on his loans, and a man named Harringford ultimately admits to killing him. The one interesting feature of the novel is a court case early in the narrative: Miss Blake has sued a Colonel Morris who has broken his rental contract by leaving the house after only a few days’ occupancy. His defence lawyer cleverly manages to get her and her daughter to admit on the stand that they too had seen the apparition of Mr. Elmsdale. I know of nothing quite like this scene: a classic scenario from the mystery or detective story has here been used to validate the supernatural. Other works by Riddell are of much lesser interest. Many of them are, indeed, mystery stories with a supernatural patina, and Riddell would have been better advised to leave the supernatural out of them. Consider “Nut Bush Farm” (in Weird Stories, 1882). A farmer is thought to have abandoned his wife and children and run off with a young woman, but many of his friends cannot credit that the farmer, an upstanding individual, could have done this. In the end it turns out, to no one’s surprise (certainly not the reader’s), that the farmer was murdered—and the sporadic appearance of his ghost toward the end of the narrative does not seem an integral component in the resolution of the case. “Walnut-Tree House” (in Weird Stories) is the kind of story the Victorians loved—a sentimental melodrama with a tinge of benign supernaturalism. A house in London is haunted by the spectre of a child—a small boy who, when his sister was taken away from the household by her cruel relatives, wasted away and died. But never fear! A happy ending of sorts is achieved by the convenient discovery of a missing will. Riddell’s prose is considerably more fluent and smooth-flowing than Braddon’s, but the poverty of her imagination fails to raise her work to any level of distinction. Once you’ve read one story, you’ve read them all.
The very different work of Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) is worth more detailed study than the work of Braddon or Riddell, for, even though she too is hampered by an overreliance on the ghost as the chief figure of her supernatural tales and novels, her work is guided by a philosophy—or, more properly, a wish-fulfilment—that transforms some of her work into a kind of religious allegory. Her autobiography makes clear the crushing grief she felt at the early deaths of her husband and three children (“I am alone. I am a woman. I have nobody to stand between me and the roughest edge of grief” [94]), and it is not surprising that she was inclined toward a somewhat heterodox but ultimately Christian view of the afterlife in which the departed remain intimately connected with the world they have left: I try to realise heaven to myself, and I cannot do it. The more I think of it, the less I am able to feel that those who have left us can start up at once into a heartless beatitude without caring for our sorrow. Do they sleep until the great day? Or does time so cease for them that it seems but a matter of hours and minutes till we meet again? God who is love cannot give immortality and annihilate affection; that surely, at least, we must take for granted—as sure as they live they live to love us. Human nature in the flesh cannot be more faithful, more tender, than the purified human soul in heaven. Where, then, are they, those who have gone before us? Some people say around us, still knowing all that occupies us; but that is an idea I cannot entertain either. It would not be happiness but pain to be beside those we love yet unable to communicate with them, unable to make ourselves known. (93) It is scarcely worth analysing this passage for its theological errors and assumptions. Hampered by orthodox indoctrination into a belief in God and heaven and the afterlife, Oliphant struggles with the paradoxes this belief entails: If souls are immortal, how can the dead cease to be interested in what is going on (especially to “those they love”) in the earth below? And since common experience establishes that very few of us have any experience of the presence of the souls of the dead in our midst, then it must be very difficult, but perhaps not impossible, for those souls to communicate with us, and us with them, in some inscrutable manner. Many
of her stories—especially those collected in Tales of the Seen and the Unseen (1889)—are attempts to probe these mysteries in the guise of supernatural fiction. The short novel A Beleaguered City (1880) may be a good place to start a discussion of Oliphant’s supernatural work. The tale is narrated by one Martin Dupin, the mayor of Semur, a small town in France. One day the town is engulfed with a curious grey light. The townspeople leave the city, and after several days the sun returns—but the town itself is still engulfed in gloom. Some citizens (mostly women) declare that they have seen the dead walking in the town. Dupin and the curé venture into the town. Eventually the cathedral bells begin to ring, the darkness lifts, and the citizens return. Oliphant leaves no doubt as to the allegorical—or, at the very least, the metaphorical—nature of the overall scenario. The darkness that engulfed the town was manifestly inspired by a casual remark by several citizens that money had become their god—a belief that, in the eyes of one citizen, was “enough to bring the dead out of their graves” (4). Later, Dupin upbraids one of these crass materialists: “You good-for-nothing!” I cried, “it is you and such as you that are the beginning of our trouble. You thought there was no watch kept up there; you thought God would not take the trouble to punish you; you went about the streets of Semur tossing a grosse pièce of a hundred sous, and calling out, ‘There is no God—this is my god; l’argent, c’est le bon Dieu.’” (37–38) Dupin’s mother observes at one point: “I have long felt that the times are ripe for some exhibition of the power of God” (81). And so on and so forth. In spite of the general realism of the work, and the elaborate efforts that Dupin makes to convince us of the literal truth of the events he is narrating, there is little sense of terror in A Beleaguered City, and its function as a parable is evident from the outset. A transitional work—that is, one that constitutes a bridge between religious allegory and supernatural horror—is “Old Lady Mary” (Blackwood’s, January 1884; in Stories of the Seen and the Unseen). Here an old woman, Lady Mary, is repeatedly pestered into making a will to make sure that her goddaughter, also named Mary, is not left impoverished
at her death. She finally does make a will—but does so in secret and hides it in a secret compartment in her desk. Sure enough, she dies and no one finds the will, rendering the young Mary destitute. The spirit of Lady Mary, appalled by these developments, feels a fervent desire to rectify the wrong she has committed—but how? When, upon her death, Lady Mary wakes up, she is told that the place she now finds herself in may or may not be heaven (“That is a word . . . which expresses rather a condition than a place” [38]). She is also informed that it is exceedingly difficult—but not, apparently, impossible—for her to communicate directly with a living person. Nevertheless, she undertakes the task—and, curiously enough, it is she who is frightened when she reenters her own house (“A great panic seized the woman who was no more of this world” [65]). A baby and a young woman who now occupy her house as tenants do sense her presence—but that is all. In the end, the desk is given to the vicar and eventually the will is found there. So in the end Lady Mary was not, in the strictest sense—or perhaps in any sense—responsible for the “happily ever after” scenario that concludes the tale. Oliphant apparently realised that her hands were tied: the dead do indeed have a certain difficulty in communicating with the living, so that she could not have them taking any direct role in the resolution of affairs lest at least a certain number of sceptical readers begin to wonder why this sort of thing does not happen all the time. Oliphant’s actual supernatural tales are of a relatively mundane sort, and many of them are dogged by the same suggestions of padding and prolixity that afflict the work of Le Fanu and other Victorians. Consider “The Secret Chamber” (Blackwood’s, December 1876), a striking re-creation of the atmosphere of the old-time Gothic novels. Lord Gowrie tells his son, Lord Lindores, of a secret chamber in Gowrie Castle—a chamber that all the male members of the family are told about when they reach a certain age, and which appears to have some baleful significance in their family history. Gowrie takes his son there in the middle of the night. Inside is a curious individual, and it does not take long for Lindores to realise that it is the wicked Earl Robert, an ancient ancestor of the family: “Vaguely gleaming through his mind came the thought that to be thus brought into contact with the unseen was the experiment to be most desired on earth, the final settlement of a hundred questions; but his faculties were not sufficiently under command to entertain it” (120). But Oliphant does not waste time on the metaphysical implications of the situation. Whereas Lord Gowrie
wishes Lindores to bow down in obeisance to Earl Robert, as he himself and all his ancestors have done, Lindores wishes to fight—and does so, engaging Earl Robert in swordplay. Later, the door leading to the secret chamber cannot be found. The story is an effective allegory of the attempt by the young to defy the heavy weight of family heritage, although certain features are left unexplained. “Earthbound” (Fraser’s Magazine, January 1880) is an intermittently effective narrative mingling supernaturalism and romance. A guest staying at the home of Lady Beresford over Christmas thinks he catches glimpses of a woman wearing a white dress—a detail that other guests think must be an error, since the household is in mourning. When the man, Edmund Coventry, finally has a conversation with the woman, he finds some of her answers inscrutable: “I have been a long time here” [154], she remarks, even though she is very young, and she says that her name “was Maud” (160; my emphasis). It is no surprise that the woman is an ancestor of the home, having lived a century ago. But Coventry’s gradual infatuation with her is effectively handled. “The Library Window” (Blackwood’s, January 1896) tells of a young woman, Jeanie, who looks out across the street into the window of a house—evidently the room is a library. She sees the figure of a man there, writing; but later, when she gets into the house at a party, she finds that the window is a false window behind a bookcase. In the end we are told that a man had been killed there by the brothers of a woman who had occupied the room Jeanie had been in when she saw the figure. This is nothing but the now routine ghostly elements minimally reworked, but the cumulative build-up to the revelation is not ineffective. Oliphant’s most effective weird tale is “The Open Door” (Blackwood’s, January 1882; in Stories of the Seen and the Unseen). Here too there is no striking originality of theme or conception—a ghost appears to be haunting the area where the modern part of a large house leads to the ruins of an older part of the house, and ultimately we learn that the ghost is the son of a housekeeper who died in the old house—but the gradual accretion of a powerful atmosphere of horror is well executed. Oliphant sets the stage for our acceptance of the supernatural manifestation by putting on stage both a scientist who doubts the spectral nature of the events and a minister who immediately recognises the voice of the ghost when he first hears it. The scientist even puts forth what he believes to be a convincing natural
explanation for the events, but the course of the narration makes it clear that this explanation is not in fact sufficient to account for all the phenomena. Prolific British short story writer W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943) was best known for humorous tales, many of them about the sea or sailing, but he dabbled in both supernatural and non-supernatural horror throughout his career. He did creditable work in both modes: “The Toll-House” (Strand, April 1907) is a powerful haunted house tale, while “His Brother’s Keeper” (Strand, December 1922) is an effective tale of the fear induced by a guilty conscience. Jacobs had, however, an annoying habit of suggesting the supernatural but deflating it with mundanity. Consider “The Brown Man’s Servant” (Pearson’s, December 1896). A sailor sells an immense diamond to a Jewish pawnbroker, Solomon Hyams, for £500; it is clearly worth much more, but Hyams realises the diamond must be stolen. Sure enough, the sailor admits that he and three others contrived to pilfer the diamond; one of their party is already dead, but the other two—a person named Nosey Wheeler and a Burmese who is never named—are still alive and, as events show, intent on getting the diamond back from Hyams. The Burmese comes into the shop and claims that he will victimise Hyams with “a little artful, teasing devil” (170); he appears to be true to his word, as he effects the murder of Hyams’s cat in a mysterious fashion. But it turns out that the “devil” in question is nothing but a snake; it bites Hyams, who, fearful of dying a slow, lingering death, shoots himself. “Over the Side” (Today, 29 May 1897) is another fake supernatural story set on board a ship. On occasion, such as “Sam’s Ghost” (Strand, December 1915), Jacobs unites humour and the supernatural more or less effectively. Perhaps the most amusing specimen is perhaps “The Rival Beauties” (Million, 30 March 1895). Here a ship encounters a huge sea serpent (it appears to be about 100 yards long). The crew wishes to lure it back to New York harbour so that they can make money displaying it to audiences. The serpent appears to follow readily enough, but just as they are entering the harbour a sailor named Joe Cooper blows a foghorn and scares the serpent away. He did this because he was offended that the other sailors had jocularly claimed that his ugly face would itself scare the serpent and cause it to flee (hence the significance of the title). Jacobs’s reputation in weird fiction will of course reside chiefly, if not exclusively, upon “The Monkey’s Paw” (Harper’s, September 1902), probably the most reprinted story in the history of supernatural literature.
Whether it deserves its celebrity is, however, open to question. The plot of this well-known tale needs little description: a monkey’s paw brought back from India appears to have the power to make wishes come true—but in doing so it engenders certain highly unfortunate side-effects. For example, a man who obtains the paw wishes for £200, but the money arrives only when his son dies at work and his office pays the family the sum in question. Traumatised by this death, the boy’s mother fervently wishes that her son would come back to life—and he appears to do so, for there is a hideous banging on the door that ceases only when the father makes another (unspecified) wish—presumably that the son return to the dead. Jacobs is to be praised for restraint in this cataclysmic conclusion: is the banging on the door really being caused by the reanimated corpse of the son, and is the fact that the street is “quiet and deserted” (30) when the father, after making made his wish, opens the door an indication that the reanimated son has gone back to his grave or merely disappeared? To the extent that nothing strictly supernatural can be seen to have occurred in the course of the narrative, the tale could conceivably qualify as “ambiguous” in the sense I have previously defined. The “moral” of “The Monkey’s Paw” is, however, so elementary—be careful what you wish for, you might get it—that it seems hardly sufficient to have engendered the story’s celebrity. The man who brings the paw from India notes that the “old fakir” from whom he obtained it “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow” (19)—another moral axiom so unimaginatively obvious that it has little to recommend it. As it is, our lasting impression is of the suggestion of gruesomeness implied in the spectacular conclusion. Several of Jacobs’s stories are of this sort: “The Well” (in The Lady of the Barge and Other Stories, 1902) features the unearthing of a murdered body from a well: “the face of a dead man with mud in his eyes and nostrils came peering over the edge” (45); but this detail does not salvage what is otherwise a predictable supernatural revenge tale. One would suppose that such a comic masterpiece as Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” (Court and Society Review, 23 February 1887), and some others one could mention, would have put a serious dent in the enthusiasm of British and American writers for displaying one stock ghost after the other; but this does not appear to be the case. In any event, Wilde’s novelette ranks as one of the gems of comic weird fiction, and it is written
with a tinge of genial malice that only he could manage. The targets of its satire are surprisingly diverse. We are here concerned with the U.S. Minister to England, Hiram B. Otis, who with his family decides to occupy Canterville Close, notorious for being haunted by a ghost. He himself, as a sensible American, does not believe in ghosts (as he states to Lord Canterville, who declared that the ghost always appears before the death of one of his family: “But there is no such thing, sir, as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy” [66]), and neither, apparently, does his family. Accordingly, when Hiram’s son, Washington Otis, sees bloodstains on the floor and is told that they can never be eradicated, he says, “That is all nonsense. . . . Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time” (70). The stain remover appears to work—but, alas, the stains are back the next day. Hiram himself later sees the ghost and its rusty chains— for which he helpfully recommends “Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator” (75). And so on and so forth. Aside from wisecracks of this sort, “The Canterville Ghost” directs its satire both at the ghost itself—it flees when Hiram’s twin boys throw a pillow at it in fun—and at the stolid Americans who refuse to believe in him, or, at least, refuse to be frightened of him. In the end, fifteen-year-old Virginia Otis takes pity on the ghost and helps him to find eternal rest. (During this process the ghost admits that he himself restored the bloodstains to the floor by using Virginia’s paints—and when the red paint ran out, he used green, causing a bit of puzzlement all around.) The overall satire against both belief (either literal or aesthetic) in ghosts and on the triteness of the ghost story as a literary form is emphatic. I suspect that the American writer John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) borrowed heavily from “The Canterville Ghost” for his own well-known comic tale, “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” (in The Water Ghost and Others, 1894), similarly predicated on the conflict between ancient superstition and contemporary technology. Bangs had earlier delivered an amusing rebuke to the prevalence of spiritualism and psychical research societies in “The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks” (in Over the PlumPudding, 1901). As for H. G. Wells’s “The Inexperienced Ghost” (Strand, March 1902), it is both less amusing and less generally effective than Wilde’s tale, but not unworthy of note. Here a man named Clayton meets a ghost in his club and is surprised to find that it really doesn’t know its
business (“I’ve tried to do it [i.e., haunt the club] several times, and it doesn’t come off. There’s some little thing has slipped me, and I can’t get back” [1002]). Clayton upbraids the ghost, saying it’s all a matter of the right “passes” (a series of hand motions that will presumably induce supernatural phenomena)—and Clayton’s advice seems to work. But the story ends with anomalous tragedy when Clayton does the “passes” himself and ends up dead.
ii. Horrors in the Mainstream Increasingly, during this period, a number of authors who had established themselves as writers of mainstream fiction tried their hands, either singly or on several occasions, at the supernatural. The end result is that some of these figures have established themselves as significant contributors to the weird, because of both the quality and the quantity of their work. It would take considerable space to specify exactly why these writers turned to the supernatural, but overall it can simply be stated that they found the mode particularly felicitous in embodying the aesthetic and philosophical concerns that dominate their mainstream work. The entire literary output of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is more intimately connected with his life than that of many other writers; in a real sense, every single work is a fragment of autobiography. The most significant things about him are his birth in Bombay and the fact that the majority of his early life was spent shuttling between England and India, with the result that he gained a powerful sense of the richness and the terror of the Indian subcontinent and of his own place as a member of the colonial ruling class. His return to India in 1882, following years of schooling in England, spelled the beginning of his literary career. The Kipling family was now settled in Lahore, in the then Indian province of the Punjab (now a part of Pakistan), and Rudyard became an assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette. By 1884 he was already writing short sketches for the paper; one of the earliest, “The Dream of Duncan Parrenness” (25 December 1884), is his first tale of the supernatural. This story of a doppelgänger could be read as a kind of anticipation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) in its suggestion of a “double” whose features reveal both the years and the sins of the protagonist. Another effective story, though not strictly a weird tale, is the brooding prose poem “‘The City of Dreadful Night’” (10 September 1885). The title derives from the pessimistic poem of that name by the Victorian poet James Thomson (“B. V.”)—a poem that, as Kipling admits in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), “shook me to my unformed core” (37) when he read it as a teenager. Kipling’s haunting account of the thousands of men
and women who sleep in the streets of Lahore because of the oppressive heat conveys much of the exoticism he found in the land of his birth. He knew India better than he knew England, and yet he was not himself an Indian: the barrier between Caucasian and “colored,” between ruler and ruled, was unbridgeable. In the winter of 1885 the Kiplings produced a family magazine, Quartette, published by the Civil and Military Gazette. It contained several more of Kipling’s weird tales, including “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” and “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.” These stories were collected in The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Tales (1888). The original preface to that volume—rarely reprinted in later editions—supplies what few hints we have regarding Kipling’s intentions or purposes in writing weird tales: This is not exactly a book of downright ghost stories, as the cover makes belief. It is rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector is certain of is, that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted [“The Phantom ’Rickshaw”]; another man either made up a wonderful lie, or visited a very strange place [“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”]; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself [“The Man Who Would Be King”]. The peculiarity of ghost-stories is that they are very seldom told first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule [“My Own True Ghost Story”]. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did. (ix–x) Brief and reserved as this is, it perhaps tells us more than is evident at first glance. The comment on “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” plainly suggests that a supernatural interpretation is not necessitated by the “facts” of the story. This chilling tale of a man apparently haunted by the ghost of a woman whom he jilted can be accounted for on strictly naturalistic grounds, as hallucinations engendered by the man’s consuming guilt. (One wonders, too, whether the scenario is meant in some way to echo an unrequited love affair on Kipling’s own part: he had fallen in love with an Englishwoman, Flo Gerrard, just prior to returning to India in 1882, but was prevented by
her family from marrying her.) The horror in this tale rests in the fact that the ghost, far from being vengeful, seeks only to ingratiate herself back into her loved one’s favour—an anticipation of Robert Hichens’s masterful “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1900). “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” is similarly a non-supernatural suspense tale; here there is not even a pretence at the supernatural. “My Own True Ghost Story” might be termed pseudo-supernatural, in that the supernatural is suggested throughout but in the end is explained away naturalistically. Are we to believe that the incident actually happened to Kipling? There is no reason to doubt it, and his preface to The Phantom ’Rickshaw explicitly asserts that it did. In the end, the most prominent feature in Kipling’s earlier weird tales is neither character nor language, but place—specifically, India. The fact that the first nine of his horror stories were written while Kipling was in India, and that thirteen of the first fourteen are set either there or in neighbouring Afghanistan, points to the consuming fascination that this exotic realm exercised upon Kipling’s imagination. In Something of Myself he provides hints of how India drew out his penchant for the strange: The dead of all times were about us—in the vast forgotten Muslim cemeteries round the Station, where one’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our mud garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and at every point were tombs of the dead. Our chief picnic rendezvous and some of our public offices had been memorials to desired dead women; and Fort Lahore, where Runjit Singh’s wives lay, was a mausoleum of ghosts. (48) The prevalence of heat, of death, of disease (chiefly cholera, typhoid, and dysentery), and of the ancient, brooding, mystical civilisation of India— these things are perhaps all we need to account for Kipling’s tendency toward the weird. His first-hand knowledge of India is evident on every page of his tales, whose realism is also enhanced by the liberal use of numerous Indian words that had so thoroughly entered the English vocabulary at this time that Kipling did not bother to define them. At the same time, the loneliness and homesickness that he must have felt, and
which were certainly felt by many of the English civil servants in India— poignantly conveyed in “At the End of the Passage” (Lippincott’s, August 1890)—are constantly in evidence. In 1891 two substantial story collections, containing several weird items, appeared: Mine Own People and Life’s Handicap. The former contained one of Kipling’s grisliest ghost stories, “The Recrudescence of Imray” (whose original title I prefer to the bland later title, “The Return of Imray”), while the latter features what is without question Kipling’s most accomplished horror tale, “The Mark of the Beast” (Pioneer, 12 and 14 July 1890). Although the “moral” of the story—an Indian magician seeks revenge upon a hapless Englishman who had wronged him—is elementary, many of the details are uncommonly fine. The gradual transformation of the man into a beast is signaled at one point by his grovelling in the dirt and his blunt assertion, “The smell of the earth is delightful” (75); and upon his complete transformation he is suddenly referred to by the narrator as “it” rather than “he.” In 1902, Kipling and his wife settled in his final home—“Bateman’s,” in Etchingham, Sussex. The bittersweet ghost story “‘They’” (Scribner’s Magazine, August 1904) was largely inspired by their drives around the English countryside—in a primitive vehicle called a “Locomobile”—while searching for a house. Again, the ghosts of the children in this story are not seeking to inspire fear, but rather love—the love they failed to receive in life. The outbreak of World War I saw Kipling write several stories about the war, including his final weird tale, “‘Swept and Garnished’” (Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, January 1915). This moving tale of the ghosts of children killed in the war manages to extend at least a modicum of sympathy toward the lonely German woman at the centre of the narrative, although Kipling’s loyalties clearly lay with the Allies. Rudyard Kipling’s horror stories are a small but distinctive facet of his diverse work. He wrote several works of pure fantasy (preeminently the Jungle Books and Just So Stories, but also Puck of Pook’s Hill) and even a few tales that might be considered early excursions into science fiction (“Wireless,” “With the Night Mail”); but his horror tales—many of them evocative of the India and England he knew so well—represent a form to which he returned again and again during the first twenty years of his literary career. They vary widely in tone, style, and subject matter—from
comic ghost stories (“Haunted Subalterns” [Civil and Military Gazette, 27 May 1887]) to grim tales of psychological terror (“The Wandering Jew” [Civil and Military Gazette, 4 April 1889]) to chilling stories of revenants (“The Lost Legion” [Strand, May 1893]). Hovering over them all is a fine sense of the psychological effects of the supernatural upon sensitive individuals, a ruggedly “masculine” prose style that enhances the nononsense realism of the scenario, and above all a sense of place that firmly grounds the tales in the distinctive locales in which they are set. Kipling never incorporated the supernatural in a novel, but two authors who did do so produced imperishable classics within five years of each other—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854– 1900). But both The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lippincott’s, July 1890; book publication 1891) are seriously flawed, although in almost opposite directions. Both, of course, are classic tales of doppelgängers, and both would appear to have derived some benefit from previous instances of this theme, notably Poe’s “William Wilson.” To write about both these novels now, given how familiar their plots are and how little of a surprise their purportedly cataclysmic revelations engender, is a difficult proposition; but there is every reason to believe that the initial readers of both works found both their fundamental themes titillatingly appalling and their “surprise” endings strikingly effective. Accordingly, our judgment of these works should not be affected by our familiarity with their conclusions, although Stevenson comes close to giving the game away at several points, especially when a document presumably by Hyde is found to be written in a handwriting identical to Jekyll’s. As it is, Stevenson himself lets the cat out of the bag about two-thirds the way through the novella, presenting a lengthy statement by Jekyll that constitutes the final segment of the text. It is here that whatever moral or aesthetic value exists in the work resides; for up to this point we have been merely reading a cleverly executed suspense narrative in which the apparently separate individuals Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde are becoming increasingly fused. Hyde’s nefarious actions—we are introduced to him at the very beginning of the narrative as stepping heedlessly on a child who has gotten in his way, and later he flies into a rage and kills with a cane an elderly man who proves to be no less a figure than the M.P. Sir
Danvers Carew—may seem a trifle tame in our day of serial killers and worse, but Stevenson has accomplished his overall mission in portraying the fundamental moral divergence of Jekyll and Hyde. What Jekyll states, both in elucidation and, implicitly, in exculpation of his actions, is that, having come to realise “the profound duplicity of life” (56)—that is, that every human being “is not truly one, but two”—he wonders whether these elements or facets of one’s personality could be separated by science, specifically by drugs. Jekyll’s ostensible purpose in doing so is altruistic: if the “evil” side of a person could somehow be suppressed or eliminated, only the “good” would remain. There are a number of problems with this formulation, chief of which is the naïveté of thinking that it is so easy to distinguish what is “good” and what is “evil” in man, especially when it is by no means clear whether moral “good” and “evil” have any genuine meaning aside from what is or is not socially acceptable to a given society at a given moment of its history. But Stevenson does not wrestle with moral conundrums of this kind; indeed, it could be said that his philosophically shallow presentation of human morality is a large part of the reason why Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has enjoyed such popularity over the years, since it corresponds exactly with the philosophically shallow views of the average individual. There are also problems with Stevenson’s execution of the plot. Jekyll manages to manufacture the drug—the chief component of which he refers to as “a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required” (58)—remarkably easily. If he had come up with this formula with such effortlessness, why had it not been discovered decades or centuries before? Only much later does Jekyll provide a lame qualification, stating that it was the “impurity” (71) of the salt in the first batch of his potion that caused his transformation into Hyde. It should be noted that Stevenson, to his credit, is not maintaining that Jekyll is all “good” and Hyde all “evil.” The latter may be the case, but the former is not. Indeed, in the earlier part of the narrative we are told that Jekyll had “sinned” (21) in youth; evidently, this is a reference (as Jekyll confesses) to a “certain gaiety of disposition” (56) that conflicted with the scholarly seriousness he wished to present to the world. All this seems to us harmless enough, but to Jekyll it is clearly a matter of concern: “I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I
laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering” (56). I suppose we are obliged to make allowances for Victorian reticence in Stevenson’s refusal to spell out exactly what “shame” Jekyll engaged in. In any event, the result is that Jekyll, even before he takes the potion, is a kind of double in himself, the “good” and “evil” elements already battling within his personality for dominance. After he begins taking the potion, he is alarmed not only at the radical transformation of his personality as represented by Hyde but by the fact that, at a later juncture, the transformation occurs without his taking the potion at all. It was, indeed, after he succumbed to the potion after two months of resisting it that he, as Hyde, killed the M.P. There may, again, be a certain logical difficulty at this point. Becoming Jekyll again, he is naturally remorseful at the death he has caused; but when, again without the potion, he becomes Hyde, he as Hyde gets in touch with a doctor, Hastie Lanyon, and asks him to bring a fresh supply of drugs to change himself back again. If Hyde, who has been consistently portrayed as entirely “evil,” is dominant in the man’s personality at this moment, why would he wish to change back to Jekyll? Is it merely to evade the authorities for the murder of the M.P., since a number of individuals had identified Hyde as the murderer and forced him to go into hiding? Whatever the case, the new potion does not work, leading Jekyll/Hyde to come up with the contrived “impurity” argument. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is, in truth, a novella that should have been a novel. Stevenson has a potentially rich and complex idea at his disposal, but he has expressed it in a disappointingly conventional and morally unadventurous manner, and the work is so compressed that the full ramifications of the concept fail to appear. Possibly Stevenson—who, quite frankly, occupies no higher than the second rank of literary greatness, his work in general aesthetically crippled by a jaunty glibness of style, an evil facility in plot construction, and a general absence of profundity—was incapable of giving the idea more detailed treatment; and even though the idea is now in the public domain, it is not clear that anyone else has done so either. The Picture of Dorian Gray suffers, conversely, from being a novella in conception that is a long-winded and meandering novel in execution. Wilde probably erred in expanding the original Lippincott’s serialisation into a longer novel, although the serialisation itself is beset by the same aesthetic
deficiencies that plague the novel. In essence, Wilde is too much the wit and satirist to buckle down to the difficult task of creating a unified supernatural novel that develops cumulative power and atmosphere. Its conclusion is spectacular, but the longueurs that the reader must endure before reaching it render the work overall an aesthetic failure. There is also a serious difficulty in ascertaining exactly why the supernatural mechanism works as it does. The painter Basil Hallward has produced a splendid portrait of the attractive young Dorian Gray; it is, indeed, a picture that, as the artist confesses, shows “the secret of my own soul” (9). As we all know, Dorian gradually deteriorates morally, but the deterioration only shows up in the picture. The question is: Why? What is it about this particular picture that has caused this result? Whether or not the secularist Wilde could have seriously envisioned, even for aesthetic purposes, the notion of a man selling his soul to the Devil to obtain his desired ends, there is virtually nothing in the novel that would lead one to believe that such a thing has occurred. At the very end, Dorian confesses, “The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away” (177), but that is all. The only other thing we are told is that the portrait “had changed in answer to a prayer” (89), specifically a prayer by Dorian that he remain eternally youthful in appearance. The matter is elaborated at the end: Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a most just God. (181) But if this “prayer” is the mechanism, then why don’t other portraits change in the manner in which Dorian’s does? Surely Dorian is not the only one who has fervently wished to retain his youth. This confusion—or, rather, absence of a valid accounting for the supernatural phenomenon—cripples the novel from beginning to end.
There are, however, some other redeeming elements, notably the suggestion that it is in fact the debonair Sir Henry Wotton who is the chief catalyst in Dorian’s moral degradation. It is Wotton who contends that “youth is the one thing worth having” (22)—a point that Dorian does not yet accept, but gradually comes to embrace. Then there is the issue of Sibyl Vane. This actress in a music hall inspires deep love—or infatuation—in Dorian, and he proposes to her after knowing her only three weeks. Although warned against such a mésalliance, he persists in the relationship —until the day when he sees her deliberately acting badly on stage (she did so out of love for Dorian), after which he breaks off all relations with her. It is at this juncture that Dorian first notices that the picture has altered: “there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth” (77). He later repents and vows to go ahead with the marriage—but in the meantime Sibyl has killed herself. Dorian reflects ruefully: “So I have murdered Sibyl Vane” (83). Note that at this point his moral decline has apparently not yet begun; but it is Wotton who blandly urges Dorian not to grieve over Sibyl. By this time, Basil Hallward notes with dismay: “Something has changed you completely,” going on to add significantly, “It is all Harry’s influence” (91). It is, however, only when Wotton gives Dorian a French book about a man who engages in the exploration of sin (probably an allusion to Huysmans’s A Rebours, although there is now reason to think that Wilde was not thinking specifically—or, at any rate, exclusively—of that book) that “strange rumours about his mode of life” (106) begin. Dorian is now thirty-eight years old, and his speech, full of cynical witticisms, is now virtually indistinguishable from Wotton’s. It is now that Hallward declares: “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed” (126). Hallward then sees the altered portrait and is appalled; Dorian kills him in a fit of anger, then compounds his crime by blackmailing a chemist friend, Alan Campbell, into destroying the body. The spectacular conclusion—Dorian, appalled by his moral corruption, takes up the very knife with which he had killed Hallward and proposes to destroy the portrait; a scream is heard; Dorian is found dead, his face old and wrinkled, while the portrait has returned to its pristine condition—is a clever variant of the self-murder of “William Wilson.” But the long stretches of inessential maundering in The Picture of Dorian Gray— especially chapter 15, unwisely added for the 1891 book publication, and relating the idle chatter of Dorian and other guests at a dinner party—
destroys whatever atmosphere of terror has so far been engendered, with the result that this novel, like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, is a work fueled by a powerful conception but marred by its bungling treatment. Wilde did not write any other weird specimens aside from “The Canterville Ghost”—his exquisite fairy tales can at best be considered contributions to the literature of fantasy—but Stevenson did produce some able shorter specimens. Probably the most central tale, from a supernatural perspective, is “The Bottle Imp” (New York Herald, 8 February–1 March 1891), a story that evokes the old-time Gothic novel in its account of a curse handed down by means of an imp in a bottle. Set in Hawaii (which Stevenson first visited in 1888), the tale deals with a bottle that has an imp from hell in it; the imp can do wondrous things for its owner, such as making him fabulously wealthy, but there is a catch: the owner must sell the bottle before he dies, and at a loss (i.e., for less than what he paid for it) or else “he must burn in hell for ever” (104). At the outset, there is no reason why we should believe this statement—made by the current owner of the bottle—and the buyer of the bottle, a Hawaiian named Keawe, is himself sceptical. But when Keawe’s uncle dies, making him wealthy, he begins to wonder. Then something dreadful happens: he finds he has leprosy. He begins to think that the bottle (like Jacobs’s monkey’s paw) brings disadvantages along with benefits. Keawe now undertakes a long search to buy the bottle back, since he feels it is his only means to cure himself; he does so at last, but finds that he can purchase it only for a single penny, thereby apparently condemning himself to everlasting perdition. His wife, Kokua, ultimately comes to his rescue. The tale is clever and suspenseful, and laced within the supernatural scenario is the self-sacrifice of both Keawe and Kokua, who are each willing to undergo an eternity in hell merely so that the other can survive and be comfortable. Other of Stevenson’s tales are either non-supernatural or tread close to the borderline of parable or allegory. Of the latter, “Markheim” (in The Broken Shaft, ed. Sir Henry Norman, 1886) is representative. Markheim kills the owner of an antique shop, apparently for money. Before he can find it, another man comes in—he knows Markheim and addresses him by name. It does not take long for both the reader and Markheim to ascertain that this is the Devil. The Devil’s offer to help Markheim to escape his difficulty is made on a very simple premise: “The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act” (107). The Devil recommends that Markheim kill the maid
who, having heard the commotion, is about to enter the shop; this will give Markheim more time to search for the shop owner’s money. But instead Markheim turns himself in. As for “The Body-Snatcher” (Pall Mall Christmas Extra, 1884), there is never any suggestion that this is anything other than an expression of loathing at the practice of unearthing the freshly dead from their graves—in this case, to supply cadavers for medical colleges. The protagonist, Fettes, finds it bad enough that economic necessity compels him to engage in purchasing cadavers in this manner; but he is horrified when one of the corpses brought to him is of a woman acquaintance who had been alive just the day before. When he consults a doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, about the possible nefariousness of the body-snatchers, he is appalled that Macfarlane blandly advises him to pay no attention. Matters turn for the worse when another cadaver brought in proves to be that of a man named Gray, who had lorded it over Macfarlane sometime earlier. Is Macfarlane himself engaged in evil practices? The most memorable features of the story are a vivid description of the act of grave-robbing— To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless by-ways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys. (146) —followed by a memorable tableau wherein Fettes and Macfarlane, going to a rural cemetery to disinter an elderly woman who has died, dig her up and place her between themselves as they ride back in their cart in the driving rain. (In a rather contrived trick ending, the body in question proves to be that of Gray.) “The Body-Snatcher” makes as good a case as any for regarding non-supernatural horror tales as legitimately within the purview of weird fiction. And what do we make of “Ollala” (Court and Society Review, Christmas 1885)? There is a suggestion of vampirism here, but the dénouement does not render the story supernatural. The focus is not in fact on Ollala—the daughter of a Spanish family with whom an English soldier
is recuperating from his wounds—but upon Ollala’s mother. The story is, ultimately, one of hereditary degeneration: the family was once high-born but has now fallen into a state of decadence. When the soldier cuts his finger, the mother seizes it and sucks his blood. But again there is no suggestion that the mother engages in the practice to extend her life supernaturally; it is, as Ollala at last testifies, simply the result of a decline on the evolutionary scale: “the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the bones, but they were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind was as the mind of flies” (185). It is true that, earlier in the narrative, the soldier heard a strange cry that he thought came from a wild beast; but even here, we are not led to believe that the mother is some kind of shape-changer and has literally become an animal. We cannot leave Stevenson without touching upon “Thrawn Janet” (Cornhill Magazine, October 1881), a tour de force of sorts in being written almost entirely in Scots dialect. The device is clever in creating verisimilitude in what might otherwise be a luridly flamboyant tale of the corpse of a witch reanimated by the Devil. Stevenson mars the story, however, at the end by an implausible contrivance whereby the hand of God comes to the rescue. What exactly we are to do with Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget, 1856–1935) is a vexing question. Although the author of two volumes of short fiction, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890) and Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1904), that would appear to be central to the supernatural tradition, not to mention a thought-provoking essay, “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art” (Cornhill Magazine, August 1880), Lee’s work is of a curious and indefinable sort: heavily influenced by the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, her tales to my mind are written with panache but are, from a strictly supernatural perspective, largely unsatisfactory. Many of them, in any case, are only on the borderline of the weird. Such a tale as “Pope Jacynth,” about Satan’s attempt to tempt the Pope, is merely a religious parable. “Dionea” (in Hauntings) is a meandering and not entirely coherent tale of a strange girl found floating in the sea who, as she grows up, is suspected of being a witch—or perhaps some kind of avatar of a pagan goddess. “Winthrop’s Adventure” (first published as “A Culture-Ghost,” Fraser’s Magazine, January 1881), is an interesting experiment in attempting to evoke horror from music. A man, Julian Winthrop, hears someone playing a little-known
musical composition that apparently dates to c. 1780. He recounts how, a year earlier, he had been travelling in Lombardy and come upon an old painting (dating to 1782) of a male singer holding a musical score; this singer, Ferdinanda Rinaldi, had been assassinated. Winthrop finds Rinaldi’s house and stays in it on St John’s Eve—the night when the dead arise from their graves. Sure enough, that night he sees a ghostly figure playing at the harpsichord and singing—the same song he later hears at the outset of the story. Lee will probably be remembered chiefly for “Oke of Okehurst,” first published as A Phantom Lover (1886). This is in fact not a tale of the supernatural, although there are suggestions of it. Oke of Okehurst wants the narrator, a painter, to paint portraits of him and of his wife, Alice. Alice strikingly resembles the portrait of a seventeenth-century ancestor, also named Alice. It turns out that this Alice and her husband, Nicholas, had murdered a poet, Lovelock, who had been paying too much attention to Alice. Can the present-day Alice be some kind of revenant? She is manifestly fascinated by her ancestor, and the painter himself regards her as “perverse and dangerous” (176). When someone suggests that the residents of the house hold a fancy-dress ball, Alice dresses up in a riding outfit that the seventeenth-century Alice had worn when she had helped to kill Lovelock. Oke in fact thinks he sees Lovelock here and there around the house; Alice teases him about it. In the end, Oke kills his wife when he fancies that Lovelock is sitting next to her on the couch, then kills himself. There is, as I say, nothing supernatural here, but the suggestions of it are intriguing; and the tale provides an able psychological dissection of the personalities of both occupants of the house. Another woman writer, Clemence Housman (1861–1955), the sister of A. E. and Laurence Housman, wrote one imperishable work of the supernatural—the novella The Were-Wolf (1896). It has frequently been lamented that the werewolf trope does not have a canonical literary treatment, unlike the vampire (Stoker’s Dracula) and other tropes; but The Were-Wolf comes very close to being unsurpassable. With a seriousness of treatment far beyond that of the hack George W. M. Reynolds, Housman writes a tale that dances delicately on either side of the boundary separating the supernatural from the fairy or folk tale. It is, perhaps, somewhat transparent that the werewolf, a strikingly beautiful woman who calls herself White Fell, is opposed by a man named Christian; but the work is
saved from descending into religious allegory by the tense depiction of the conflict between Christian and his brother, Sweyn, who has fallen into an infatuation with White Fell and violently opposes Christian’s attempt to reveal her true nature. The most gripping scene in the story is its climax, where we witness a mesmerising chase of White Fell (still in the form of a woman) by Christian: he cannot strike a woman, but at midnight she will turn into a wolf and at that point will be fair game for him: “You may live till midnight” (42), he tells her grimly. Her transformation is spectacular, after she herself has mortally wounded Christian with an axe: “And before the final blank overtook his dying eyes, he saw that She gave place to It; he saw more, that Life gave place to Death—incomprehensibly” (48–49). Christian has managed to kill White Fell, and he is found by his brother in the position of Christ on the cross. Housman wrote an interesting novel, The Unknown Sea (1898)—in which a sailor is torn between the placid life of his home in a coastal village and a possibly supernatural woman on an offshore island—but it pales in comparison with the pathos, delicacy, and withal the clutching horror of The Were-Wolf. Some attention should probably be given to the Scottish writer William Sharp (1855–1905). Under his own name he wrote a superb tale of a revenant, “The Graven Image,” as well as a curiously powerful novelette about religious mania, “The Gypsy Christ”; both stories are collected in The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (1895). But Sharp deserves notice for the powerful array of tales and poems written under the female pseudonym Fiona Macleod, which he made elaborate efforts to portray as a real person. The Macleod tales, uneasy combinations of supernaturalism, fantasy, and Celtic myth and legendry (some of it perhaps invented or altered out of recognition), are unique in the literature of their time. For our purposes the most significant work is the long short story “The Sin-Eater” (in The SinEater and The Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities,1895), an evocative account of that curious Celtic myth of the sin-eater—the stranger who, coming upon a body laid out for burial, must consume the cake placed on the corpse’s body as a means of “eating” the sins of the deceased so that he or she can be properly interred. It is not clear that anything supernatural occurs in this haunting narrative, but the atmosphere of primitive morbidity is unmatched.
Toward the end of the century, perhaps under the influence of Wilde and others, a number of eccentric works emerged from the press that to this day evoke the decadence, esoteric learning, and bizarre imagination typical of one phase of the Yellow Nineties. Two such works appeared in 1894. The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances by R. Murray Gilchrist (1867– 1917) is only on the borderline of the weird. Gilchrist was a prolific novelist and regional writer, but is now chiefly remembered for this single volume of tales, whose chief focus is the fusion of love and death. The supernatural rarely enters his work except in random tales such as “The Return,” about the return of a lover from the dead to reclaim his mistress. I don’t find the volume quite as piquant as its devotees apparently have, and it has nowhere near the demonic power of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895); but it is a work to be reckoned with. Somewhat more interesting is Aut Diabolus aut Nihil and Other Tales by an American, Julian Osgood Field (1852–1925), who spent most of his adult life in England. Aside from being a bit of a scoundrel—he spent some time in jail after involving Lady Ida Sitwell (mother of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell) in a financial scandal—he seems to have enjoyed parading his learning in his tales, some of which are genuinely supernatural. Perhaps the most notable is “A Kiss of Judas,” a vampire tale that contains some striking anticipations of Dracula in its depiction of a hideous-visaged Moldavian man who may be one of the descendants of Judas and who can kill with a kiss. This Moldavian later transforms himself into a lovely woman and kisses (that is, bites) the narrator in the neck and kills him. Other tales in the volume are non-supernatural but contain their elements of charm, but Field’s verbosity and his parading of erudition tend to dilute the overall effect. Then there is The Lost Stradivarius (1895) by J. Meade Falkner (1858– 1932), a mystical novel that attempts to evoke supernatural terror from music. Although not without power, the novel is ultimately slight and ephemeral; it fails to justify the excessive praise of some of its partisans. Falkner wrote other novels, one or two of which might be considered weird, but none has survived except The Lost Stradivarius. The degree to which elements of horror entered into the literary mainstream in this and later eras is exemplified in no greater example than in Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness” (Blackwood’s, February– April 1899). Among the bewildering plethora of interpretations to which
this landmark tale has been subject, the claim that it constitutes a contribution to the literature of horror has not infrequently been made. E. H. Visiak, as an occasional fantastic novelist, was an early Conrad scholar particularly keen on this point; for him, “Heart of Darkness” is “the story of an appalling transformation in a man’s soul, and it is as horrific—and as symbolic—as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it is not, as is Stevenson’s nightmare story, an extravaganza, for it is true in a realistic way and, in the general circumstances, at least, is faithful to Conrad’s own experience” (224). But in my judgment, although it draws upon the horrific tradition to some extent, it cannot be classified as a work of horror tout court. To be sure, nothing supernatural occurs in the tale, for all the hauntingly dreamlike features of Marlow’s journey into the depths of Africa to encounter the enigmatic Kurtz. And although Marlow sporadically portrays Kurtz as a kind of quasi-supernatural figure—“This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere” (122); “an animated image of death” (135); “His was an impenetrable darkness” (147)—these comments are so manifestly meant metaphorically that their relevance to the traditions of supernatural horror are by no means clear. And as for Kurtz’s celebrated concluding utterance —“The horror! The horror!” (147)—Marlow himself provides his insight into its significance: “Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’” (148–49). That, on one level, “Heart of Darkness” expresses a kind of shuddering loathing of the inscrutable darkness of the cosmos certainly brings it close to the realm of horror literature; but to restrict it to that realm would be a cruel limiting of its aesthetic richness.
iii. Between the Genres This period saw the gradual emergence of two genres parallel to weird fiction—science fiction and mystery/detective fiction—in the form of its two most noteworthy early practitioners, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1869–1930). It cannot be said that either genre was definitively established at this juncture, but both were gathering the momentum that led to their establishment early in the next century. As for science fiction, while some overly enthusiastic historians have traced the form back to Plato’s Republic, one cannot legitimately maintain that the genre as we know it can be dated any earlier than the work of Jules Verne in the 1860s, when such works as A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and From the Earth to the Moon (1867) appeared in French. Even these works are now regarded more as “scientific romances”—as, indeed, are many of Wells’s works. In Verne the sense of wonder surrounding the imagined invention of new technologies and the probing of either the depths of the earth or the depths of space far eclipses any sense of terror these events might generate; but with Wells it is a very different matter. The remarkable burst of writing that constitutes the first decade and a half of Wells’s literary career—chiefly from 1895 to about 1910—is virtually unparalleled in the history of imaginative fiction. Of his novels, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and especially The War of the Worlds (1898) are laced with terror and gruesomeness, and the same can be said for his bountiful short stories, gathered in five collections from The Stolen Bacillus (1895) to The Country of the Blind (1911). If in the present discussion I focus on the latter body of work rather than the former, it is chiefly because it is only in the former that one can find occasional—and only occasional— examples of weird fiction in a relatively pure form. The difficulty in examining a writer like Wells in the context of weird fiction is precisely due to the rarity with which he presents defiances as opposed to extensions of natural law as commonly understood. If, as Lovecraft asserted, the “crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen,” then virtually none of Wells’s work qualifies as weird: it
is precisely the possibility (whether in the present or the future) of the phenomena he displays in his novels and tales that makes them so breathtakingly compelling. This is, indeed, the chief distinction between weird fiction and science fiction. And yet, as Lovecraft wrote on another occasion, some of Wells’s conceptions are so inherently terrifying—the mingling of human and animal body parts in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the invisible man of that novel—that they create an emotion of terror that does not depend either upon a suspension or violation of natural law (as in supernatural fiction) or upon a sense of personal danger or of mental aberration (as in psychological horror fiction). In a letter Lovecraft captured this paradoxical sensation: “H. G. Wells is a ticklish question on my literary scales. I can’t derive a really supernatural thrill from matter which keeps my mental wheels turning so briskly; & yet when I think of some of his things in retrospect, supplying my own filter of imaginative colour, I am reduced to doubt again” (Selected Letters 2.210). Part of Lovecraft’s difficulty (and mine) rests upon the relative absence of a decisive atmosphere of weirdness. In his early work, Wells seemed so bursting with dynamic ideas that he frequently failed to vivify them in a way that brought out their full emotional resonance; his relatively dry and workmanlike prose contributed to this deficiency. Nevertheless, those ideas remain compelling both from a (proto-)science-fictional and a weird perspective. As is appropriate for an author whose first book was a textbook of biology, many of Wells’s tales focus on anomalous flora and fauna in remote corners of the globe. It may be a convenient device to unveil these oddities in places far off the beaten track, but Wells turns the trick well enough. Hence in “Empire of the Ants” (Strand, December 1905), we find giant ants in British Guiana, with a hideous possibility that they will ultimately bring about the overthrow of human domination of the earth; in “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (Pall Mall Budget, 2 August 1894), a man buys an unusual orchid (one that may have already killed its previous owner) and, reduced to fainting by its heavy scent, awakes to find it sucking his blood; “In the Avu Observatory” (Pall Mall Budget, 8 August 1894), a scientist in Borneo is attacked in the dark by a huge black winged creature; “In the Valley of Spiders” (Pearson’s Magazine, March 1903) reveals enormous spiders in a desolate valley. The mysteries of the sea are not avoided by Wells, as witness “The SeaRaiders” (Weekly Sun Literary Supplement, 6 December 1896), about
human beings attacked by strange deep-sea creatures unknown to science. A much more compelling story on this subject is “In the Abyss” (Pearson’s, August 1896). A man goes down to the bottom of the sea (a depth of at least five miles) in a steel sphere. When he finally comes back to the surface, and he tells not only of the spectacular creatures he saw in the deep (“It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper” [438]), but, even more remarkably, of a city on the sea-bottom, manifestly built by some of the strange creatures he has seen. This suggestion of an entire underwater civilisation unknown to the creatures on the earth’s surface is the source of terror in this tale. Wells is surprisingly effective in comic or half-comic treatments of his imaginative conceptions. We have already seen his dynamiting of the ghost in “The Inexperienced Ghost.” A tale like “Æpyornis Island” (Pall Mall Budget, Christmas 1894) reads like a delightful self-parody. A man landing on a remote island finds huge dinosaur eggs—fresh ones—and, after eating one or two, sees the last of them hatch. A creature emerges and eventually grows to fourteen feet in stature, raised by the man for a period of years. When the creature begins fighting over food with the man, the latter reaches his limit (“I told him straight that I didn’t mean to be chased about a desert island by any damned anachronisms” [308]) and he kills it, to the irreparable loss of science but with the result that the man is eventually rescued. “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” (Illustrated London News, July 1898) tells of a man, Fotheringay, who has somehow developed the ability to make things happen merely by commanding them. It hardly matters how this wondrous trait came to be, for Wells manifestly intends a send-up of this type of narrative. There is, first of all, the awkward matter of the policeman who, having irritated Fotheringay, is commanded to go to Hades; thinking this punishment a bit harsh, Fotheringay revises his command so that the policeman finds himself in San Francisco. When he, like Joshua, wants the earth to stop its rotation around the sun, he unwittingly causes everything to be smashed up, so he takes the obvious course of wishing that everything be restored to the way it was before he made his wish—and, at the same time, that his powers be terminated. But the best story of this kind in the Wells corpus is “The Truth about Pyecraft” (Strand, April 1903). Pyecraft, a hugely fat man, takes a liking to
the narrator, a very thin man, as they meet in their club. The narrator provides Pyecraft with a formula—derived from his great-grandmother, who was from India—for “Loss of Weight” (972); but it quickly becomes clear that the wording of this formula is erroneous, for instead of shedding pounds, Pyecraft ends up floating up to the ceiling. Initially horrified and dismayed, Pyecraft eventually adjusts to his life above the ground; as the narrator reports, “it was delightful to think of Pyecraft like some great, fat blow-fly, crawling about on his ceiling and clambering round the lintel of his doors from one room to another, and never, never, never coming to the club any more” (979). Some of the stories that are definitively science fictional—and in which nothing even remotely supernatural can be said to occur—are nonetheless fraught with terror. Consider “The Star” (Graphic, Christmas 1897), about a star that appears to be approaching the Earth (it has already destroyed Neptune). Is the earth doomed? A professor seems to think so, as he utters the ponderous dictum: “Man has lived in vain” (721). Wells’s spectacular tableau of both the natural and the human cataclysms that take place around the world as the star grows larger and larger in the horizon is imperishable; it is a little unfortunate that the star does not in fact hit the earth, bypassing it instead and perhaps (in Wells’s naively optimistic view) effecting a moral regeneration of human society. In “The New Accelerator” (Strand, December 1901), in which a chemist has invented a potion to speed up mental and physical action thousands of times over, the result is not that the two characters who imbibe the potion operate at super-speed, but that they seem to see everything else around them functioning with incredible slowness: “He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid snail—was a bee” (1038). There is a certain half-comic treatment here also, but the phenomenon is depicted in such a hypnotic manner that for much of the narrative we are held in a state of awe and wonder. The two Wells stories that come closest to orthodox weird fiction are “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” (Idler, May 1896) and “Pollock and the Porroh Man” (New Budget, 23 May 1895). Both are substantial. In the former, the narrator, Edward George Eden, encounters an old man, Robert Elvesham, who wants to leave all his assets to a healthy young man—on condition that he take Elvesham’s name. In spite of his misgivings, Eden agrees, drinking a strange elixir given by Elvesham. The end result is that
his own soul or personality is ejected from his body and thrown into the decrepit body of Elvesham—who, it is suggested, has performed this nefarious act numerous times in the past, continuing his life by jumping from body to body. Eden reflects poignantly on the loss of his own life: “You who are mind and body together at your natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body” (420). But the greatest source of terror to Eden (and, no doubt, to Wells) is a philosophical one: “I have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear case of man’s detachability from matter” (424). (This approximate premise is used in a later but less effective story, “The Stolen Body” [Strand, November 1898], in which a man’s soul leaves his body, at which point another soul occupies it and runs amok.) As for “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” we are taken to West Africa, where Pollock shoots in the hand a Porroh man (a witch-doctor) who had killed a native woman. Is the Porroh man then sending various curses— snakes, aching bones, and so forth—to Pollock? Or are we witnessing merely a series of coincidences? Pollock makes the mistake of having the Porroh man killed, for now the curse cannot be lifted. The Porroh man’s decapitated head keeps showing up, even when Pollock returns to England. And yet, the narrative tone suggests that many of the later incidents in the tale are the products of Pollock’s hallucinations and sense of terror that he has in fact been the victim of a dead witch-doctor’s curse. His death by suicide is no surprise. Two other stories that tread close to the weird are “The Moth” (Pall Mall Budget, 28 March 1895) and “The Red Room” (Idler, March 1896; sometimes titled “The Ghost of Fear”). In the former, are we to imagine that an entomologist’s soul has entered the body of a moth in order to plague a rival scientist? Wells leaves the matter unresolved. “The Red Room” seems to be an orthodox haunted house tale about the haunted red room of Lorraine Castle. The cumulative power of the narrative is impressive: a man lights seventeen candles all around the room but is horrified when they go out one by one, so that he is left in darkness. He can only conclude that the room is haunted, not by a conventional ghost, but by Fear: “Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms” (512).
It is difficult to give up talking about Wells’s stories; they are, as I say, so full of potentially rich and powerful conceptions—“Under the Knife” (New Review, January 1896), about the spectacularly cosmic perceptions of a man undergoing surgery; “The Crystal Egg” (New Review, May 1897), about a crystal egg that may provide glimpses of the world on Mars; “The Magic Shop” (Strand, June 1903), about the wonders of a magic shop—that one can only regret Wells’s occasional failure to treat these conceptions with the detail and expansiveness they deserve. Some of them should have served as the basis of full-fledged novels. As for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it cannot be said that he genuinely mingles mystery or detection with the weird, except in a few instances, but his celebrity—both in his own time and in after years—as the inventor of the prototypical fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, makes his frequent ventures into both weird fiction and pseudo-scientific fiction something of an anomaly. It is well known that Poe’s three or four detective stories of the 1840s launched the form, but he had few imitators for some decades. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) showed the boundless possibilities of the detective novel, and his example was quickly adapted by the American novelist Anna Katharine Green beginning in the late 1870s. Doyle himself first published two novels about Holmes (in 1887 and 1890) before issuing the first Sherlock Holmes collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), the stories of which had appeared in the Strand in 1891–92. In the various weird tales he wrote in the latter two decades of the twentieth century, Doyle generally adhered to relatively conventional supernatural conceptions—ghosts, vampires, femmes fatales, horrors out of Egypt—and also wrote a number of tales involving spiritualism. This lastnamed point is of some interest because, especially following World War I and the traumatic death of his son, Doyle became a wholehearted convert to spiritualism, spirit photography, and the like, thereby engendering a mortifying collapse in his reputation for sanity. One can sense his increasingly credulous leanings in this direction even during this period. An early story, “The American’s Tale” (London Society, Christmas 1880), is surprisingly on the verge of science fiction in its depiction of a man in Arizona who is eaten by an immense flytrap plant. But the story is poorly executed, its climax telegraphed almost from the outset. A later tale, “The Los Amigos Fiasco” (Idler, December 1892), may also be thought to have a quasi-science-fictional premise. A criminal, set to die by
electrocution, is wired up to a whole series of electrical generators in the town of Los Amigos, but the result is that he gains preternatural strength and endurance thereby: he is subsequently able to withstand prolonged strangulation and also a pistol shot. The idea, apparently, is that “Electricity is life” (230), but the whole tale is crippled by implausibility. “The Captain of the Polestar” (Temple Bar, January 1883) is a touching tale of a sea captain, recklessly hunting for whales in the ice-fields near Spitzbergen, who is plagued by inexplicable fear and sorrow. It turns out that he is mourning his dead lover, whom he then thinks he sees on the ice. He later goes out on the ice to embrace her—a “pale misty figure” (39) who is seen to be bending over the captain’s dead form to give him a kiss. Another celebrated sea story is “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (Cornhill, January 1884), which has been credited with virtually creating the myth of the “lost” ship Mary Celeste. Doyle takes numerous liberties with the actual account of the ship, which was lost at sea in 1872–73, especially in that he gives it the erroneous name of the Marie Celeste. Jephson, the narrator, claims to have been on board the ship when it was deserted; but his tale veers off into another direction, focusing on a man named Septimius Goring, a quadroon who has “devoted my life to the destruction of the white race” (139). (Jephson, conveniently, is a rabid abolitionist.) There is also a peculiar episode about a black stone that acts as a magic talisman, as it proves to be the missing part of a statue made from the sacred black stone of Mecca. Again, the tale is unconvincing in its incidents and crude in its characterisation. Somewhat more successful is the femme fatale story “John Barrington Cowles” (Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 12–19 April 1884), about several men who fall under the spell of a cruel, domineering woman who is variously referred to as “beautiful; but the devil!” (255) and “A fiend! . . . A ghoul from the pit! A vampire soul behind a lovely face!” (269). It is not entirely clear whether there is anything actually supernatural about this person. Somewhat along the same lines is the novelette “The Parasite” (Harper’s Weekly, 10 November–1 December 1894). The thrust of the story is mesmerism, embodied in the form of a Caribbean woman named Miss Penclosa. The narrator, Austin Gilroy, becomes convinced by a series of demonstrations that Penclosa’s mesmeric powers are real and undergoes mesmerism himself. Later, however, he is disconcerted to find that Penclosa has fallen in love with him and is seeking to break up his engagement with
his fiancée, Agatha—in particular by mesmerically commanding him to throw sulphuric acid in her face. The attempt fails, Gilroy eventually finds himself able to resist Penclosa’s mesmeric powers, and—in a woeful anticlimax—she proceeds to die. “The Parasite” is sometimes referred to as a vampire story, but the term is never used in the tale and the most one can assume is that Miss Penclosa is some kind of psychic vampire. Doyle tried his hand at comic weird tales, with indifferent success. One example is “Selecting a Ghost” (London Society, December 1883), in which a man hires a “ghost-dealer” to furnish a ghost for his mediaeval castles, since of course all mediaeval ghosts must have a ghost. The dealer makes several different types of ghosts appear in succession in a kind of interview process. In reality, however, he is merely bamboozling the castle owner by drugging him and then robbing him. The tale is a bit heavy-handed and obvious, but not entirely without its chuckles. Somewhat better is “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (Belgravia, July 1885), in which a Professor von Baumgarten, determined to prove that the soul is separable from the body, engages in a mesmeric experiment that will allow his soul to enter the body of a pupil, Fritz von Hartmann, while Hartmann’s soul enters his own body. The experiment works, although the two men aren’t immediately aware of it: incredibly, each soul fails to realise that it has entered a different body until well along in the proceedings. A second experiment reverses the process. Doyle’s reputation as a weird writer will rest on his two substantial tales of Egyptian horror, “The Ring of Thoth” (Cornhill, January 1890) and “Lot No. 249” (Harper’s, September 1892). The first might in fact constitute a genuine mystery/horror hybrid in that, at the outset, the crux of the tale is the puzzle represented by an Egyptian attendant at the Louvre who appears to be paying an unusual amount of attention to a female mummy. The narrator, the Egyptologist John Vansittart Smith, finding himself (implausibly) locked in the Louvre at night after having fallen asleep in some remote alcove, sees the attendant unwrap the mummy, whose body is remarkably well-preserved. Confronting the man, Smith finds that the attendant is one Sosra, born in 1600 B.C.E. Sosra had discovered a chemical formula that “would endow the body with strength to resist the effects of time, of violence, or of disease” (214). He had fallen in love with Atma, but she was hesitant in taking the formula (“was it not a thwarting of the will of the gods?” she wonders [215]), and she died of the white plague
before Sosra could prevail upon her to take the formula. A friend, Parmes, who had also taken the formula had found an antidote to it—because he had in fact become tired of living forever and wished to die naturally. A key ingredient of this antidote was placed in the hollow crystal of the ring of Thoth, now on the finger of the female mummy, who of course is Atma. The most memorable phase of the story is not the formula for eternal life (which a physician like Doyle must have known was ludicrously implausible) but Sosra’s cosmic reflections on his long life: “‘I have travelled in all lands and I have dwelt with all nations. Every tongue is the same to me. I learned them all to help pass the weary time. I need not tell you how slowly they drifted by, the long dawn of modern civilization, the dreary middle years, the dark times of barbarism. They are all behind me now’” (219–20). Sosra goes on to state, remarkably, that he wishes to “shake off that accursed health which has been worse to me than the foulest disease” (221). “Lot No. 249” is Doyle’s most celebrated weird tale and, on the whole, it deserves its celebrity. We are at Oxford, where Edward Bellingham has purchased a very large mummy (six feet seven inches in height) at an auction—it was lot number 249. The mystery element here is really not much of a mystery: when we learn successively that a servant hears someone walking about in Bellingham’s room when he is not there, and when a student who had a grudge against Bellingham is attacked by an apelike creature, the only likely scenario is that Bellingham has somehow managed to revive the mummy. The mummy’s pursuit of the protagonist, Abercrombie Smith, who is attempting to combat Bellingham’s nefarious scheme, is a memorable action-adventure scene, and the tale climaxes effectively with Smith compelling Bellingham to cut up the mummy and throw it in the fire, along with the papyrus that evidently contains the secret of its reanimation. Doyle worked reasonably effectively in the non-supernatural horror tale. “The Case of Lady Sannox” (Idler, November 1893) is somewhat reminiscent of “The Parasite” in its account of a man who revenges himself upon an unfaithful wife by contriving to have her doctor lover unwittingly disfigure her face. “The Brazilian Cat” (Strand, December 1898) contains some hair-raising scenes in telling of a man, Marshall King, who finds himself trapped in a room with a very large and vicious Brazilian cat but manages to redirect the cat’s ferocity against its owner, his cousin Everard,
who had sought to gain a title and inheritance by putting Marshall out of the way. We will have occasion to treat some of Doyle’s later science fiction/horror hybrids in a later chapter. For now, it can be said regretfully that most of Doyle’s early horror tales really amount to very little: they are just stories, told well or badly as the case may be, with little underlying depth or substance. They lack even the vivid play of ideas that enlivens the tales of H. G. Wells, and at best can be regarded merely as competent examples of the weird fiction of their time, no better or worse than the work of Doyle’s contemporaries.
iv. French Horror The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the surprising emergence of Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) to prominence in the realm of supernatural and psychological horror literature. I say surprising because this master craftsman of the short story, although manifestly influenced by Poe in the construction of short fiction, appears not to have been notably attracted to the supernatural until late in life; whether the onset of paranoia and other psychological troubles, apparently the product of the syphilis that resulted in his early death, led or contributed to this attraction remains an open question. None of his six novels are supernatural. In Maupassant it is frequently difficult to make a clear distinction between supernatural and psychological horror, not only because the appearance of the supernatural frequently engenders extreme psychological reactions in the protagonists but because those protagonists themselves, often patently disturbed at the very outset of the tale, become highly unreliable narrators, so that the manifestation of the supernatural becomes a matter of doubt. Consider the celebrated “He?” (“Lui?” Gil Blas, 3 July 1883). Here a man decides to marry, even though he holds the institution of marriage in disdain, “so I shall not have to be on my own!” (18). The reasons for his terror of solitude emerge gradually in the narrative. He had once come back to his house to find someone sitting in the chair before the fire—but no one is in fact there. This kind of thing happens several times, until the man becomes terrified of seeing “him” in his residence. The result is a constant state of fear: “Well, then!” you’ll say. “What are you afraid of?” Yes, I know . . . Well . . . I’m afraid of myself! I’m afraid of fear, afraid of my panic-stricken mind, afraid of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible terror. Oh, you can laugh, if you like. But it’s terrible—and incurable. I’m afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of familiar objects, which
seem to me to take on a kind of animal life. Above all, I am afraid of the horrible confusion of my thoughts, of the way my reason becomes blurred and elusive, scattered by a mysterious, invisible anguish. (18–19) As this passage itself suggests, the entire story reads like a clinical account of madness. Similarly, in the mad narrative called “Who Knows?” (“Qui sait?” Echo de Paris, 6 August 1890), the narrator announces at the outset: “I am writing this in a private mental hospital” (145). This does not inspire confidence, especially when he tells the bizarre tale of coming home at night and finding all the pieces of his furniture marching out of the house of their own accord. Later the man finds them in an antique shop, but when he notifies the police the furniture is no longer in the shop; still later, the furniture returns to the man’s house. Did the furniture ever really walk out? Was the man mad even before he checked himself into the mental hospital? We never know, and are not meant to know. “The Dead Girl” (“La Morte,” Gil Blas, 31 May 1887; usually translated as “Was It a Dream?”), if genuinely supernatural, constitutes a spectacular use of the supernatural for the purposes of moral satire. A man loves a woman, but she dies soon after they are married. He later goes to the cemetery where she is buried and sees all the occupants of the graves rising up: they are erasing the euphemistic inscriptions written on their tombstones and instead are writing the unvarnished truth about themselves. Here is one of them: “Here lies Jacques Olivant, who departed this life at the age of 51. Through his callous behaviour he hastened the death of his father, because he wanted his money. He tortured his wife, tormented his children, deceived his neighbours, robbed people whenever he could, and died in disgrace” (136–37). In a particularly grim twist, the man’s beloved’s tombstone is revised as follows: “Having gone out one day in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold in the rain, and died” (137). The story remains just on this side of allegory. “Apparition” (in Claire de lune, 1884), uncharacteristically set in the past—the Rouen of 1827—deals with a soldier who meets an old friend who has aged hideously: this man had married but his wife had died after a year. The man asks the soldier to go to his chateau and bring back some papers from the bedroom, which has been sealed up since the wife’s death.
He does so—but sees the apparition of a woman who, in a transparently sexual gesture, asks him to comb her hair. Later the spectre disappears—but the man’s coat is covered with long black hair. Some of Maupassant’s tales are manifestly tales of crime and suspense: “On the River” (“En Canot,” Bulletin Français, 10 March 1876), in which a man in a boat, finding it difficult to pull up his anchor, finally manages to extricate the anchor from some impediment and finds that it brings up the body of a dead woman with a stone tied around her neck; “The Little Roque Girl” (“La Petite Roque,” Gil Blas, 18–23 December 1885), in which the mayor of a small town comes upon a young woman bathing and, in a fit of madness, rapes and kills her, but then finds himself overwhelmed with guilt and terror and kills himself. But even these tales are written with such a compressed tensity of expression that they become almost intolerably grim. For all the excellence of Maupassant’s other tales, his richest and most compelling supernatural tale remains “The Horla” (“Le Horla”), which was published in both a short version (Gil Blas, 26 October 1886) and a long version (as a booklet, Ollendorf, 1887). This mesmerising narrative of a man who believes himself to be haunted by an invisible creature who appears to subsist on milk and water makes one momentarily think that the events of the tale can be accounted for psychologically. At the very outset he announces that he is feverish and depressed; after his condition deteriorates, he goes on a vacation to Mont St. Michel, where he hears strange legends of monsters and asks himself whether “beings other than ourselves exist” (100). All this appears to suggest that the invisible monster may be a hallucination; but then the man conducts an experiment that seems to confirm the actual existence of the alien entity. Unless we are to assume that the narrator is so unreliable that even his bare recital of facts is in doubt, we are forced to assume that at this point the supernatural is involved. The narrator’s poignant utterance much later—“The rule of man has come to an end” (117)—is the result of his reading a book by one Hermann Herestauss, “doctor of philosophy and theogony” (114), who, it appears, has provided a kind of anthropology of the supernatural: From reading this book I have the impression that man, ever since he has had the ability to think, has had the foreboding that a new creature would appear, someone stronger than himself, who
would be his successor on earth. And, feeling that his arrival was imminent, but not being able to see what form this new master would take, man has created, out of sheer terror, a whole race of imaginary occult beings, vague ghosts born of fear. (114–15) When the narrator hears of similar creatures appearing in Brazil, he feels that the onslaught of these invisible monsters has come in earnest—so what else can he do but kill himself? “The Horla” is one of the pinnacles of that fusion of supernatural and psychological horror that Maupassant made distinctly his own: once the manifestation of the supernatural is verified beyond all doubt, the effect on the psyche of a sensitive mind is so cataclysmic that madness or suicide is the only escape. A fair number of Maupassant’s stories fail to deliver, but the best of them will give him an unassailable place in the supernatural literature of his time. It is customary to regard Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) as a significant figure in weird literature, but his actual contributions to specifically supernatural writing are slim to negligible, although this is not of course to deny the scintillating brilliance of his two chief novels, À Rebours (1884; usually translated as Against the Grain) and Là-Bas (1891; usually translated as Down There). There is, indeed, a pervasive sense of weirdness in Against the Grain and the quest of its celebrated protagonist, Jean Des Esseintes, to find some exotic phase of human activity—physical, artistic, or religious—to relieve his ineffable ennui; but it becomes plain that Des Esseintes’s quest is fundamentally aesthetic—a rejection of the bourgeois naturalism of Zola and his school. Much the same could be said of Down There, where at the very opening we are regaled with a vicious attack on Zolaesque naturalism, which “rejects every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond” (8). The protagonist of Down There, Durtal, does not entirely subscribe to this view, and of course nothing supernatural actually occurs. Instead, we are given highly detailed—and rather repulsive —accounts of the mediaeval black mass, the loathsome crimes of Gilles de Rais (about whom Durtal professes to be writing a treatise), and, in the novel’s most sensational (but quite brief) scene, a depiction of a modernday black mass, chiefly involving a mixture of lasciviousness and deliberate blasphemy. This scene, as well as the novel as a whole, may have influenced subsequent supernatural literature to some degree, but the overall effect of Down There is more disgust than terror.
The work of another distinguished Frenchman, Jean-Marie-MathiasPhilippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889), should be noted if only to make the point that they do not fall within the scope of the weird tale. His Contes cruels (1883) and Nouveaux contes cruels (1888) are masterpieces of the short story and, in their emphasis on grim twists of fate, set the stage for the later work of Maurice Level. His most celebrated tale, “The Torture by Hope” (“La Torture par l’espérance”), in which a prison official deliberately lets a prisoner escape only so that he may experience the added pain of recapture, is certainly a keen and meticulous analysis of sadism; and much of Villiers’s other work reveals keen psychological analysis of this sort. At best, his stories may venture occasionally into the realm of psychological suspense, but even here only rarely.
v. Slumming with Stoker and Others The later nineteenth century saw the true emergence of what might be called the cleavage between “high” and “low” literature. We have seen that Edgar Allan Poe was already aware of such a cleavage in the 1840s, but, as I have argued elsewhere (see Junk Fiction 16–20), the dichotomy only became pronounced around 1880 and afterward, a combined result of the increased literacy rates among the general populace in both the United States and Europe and the increase in wages and leisure time on the part of these newly literate citizens, allowing them to purchase literary works (and other “entertainment” products) in far greater numbers than before. The phenomenon of the “bestseller”—the book (almost always a novel) that sells millions, rather than merely tens of thousands, of copies—really emerges only at this time. In England, one of the most notable writers of popular fiction—notable not because of his aesthetic skill but because of his ability to write what the public wanted—was H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925). In a long career that spanned more than forty years and included nearly sixty novels along with several books of nonfiction, Haggard established a reputation as a writer of thrilling adventure stories set in exotic locales. He was himself widely travelled in the regions he wrote about, having spent significant time in South Africa, Egypt, Mexico, the Middle East, and elsewhere, either for work or for pleasure. King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was his first bestseller. Haggard rarely dealt significantly with the supernatural, and our chief concern is with the early novel She (1887). This novel, along with most of Haggard’s others, displays to the full the traits of what might be called the “page-turner” school of popular fiction: a relatively simple, easy-to-read prose style and likeable characters with whom the reader can identify; a plot full of intriguing complications that are nonetheless resolved at the end; “cliffhanger” conclusions to chapters that compel the reader to find out what happens to the hapless protagonists who appear on the verge of death or injury; a parade of pseudo-scholarly learning to impress the naive reader; and so on. It is hardly necessary to trace the convoluted plot of She; suffice it to say that it broadly concerns the
attempt by the young and strikingly handsome Leo Vincey and his guardian, Ludwig H. Holly, to find the lost kingdom of Kôr and its enigmatic ruler, the unnamed and possibly immortal woman who goes only by the name of She—or, more precisely (and preposterously), “She-whomust-be-obeyed.” In fact, She is not actually immortal, but has lived for about two millennia in a remote and nearly inaccessible area of Africa somewhere near Zanzibar (which, nevertheless, our intrepid heroes find with surprising ease). She has extended her life by means of a flame called “Pillar of Life” (37) into which she once (and only once) stepped. She is a “beautiful white woman . . . who is reported to have power over all things living and dead” (34). It would not do to have a valiant Englishman fall in love with a woman of colour. Both Vincey and Holly do fall in love with She, although her eyes are clearly for the former, who himself looks something like a Greek god. In point of fact, She comes to the realisation that Vincey must be the reincarnation of the Egyptian man she had fallen in love with two thousand years ago—something that Vincey’s father had suggested to Holly prior to his death. But, alas! things go awry at the end. She urges Vincey to step into the Pillar of Life to become immortal; he is reluctant, and so she does so herself, perhaps to rejuvenate herself for another twenty centuries— but the result is catastrophe, as she shrivels up and (apparently) dies. Haggard’s portrayal of She is not entirely incompetent, although he amusingly endows her with various traits—such as a robust belief in what would come to be called Social Darwinism, not to mention a scorn of religion that comes pretty close to atheism—that is clearly meant to make her a redoubtable figure to pious young Englishmen. Indeed, Holly, while acknowledging her transcendent beauty, plainly brands her as “evil” (187). It doesn’t help her cause, in Holly’s eyes, that She blandly and ruthlessly kills a native woman, Ustane, who had herself fallen in love with Vincey. As it is, the most dramatic and engaging scene in She is the attempt by the three protagonists to go through the ruins of the city of Kôr (a city that was built by some race now extinct), through a volcano, and toward the Pillar of Life that will presumably rejuvenate them—although there is more of adventure than the supernatural in this episode. After the dénouement where She, going into the fire, is seen “growing old before my eyes!” (355), Haggard is careful to leave room for a sequel (“we feel that it [the end of the adventure] is not reached yet” (384). But it took Haggard a number of
years to produce the sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), a lacklustre performance in which the three protagonists are revived like reanimated corpses to go through their mechanical motions one more time. Still later, in She and Allan (1921), Haggard united She and his other chief hero, Allan Quatermain (from King Solomon’s Mines and other novels), in another lifeless sequel. Haggard is of significance in virtually creating the “lost race” subgenre of adventure fiction, although this subgenre has rarely produced works of any aesthetic viability. W. Clark Russell (1844–1911), the author of sea stories, wrote two novels that may or may not be supernatural. Russell joined the British merchant service in 1858 and served for eight years, gaining the nautical background that he utilised in dozens of novels written over the next forty years. In The Frozen Pirate (1887) Russell approached the supernatural. In 1801 a shipwrecked sailor, Paul Rodney, stumbles upon an icebound pirate ship, the Boca del Dragon, near Antarctica and finds several of its crewmen apparently frozen to death. Rodney inadvertently resuscitates one of them, a French pirate named Jules Tassard, when he brings Tassard’s body close to a fire in the ship’s kitchen. He learns that Tassard has been frozen since 1754, although Tassard himself refuses to believe that so much time has passed. Shortly after his revival, Tassard suddenly ages half a century in a few hours, dying a hideously decrepit old man. The rest of the novel is a letdown, as it merely concerns Rodney’s efforts to free the ship from the ice and sail it back to England while protecting the ship’s immense stolen booty from thieves or customs agents. Russell’s next novel, The Death Ship (1888), is manifestly supernatural. It makes use of the same basic plot as Marryat’s Phantom Ship but is somewhat more compelling (or less absurd). In 1799 a sailor, Geoffrey Fenton, falls overboard and is picked up by the Braave, which proves to be nothing less than the legendary “Flying Dutchman”—a ship that set sail from Holland in 1653 and, because of the captain’s defiance of God, is compelled to sail repeatedly around the Cape of Good Hope and never return home. The ship’s crewmen, while seemingly alive, are grotesquely gray and wizened in appearance, and they are unable to realize that they have been sailing for a century and a half, believing they have been on the boat for only a few months. Much of the narrative is focused on a love interest that develops between Fenton and another living human being, Imogene Dudley, who has been on the ship for five years and despairs of
ever getting off it. Fenton believes that their only hope of escape lies not in meeting another ship—which would only flee in terror, perhaps believing that Geoffrey and Imogene are among the living dead—but in sailing into a port and hoping that they will be rescued there. At long last the Braave approaches a port, but the duo’s escape goes awry: although they manage to get into a lifeboat, Imogene is hit by a bullet fired by the captain, Cornelius Vanderdecken, and dies. Fenton rescues himself and returns to England, but is heartbroken. Both of Russell’s novels were immensely popular and were issued in numerous pirated editions in the United States, the latter sometimes appearing under the title The Flying Dutchman; or, The Death Ship. Like Russell’s other works, they are prolix and stiff in diction, and Russell’s overuse of technical nautical jargon makes for difficult reading. His characterisation is unremarkable, but his realism in depicting all aspects of sea life has rarely been matched. Another author who is more trashy than otherwise is Richard Marsh (1857?–1915), whose chief claim to fame is the sensational novel The Beetle (1897). This work is perhaps the first supernatural “thriller” of any consequence, and it is an entertaining enough read, although entirely frivolous and insubstantial. Its structure is superficially clever: it is told in four “books,” each narrated by a different character. What one concludes after reading The Beetle, however, is that this narrative device is chiefly utilised to stretch out into a full-length novel a plot that would otherwise be barely sufficient for a longish short story. In essence, we are dealing with a horror out of Egypt. Paul Lessingham, a noted British politician, ventured to Egypt when he was eighteen and was kidnapped by a member of the cult of Isis. After witnessing “orgies of nameless horrors” (253) that apparently involved human sacrifice (mostly of white women, with Englishwomen given high preference), Paul manages to escape by throttling his female captor—although as he is completing the job she apparently turns into a large beetle in front of his eyes. Twenty years later the cult is after him, for unspecified reasons: if it merely wishes to exact revenge upon him, why did it wait so long? Well, no matter. We are now dealing with the presence in London of a baleful Egyptian: whether it is a man or a woman is unclear, and whether it is the same person who kidnapped Paul two decades before or some other is also a mystery (this person does declare, however, that Paul
actually killed his/her kinswoman [132–33], leading one to think that this is some other person). There is no need to trace the complexities of the convoluted plot, which, as I have suggested, ultimately resolves into a relatively simple chain of events. Much space is spent on a tedious development of a love interest between Paul and Marjorie Lindon—and, as could have been predicted almost at the outset, the novel concludes with a thrilling chase scene in which Marjorie is seized by the Egyptian (apparently for the purpose of taking her back to Egypt to be sacrificed), and Paul and others giving chase. Naturally, they save her. The crux is whether the transformation into a beetle is genuine or merely some kind of trick—perhaps a result of hypnosis. The phenomenon occurs in front of another character, Sydney Atherton, a rival for Marjorie’s affections. Marsh apparently tips his hand when at the end of the novel— after the Egyptian has died in a train crash—a private detective notes that the following is all that is left of the entity: On the cushions and woodwork . . . were huge blotches,—stains of some sort. When first noticed they were damp, and gave out a most unpleasant smell. One of the pieces of woodwork is yet in my possession,—with the stain still on it. Experts have pronounced upon it too,—with the result that opinions are divided. Some maintain that the stain was produced by human blood, which had been subjected to a great heat, and, so to speak, parboiled. Others declare that it is the blood of some wild animal,—possibly of some creature of the cat species. Yet others affirm that it is not blood at all, but merely paint. While a fourth describes it as—I quote the written opinion which lies in front of me—“caused apparently by a deposit of some sort of viscid matter, probably the execretion [sic] of some variety of lizard.” (347) So I suppose we are to assume that this is the end of the beetle. Marsh wrote some supernatural short stories—now gathered in The Haunted Chair and Other Stories (1997)—but they don’t amount to much. It has frequently been noted that The Beetle was published in the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and for a time outsold it; but this does not
signify much, for Dracula was not in fact a commercial success. Although receiving generally positive reviews, it sold poorly, and, surprisingly, there was no American edition to match the British edition published by Constable. The book soon fell out of print and would not be reissued until 1901. Although Stoker himself prepared a hasty dramatic version, chiefly to protect his copyright for such an adaptation, no actual drama of Dracula appeared until after his death. Stoker had every reason to believe that his years-long effort in researching and writing the novel had been wasted. Bram Stoker (1847–1912) would have been astounded that his novel Dracula would become the prototype of the vampire myth and the source for more adaptations—in film, theatre, television, and other media—than almost any other work in literary history. For much of his life, Stoker did not even consider himself primarily a literary man; instead, he snatched the time to write his dozen novels and a handful of short stories in the midst of a career of a very different sort. It is well known that, after working as a drama critic for some years, he became in 1878 the business manager and personal secretary to Henry Irving, one of the leading actors of the period. This work continued until Irving’s death in 1905, with the result that Stoker could only take up literary work in fits and starts, beginning with the story collection Under the Sunset (1882). Dracula has, especially in recent years, inspired a cadre of devoted— sometimes fanatical—supporters who parse its minutiae as if it were a biblical text and vaunt its literary virtues far beyond what any fair-minded critic would accept. In fact, Dracula is not a particular success from a purely aesthetic point of view. Although its first four chapters—the episode where Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, goes to Castle Dracula in Transylvania to complete the paperwork for Dracula’s purchase of a castle in Purfleet in Essex—constitute one of the most gripping and evocative set-pieces in the history of supernatural fiction, the novel subsequently gets bogged down in tedious repetition (the very slow transformation of Lucy Westenra into a vampire as a result of repeated bloodsuckings by Dracula; the glacial pace with which the madman Renfield falls under Dracula’s spell) that woefully dissipates the dramatic tensity established at the outset. Dracula’s final demise at the hands of the valiant band of Englishmen (with one American thrown in) is more than a little anticlimactic. The greatest failing of Dracula, however, may be its moral unadventurousness. The whole novel is structured along a series of
dichotomies, chief of which is the portrayal of Dracula as wholly evil and his opponents (Harker and his wife, Mina; Arthur Holmwood [later Lord Godalming], Lucy’s fiancé; Jack Seward, who runs the nearby insane asylum; and, preeminently, the saintly Dutchman Abraham Van Helsing, whose broken English resembles nothing so much as the similar linguistic clumsiness of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or John P. Marquand’s Charlie Chan) as wholly good. The fact that Dracula alone never presents his side of the matter, after the early chapters with Jonathan Harker, and that he is scarcely even seen throughout the rest of the novel and is detected only through his baleful handiwork (chiefly the bloodsucking of Lucy and Mina Harker, with sundry murders along the way), definitively paints him as the prototypical Other. The novel is famously composed of a series of documents—diaries, letters, or memorandums by Jonathan, Mina, Seward, Van Helsing, and others—but Dracula scarcely utters a word after the opening chapters. Some other dichotomies are worth pursuing briefly. The central one in Dracula would seem to be the contrast between Christianity and Satanism. And yet, it is not entirely clear whether Dracula has in fact sold his soul to Satan to achieve his supernatural powers. There is, indeed, a perplexing lack of clarity as to how he actually became a vampire. When, in chapter 18, Van Helsing presents a history and biology of vampires, he first remarks that vampires are known throughout the world (India, China, France, Germany, etc.)—in which case it becomes a bit of a puzzle why the tokens of Christianity are so efficacious against them, especially against Dracula. Van Helsing goes on to assert that Dracula was a valiant soldier who battled the Turks: “That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us” (264–65). But surely these traits are not enough to make one a vampire, otherwise there would be thousands of them. Van Helsing also declares that some members of Dracula’s family “were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One” (265), but the purport of this remark is unclear. Indeed, much earlier it is suggested that Dracula’s ancestors worshipped Thor and Odin (32). Whatever the case, Christianity does indeed appear to be the weapon of choice against Dracula. It is in this novel that we find the now hackneyed use of the crucifix as a defence, along with the sacred wafer (Van Helsing, depositing one on Lucy’s tomb, blandly notes, “I have an Indulgence” [232]) and so forth. It is, however, never clarified why garlic is a vampire
repellent. Why, among all the flora in creation, does this particular one work so efficaciously? Stoker did not invent this tidbit, but presumably adapted it from existing superstition. The suggestion has been put forth that garlic is a mosquito repellent, and that therefore it could also work against vampires when they take the form of bats. (It is now well known that Stoker was not entirely clear-cut on whether Dracula could walk about during the day. Overall, Dracula suggests that he can, but that his powers are restricted during daylight—that is, he must remain in the human form and cannot transform himself into a bat, a wolf, or a mist, as he does at other times. It was only the film Nosferatu [1922] that definitively declared that vampires cannot walk in daylight and in fact can be killed by the rays of the sun.) Other dichotomies can be dealt with more briefly. There is an obvious contrast of past and present (Dracula, at the outset, states: “I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me” [26]) and of East vs. West. There might be a contrast between nobility and commoners, but in fact the distinction is not clear-cut. Dracula’s opponents are by and large commoners (especially the American Quincey Morris, although he is in fact a relatively colourless character who does not figure much in the action), but one of them, Arthur Holmwood, becomes Lord Godalming upon his father’s death and uses his title at key moments to foster the group’s attempts to hunt down Dracula. Similarly, notwithstanding many critics’ claims to the contrary, there is no genuine contrast between superstition and (contemporary) science, even though Van Helsing at one point observes that “we have sources of science” (262). In fact, the weapons he and others use to combat Dracula are precisely those that derive from the legendary superstitions about the laying of vampires—the cross, the stake, garlic, and so forth. In hindsight, the sexual overtones of Dracula seem to us unmistakable; and yet, contemporary readers and reviewers—who only a few years earlier had expressed outrage at the seeming sexual perversion hinted at in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894)—appear to have overlooked them. Stoker’s horror of unconventional sexuality manifests itself on several levels: the perceived threat of sexually aggressive women is seen in the attempt of the three female vampires to seduce Jonathan Harker in the depths of Dracula’s castle, and also in the fate of Lucy Westenra, who is punished for her suggestions of sexual dalliance by becoming a vampire and suffering a hideous perversion of a bride’s deflowering when she is
staked through the heart by her fiancé, Lord Godalming. Perhaps the most dramatic scene in Dracula, from this perspective, is Dracula’s seduction of Mina at the very time she is sharing a bed with her new husband, Jonathan, as he forces her to suck blood from his own breast—a transparent metaphor both for oral sex and for the Victorian male’s ever-present fear of female infidelity. Indeed, Stoker’s portrayal of the central women in his novel is discouragingly conventional. Statements like Mina’s toward the end—“I know that all that brave earnest men can do for a poor weak woman . . . you will do” (365)—abound. Stoker can hide behind the fact that these statements are uttered by his characters and not by any omniscient narrator, but the absence of any statements or actions contradicting them bespeaks Stoker’s reactionary attitude toward women. Dracula has, as I have suggested, spawned a cottage industry tracing its sources and influences. By all accounts it is his most autobiographical novel; as his most recent biographer, Barbara Belford, has noted, “He dumped the signposts of his life into a supernatural cauldron and called it Dracula” (256). Something so trivial as the name of the hapless solicitor Jonathan Harker has been traced to one Joseph Harker, a scene painter at the Lyceum, the London theatre where Irving and his company performed. In Harker’s wife, Mina, the prototype of the pure, virginal, deferential woman whom Stoker manifestly saw as the ideal for the female sex, we perhaps see some features of the personality of the famous actress Ellen Terry, who frequently shared the stage with Irving and became one of Stoker’s closest friends. In the more disturbing character of Lucy Westenra, who appears willing to bestow her feminine charms upon a succession of willing suitors, we may perhaps see a dim echo of Stoker’s vision of his own wife, Florence, who had dallied with Oscar Wilde before agreeing to link her fate with another Irishman. The American adventurer Quincey Morris no doubt derives from the numerous colourful figures Stoker met during his American tours of the 1880s—perhaps he was thinking specifically of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he shared a stage in 1886. As for Abraham Van Helsing, the valiant Dutch psychic detective who finally defeats the vampire, his first name echoes that of Stoker’s own father, as is fitting for this benevolent father-figure. No doubt he also owes much, especially in his irritating know-it-all stance, to Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius. And in Dracula himself it is difficult not to see the figure of Henry Irving,
whose performances in the roles of Hamlet and Macbeth showed him to be a master at portraying the forbidding hero-villain. Literary and historical sources for Dracula also seem to abound. The pioneering research of Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally has identified the historical Dracula as Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth-century Hungarian tyrant whose ruthless campaigns against the Turks bestowed upon him the soubriquet Vlad the Impaler. Vlad, of course, was not a vampire, nor was even rumoured to be a vampire, but he became one significant component of a manifestly composite picture. Stoker found the name Dracula in William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.” A book by Stoker’s brother George, With the Unspeakables; or, Two Years’ Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey (1878), provided the background for the Transylvanian setting of Dracula’s opening chapters. The numerous parallels between Dracula and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (staged at the Lyceum in 1888–89) are noteworthy, chief among them the three “weird sisters,” echoed by the three female vampires in Dracula’s Transylvanian castle. Count Dracula’s frequent use of hypnotism may owe something to the celebrated character Svengali in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894). As for previous vampire literature itself, Stoker took at least a few hints from a number of his predecessors, whether it be such potboilers as Rymer’s Varney the Vampire or more artistic works such as Polidori’s “The Vampyre” or Le Fanu’s “Carmilla.” Indeed, it is believed that Stoker omitted an early chapter of Dracula out of respect for Le Fanu; titled “Dracula’s Guest,” it later served as the lead story in the posthumous collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914). Dracula is not the only novel of Stoker’s that merits our attention. Although he followed it up with a mediocre romance, Miss Betty (1898), he then produced the respectable witchcraft novel The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and an impressive tale of Egyptian horror, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Like Dracula, it is a supernatural detective story, with elements of the locked-room mystery. No doubt Stoker had read the early Sherlock Holmes tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to good effect as they appeared in the Strand in the 1890s. Like Holmes in a similar situation, a character in The Jewel of Seven Stars, Dr. Winchester, makes the momentous
pronouncement: “I have exhausted all human and natural possibilities of the case, and am beginning to fall back on superhuman and supernatural possibilities” (728). There is even a quasi-science-fictional element, in that the jewel of the title has been extracted from an aerolite. Like many later Victorians, Stoker saw in the radical advancements of science during his time a means to defeat superstition once and for all. The Egyptologist Abel Trelawny suggests as much when he ponders the possibility that the ancient Egyptians might have known and used the properties of radium. His socalled Great Experiment—the magical resurrection of the mummified pharaoh-queen—constitutes some of the most impressive pages in Stoker’s entire output. The Lair of the White Worm (1911), Stoker’s last novel, was written in a scant three months in 1911, but its rapidity of composition should not lead us to devalue it; Lovecraft thought it a dreadful piece of hackwork, but it is not entirely to be despised. It is, once again, a supernatural detective story, and Stoker is careful to lay the clues that allow us to identify the sinister Lady Arabella March as something very different from the refined aristocrat she claims to be. Some of Stoker’s relatively few short stories are of note. The entire collection Under the Sunset contains some bizarre fairy tales that appear to take great relish in describing the vicious mutilation of children. His most noteworthy stories are “The Judge’s House” (Holly Leaves, 5 December 1891), a grim tale of a revenant, and “The Squaw” (Holly Leaves, 2 December 1893), a powerful supernatural revenge tale. Bram Stoker died on 20 April 1912, five days after the Titanic disaster. The story of his widow Florence’s jealous guarding of his literary properties —in particular, her lawsuit against F. W. Murnau, whose masterful film Nosferatu (1922) was loosely based on Dracula, with the result that the film was withdrawn from circulation and not seen for decades—is well known. She did permit dramatic adaptations of Dracula by Hamilton Deane (1924) and John Balderston (1930), the latter of which was famously adapted for the film starring Bela Lugosi. It is, indeed, widely acknowledged even by Stoker’s most devoted supporters that it was only the films that established the novel as the prototypical literary work on vampires. It is certainly the most exhaustive treatment of the subject up to its time, but whether it deserves the adulation it has elicited in certain quarters is very much to be questioned.
VIII. The Deluge: American Branch American writers were by no means slow in taking up the cause of supernatural fiction. The two most celebrated proponents of the form in this period, Henry James and Ambrose Bierce, embody what might be seen as a significant geographical polarisation in American weird writing. What I term the East Coast School appears to have drawn its chief inspiration from English or European models and chose predominantly East Coast or European settings for their tales, while the West Coast School, under the tutelage of Bierce, sought to transfer the sense of horror and weirdness to the “new” lands (new, of course, only in terms of Anglo-Saxon settlement) of the Pacific coast. In so doing, they generated work that is substantially more violent, grisly, and in many cases emotively powerful than their more reserved East Coast rivals, with the result that this West Coast School ultimately came to have the greater influence upon subsequent weird work in the United States. The writers of this school also departed more forcefully than the East Coast School from the hackneyed ghost story tradition, opening the way for more imaginative treatments of supernatural motifs in the generations to follow.
i. The East Coast School By general acclamation, then and now, the leader of the East Coast School was Henry James (1843–1916), in spite of the fact that he deserted the United States for England in 1876, after only the first four of his eighteen or so ghost stories were written. In truth, however, a number of the tales collected by Leon Edel and first published under the title The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1949; later titled Stories of the Supernatural) are so marginally weird that they scarcely deserve discussion here. Indeed, the sad fact is that a great bulk of James’s ghostly writings are disappointing at best, crippled by James’s increasingly mincing and affected prose style and their general timidity in regard to the actual supernatural manifestation. Whatever value they may have as documents of psychological analysis, as weird tales they are sorry pieces of work. The early tale “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (Atlantic Monthly, February 1868), published when James was not quite twenty-five, is curiously wooden and stiff, and every plot development (including the supernatural dénouement) is telegraphed. “De Grey: A Romance” (Atlantic Monthly, July 1868) deals in lacklustre fashion with a priest who appears to be a kind of psychic vampire. “Sir Edmund Orme” (Black and White, Christmas 1891) is of slightly greater interest, speaking of an apparition—the ghost of a man who was jilted in love—who haunts his lover’s daughter, and who finally vanishes when the daughter admits to him her love for another man. As a means of emphasising the pangs of disappointed love, the supernatural is used with some effectiveness here. Of James’s shorter tales, perhaps only two are worth singling out. In “The Ghostly Rental” (Scribner’s Monthly, September 1876), an old man claims that he drove his daughter to death and that she now rents his house from him, paying him in gold and silver pieces that “are all dated before the young girl’s death” (122). This is a fascinating premise for a ghostly tale, and the narrator actually sees—or thinks he sees—the ghost of the daughter at one point. In fact, however, the daughter is alive, and she comes to her father when he is dying, whereupon she sees his ghost. “The Real Right Thing” (Collier’s Weekly, 16 December 1899), the shortest of James’s ghost
stories, powerfully etches the heavy hand of the past in the figure of a celebrated writer who, after his death, appears to haunt his widow and the man he designated to look after his estate. Ambiguity remains to the end as to whether the ghost has actually appeared, but the tale is no less powerful for that. But all James’s incompetencies and fussinesses and nebulosities can be forgiven in light of The Turn of the Screw (1898)—a tale that forms the ultimate refinement of the Christmas ghost story that is told to a group of receptive listeners. The short novel has inspired a veritable library of criticism, some of it abstruse beyond comprehension or tolerance, so I do not pretend to do more here than touch upon certain central features of the text. The chief point of dispute, of course, is the very existence of the supernatural in the tale. What has somewhat pejoratively been termed a “naive” reading sees the story as putting on stage two definite ghosts—that of the dead valet Peter Quint and that of the dead ex-governess Miss Jessel —who, either individually or in tandem, work to corrupt the “innocent” children, Miles and Flora, whom the new governess (the narrator of the bulk of the text) is charged to educate. So the query becomes: Are the ghosts “real” or are they merely hallucinations on the part of the governess? Such critics as Edna Kenton, Edmund Wilson, and Leon Edel, beginning as early as the 1920s, have pointed out the obvious fact that it is only the governess who actually “sees” the ghosts and that it is therefore highly plausible that they are products of her imagination. But since this interpretation of events cannot be definitively proven, The Turn of the Screw has been taken to be the prototypical “ambiguous” horror tale, where it is impossible to determine whether the supernatural has actually come into play or not. I presume to dispute this widely held view. The chief difficulty that the “non-apparitionists,” as they are called, must contend with is the very first (or, more precisely, the second) appearance of the ghost of Peter Quint. It is true that the governess first saw the ghost of Quint at quite a distance, on the battlements of Bly—shortly after noting that “it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet some one” (454). But the second appearance of the ghost, on the other side of the window of the dining room, is so vivid that the governess not merely has no doubt that it is “real” but is able to describe the vision precisely to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose:
“He has no hat. . . . 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.” (465) Whereupon Mrs. Grose immediately recognises him: “Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!” (466). And of course she shortly thereafter announces, to the governess’s horror, that Quint is dead. Later the governess enunciates the crux of the issue: how could she have described Quint and also Miss Jessel so precisely when she had at that time not even known of their very existence? “I found that to keep her [Mrs. Grose] thoroughly in the grip of this I had only to ask her how, if I had ‘made it up,’ I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks—a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognised and named them” (478). Attempts have been made to maintain that the governess could somehow have had prior knowledge of these servants (or at least of their appearance), but there appears to be no textual evidence to support such a view. The non-apparitionists are, indeed, at this point forced to conclude that the description of Quint by the governess is not as precise as it in fact is, and that Mrs. Grose has simply jumped to the conclusion that it is Quint because she didn’t like him and, in her class-consciousness (note the touch about his wearing no hat!), felt him an inappropriate companion to little Miles. This interpretation so strains credulity as to be put out of court at once. If this apparition of Quint is taken to be “real,” then there is no reason not to assume that the apparition of Miss Jessel is also real. Accordingly, the standard interpretation of the tale—enunciated compactly by Noël Carroll: “this tale is narrated in such a way that the reader cannot tell at the end of the tale whether the house is genuinely haunted or whether the apparent haunting is the product of the hysterical imaginings of a disturbed governess” (145)—is plainly false. Indeed, it could well be that the governess’s “hysteria” (which to my mind has been much exaggerated by
critics) is the product of the increasingly frequent manifestations of the ghosts. A later passage is worth study. The governess, in the company of Flora and Mrs. Grose, sees the ghost of Miss Jessel—and naturally wonders whether her companions have seen it also. Both emphatically deny doing so —but the very harriedness of Mrs. Grose’s assertion—“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there—and you never see nothing, my sweet!” (529)— appears to be aimed at protecting Flora from the horror of the ghostly visitation. So it is at least arguable that, in this instance, someone other than the governess (either Mrs. Grose or Flora herself, or both) has seen a ghost. The non-apparitionists have one more card up their sleeve, but it is a feeble one. They have noted that James, in his notebooks, admitted that he derived the kernel of the tale from an anecdote told to him by Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury: “The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children: the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree” (quoted in Edel’s introductory note to the story, 425). When, in 1908, James published a slightly revised version of the story in the New York Edition of his collected works, he made what has been taken to be a significant alteration: “The story . . . [deals] with a couple of small children in an out-of-the-way place, to whom the spirits of certain ‘bad’ servants, dead in the employ of the house, were believed [my emphasis] to have appeared with the design of ‘getting hold of them’” (427). But this introduction of apparent ambiguity in regard to the ghostly manifestation can scarcely stand up to the actual textual evidence of the story. (I should note in passing that Peter G. Beidler’s Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James also endorses the supernatural interpretation of the story, although I came to my views independently.) There also seems general confusion as to the source of the horror in the tale. It is not the mere appearance of the ghosts; it is what those ghosts did when they were alive. Various comments by Mrs. Grose about Quint and Jessel (“Poor woman—she paid for it!”; “Of her [Jessel’s] real reason for leaving? Oh yes—as to that. She couldn’t have stayed. Fancy it here—for a governess! And afterwards I imagined—and I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful” [477–78]) seem clearly intended to suggest that Quint and Jessel had had an affair, that Jessel had become pregnant, and that she had died as a result of a botched abortion. This is just the kind of thing to send late Victorian readers (not to mention a sexually repressed bachelor like James) into a tizzy of horror. The fact that Miss Jessel always appears
in black may suggest that she is mourning the death of her unborn child. Indeed, the governess’s pained lament that the children are “lost” (478) may stem not merely from the fact that they blandly accept the existence of the ghosts but that they also accepted their amorous relations in life, since it is plainly stated that Miles knew of these relations but said nothing to anyone (482). James therefore may be suggesting that these “innocent” children are anything but innocent—that they are, in fact, corrupt and depraved in spite of their tender years. (This point is hinted at in the splendid film adaptation of the tale, The Innocents [1961].) Whatever the case, The Turn of the Screw is a masterwork of subtlety and indirection; for once, James’s aesthetic restraint enhances rather than dilutes the horror in the narrative. The initial revelation of the fact that Quint is dead, just after the governess has seen him, is one of the more potent moments in the entire range of nineteenth-century supernatural literature; and the narrative gains steady power as the governess’s account becomes increasingly harried by the repeated appearance of the spectres. It is possible that James’s greatest contribution to the weird would have been his last, unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past (first published in 1917), a depiction of a man who falls into the past and fears that he will remain there. James has at last used a supernatural trope other than the ghost; indeed, in its rumination on the paradoxes of time travel the work could even be considered an early contribution to science fiction. The ghost stories of James Lite—that is, Edith Wharton (1862–1937)— are, on the whole, substantially more satisfying than those of James himself, since Wharton was not quite so wedded to a fussy and simpering prose style and actually sought to tell a comprehensible story. She may not have written a single work of the depth and complexity of The Turn of the Screw, and several of her tales are marred by serious aesthetic errors in judgment; but, in spite of her sedulous devotion to elegance of diction and her avoidance of anything that could be construed as violence of incident, there are genuine shudders in a number of her tales. Wharton’s membership to the East Coast School is testified by her nearly ubiquitous use of settings in New York, New England, England, or continental Europe. And even though her weird work extended to the very end of her life—her ghost stories were collected chiefly in two volumes, Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) and Ghosts (1937), the latter of which contains one unpublished tale—and therefore extended well beyond the
period covered by this chapter, the bulk of them reveal an ambience that is resolutely late-nineteenth-century. Indeed, in her somewhat querulous preface to Ghosts, she simultaneously dismisses Osbert Sitwell’s assertion that (in her words) “ghosts went out when electricity came in” (3) and also protests that the “instinct” for perceiving ghosts is “being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema” (2), attesting—at least in her old age—to a sense of temporal dislocation from the era of jazz, the depression, and movies. To the end of her life she remained a fin de siècle writer. Many of Wharton’s ghost stories reveal that she has absorbed previous ghostly literature and sought to reproduce its effects in her work. “The Duchess at Prayer” (Scribner’s Magazine, August 1900) evokes a fine Gothic atmosphere in telling the tale of a duke and duchess in Italy. The former, suspecting the latter of infidelity, places a statue of her (executed by Bernini) over the entrance of a crypt, thereby sealing it off—and, by implication, sealing off the duchess’s lover (the duke’s cousin) within the crypt. The duchess takes poison and dies—whereupon the statue changes its countenance so that it now reveals “a frozen horror” (29). The tale is a nice mix of natural and supernatural horror—if, of course, we can believe the latter has actually occurred from the rambling tale of the old man who heard it from his grandmother. Domestic issues loom large in Wharton’s ghost stories, and she is manifestly determined to use the supernatural to highlight tensions within and without the family circle. “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (Scribner’s Magazine, November 1902) is told in a highly indirect fashion, but suggests that the master of the house conducted an affair with the maid; the latter ultimately becomes a ghost. “The Eyes” (Scribner’s Magazine, June 1910) is a curious but effective moral ghost story. A man, Culwin, sees a hideous pair of eyes in his dark bedroom: They were the very worst eyes I’ve ever seen: a man’s eyes—but what a man! My first thought was that he must be frightfully old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes,
the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim about the pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish. (100) This is as close to physically repulsive horror as Wharton ever comes in any of her weird tales; but in the end we learn that these eyes appear only when Culwin tells a lie, even when the lie is meant well (as when he promises a homely cousin he will marry her, or when he tells another cousin that he is a good writer when he isn’t). “Kerfol” (Scribner’s Magazine, March 1916) is a bit of a novelty in displaying ghosts of dogs, although in the end the story resolves into an elementary supernatural revenge tale: the dogs are those that have been killed by Yves de Cornault to exact vengeance on his wife, Anne, for her suspected adultery. “Bewitched” (Pictorial Review, March 1925) engenders a fine atmosphere of the grimness of old New England—similar to what Wharton achieved non-supernaturally in Ethan Frome (1911)—in its account of a revenant. Wharton, however, is capable of making curious blunders in the execution of her ghost stories. This problem afflicts the most celebrated of them, “Afterward” (Century Magazine, January 1910). Set at an old house in England, it is based upon an intriguing premise—the house is indeed haunted, but one never knows one has seen a ghost until “long, long afterwards” (66). But what actually transpires is that an American couple, Mary and Ned Boyne, are plagued by the ghost of a man, Bob Elwell, whom Ned had tricked in a business deal and who had subsequently committed suicide. Not only does this tale once again employ a simple supernatural revenge motif, with every incident telegraphed and predictable, but an obvious question of logic emerges: the ghost that Mary twice sees is indeed that of Elwell, but how do these sightings justify the “long, long afterwards” premise, which is presumably attached to the house and not to these random guests? In spite of these failings, the story does have one authentic shudder. Mary had seen the ghost of Elwell twice, because he had not entirely killed himself on the first attempt: “He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough—he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months to die; and then he came back again—and Ned went with him” (93). A crippling flaw also besets “Miss Mary Pask” (Pictorial Review, April 1925). The narrator visits the woman of the title (the sister of his friend),
who now lives in a remote location in Britanny. It becomes—or seems to become—evident that Mary is a ghost, especially when she says, “I’ve had so few visitors since my death, you see” (185). This is an authentically shuddersome moment, but Wharton destroys it by playing a cheap trick on the reader: she later reveals that Mary did not die, but only went into a cataleptic trance. This low contrivance is surely beneath the dignity of a writer of Wharton’s stature. Some of Wharton’s ghosts are surprisingly active. In “Mr. Jones” (Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1928) a ghost of an old servant actually kills the housekeeper by strangulation: her body reveals “a circle of red marks on it—the marks of recent bruises” (239). In “Pomegranate Seed” (Saturday Evening Post, 25 April 1931), the ghost of a man’s dead first wife writes letters to him. Wharton addresses this story in her preface to Ghosts, writing that several readers had written to the Saturday Evening Post, asking “how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letterbox” (2; Wharton’s emphasis). It is here that she makes her remark about the wireless and the cinema, suggesting that it is only the imaginative impoverishment of the modern age that cavils over points like this. But in fact the concern is genuine, for it raises the issue of the metaphysical status of the ghost. Traditional ghosts—and Wharton’s ghosts, for the most part, are pretty traditional—have been considered immaterial, because they are the offshoots or residue of a person’s soul, which almost every orthodox religion considers immaterial. We have seen Margaret Oliphant wrestle with this issue of how a ghost can engender any physical act in the world of the living. Wharton, by dodging this issue, seems to be yielding merely to authorial convenience in having her ghosts manipulate physical objects whenever it is convenient for her narrative to do so. I should add that “Pomegranate Seed” is in fact an extraordinarily poignant tale, in which the ghost’s letters—written in ink so faded that only the husband can read them —are a symbol for the rapid oblivion that overtakes the dead, as they quickly fade from people’s memories. I would have liked a clearer resolution of the scenario: the husband, promising to take his new wife on a long trip to escape the continual missives that the first wife is sending, is gone all day from his office, and it is never clarified what happened to him. But the overall emotional impact of the narrative, told largely from the second wife’s point of view, is impressive.
Wharton’s most successful ghost story is probably “All Souls’” (first published in Ghosts). The narrator—a cousin of Sara Clayburn, the protagonist of the tale—announces at the outset that it is “not exactly a ghost story” (288), and she speaks the truth. Clayburn, a widow, lives in an old, rambling house in Connecticut. One day she twists her ankle and is advised to stay off her feet; but she is forced into action when, after a long and painful night, she discovers that none of the five servants in the house appear to be around. The atmosphere of desolation and gloom that Wharton creates as Sara wanders around her own house, trying to find some signs of life (the electricity is off, the phone doesn’t work, the radiators are cold), is masterful. (There is, however, one more cheap trick, as Sara hears a strange male voice in the kitchen, only to discover that it is the radio.) The next day everything seems to be back to normal, and no one believes Sara’s tale of her terror and isolation. Exactly a year later Sara sees a woman wandering near her property—the same woman who had come a year before, just prior to her accident. She drives the woman away. Later she realises that that day is All Souls’ Eve, “the night when the dead can walk—and when, by the same token, other spirits, piteous or malevolent, are also freed from the restrictions which secure the earth to the living on the other days of the year” (307). But there is a further suggestion: the woman—who might be “either a ‘fetch,’ or else, more probably, and more alarmingly, a living woman inhabited by a witch” (307)—may be coming to lure the servants to a witches’ coven. The matter is never resolved, and we are left with either a supernatural explanation (the woman is some kind of revenant who comes every All Souls’ Eve) or a non-supernatural explanation (the servants are part of a witch-cult)—or both. Wharton, incidentally, is surprisingly successful in two tales of nonsupernatural horror: “A Journey” (first published in the collection Greater Inclination, 1899), in which a woman travelling by train with a sick husband finds that he has died but, terrified at being asked to leave the train, conceals his death as long as she can; and, much more substantially, “A Bottle of Perrier” (Saturday Evening Post, 27 March 1926), set in the Egyptian desert and focusing on a servant who has killed his master because the latter would not allow him a vacation. This premise sounds comical, but the execution of the narrative is uncommonly fine. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) is in many ways a prototypical representative of the East Coast School, as testified by her unremittingly
grim portrayals of dour New Englanders, both in her weird work and in her many mainstream tales and novels, and her nearly uniform adherence to the ghost as the chief motif in her supernatural tales. And yet, in spite of her relatively conventional supernaturalism, her tales occasionally generate substantial power—largely as a result of the intensity of her etching of the pinched, hardscrabble lives of her small-town protagonists. All the seven ghost stories in her landmark collection, The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903), were published in Everybody’s Magazine in 1902–03, but several additional weird tales have been unearthed from her large corpus of short fiction, from as early as 1887 to 1905. That Wilkins Freeman found the supernatural a vivid vehicle for underscoring her focus on the intricacies of domestic relationships— virtually her sole concern in all her writing, but one so complex that it was capable of infinite variation—is evident in her most celebrated ghost story, “The Shadows on the Wall” (Everybody’s, July 1902). The actual supernatural phenomenon—the ghost of the deceased Edward Glynn manifests itself as a shadow on the wall of the family home—is almost childishly elementary, but the tale gains tremendous power merely from the nameless and ill-defined terror that afflicts all the inhabitants of the house, including Glynn’s three sisters and his brother, Henry, who had quarrelled with Edward before his death. Henry leaves the house abruptly, and the sisters are horrified to find that there are now two shadows on the wall—at which point a telegram arrives announcing Henry’s death. “Luella Miller” (Everybody’s, December 1902) has gained a reputation as a vampire tale, although the central figure is at most a psychic vampire. It is said of Luella Miller that all the people around her grow weak and die; she is therefore shunned and finally dies herself. The story pungently uses the supernatural as a metaphor for a woman who feigns helplessness so that others will take care of her. “The Wind in the Rose-bush” (Everybody’s, February 1902) is similar: the rose-bush that moves even though there is no wind is symbolic of a dead young woman who was neglected by her uncaring stepmother. The extent to which Wilkins Freeman restricts her use of the supernatural to elementary domestic phenomena is revealed in “The Southwest Chamber” (Everybody’s, April 1903), where a purple dress worn by the deceased Aunt Harriet keeps appearing and reappearing. Other
ghostly manifestations of an analogous sort cause the narrator to remark of the protagonist, Mrs. Simmons: “This apparent contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace thing as chintz of a bedhanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative woman as no ghostly appearance could have done” (148). Similarly, in “The Vacant Lot” (Everybody’s, September 1902) we find the shadow of a woman hanging shadows of clothes on a clothesline. “The Lost Ghost” (Everybody’s, May 1903) is a surprisingly gruesome tale for Wilkins Freeman, although it is told in the same bland and reserved manner as her other tales. The ghost of a little girl is shown to be the result of her death by starvation when she was locked in her room, after her mother had run off with a married man. As if this were not appalling enough, the woman’s husband then hunted his wife down and killed her. In a rather touching conclusion, one of two women currently owning the house dies and is later seen walking hand in hand with the ghost of the child. From a purely supernatural point of view, “The Hall Bedroom” (Collier’s, 28 March 1903) is Wilkins Freeman’s most imaginative tale. A man renting the hall bedroom of a lodging house comes home in the dark to find his room infinitely extended: he is unable to reach any of the walls of the room. Later his senses are assailed in turn—smell (he detects a rose— but “not the fragrance of any rose which I have ever known” [31]), taste (“I was tasting . . . some morsel of sweetness hitherto unknown” [32]), hearing (he hears a sound like “the constantly gathering and receding murmur of a river” [33]), and touch (“Then suddenly, without any warning, my groping hands to the right and left touched living beings, beings in the likeness of men and women, palpable creatures in palpable attire” [36]). By this time the narrator, who is writing a diary of his adventures, has learned that two previous tenants have disappeared from the hall bedroom. Sure enough, he then disappears—into the “fifth dimension” (38), the narrator opines. Has he somehow found his way into the landscape of a painting that hangs on the wall? Whatever the case, this strikingly original tale is perhaps the best of Wilkins Freeman’s excursions into the supernatural. Another New England writer, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), utilised the supernatural in several tales. Jewett’s short stories etch with delicacy and power the rugged beauty of the New England terrain, especially her native Maine, with its historical richness, its diverse topography, and especially the stone-faced but emotionally complex men and women who
grimly strive to wrest a living from the unyielding New England soil or the hazards of the sea. Throughout her career Jewett employed the supernatural as a means of adding depth to her portrayal of character and landscape. Perhaps her most successful tale in this regard is “In Dark New England Days” (Century Magazine, October 1890), in which two sisters, Betsey and Hannah Knowles, after a long, hard life, lose a fortune in silver coins and curse the right hand of the man they suspect of the crime, Enoch Holt; subsequently, three members of the Holt family, including Enoch, lose their right hands. Ambiguity is maintained to the end as to the perpetrator of the crime and whether the supernatural has genuinely come into play; but the story is an unforgettable depiction of the cheerless poverty of an ageing New England family. In “The Landscape Chamber” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1887), a traveller comes upon a middle-aged woman and her elderly father who live in a remote farmhouse in a state of apparently dire poverty, but later the man maintains that a curse from an ancestor condemned him to miserliness. “The Foreigner” (Atlantic Monthly, August 1900) is a powerful portrayal of a French-born woman who marries a New England sea captain but is never accepted by the community; on her deathbed she and her one friend see the ghost of her mother, who comes to take her spirit away. Other stories are less successful, including “Lady Ferry” (in Old Friends and New, 1879), a longwinded account of an old woman who seems to have lived for centuries, and “The Gray Man” (in A White Heron and Other Stories, 1886), about Death masquerading as a grey-looking stranger in a farming community. There is one supernatural episode in Jewett’s best-known novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs (Houghton Mifflin, 1896), when a captain reports seeing ghostly figures on an expedition to Greenland. Yet another New Englander, the feminist and social activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), wrote a solitary but transcendentally significant excursion into the weird, “The Yellow Wall Paper” (New England Magazine, January 1892), which has become one of the most frequently reprinted stories in the genre. The premise of the story—a woman suffering post-partum depression (as Gilman herself did shortly before she wrote the story) is largely confined to the attic room of a house, where she becomes obsessed with the bizarre patterns in the yellow wallpaper of the room and subsequently goes mad—is elementary, but its subtleties have frequently been overlooked by critics who have been eager
to point to the tale as a prototypical embodiment of male domination of women and society’s inclination to denigrate female emotions and female ailments. The plain fact of the matter is that, as Lee Weinstein has etablished, the story is supernatural. H. P. Lovecraft casually noted the supernatural element when he described the story as featuring “a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined” (S 53). The woman in question, writing the entire story in the first person, manifestly sees the figure of a woman embedded in the wallpaper; she also notices that “there are rings and things in the walls” (250)—presumably meant to restrain the madwoman, and evoking the loathsome dungeons of earlier Gothic fiction. What happens, in the course of the narrative, is that the woman (never named) becomes gradually possessed by the madwoman, until finally the possession is complete. Toward the end, as her husband knocks on the door, she writes, “It is no use, young man, you can’t open it!” (262). At this point, the woman has become the (presumably elderly) madwoman. For a time she reverts to her own self, but then she says to her husband, John, “I’ve got out at last . . . in spite of you and Jane” (263). That citation of “Jane” has baffled many critics, but it must be the woman’s own name, and it therefore spells the final and permanent possession of the woman by the previous occupant. That there is a supernatural element to the story does not in any sense refute or compromise the feminist, sociological, and other interpretations of the story; it merely shows that the supernatural has, as so many times before and since, been used symbolically to convey meaning in a particularly effective manner.
ii. The West Coast School I have suggested that the West Coast School established itself as a kind of topographical rival to the East Coast School. Ambrose Bierce, its de facto leader, not only became the mentor of a wide array of Californians who came under his influence, but harboured a certain hostility to the East Coast literary establishment for its failure to accord him the fame and recognition he felt he deserved. Accordingly, with the passing of years he and many of his disciples became resolutely resigned to being titans only on the Pacific coast, under the evident belief that celebrity, however local and contracted, was better than obscurity in the world at large. In some ways it is surprising that Bierce (1842–1914?) wrote any fiction at all. The great majority of his literary career was devoted to newspaper and magazine journalism, and his stories appear to have been written at odd moments while he was otherwise engaged in being either a humourist or a censorious lampooner of the individuals and causes he despised—chiefly political chicanery, moral hypocrisy, and the general “cussedness” of human beings that impels them to act perversely against their own, and others’, best interests. Bierce has developed the reputation as an irremediable cynic and misanthrope, but it would be fairer to say that he did not truly hate the human race but rather was disappointed by it. Bierce’s birth and upbringing in the Midwest and his service in the Civil War on the Union side are well documented—not least by himself in his “Bits of Autobiography” (published in the first volume of his Collected Works, 1909), which recount his harrowing participation in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Shortly after the war he drifted to California, where he found ready work as a journalist. The bulk of his literary work is in fact journalism, written for such papers as the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser (1867–72), the Argonaut (1877–79), the Wasp (1881–86), and, most famously, the San Francisco Examiner (1887–1906), where he was William Randolph Hearst’s star editorial writer. He spent the years 1872–75 in England, hoping like Mark Twain to establish a literary reputation; he did so to some extent, but he
acceded to his wife’s request to return to California after she became pregnant with their third child. What is not generally known is that the bulk of Bierce’s fiction, especially his weird work, was written in a relatively short period between 1887 and 1893, during the first phase of his work for Hearst. He had written humorous sketches and tall tales since 1867, but it required years or decades of rumination for him to produce both his imperishable Civil War tales and his tales of supernatural horror—the former gathered in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891 [actually released in early 1892]) and the latter in Can Such Things Be? (1893). Later tales did appear in the Examiner and other papers, as well as in Cosmopolitan, where Bierce was a contributor and columnist from 1905 to 1909 after Hearst had purchased the magazine. At the urging of a young publisher, Walter Neale, Bierce assembled his own Collected Works (1909–12) in twelve volumes, in which he clearly took great care to collect his Civil War tales and his tales of psychological terror in Volume II (now retitled In the Midst of Life, after the 1892 British edition) and his tales of supernatural horror in Volume III (Can Such Things Be?). It is notoriously difficult to characterise Bierce’s work as a fiction writer, especially as the totality of his work is of such diversity, ranging from light-hearted comic ventures to political fantasies in the manner of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to grim tales of psychological suspense to poignant accounts of the Civil War to stories of the supernatural. Perhaps the overarching focus of his work is satire—a focus that unites the entirety of his work, from journalism to fiction to fables to poetry (his Collected Works includes two full volumes of poetry, most of which consists of pungent skewerings of local and national celebrities). The conventional characterisation of Bierce as a cynic and misanthrope is a crude caricature; Bierce himself denied that he was either of these things, except insofar as he embodied his own definition of “Cynic” from The Devil’s Dictionary (1906/1911): “A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” Bierce prided himself on an unflinching view of life and humanity; on occasion this view might lapse into something approaching misanthropy, as when he wrote (in contesting the Theosophical Society’s belief in “universal brotherhood”) that “Universal brotherhood, if it means anything, means (for me) a closer relation between me and the rest of the race. As a considerable majority of the rest of the race happens to be
made up of knaves, dunces and savages, I am not seeking that kind of relations with it” (Sole Survivor 205). But a more straightforward expression of Bierce’s “relations” with his fellows can be seen in the following statement, where he is combating the views of a fellow journalist who had taken him to task for excessive harshness: John Bonner, does it really seem to you that contempt for the bad is incompatible with respect for the good?—that hatred of rogues and fools does not imply love of bright and honest folk? Can you really not understand that what is unworthy in life or letters can be known only by comparison with what is known to be worthy? He who bitterly hates the wrong is he who intensely loves the right; indifference to one is indifference to the other thing. Those who like everything love nothing; a heart of indiscriminate hospitality becomes a boozing ken of tramps and thieves. Where the sentimentalist’s love leaves off the cynic’s may begin. (Sole Survivor 215–16) It may be said that Bierce’s unrelenting emphasis on human weakness and folly implies a deeper level of misanthropy than he suggests in the above passage; but one can counter that, with the instances of human weakness and folly so prodigally abundant, there is more than a little philosophical justification for this kind of misanthropy. The element that fuses Bierce’s tales of the Civil War, his tales of psychological terror, and even many of his supernatural tales is the focus on what might be called the psychology and physiology of fear. Whether that fear is produced by a ghost (as in “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” [Examiner, 17 August 1890]) or the false perception of danger (a supposedly animate corpse in “A Watcher by the Dead” [Examiner, 29 December 1889]; a snake that turns out to be a toy in “The Man and the Snake” [Examiner, 29 June 1890]), Bierce is relentless in dissecting the precise succession of emotions that transforms a sane, normal man (it is almost always a man) into a gibbering lunatic. Indeed, it can be seen that the Civil War tale “A Tough Tussle” (Examiner, 30 September 1888) and the “civilian” tale “A Watcher by the Dead” have, fundamentally, the same theme—the horror inspired by close proximity of the recently dead. (It is
perhaps for this reason that Bierce placed the former in Volume III of the Collected Works, even though it is obviously a Civil War narrative that should have been placed in Volume II.) One of the most notable features of Bierce’s writing is his ability to portray the harrowing terror that lurks in the deserted boom towns and other remote regions of the American West. For a land settled so relatively recently (by Anglo-Saxons, at any rate), the sense of almost mediaeval barbarism and remoteness that Bierce conveys in such tales as “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,” “The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch” (Wave, 25 April 1891), and “The Spook House” (Examiner, 7 July 1889) is remarkable. This, in effect, is Bierce’s answer to the strictures of many critics, beginning with William Hazlitt, who maintained that the United States was too new and “rational” a land to inspire the dread that can come only with centuries of settled habitation. While Easterners like Nathaniel Hawthorne were able to draw upon America’s heritage of New England Puritanism as a kind of ersatz Middle Ages and utilise it as a source of age-old horror, Bierce found terror in the mining towns of the West, whose rapid desertion after only a few years of frenetic activity cast a pall of eeriness that served him well. At the same time, at least a few of Bierce’s tales contain conceptions so advanced that they could virtually belong to the later genre of science fiction. I refer specifically to two remarkable tales, “Moxon’s Master” (Examiner, 16 April 1899) and “The Damned Thing” (Town Topics, 7 December 1893). The former, possibly inspired in part by Poe’s essay, “Maezel’s Chess-Player” (1836), masterfully conveys the notion of an automaton slowly gaining human emotions, especially in the potent line describing the automaton’s moving of a chess piece “with a slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat theatrical movement of the arm” (SF 3.934). There has recently been some controversy as to whether we are to imagine Moxon’s machine as an actual instance of artificial intelligence or merely as a hoax, but I think the indications in the story point strongly to the former. “The Damned Thing,” with its breathtaking image of an invisible monster, may similarly draw in part upon such celebrated predecessors as Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (although Bierce explicitly denied that he had this tale in mind when he wrote his own [see SF 3.1183–84]) and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”; and its provocative notion that “there are colors that we cannot see. And, God help me! the
Damned Thing is of such a color!” (SF 2.863) may well point the way to H. P. Lovecraft’s use of the same idea in “The Colour out of Space” (1927). The very short tales that Bierce grouped under the collective headings “Some Haunted Houses,” “Bodies of the Dead” (first published in the original edition of Can Such Things Be? but not included, oddly enough, in his Collected Works), “Mysterious Disappearances,” “The Ways of Ghosts,” and “Soldier-Folk,” are worth some discussion. These curious vignettes— many of them can hardly be deemed short stories in any meaningful sense of the term—evidently constitute an elaborate hoax that Bierce attempted to perpetrate upon his readers. They began appearing in the Examiner in 1888 under such collective titles as “Hither from Hades,” “Behind the Veil,” and so forth; and their targets, aside from credulous readers who were all too eager to swallow the accounts of disappearances, reanimations from the dead, and so forth, were the growing numbers of spiritualists and spiritualist organisations that actively fostered such beliefs. Their original appearance in a newspaper, without any indication that they were works of fiction, no doubt enhanced the effect Bierce wished to create. Indeed, in “Behind the Veil” (later carved up into the stories “The Isle of Pines” and “A Cold Greeting”), Bierce soberly prints a letter by one Richard Hodgson, of the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research, asking for further particulars of an earlier account (the segment later entitled “‘Dead and Gone’” in “Bodies of the Dead”), to which Bierce replies in his inimitable deadpan manner: In the absence of my notes I am unable to comply with Mr. Hodgson’s request; if in my published account I did not state the source of my information with as great particularity as I am confident I did all the essentials that it embodied, it was an oversight which I promise myself the pleasure of rectifying later, for the benefit of the Society of Psychical Research. In the mean time the data that I have at hand enable me to supply the society with a few facts which it may perhaps deem worthy of its attention. (SF 1.606) This is a scarcely veiled admission that Bierce had in fact made up the whole story.
In many ways the most interesting stories of this type are those gathered under the heading “Soldier-Folk,” for it is here that, for apparently the first time, Bierce definitively fused his Civil War tales with his tales of the supernatural. These four sketches were all written quite late in his career (they were published in Cosmopolitan between 1905 and 1908), at a time when the events of the Civil War had themselves receded to such an extent that they could serve as a backdrop for the bizarre episodes Bierce recounts. (Another story of a somewhat similar type, “A Resumed Identity” [Cosmopolitan, September 1908], is an intriguing tale of a Civil War soldier who has lost his memory and only regains it when he sees a memorial to a battle he had fought in more than forty years before.) Self-parodic as they may be, the feature that unifies these apparent hoaxes with the rest of Bierce’s supernatural work is the fascination they reveal with the phenomenon of death, and the awful threshold it represents between life and the beyond. Bierce in all likelihood was an atheist who did not believe in an afterlife and who habitually ridiculed belief in ghosts, apparitions, and revenants; but he nonetheless found in death a potent and baffling conception. It is significant that he does not even provide an entry for “Death” in The Devil’s Dictionary: it was, perhaps, the one phenomenon he could not poke fun at. Many of his supernatural tales—“Beyond the Wall” (Cosmopolitan, December 1907), “A Jug of Sirup” (Examiner, 17 December 1893), even the richly evocative “The Moonlit Road” (Cosmopolitan, January 1907)—have as their “climax” merely the revelation that a ghost or revenant has in fact been seen or experienced. In many cases the ghost does nothing except manifest itself; even in the supernatural revenge tale “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” the ghost of a woman effects her aim—the death of the man who had killed her—by her mere presence. Bierce’s most complex supernatural tale is “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (Wave, 19 December 1891). This extraordinarily rich story— whose haunting initial scene, in the wilds of Napa Valley, was taken from a dream Bierce had, as recorded in the essay “Visions of the Night” (Examiner, 24 July 1887)—is interpretable on many levels. There is, indeed, a scholarly dispute over the bare events of the tale; and Cathy N. Davidson, in The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce (1984), has maintained that it was deliberately written in such a way as to make no sense even on the level of plot. I strongly dispute this interpretation and
maintain that a coherent plot can in fact be determined. In my view, the story goes something like this: Halpin Frayser, who has an unnatural affection for his mother, Catherine, leaves for California. Some years later, Catherine, now widowed, follows him. She and Frayser marry, living under the name Larue. Frayser then murders his mother, but, overwrought by his actions, loses his memory of these events (Frayser experiences a horrible dream that he believes “was in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember” [SF 2.805]). In accordance with the epigraph (a passage from the prophet Hali), Catherine rises from the dead, a soulless lich, and murders Frayser over her own grave in a California cemetery. Bierce leaves sufficient clues for the piecing together of this scenario; the comment by one of the two detectives tracking Frayser down—“There is some rascally mystery here” (SF 2.815)—does not indicate, as Davidson believes, that the story is inexplicable, but rather that something supernatural (and therefore not amenable to “solution” by ordinary methods of detection) has occurred. (See further my article “What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’”) If this reconstruction is accepted, it can be seen that the horror is engendered on numerous levels—the hideous incest implied in the cohabitation of son and mother as husband and wife, and the supernatural horror of the “lich” of the dead mother killing her own son (not through vengeance but through blind hatred) over her own grave. It is not surprising that Frederic Taber Cooper, who came close to deciphering the full scope of the plot’s tale (but failed to notice the incest aspect), wrote that “In all imaginative literature it would be difficult to find a parallel for this story in sheer, unadulterated horror” (352). “The Eyes of the Panther” (Examiner, 17 October 1897) is another provocative tale, and there is serious question as to whether the supernatural is involved. Is it the case that Irene Marlowe is a shape-changer who at times turns into a panther, or is she merely subject to hallucinations? Shortly after the story was first published, Bierce wrote a letter that may clarify the point: “My story is not a ‘wonder-story,’ and does not, I think, even pass the bounds of probability—merely an instance of pre-natal influence. The girl can see in the dark—which means gleaming eyes—and has a mania for looking into windows o’ nights. Transformation into an animal is another matter” (quoted in SF 3.912). This would seem to suggest
that Irene is not in reality a shape-changer, but the matter remains open—as perhaps Bierce intended. The two prose-poems “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (San Francisco News Letter, 25 December 1886) and “Haïta the Shepherd” (Wave, 24 January 1891) embody some of Bierce’s most evocative prose. On the whole, following the early experiment “The Haunted Valley” (Overland Monthly, July 1871), Bierce generally wrote in such a spare, proto-Hemingwayesque manner that H. P. Lovecraft referred dismissively to his “prosaic angularity” (S 52). Bierce manifestly felt that the narration of incredible or supernatural incidents required such a degree of sobriety and restraint that all superfluous matter, including the richly textured prose of Poe and his followers, must be eliminated. Bierce was, otherwise, a devoted follower of Poe’s principles of short story writing, consciously adopting Poe’s notion of the “unity of effect” and maintaining that neither the long poem nor the novel was a viable aesthetic entity. If I have refrained from discussing Bierce’s most celebrated tale, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Examiner, 13 July 1890), it is because it lies only on the borderline of the weird. The notion that a man facing execution by hanging can experience what appears to be hours and even days of life in the split-second between life and death is psychologically clever—and perhaps even true—but is not an inherently weird conception, for of course nothing supernatural is predicated to have occurred. And although this ingenious premise has served as the inspiration for several later literary works and even a horror film or two (Jacob’s Ladder), the power of Bierce’s story rests precisely on the very possibility of its occurrence. Other Civil War tales contain their doses of terror (terror, that is, not specifically involving the gruesomeness of war). “One of the Missing” (Examiner, 11 March 1888) is worth singling out. A hapless scout, Jerome Searing, finds himself immobilised after a deserted house collapses upon him; what is worse, his own rifle is now pointed directly at his forehead, and the least movement on his part might send a bullet through his brain. This is one of several Bierce stories where the scenario seems a bit contrived to generate a particularly ironic sense of terror; but the working out of Searing’s conflicted emotions as he struggles with his fate is masterful. Of course, he perishes of fear.
What separates Bierce from his many disciples and imitators is the unusually grim and cynical vision that underlies his tales and, indeed, the rest of his work. In this sense Maurice Lévy is not entirely in error when he asserted, “One is almost tempted to believe that one day [Bierce] decided to instill fear into his contemporaries by hatred, to gain revenge on them” (Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic 14). I have already suggested that this may be, at a minimum, an exaggeration, but the low opinion Bierce maintained of the human species and of human accomplishment is undeniable. It is significant that, in the tutorial essay “To Train a Writer” (Examiner, 27 August 1899), he declared flatly that “this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, and cursed with illusions—frothing mad!” (Collected Works 10.77). Such later authors of satirical horror as L. P. Hartley, A. E. Coppard, and Roald Dahl may have borrowed various elements of Bierce’s manner; but perhaps only Shirley Jackson comes close to echoing both Bierce’s jaundiced view of humanity and the rapierlike prose that lays bare the emptiness of human aspirations and the cowardice, hypocrisy, perversity, and folly that condemn our species to eternal wretchedness and misery. The sum total of Bierce’s accomplishment in supernatural and psychological horror establishes him as the most distinguished figure in weird fiction subsequent to Poe and preceding the “titans” of the early twentieth century. It is perhaps unfair to consider W. C. Morrow (1854–1923) a mere pupil of Bierce, as he has customarily been regarded. Born in Selma, Alabama, he emigrated to California around 1879. In that year he published in the Argonaut two striking tales of the Civil War, “The Bloodhounds” (13 December 1879) and “The Three Hundred” (10 January 1880), both of them set in the South. The first tale that might conceivably be termed weird was “A Glimpse of the Unusual,” appearing in the Californian for April 1880. Although purely a tale of psychological horror, it already displays the features that would come to typify much of Morrow’s later work: a crisp, tightly controlled prose style, penetrating psychological analysis of a disturbed mentality, and an unrelenting focus on the protagonist’s psychological state—tantamount, in some later works, to a kind of protostream-of-consciousness. It would be difficult to find parallels for these tales in the entire range of nineteenth-century literature—except, perhaps, in the tales of Poe (clearly a dominant influence on Morrow), some of the later
work of Guy de Maupassant (written after Morrow’s early work), and the tales of Bierce, who may well have been influenced by Morrow’s example in his own memorable Civil War tales and horror stories of the later 1880s. In 1882 Morrow published his first novel, Blood-Money (1882), a searing indictment of the rapacity of the huge railroad companies that were dominating Californian politics and economy at this time. When William Randolph Hearst took over the operation of the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887, one of the writers he urged to contribute (probably on Bierce’s recommendation) was Morrow. Now began a fruitful phase of Morrow’s short-story writing, and some of his best work appeared in that newspaper. Morrow resumed contributions to the Argonaut as well, writing such works as the grim non-supernatural tale of revenge “His Unconquerable Enemy” (11 March 1889), the tense detective thrillers “The Woman of the Inner Room” (12 January 1891) and “The Red Strangler” (18 May 1891), the conte cruel “The Wrong Door” (9 February 1891), and the science-fiction/horror story “The Surgeon’s Experiment” (15 October 1887), later titled “The Monster-Maker.” By 1896 Morrow evidently felt that he had enough tales to assemble a collection. In fact, by this time he had written enough to fill two or three volumes, and it is not entirely certain that he exercised sound judgment in the tales he decided to include in the celebrated collection The Ape, the Idiot and Other People (1897). Nevertheless, this volume is a landmark for all lovers of the weird, the strange, and the unusual. But because it appeared later than Bierce’s two collections, it was naturally assumed that Morrow had been influenced by Bierce. Strangely enough, after the publication of his seminal collection, Morrow appeared to lose interest in the short story as a form of expression. Only random tales—rarely in the weird or even the suspense mode— emerged from his pen over the next decade or so during which he was a practising writer. Possibly economic concerns were a factor. By no later than 1899 Morrow had begun a school for beginning writers. His relatively few book publications of the first decade of the twentieth century suggest that he was either trying to capture the tastes of a more general readership or, in fact, had declined into hackwork. No work published subsequent to 1909 has been located. It is difficult to characterise Morrow’s literary work—even his short stories—in small compass. Writing at a time when the rigid division of
literature into well-recognised “genres” was unknown, Morrow chose to experiment at will in what would only later be termed mystery, suspense, weird, or even science fiction. In many ways, it is his seamless amalgamation of several of these modes within a single tale that lends it its distinctiveness. It is worth noting that there may not be a single orthodox tale of the supernatural in Morrow’s entire corpus. His most celebrated story, “The Monster-Maker,” clearly relies upon a conjectural development of medical science—whether plausible or not—in its depiction of an anencephalous man; “The Woman of the Inner Room” advances a pseudo-scientific argument for a woman’s ability to perceive a man’s thoughts when she inserts a finger into a bullet wound in his head and touches his brain. Similar medical erudition is utilised in “The Permanent Stiletto” (first published as “A Peculiar Case of Surgery” in the Argonaut for 4 February 1889), about a man who is stabbed in the neck with a stiletto that doctors are unable to remove entirely; he spends the rest of his life a shattered man, pondering his imminent death. The bizarre story “The Queen of the Red Devils”—published in the Christmas 1892 issue of the San Francisco weekly magazine, the Wave (later known for its publication of many of the tales of Frank Norris)—is a fantasy of sorts. Morrow can now take his rightful place as a distinctive voice in the American literature of the later nineteenth century. His gripping tales—the products of a powerful and unusual imagination, a taut prose style, and an insight into aberrant psychology rarely displayed in his time—retain the power to fascinate and terrify. Another member of the West Coast group, and an early colleague of Bierce, Emma Frances Dawson (1851–1926), produced a single volume of stories, An Itinerant House and Other Stories (1897), that has some strange elements but, in my judgment, is not sufficiently weird to be worth discussing here. Dawson vividly depicts the early days of San Francisco, teeming with miners, Chinese immigrants, and other distinctive figures, and she occasionally employs the haunted house theme in a curious manner; but her work is too mannered and diffuse to produce a genuinely weird effect. Gertrude Atherton (1857–1948) might represent a kind of bridge between the East Coast and West Coast schools of weird fiction. Although a lifelong Californian, she took frequent trips to the East and also overseas, spending much time in England. As a young writer she became acquainted
with Bierce; in fact, she maliciously tells the story of how Bierce once tried to embrace her—but in her strong-minded way she eluded his grasp and mocked his clumsy attempt at lovemaking. Like Edith Wharton, her writing —including her weird writing, embodied in nine tales long and short— extends over a very long period, a partial function of her unusually long and vigorous life. And unlike Morrow and even, to some degree, Bierce, Atherton established a genuine—if, as it turns out, fleeting—popular and critical reputation, becoming a best-selling author whose work sold generally better than that of Wharton, Willa Cather, and other women writers of the period. Much of this work—chiefly in the form of a good many very long novels—has been forgotten, and probably deservedly; and, as with so many others, it may be her slim body of weird work that ensures her continuing reputation. Two of her story collections, The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories (1905) and The Foghorn (1934), contain the bulk of her weird work, although some stories remained uncollected until recently. In a scant nine tales, Atherton has effectively displayed mastery in several of the significant subdivisions of weird fiction: the fantastic allegory or parable (“The Caves of Death,” “When the Devil Was Well”), the psychological horror tale (“A Tragedy,” “The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number”), the orthodox ghost story (“Miss Markham’s Wedding Night”), the tale of supernatural realism (“The Striding Place”), the ambiguous horror tale (“Death and the Woman,” perhaps “The Bell in the Fog”), or sundry combinations of these. Her apparently casual tossing off of these stories in the course of a career devoted to very different concerns points to the truth of her own comment in “The Bell in the Fog”: “Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult” (77). One of the central concerns in Atherton’s weird work is the awesome threshold of death. At least three of the stories utilise this topos in varying ways. “The Caves of Death” (San Francisco News Letter, 25 December 1886) is a manifest allegory of the afterlife. Atherton has used the dream or vision of an afterlife as a means for the expression of a number of cynical reflections on human foibles, for it is evident that those who have gone to the Great Beyond are afflicted with the same follies, hypocrisies, and vanities that they carried in life. The other allegory in Atherton’s work, “When the Devil Was Well,” was included as the final story in her volume of California tales, Before the Gringo Came (1894). It too is highly cynical
in its suggestion that the Devil will find in California a ready haven for his machinations. “Death and the Woman” (Vanity Fair [London], 14 January 1893) presents a straightforward expression of the fear of death, embodied here both by a dying man and the apparent presence of the actual figure of Death at the end. Is this latter merely a metaphor? Does the man’s wife, increasingly agitated by the trickling away of life from her husband, merely hallucinate the presence of Death coming up the stairs and into the deathchamber? Atherton wisely leaves the matter unresolved. “The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number” (in The Bell in the Fog), the third of Atherton’s stories focusing specifically on death, is a very different proposition. The very title speaks of its philosophical underpinnings, pointing to the central principle of the utilitarian moral philosophy as outlined by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Of course, these philosophers would by no means have advocated the withholding of medical attention from the sick, as Atherton’s physician does here: his ultimate decision that the death of the ailing woman will benefit several others in her circle, whereas her continued existence will only create a continuation or augmentation of misery, is in some senses a reflection of a Social Darwinist mentality that Atherton had adopted early in life and retained to the end. The power of this tale rests not in its display of the supernatural—for there is no supernatural phenomenon—but in its careful dissection of psychological states, both that of the physician and that of the dying woman. Atherton’s masterpiece in this regard is a previously unknown and uncollected story, “A Tragedy,” first published in the London Vanity Fair for 11 February 1893. This extraordinary account of a woman who is, at the outset, ignorant of the fact that she has been housed in an insane asylum for decades was later rewritten—not necessarily with greater effectiveness—as the long story “The Foghorn” (Good Housekeeping, November 1933). The secret of the tale’s effectiveness is the gradual manner in which the woman —and, accordingly, the reader—come to be aware that she has woken not merely from a single night’s sleep, but from decades of amnesia or madness. And because she “was a woman who revelled in her beauty, worshipped it” (18) (as Atherton’s own mother and, perhaps, Atherton herself did), the revelation of her true state is manifested largely by physical tokens: the fact that her hair has been cut (“That glorious mane, of which
she had been so proud!” [22]), the fact that her once-beautiful hands had become “large-veined [and] skinny” (21); and so forth. It is particularly ironic, given her own physical repulsiveness, that the man “who had sent her here” (presumably by jilting her) was himself “a wonderfully preserved man; sixty, probably, but looking little more than forty” (24). To some degree Atherton may be guilty of an antifeminist concentration on physical beauty and its decay; but in reality the tale underscores the “tragedy” of a wasted life in which twenty years have passed as if in a single night. Skilful as several of these tales are, Atherton’s signature piece of weird fiction remains “The Striding Place”; it has appeared in more than half a dozen anthologies of supernatural tales and is the tale by which she is chiefly recognised by devotees of the genre. The story had been rejected by the Yellow Book as too gruesome and was published in the Speaker for 20 June 1896, under the title “The Twins.” As a tale of purely physical horror, in which the grisly climax is suddenly revealed in the final line, it is difficult to surpass. It underscores the peculiarly philosophical nature of the weird tale in that it is exemplifies the “truth” of a casual utterance made by the protagonist (“I cherish the theory . . . that the soul sometimes lingers in the body after death” [40]), who little knows that he himself will verify that utterance at the end. Considerably more conventional is “Miss Markham’s Wedding Night” (Vanity Fair [London], 28 November 1895), a relatively straightforward ghost story that begins as a light-hearted social comedy but quickly turns darker. “The Dead and the Countess” (Smart Set, August 1902) appears, at the outset, rather quaintly allegorical, as we are led to believe that the dead spirits in a cemetery in Brittany find their repose disturbed by the rumbling of a new train line—a charming conceit expressing protest at the ruin of a pristine natural landscape by technological development. But although the train itself (“a brute of iron and live coals and foul smoke” [65]) in some senses suggests the fires of hell, the tale resolves into an uneasy mix of allegory and supernatural realism. “The Bell in the Fog” could qualify as an ambiguous horror tale: we can never be quite certain that the little girl at the centre of the narrative is or is not a reincarnation of the girl depicted in the painting found in the portrait gallery at Chillingsworth. But the chief focus of the tale is on the psychology of Ralph Orth, who is manifestly a Henry James stand-in: he is an American who left the United States “soon after his first successes” (67),
who focuses on portrayals of European society, and who remains single and unattached. Atherton’s passing comment about “his own famous ghost stories” (76) makes one realise that she has read them with care. The Bell in the Fog is dedicated to James. Two other stories by Atherton should be addressed. A Christmas Witch, a nearly novel-length work of about 40,000 words published in Godey’s Magazine for January 1893, suggests the supernatural in a number of features, but resolves itself into a non-supernatural Bildungsroman of an unruly and headstrong girl (clearly based on Atherton herself as she remembered her own childhood and upbringing), the daughter of a French count who has come to California to seek his fortune. “The Eternal Now,” included in The Foghorn, is a curious tale apparently involving a man who, fascinated with fourteenth-century France, somehow goes back in time to that era, but with faint recollections of his life in the twentieth century.
iii. Eccentrics This period saw the emergence of a number of writers, some of them only on the margins of the weird, who were such literary and personal eccentrics that they deserve to be in a class by themselves. We have seen that Gertrude Atherton made note of the inveterate tendency of “imaginative” writers toward the weird; Lovecraft echoed those sentiments, writing a bit flamboyantly of the “impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them” (S 22). The career of Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933)—whether we consider only his weird writing or his output as a whole—is the sad tale of a man who, starting with a vivid and distinctive imagination and a seemingly natural gift for putting words to paper, discovered popularity too quickly and devoted the rest of his life to catering to the whims of the reading public. The best of Chambers’s work can almost be measured by its very lack of popularity. Of Chambers’s life we know little. Born in Brooklyn, he entered the Art Students’ League around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow-student. From 1886 to 1893 he studied art in Paris, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and at Julian’s, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. Returning to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue, but for reasons still not entirely clear turned to writing and produced his first “novel,” In the Quarter (1894), really a series of loosely connected character sketches of artist life in Paris. That Chambers was not, in any case, sincerely interested in capturing his own experiences is testified by the fact that he completely dropped the “Gallic studio atmosphere” (S 52) after The Mystery of Choice (1897), presumably because it no longer proved popular. With The King in Yellow (1895) Chambers’s career as a writer was established—not because he had felt himself a born writer but because that collection of short stories was (probably in spite rather than because of the horror tales contained in it)
successful. Chambers had somehow caught the public eye; he knew what the public wanted and gave it to them. Although from time to time he returned to the weird, Chambers never did so with the gripping and almost nightmarish intensity of The King in Yellow; nor did he ever again attempt a sincere and scathing depiction of the hollowness of American social and intellectual life as he did in the unsuccessful novel Outsiders (1898), which alone of his works may be of interest to the social historian. Instead, he wrote novels and tales that, while superficially dealing with a wide range of topics—the Franco-Prussian War; the American Revolution; modern New York society; World War I; the Civil War—all contained an unending procession of pompous and dimwitted fellows (usually of independent means and attemptedly cynical temperament) falling in love at the least provocation with an equally endless parade of simpering and virtuous women who, although capable of blushing instantly at the slightest suggestion of impropriety, nevertheless give themselves body and soul to their male pursuers after what proves to be a merely token resistance. Some passages in Chambers’s works would probably have been considered salacious at the time of their writing, and the only fitting modern parallels are Harlequin romances. It is doubtful whether any of his work would serve even as raw material for historical or sociological analysis of the period, since even in his own day he was castigated for producing wooden and unrealistic characters. It is not, then, surprising that nearly the whole of his output—of which I have counted eighty-seven different volumes, including novels, tales, one volume of poems, one drama, juvenile books on nature, and even an opera libretto— has lapsed into obscurity and has yet to be resurrected by industrious academics always on the lookout for new dissertation topics. Chambers’s fantastic writing is limited principally to five volumes— The King in Yellow (1895), The Mystery of Choice (1897), In Search of the Unknown (1904), Police!!! (1915), and the novel The Slayer of Souls (1920) —while several ancillary volumes contain weird matter in lesser degrees— The Maker of Moons (1896), The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906), and The Tree of Heaven (1907). This wide scattering of his fantastic writing shows that Chambers never considered himself a fantaisiste in the tradition of Poe and Bierce (although he was influenced by both), but seems to have written fantasy whenever the mood struck him. It is, of course, to be noted that three of the eight works listed date to Chambers’s very early period; and
future generations of fantasy readers have confirmed C. C. Baldwin’s remark on Chambers’ output: “Had I my choice I’d take the first three or four [of his books] and let the rest go hang” (90). The inspiration for The King in Yellow—a collection of short stories of which only the first six are fantastic, and of these the first four are loosely interrelated—is, however, sufficiently obvious. Chambers must have read Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)—or the English edition of 1892, In the Midst of Life—shortly after his return to America from France, for he adopts certain cryptic allusions and names coined in some of Bierce’s tales and appropriates them for his own. The focus of these first four tales in The King in Yellow is a mysterious drama (apparently in two acts) called The King in Yellow, which incites a peculiar fear and desperation upon reading. Chambers’s descriptions of this odd volume may rank as some of his finest moments: 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. (“The Repairer of Reputations” [9]) It has, however, not been generally noticed that Chambers has wilfully altered the components he derived from Bierce, and in any case it is not clear whether the Bierce influence really extends beyond these borrowed names. Bierce indeed created Carcosa, which he describes in “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” as some great city of the distant past. Chambers maintains this notion, but in Bierce Hali was simply a prophet who is “quoted” as the epigraphs for the tales “The Death of Halpin Frayser” and “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” Finally, Chambers borrows the term “Hastur” from Bierce; but whereas Bierce imagined Hastur as a god of the shepherds (see “Haïta the Shepherd”), Chambers regards Hastur alternately as a place or as a person.
From the first four stories in The King in Yellow we learn a few more details about the contents of Chambers’s mythical play: there are at least three characters, Cassilda, Camilla, and the King in Yellow himself; aside from places such as Hastur and the Lake of Hali, we learn of regions called Demhe, Yhtill, and Alar; finally, there are other details such as the Pallid Mask and the Yellow Sign. It is obvious that Chambers intended to leave these citations vague and unexplained; he wished merely to provide dim hints as to the possible worlds of horror and awe to which his mythical book was a guide. Although in “The Silent Land” (in The Maker of Moons) Chambers twice makes mention of a “King in Carcosa,” he never develops this “King in Yellow mythology” elsewhere. The tales in The King in Yellow differ widely in tone, mood, and quality. The first, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a bizarre tale of the future (its setting is New York in 1920) in which Chambers, aside from predicting a general European war, imagines a quasi-utopia with euthanasia chambers for those who wish to slough off the burden of existence, while Chicago and New York rise “white and imperial” in a new age of architecture wherein the “horrors” of Victorian design are repudiated. Nevertheless, the tale cannot be called science fiction (on which see further below), since the futuristic setting does not in the end have any role in the story line, which concerns a demented young man who imagines that he is the King in Yellow and that his cousin is vying for the throne. Such a bald description cannot begin to convey the otherworldly, nightmarish quality of the tale, where the unexplained elements of Chambers’s “King in Yellow mythology,” along with a prose style bordering upon the extravagant and an intentionally chaotic exposition, create an atmosphere of chilling horror. “The Mask,” in contrast, is an exquisitely beautiful tale set in France concerning a sculptor who has discovered a fluid capable of petrifying any plant or animal such that it resembles the finest marble. Several portions of the narration, especially toward the end, are pure poetry. “The Yellow Sign” is generally considered to be the best tale in The King in Yellow, dealing horrifyingly with the nameless fate of an artist who has found the Yellow Sign. Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” has well described the loathsome hearse-driver who is a harbinger for the narrator’s death—a soft, pudgy, wormlike creature who has one of his fingers torn off in a tussle and who, when found in the artist’s studio at the end, is pronounced to have been dead for months. “The Demoiselle d’Ys,”
in spite of its inclusion of Hastur as a minor character, is not part of the “King in Yellow mythology,” but is another hauntingly beautiful tale about a man who is supernaturally transplanted into the mediaeval age while hunting in the Breton countryside and falls in love with a beautiful huntress three centuries dead. The rest of The King in Yellow contains a series of fine prose-poems (“The Prophets’ Paradise”) followed by several gripping tales dealing with the Franco-Prussian War. The Mystery of Choice (1897) is an undeservedly forgotten collection and, in its more refined and controlled prose style, greater unity of theme, and exquisite pathos, ranks close to The King in Yellow in quality. The first five stories are linked by a common setting—Brittany—and some recurring characters; and although the first (“The Purple Emperor”) is an amusing parody on the detective story, the rest of the collection contains fine tales of fantasy and even science fiction. In In Search of the Unknown (1904) Chambers begins to take another tack—the mingling of weirdness, humour, and romance—and readers must judge for themselves how felicitous this union is. His conceptions are as fertile as ever: we are here concerned with a series of tales depicting successive searches for lost species of animals, including a loathsome halfman and half-amphibian called “the harbor-master,” a group of invisible creatures apparently in the shape of beautiful women, and the like; but in every tale the narrator attempts to flirt with a pretty girl, only to lose her at the last moment to some rival. Chambers reprinted “The Man at the Next Table” (from The Maker of Moons) and “A Matter of Interest” (from The Mystery of Choice) into this work; a work that, though labelled a novel, is in fact a string of tales (several published separately in magazines) stitched together into a continuous narrative. Indeed, so many of Chambers’s “novels” are of this sort that few can be termed other than episodic. A sequel to this volume is Police!!! (1915), a collection of tales where further searches are made into lost species—including mammoths in the glaciers of Canada, a group of “cave-ladies” in the Everglades, and the like. This book places still greater emphasis on humour than its predecessor, and several of the tales are quite amusing; but there also seems to be a slight decline in Chambers’s fertility of invention: the amphibian man in “The Third Eye” too closely resembles the harbour-master, while in “Un Peu d’Amour” we encounter an irascible character obviously reminiscent of a similar character in the first segment of In Search of the Unknown. But even here there are
some gripping moments: “Un Peu d’Amour” presents some horrifying glimpses of a gigantic worm burrowing beneath the fields of upstate New York, while another tale (“The Ladies of the Lake”) discloses a school of huge minnows the size of Pullman cars. The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906) is another episodic novel, somewhat more unified than many of Chambers’s others. Most of the tales are rather flippant accounts of a mysterious gentleman, Westrel Keen, who assists young men in finding their true loves; but one haunting episode about the resurrection of an Egyptian woman suspended in a state of hypnosis for thousands of years is another remarkable fusion of beauty and horror. The Tree of Heaven (1907) is similarly not exclusively fantastic, but contains some very fine moments. The construction of the “novel” is ingenious: at the outset an odd mystic utters prophecies to a group of his friends, and the subsequent episodes are concerned with their fulfilment. For once the loveelement is not extrinsic to the plot, and in several of these tales love is simply given a supernatural dimension that creates a profundity not often found in Chambers; even the non-fantastic romantic tales are handled with a seriousness and depth completely absent in other of his works. The superb atmosphere of delicate pathos and dream-fantasy maintained in some of these tales may place this volume only behind The King in Yellow and The Mystery of Choice as Chambers’s finest. With The Slayer of Souls (1920), however, Chambers reaches the nadir of his career as a supernaturalist. Even if we could swallow the tasteless premise—that “Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times” (39) the descendants of the devil-worshipping Yezidi sect of inner Asia, which is poisoning the minds of misguided leftists and labour unionists for the overthrow of good and the establishment of evil—there is no escaping the tedium of the whole work, which is concerned with the efforts of the U.S. Secret Service, along with a young woman who, although having lived for years with these evil Chinese, has now defected and converted to Christianity, to hunt down the eight leading figures of the sect and exterminate them. This happens with mechanical regularity, and it is no surprise that civilisation is saved in the end for God-fearing Americans. The novel—an elaboration of the title story of The Maker of Moons (1896), although that tale is handled far better and contains some delicate moments of shimmering fantasy—is further crippled by a ponderous and entirely
humourless style, and with characters so moronic that they cannot reconcile themselves to the supernatural even after repeated exposure to it. And the crowning absurdity is that the origin of all these evils is a “black planet . . . not a hundred miles” (289–90) from the earth! There is not a single redeeming element in this novel. One of the more interesting features of Chambers’s weird work is a proto-science-fictional element that emerges in some works cheek by jowl with the overt supernaturalism of other tales. We have seen that “The Repairer of Reputations” is set in the future; but “The Mask” actually makes greater use of a science-fictional principle of great importance: the scientific justification for a fantastic event. Chambers never precisely explains the nature of the petrifying fluid used in the story, but we are led to believe that it would not be beyond the bounds of chemistry to encompass it. Similarly, in “A Matter of Interest” elaborate attempts are made at the outset to establish the veracity and accuracy of the narrative, which concerns the discovery of the last living dinosaur (the “thermosaurus”). Other segments of In Search of the Unknown are even more emphatic on the point, and one of the characters vigorously denies the supernatural character of the harbour-master: “‘I don’t think that the harbor-master is a spirit or a sprite or a hobgoblin, or any sort of damned rot. Neither do I believe it to be an optical illusion’” (285). Less scientific justification is presented for the creatures in Police!!!, but even here few strain credulity beyond the breaking-point. Even The Slayer of Souls enunciates the principle: “‘We’re up against something absolutely new. Of course, it isn’t magic. It can, of course, be explained by natural laws about which we happen to know nothing at present’” (173). Unfortunately, in this case little effort is made to coordinate the bizarre events into a plausibly scientific framework. No writer typifies the appeal of weird fiction to temperaments seemingly antipodally opposed to it than Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942), who in later life gained celebrity as a world-renowned architect and proponent of the neo-Gothic style in architecture, but who in his youth produced a very slim collection of horror tales, Black Spirits and White (1895), which has gained a certain cachet among collectors of the weird, for all that Cram himself in later years dismissed it as an indiscretion of his youth. Containing only six stories and no more than 25,000 words, the little book is worth remembering if only for a single classic tale.
Why Cram took to the supernatural in these early pieces does not seem apparent from the surviving documentary evidence. He wrote a few other works of fiction aside from the stories in Black Spirits and White, but they are not weird. What is, however, clear is that he used these narratives as expressions of his taste in both architecture and European travel. The six tales are set, successively, in Paris, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Brittany, and Sweden. Cram had visited these locales on several European trips, including one in the company of a friend, T. Henry Randall, who appears to be “Tom Rendel” cited by the first-person narrator in several tales. Cram is, however, not always felicitous in the specific supernatural manifestations he stages. In “No. 252, Rue M. le Prince,” we are given an array of weird phenomena in a Paris hotel room formerly occupied by a suspected witch, but the precise nature of the phenomena—in other words, why the manifestations took the exact form they did—is never clarified. Another tale, “The White Villa,” is a routine tale of ghosts in an Italian villa. More successful is “In Kropfsberg Keep,” where two young men, Rupert and Otto, make bold to stay in a German castle that is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of Count Albert. Forty years previously, the count gave a party during which he set the place ablaze and killed all the guests. Sure enough, Rupert sees a reenactment of this party: Around the long, narrow hall, under the fearful light that came from nowhere, but was omnipresent, swept a rushing stream of unspeakable horrors, dancing insanely, laughing, gibbering hideously; the dead of forty years. White, polished skeletons, bare of flesh and vesture, skeletons clothed in the dreadful rags of dried and rattling sinews, the tags of tattering grave-clothes flaunting behind them. These were the dead of many years ago. Then the dead of more recent times, with yellow bones showing only here and there, the long and insecure hair of their hideous heads writhing in the beating air. Then green and grey horrors, bloated and shapeless, stained with earth or dripping with spattering water; and here and there white, beautiful things, like chiselled ivory, the dead of yesterday, locked it may be, in the mummy arms of rattling skeletons. (28)
Rupert, in alarm, shoots his revolver in what he believes to be the face of Count Albert—only to find, in the morning, that his friend Otto has been killed by a gunshot. “Sister Maddelena” is the grim story of a nun who had fallen in love with a man and was killed by her own mother superior, her body secreted within a recess of the immensely thick wall of her room. Her ghost naturally haunts the place until it is discovered. “Notre Dame des Eaux” is an interesting non-supernatural specimen. A man, crazed and disappointed in love, traps his erstwhile lover Héloïse in a church, whereupon she keeps him at bay by singing all night until help can arrive. But Cram’s reputation as a weird writer will probably continue to rest largely on “The Dead Valley,” a magnificently atmospheric tale set in Sweden. The valley in question—“a level plain of ashy white, faintly phosphorescent, a sea of velvet fog that lay like motionless water, or rather like a floor of alabaster, so dense did it appear, so seemingly capable of sustaining weight” (80)—is a notable triumph of the imagination. The two boys who skirt this valley later seek it out again: “There lay the Dead Valley! A great oval basin, almost as smooth and regular as though made by man. On all sides the grass crept over the brink of the encircling hills, dusty green on the crests, then fading into ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last colour forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren. Not a tuft of grass, not a stick of brushwood, not even a stone, but only the vast expense of beaten clay.” (83) This would be bad enough, but when a falcon, flying above the valley, cries out and falls dead at a tree—a tree surrounded by the bones of thousands of creatures—the boys understand why they had heard a hideous shriek on their first visit to the valley. This notion of biological deadness might conceivably have a natural or science-fictional explanation, but Cram provides none, so the supernatural is the only alternative. The story was thought to have inspired the “blasted heath” in Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space,” but he read Cram’s story after writing his own.
Of the voluminous work of F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909), the American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and historian, sadly little is read today. The writer who in his day was compared favourably to William Dean Howells and Henry James, and who may have been the most popular American novelist of the late nineteenth century, is now remembered for a few powerful weird tales and some novels where the weird enters fitfully; oblivion has—probably justifiably—overtaken his dozens of other historical and romantic novels, although the F. Marion Crawford Society tries valiantly to perpetuate the memory of his entire work. Although supernaturalism is tangentially involved in several works— including Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India (1882) and With the Immortals (1886)—Crawford’s weird work can rightly be restricted to four volumes, the novels Zoroaster (1885), Khaled (1891), and The Witch of Prague (1891), and, above all, the landmark posthumous story collection Wandering Ghosts (1911; published in England as Uncanny Tales). This is all that anyone with an interest in the weird need read of Crawford’s work. Zoroaster and Khaled would nowadays be considered fantasies, so there is no need to spend much time on them, although both are worthy short novels. The former is, as the title proclaims unambiguously, a novel about the life of Zoroaster (the Greek name for Zarathustra), founder of Zoroastrianism. This description would seem to imply that the work is more properly to be categorised among Crawford’s many historical novels; and although it is true that only the faintest touches of the supernatural are found in this novel, it is really what one might call an historical fantasy. The great strength of Zoroaster is its prose style. It is really a novel-length prose poem, and it is this that raises the otherwise conventionally romantic events of the tale close to the realm of fantasy. Crawford here approaches Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, and Clark Ashton Smith as a wielder of poetic prose. Khaled: A Tale of Arabia is in many ways a pendant to Zoroaster, although here there is not even the pretence of giving the work an historical foundation. We are here concerned with Khaled, “one of the genii converted to the faith on hearing Mohammed read the Koran by night in the valley of Al Nakhlah” (1). Because of some misdeed, Khaled is made a human being and is wedded to the princess Zehowah; and before his mortal death, whenever that shall be, he must persuade his bride to love him so that he can gain an immortal soul. Through a long series of events involving battles and political uprisings in the domain Khaled now rules, he finally wins the
love of the cold and indifferent Zehowah. I have no idea whether this tale is an actual fable, either from the Koran or anywhere else; but it has all the earmarks of a fairy tale similar to the one that La Motte-Fouqué so poignantly transformed into the story of Undine. The Witch of Prague, written slightly before Khaled in the winter of 1889–90, is Crawford’s most ambitious work of weird fiction; it is subtitled “A Fantastic Tale.” The plot is considerably convoluted, but its principal weird element is the quest of Unorna, the witch of Prague, and her sardonic partner Keyork Arabian to extend the bounds of human life, perhaps indefinitely, through the power of hypnotism. The two have kept an aged man under hypnosis for years in the hope that this process, plus the replacement of his old blood with the blood of a younger man, Israel Kafka, will rejuvenate him. What makes the novel interesting is the everunresolved tension as to whether Unorna’s hypnotic powers are natural or supernatural. Crawford was writing just at the time when the science of psychology was making startling advances in charting the functions of the mind; in a footnote Crawford even cites the leading psychologist prior to Freud, Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). The mere fact that Unorna has come to be called the “witch of Prague” suggests the uneasiness with which her contemporaries regard her strange power of will. But like Zoroaster and Khaled, The Witch of Prague is not so much a weird tale as a love story. Much of the action again centres on a very complicated love triangle. A mysterious man designated only as the Wanderer is seeking his lost love Beatrice, who is being dragged across Europe by her father because he opposes her marriage to the Wanderer; the father dies, and the Wanderer spots Beatrice in a church in Prague, but loses her again. He approaches Unorna for help in finding Beatrice, but Unorna falls in love with the Wanderer herself. She hypnotises him and strives to make him forget Beatrice; apparently she succeeds, but is no closer to being loved herself by the Wanderer for all that. The novel proceeds with many intense emotional episodes, until at last Unorna yields and unites the Wanderer with Beatrice. The fundamental metaphor behind the whole hypnotism issue is loss of identity or individuality. It is this phenomenon that links hypnotism to oldtime effects of demonic possession. When Unorna first hypnotises the Wanderer, he senses his personality ebbing away. Keyork Arabian, on the other hand, is impervious to Unorna’s powers because he is the prototypical
individualist and egotist: “‘Autology is my study, autosophy my ambition, autonomy my pride. I am the great Panegoist, the would be Conservator of Self, the inspired prophet of the Universal I. I—I—I! My creed has but one word, and that word but one letter, that letter represents Unity, and Unity is strength. I am I, one, indivisible, central!’” (36). And yet, Unorna herself, when lost in love for the Wanderer, “seemed to have no individuality left” (227). It is in passages like this that Crawford unites the fantasy and love elements in this novel. Keyork Arabian is as invulnerable to love as he is to hypnosis; in one remarkable scene toward the beginning he claims to profess his love for Unorna in heart-rending tones but shatters the pretence with devilish cynicism. Indeed, as the novel progresses Keyork develops into an increasingly evil figure, as his singleminded quest to triumph over death becomes more and more ruthless and self-serving. As a weird tale the novel is, however, only of intermittent interest; for in spite of the subtitle, it is clear that the romantic entanglement is at the heart of the novel. The moments of horror are scattered: a prose-poetic paean to death (84–91), the display of Keyork Arabian’s studio, filled with specimens from his previous attempts to conquer death (106–11); and, most gripping of all, a hallucination by Israel Kafka induced by Unorna, wherein he is made to experience the torture of Simon Abeles, a seventeenth-century Jew punished by his father for converting to Christianity (188–96). This allows Crawford to indulge not only in loathsome descriptions of physical torment but some equally repulsive anti-Semitism. Ultimately, however, The Witch of Prague is a disappointment for not delivering upon its fantastic premise: aside from its great length (it was first published, in good Victorian fashion, in three volumes), the hypnotism issue is unsatisfactorily and hastily resolved at the end, as the old man is suddenly resuscitated in health and vigour. Crawford is simply not a profound or subtle enough novelist to keep the reader’s interest on the basis of the love element alone, and he would have done better to have written more concentratedly on the distinctively horrific theme of the novel. But Crawford will hold a worthy niche in weird fiction merely for the seven stories in Wandering Ghosts. These stories were written over at least a twenty-year span, “The Upper Berth” dating to as early as 1886 and “The Screaming Skull” to around 1908; the impression is that Crawford wrote these tales whenever mood and opportunity arose. Perhaps he himself did
not put much stock in them; it is significant that they were collected only posthumously. There is no especial progression or development of technique in these stories, and accordingly no virtue to studying them chronologically. A thematic approach will be more revealing and illuminating. “The Dead Smile” (Ainslee’s, August 1899) is one of the most grippingly horrifying tales ever written, although Crawford could not have thought that the supposed surprise ending—that Gabriel Ockram and Evelyn Warburton, engaged to be married, turn out to be brother and sister —was really much of a surprise. Crawford fills his story with references to “their strangely-like eyes” (6) and “their faces, that were so strangely alike” (9); all this is a little too obvious, but fortunately the story’s effectiveness does not depend on the concealing of the plot’s outcome. The very title signals the loathsome perversion of the good that is at the heart of the tale: just as a smile is ordinarily an indication of happiness, so a “dead smile” is not merely suggestive of the grinning of a skeleton but a symbol for the near-incest that is warded off at the story’s conclusion. The atmosphere of horrific gloom hovering over the entire narrative is almost oppressive; and when Gabriel descends into the family crypt (“There was a frightful stench of drying death” [36]) to discover the secret of Evelyn’s birth, the culmination of horror is reached: The dead face was blotched with dark stains, and the thin, grey hair was matted about the discoloured forehead. The sunken lids were half open and the candle light gleamed on something foul where the toad eyes had lived. But yet the dead thing smiled, as it had smiled in life; the ghastly lips were parted and drawn wide and tight upon the wolfish teeth, cursing still, and still defying hell to do its worst—defying, cursing, and always and for ever smiling alone in the dark. (38) The extravagance of the tone and language throughout this tale is strangely effective; and although Crawford was more restrained in his other works, we miss the luridness of what might be called the “oh-my-God” school of horror embodied in this story.
“For the Blood Is the Life” (written in 1905) was praised by Lovecraft, but is in reality a confused story of vampirism. It is one of several stories in which Crawford uses the framework of two individuals chatting idly over drinks, with one of them eventually supplying a casual narration of a ghost story; this device can be effective in allowing the horrific atmosphere to build gradually, but here it is the logic of the tale that is at fault. A young woman in Italy is killed by two robbers as she sees them burying their treasure on a mound, and they hurl her body into the pit along with their illgotten prize; but in some inexplicable fashion this woman becomes one of the undead and repeatedly drains the blood of her still-living lover. How this transition occurred is never clarified. It might not occur to us to rank Crawford among the great practitioners of the sea-horror tale, but at least three of his short stories directly or indirectly involve the sea, and do so with great effectiveness. The least interesting, perhaps, is “The Screaming Skull” (Red Magazine, December 1908), where an old sea-captain tells to a friend the story of a strange murder and its supernatural revenge. However, the offhand manner of the narration here results merely in flatness and a failure to realise the atmospheric potential of the situation. In an author’s note at the end Crawford informs us that the core of the plot is based on an actual English legend; this is perhaps one more piece of evidence that the best weird tales are ordinarily based on ersatz, not real, myths. “‘Man Overboard!’” (1903), a novelette first published as a booklet, is one of Crawford’s subtlest works. Here, in a story that displays nautical erudition rivalling anything in William Hope Hodgson, the actual supernatural manifestation—the ghost of one of a pair of twins, Jim and Jack Benton, who either fell overboard during a storm or was deliberately murdered by his brother—is not displayed until the very end: throughout the story we see the ghost only indirectly, and the cumulative power and suspense are compelling. We first learn that, although Jim Benton has been lost from the crew, the cook still finds the same number of plates used after every meal; then we see the dead man’s brother holding two pipes in his hand, one of them waterlogged; then the cook appears to go mad and stabs at something near the surviving brother, Jack, shouting: “There were two of them! So help me God, there were two of them!” (135). The tale gives the impression of winding down when the ship ends its journey with no further
mishaps; but then we learn that the narrator has been asked by Jack Benton to attend his wedding. After the ceremony the narrator sees this: I looked after the couple in the distance a last time, meaning to go down to the road, so as not to overtake them; but when I had made a few steps I stopped and looked again, for I knew I had seen something queer, though I had only realised it afterwards. I looked again, and it was plain enough now; and I stood stock-still, staring at what I saw. Mamie was walking between two men. The second man was just the same height as Jack, both being about a half a head taller than she; Jack on her left in his black tail-coat and round hat, and the other man on her right—well, he was a sailor-man in wet oil-skins. I could see the moonlight shining on the water that ran down him, and on the little puddle that had settled where the flap of his sou’wester was turned up behind; and one of his wet shiny arms was round Mamie’s waist, just above Jack’s. The quiet narration of this tale renders this climactic moment the more effective, and “‘Man Overboard!’” must rank as one of Crawford’s great triumphs. In spite of the merits of some of Crawford’s other tales, there is little reason to contradict the standard affirmation that “The Upper Berth” (in The Broken Shaft, ed. Sir Henry Norman [1886]) is his best weird tale. Here again it is the narrative voice that is the secret to the tale’s power. We are dealing with a hardy, gruff, no-nonsense figure named Brisbane, one who is not easily rattled. This trait inspires confidence in the reliability of Brisbane’s story. The gradual accumulation of horrific details—the porthole that refuses to stay closed; the air of musty dampness in the room; the fact that we never get a good look at the doomed occupant of the upper berth, who leaps to his death on the first night out—creates an intensely potent atmosphere, and prepares us for the actual confrontation with the loathsome: I remember that the sensation as I put my hands forward was as though I were plunging them into the air of a damp cellar, and from behind the curtains came a gust of wind that smelled horribly of
stagnant sea-water. I laid hold of something that had the shape of a man’s arm, but was smooth, and wet, and icy cold. But suddenly, as I pulled, the creature sprang violently forward against me, a clammy, oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength. I reeled across the state-room, and in an instant the door opened and the thing rushed out. (219) Even here, however, Brisbane immediately discounts the supernatural (“It was absurd, I thought. The Welsh rare-bit I had eaten had disagreed with me” [220]), thereby setting the stage for another encounter with the cold, dead thing in the upper berth. The tale ends in Brisbane’s usual clipped manner: “It was a very disagreeable experience, and I was very badly frightened, which is a thing I do not like. That is all. That is how I saw a ghost—if it was a ghost. It was dead, anyhow” (233). The two remaining stories in Wandering Ghosts, “By the Waters of Paradise” (in The Witching Time, ed. Sir Henry Norman [1887]) and “The Doll’s Ghost” (date of first publication unknown), are very different from the clutching horror of Crawford’s other tales. Here Crawford skirts close to a major danger in weird fiction, something that Lovecraft (in reference to Algernon Blackwood) aptly termed “the flatness of benignant supernaturalism” (S 66). The cheerful or wistfully happy ghost story always runs the risk of seeming blandly innocuous and unreasoningly optimistic; and although “By the Waters of Paradise,” which may not even be supernatural, probably fails for this reason, “The Doll’s Ghost” surmounts the difficulty and becomes a poignant little vignette. The former is nothing but a love story, in which a man sees in his garden a vision of a lovely young woman, finally tracks her down, marries her, and saves her from death by drowning, robbing the “Witch of the Water” of a new victim. It is all elegantly told, and the courtship of the couple is handled with genial wit, but we have heard too many such tales before. “The Doll’s Ghost” portrays an aged doll-repairer who falls in love with a doll brought to his shop and lovingly repairs it; in return the doll helps him to locate his lost daughter, ultimately found in a hospital after being attacked by young boys. It is a charming work where, for once, the happy ending does not seem forced or contrived.
There is also an eighth, uncollected tale by Crawford, “The King’s Messenger” (Cosmopolitan, November 1907). This story, too, is impressive in its narrative subtlety. At an elaborate dinner party the narrator notices one unoccupied seat, but is informed by the young woman, Miss Lorna, sitting next to him that the final guest shall shortly arrive. The guest is Death. The whole story becomes a double entendre, as everything Lorna says about the expected guest takes on another meaning under the bland conventionality of her words. Lorna will run away with the guest that night; the narrator thinks it merely an elopement, but we begin to suspect something more sinister when she confesses her love for “the King’s Messenger”: “Oh, I don’t pretend that I fell in love with him at first sight; I went through a phase of feeling afraid of him, as almost everyone else does. You see, when people first meet him they cannot possibly know how kind and gentle he can be, though he is so tremendously strong. I’ve heard him called cruel and ruthless and cold, but it’s not true. Indeed it’s not! He can be as gentle as a woman, and he’s the truest friend in all the world.” (157) In fact, the woman will commit suicide. The narrator later finds that he has been dreaming (thereby accounting for the otherwise anomalous fact that all the other guests save himself seem to know the missing man’s identity), but he receives a telegram shortly afterward telling of Lorna’s death. “The King’s Messenger” is an unrecognised jewel of weird fiction. In the history of the weird tale F. Marion Crawford occupies roughly the same place as Robert W. Chambers. Both wrote tales of horror and the supernatural sporadically over their lifetimes, although Chambers did so principally at the beginning of his career and Crawford, if anything, toward the end; both will be remembered primarily for their scattered weird work rather than their voluminous mainstream work; and both exercised only a marginal influence on later writers in the field. The supernatural was, for both writers, a diversion or a recreation; and both were under the impression that their lasting work would be their many novels of romance —an impression, to be sure, apparently justified by the tremendous popular and (for Crawford) critical success they enjoyed during their lifetimes, but one which subsequent readers and critics have not sustained. Let us not be
unfair to Crawford: his mainstream work is not nearly as ephemeral or insubstantial as Chambers’s, and he will occupy a markedy more significant place in American literature than Chambers ever will; but it is as unlikely that such of his works as Paul Patoff (1887) or Via Crucis (1899) will ever be resurrected, even by industrious doctoral candidates, as it is that Chambers’s endless series of frivolous romances will ever again be held in much esteem. The small and restricted domain of weird fiction is often kinder to its practitioners—even those, like E. F. Benson, John Buchan, or Ralph Adams Cram, who do not make it their exclusive literary focus— than mainstream fiction tends to be; and in this domain the work of F. Marion Crawford will not go unappreciated. Finally, there is the case of Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904). Hearn’s reputation as a weird writer is perhaps exaggerated, since it is not at all clear that he made any original contributions to the supernatural in the strictest sense of the term; but the gorgeousness of his prose, and his work as translator, lecturer, and folklorist has perhaps understandably led to his high reputation in the field. Perhaps his most signal accomplishment is his work as a translator—both of Gautier’s One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882) and of Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony (posthumously published in 1910), the latter of which, in its vivid hallucination scenes, occupies a kind of borderland of the weird. Otherwise, Hearn’s work in the supernatural is restricted to such books as Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Kwaidan (1904), and the posthumous Fantastics and Other Fancies (1914). The last-named, reprinting selections of a column called “Fantastics” that he wrote during his years as a journalist in New Orleans (1877–87), are chronologically the earliest of these writings. They are all exquisite prose-poems, but if anything they belong to the realm of fantasy rather than supernatural horror. Their dominant theme is the fusion of love and death—a fusion that Hearn handles with both poignancy and terrifying intensity. In “The Ghostly Kiss,” a man believes he is in a theatre, where he kisses a lovely woman— but in fact he is in a cemetery. “The Vision of the Dead Creole,” which is more of a connected narrative than most of the other items in the book, speaks plangently of a man whose lover rises from the tomb. Then there are such delicacies as “When I Was a Flower,” a gorgeous tale of a flower’s life and death, told in the first person. Hearn reported that these little sketches “are my impressions of the strange life of New Orleans” (3), and he has
certainly accomplished his purpose of vividly portraying the curious sense of life-in-death that continues to pervade that metropolis. Whether we should consider any of the books that Hearn wrote after his emigration to Japan in 1890—where he ultimately took a Japanese name, Koizumi Yakumo, married a Japanese woman, and apparently converted to Buddhism—as contributions to the weird (or, at any rate, to weird fiction) is greatly open to question; for of course all the books in question record ageold legendry from the Orient and cannot be considered original except in certain elements of narration. Some Chinese Ghosts was written while Hearn was still in New Orleans, but it heralds his fascination with the culture of the Far East. Both In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan are collections of Japanese folklore and legend, some of which is deliciously gruesome (“Jikininki,” in Kwaidan, tells of a corpse-eating goblin in the shape of a priest), but they constitute the raw material of weird fiction rather than finished instances of it. Hearn occupied a curious position in his time: as a professor at Imperial University in Tokyo, he taught English literature to his Japanese pupils while writing books that artfully elucidated Japanese culture to European readers. His undated lecture “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction” is still worth reading as a defence of the literary value of the weird tale.
Epilogue I appear to have suggested that the history of weird fiction—at least the portion of that history covered in this volume—is a series of anticipations: the quasi-weird writing stretching from Gilgamesh to the middle of the eighteenth century was an anticipation of the Gothic novels; the Gothic novels themselves, along with such of their successors as Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving, was an anticipation of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, who to my mind was the true founder of weird fiction as a viable literary mode. I now make bold to state that the entire history of weird fiction down to the end of the nineteenth century was in a certain sense an anticipation of what has come to be called the golden age of weird writing—roughly extending from 1880 to 1940, and encompassing such titans (some of them hardly regarded as titans except in the realm of supernatural fiction) as Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and H. P. Lovecraft. It was this second phase of the “deluge” of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that saw the full flower of weird writing, in novels and tales alike. While it may seem uncharitable to regard such immemorial works as Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Stoker’s Dracula as mere anticipations of what came after, it must be stated—and I trust my analysis has shown—that in these works the supernaturalism is either so attenuated or so marred by aesthetic blunders that they are flawed masterworks of the weird at best (Hawthorne’s novel, it hardly need be stated, is a masterwork on any level, but its relation to weird fiction is highly tenuous). Always leaving aside the unsurpassable master Poe, the work of Le Fanu, Henry James, and even Ambrose Bierce does not constitute the absolute pinnacle of weird writing; but all these writers and
others laid the groundwork for the attainment of that pinnacle by others— not merely the titans named above but such of their successors as Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Ramsey Campbell, and Thomas Ligotti, all of whom occupy the upper ranges of the canon of weird writing. The supernatural work of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will see a definitive break from the motifs of old-time Gothicism, as the wonders and terrors of a new age of scientific advance, atomic warfare, and social and political upheaval bring to the fore new concerns and new approaches to treating them. Media such as film and television will also increasingly colour the manner and even the matter of weird fiction, as writing from as early as the 1920s becomes increasingly visual and even cinematic while at the same time reflecting a deeper awareness of the philosophy of terror and the physiology of fear. Many of the above-named authors became important theoreticians of the tale of terror, and from their perspective as practising writers they generally evolved more cogent analyses of the nature and functions of supernatural horror than their more academic colleagues among literary critics and theorists. At the same time, the sheer quantity of weird writing—especially during the short, twodecade period (roughly 1970 to 1990) when supernatural horror became a best-selling phenomenon—led to the production of a fearsome amount of rubbish, much of which has mercifully descended into the maw of oblivion. As I stated at the outset, there is good reason for thinking that the best weird fiction is generated when written for a relatively small circle of sensitive readers; and in our own day, as I hope to show in the next volume, we appear to be experiencing an unprecedented revival of weird writing on the part of a number of writers who, while drawing upon the rich heritage of the past, have the skill to direct their work to a present-day audience with present-day concerns. I do not maintain that I have said the last word on the history of weird fiction, or that the last word can ever be said. But I trust I have provided a broad outline of the genre and made some suggestive comments on some of the leading authors and works that will generate continuing discussion on exactly what this literary mode seeks to do and whether it is successful in doing it.
Bibliographical Essay Space restrictions prevent my supplying, in my bibliography, anything approaching an exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary sources pertaining to the authors, works, and topics discussed in this book. However, an array of reference works should assist the reader interested in pursuing additional research on any of the subjects I have broached. Criticism and analysis of supernatural literature may not, in some respects, have progressed very far, but bibliographical charting of the field has made considerable headway. One of the pioneering reference works in the field was E. F. Bleiler’s Checklist of Fantastic Literature (Shasta, 1948; rev. ed. as Checklist of Science Fiction and Supernatural Fiction [Firebell, 1978]), and it retains usefulness. More recently, Bleiler has made good use of his exhaustive knowledge of the field to compile Guide to Supernatural Fiction (Kent State University Press, 1983), a bibliography (with plot synopses) of thousands of novels and tales of supernatural horror. Mike Ashley and William G. Contento’s The Supernatural Index (Greenwood Press, 1995) is a comprehensive and immensely helpful index to anthologies of supernatural fiction. Ashley is contemplating the compilation of an analogous volume for single-author collections, but the pressure of other work may delay completion of this project for some years. In the meantime, readers can make do with Donald H. Tuck’s still useful Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (Advent, 1974–82; 3 vols.), although of course it is very much out of date. The Locus Index to Science Fiction (http://www.locusmag.com/index) has fair coverage of weird writers. Several encyclopedias that contain both bibliographies and brief critical discussions of a wide array of weird writers can be cited. The Penguin
Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Jack Sullivan (Viking Penguin, 1986), although somewhat limited and idiosyncratic in its selection of topics, features articles written by leading critics. David Pringle’s Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers (St. James Press, 1998) is of considerable value, as is Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank (Greenwood Press, 2002). (The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as it covers writers from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.) Primary and secondary sources for many leading authors of supernatural fiction can be found in Horror Literature, ed. Marshall Tymn (Bowker, 1981), and Horror Literature, ed. Neil Barron (Garland, 1990), the latter revised and fused with another volume as Fantasy and Horror (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, ed. S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz (Greenwood Press, 2005; 3 vols.), has the virtues of comprehensiveness and recency. H. W. Hall’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, 1785–1985 (Gale Research Co., 1987) is an extensive listing of secondary sources, but without annotation or commentary. Hall has followed up this work with supplements covering the years 1985–91 (Libraries Unlimited, 1993) and 1992–95 (Libraries Unlimited, 1997). More recently, he has taken his work online: see his Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database (http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu). Of more specialised reference works there are a fair number. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines, ed. Marshall B. Tymn and Mike Ashley (Greenwood Press, 1985), is enormously useful for discussions of magazines devoted to supernatural fiction. Along the same lines, Frank H. Parnell and Mike Ashley’s Monthly Terrors (Greenwood Press, 1985) provides issue-by-issue indexes to hundreds of important periodicals devoted to the supernatural, including Weird Tales. My own compilations, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural (Greenwood Press, 2006; 2 vols.) and The Encyclopedia of the Vampire (Greenwood Press, 2010), benefited from strong work by a variety of contributors. The latter volume in no way supersedes J. Gordon Melton’s The Vampire Book (Visible Ink Press, 1994; rev. ed. 1999), which discusses several topics not covered in my own work. I have suggested in my introduction that I am disappointed with most of the standard histories of supernatural fiction. The first, chronologically
speaking, is Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (Putnam’s, 1917). H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927; rev. 1933–35) may still be the soundest general historical treatment, although of course it is now nearly a century out of date. Peter Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction (Peter Nevill, 1952), has some penetrating discussions of early twentieth-century writers. Les Daniels’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Scribner’s, 1975) is a sound study written by a critic who later became a distinguished horror novelist. I do not find much value in Glen St. John Barclay’s Anatomy of Horror (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (Longmans, 1980; rev. ed. 1996), or Walter Kendrick’s The Thrill of Fear (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). Some studies of more limited scope are much more useful, such as Julia Briggs’s Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (Faber & Faber, 1977), Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Ohio University Press, 1978), José B. Monleón’s A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton University Press, 1990), and Faye Ringel’s New England’s Gothic Literature (Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). I hope that my studies, The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001), The Evolution of the Weird Tale (Hippocampus Press, 2004), and Classics and Contemporaries: Some Notes on Horror Fiction (Hippocampus Press, 2009), are of some use. My Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry (P’rea Press, 2008) is a brief treatment of a topic that demands much greater discussion. Some collections of essays are useful, among them The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow (University of Georgia Press, 1983); Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Starmont House, 1985–88; 2 vols.); Discovering Classic Horror Fiction, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Starmont House, 1992); Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Borgo Press, 1996); and American Supernatural Fiction: From Edith Wharton to the Weird Tales Writers, ed. Douglas Robillard (Garland, 1996). Survey of Fantasy Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill (Salem Press, 1983; 5 vols.), has a number of essays on supernatural writing. Supernatural Fiction Writers, ed. E. F. Bleiler (Scribner’s, 1985; 2 vols.), and Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and
Horror, ed. Richard Bleiler (Scrbner’s, 2003; 2 vols.) are more useful compilations of the same approximate sort. “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, ed. Jason Colavito (McFarland, 2008), is useful and entertaining, although some of the selections are rather slight.
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Seneca. The Tragedies. Ed. David R. Slavitt. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. [Volume 1 includes Thyestes, Medea, Agamemnon; Volume 2 includes The Madness of Hercules, A Cloak for Hercules.] Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Gen. Ed. Alfred Harbage. (The Complete Pelican Shakespeare.) New York: Viking, 1977. Shelley, Mary. Collected Tales and Stories. Ed. Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. Frankenstein. In Three Gothic Novels. Ed. Peter Fairclough. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. ———. The Last Man. Ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson (rev. G. M. Matthews). London: Oxford University Press, 1970. ———. Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Sophocles. [Plays.] Tr. F. Storr. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1913. [Volume 2 includes Trachiniae.] Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. New York: Worthington, 1889. [Includes “Markheim,” “Thrawn Janet.”] ———. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. New York: Dell, 1966. [Includes The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “The Bottle Imp,” “The Body-Snatcher,” “Olalla.”] Stoker, Bram. Best Ghost and Horror Stories. Ed. Richard Dalby, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. ———. Dracula. New York: Modern Library, [1950]. ———. The Jewel of Seven Stars. In Stoker’s Five Novels. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. Thackeray, William Makepeace. “The Painter’s Bargain.” In The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Kensington Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1904. 17.79–97. Virgil. The Poems of Virgil. Tr. James Rhoades. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. In Three Gothic Novels. Ed. Peter Fairclough. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Wells, H. G. The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. London: Ernest Benn, 1927. 2 vols. (paginated continuously).
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Conger, Syndy M. Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977. Cooper, Frederic Taber. “Ambrose Bierce.” In Cooper’s Some American Story Tellers. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. 331–53. Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. deFord, Miriam Allen. Thomas Moore. New York: Twayne, 1967. Drake, Nathan. Literary Hours. Vol. 1. 1798. Rev. ed. 1800. New York: Garland, 1970. Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved.” In Kenneth W. Graham, ed. Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations. New York: AMS Press, 1990. 157–72. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complte Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Tr. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 17.219–52. Gruener, Gutav. “Notes on the Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann upon Edgar Allan Poe.” PMLA 19 (1904): 1–25. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Hartley, L. P. “Introduction.” In The Third Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith. New York: Beagle, 1970. vii–ix. Hawkins, Peter S. Dante: A Brief History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. James, Henry. “Mary Elizabeth Braddon.” In James’s Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. New York: Library of America, 1984. 741–46. Joshi, S. T. Junk Fiction: America’s Obsession with Bestsellers. Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2009. ———. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. “What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” Studies in the Fantastic No. 2 (Winter 2008/Spring 2009): 94– 101.
Kaske, R. E. “[The Governing Theme of Beowulf.]” In Beowulf: The Donaldson Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. 118–31. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. Lévy, Maurice. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic. Trans. S. T. Joshi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Lonsdale, Roger. “Introduction” to Vathek by William Beckford. London: Oxford University Press/World’s Classics, 1970. vii–xxxi. Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” 1927. In The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000. ———. Selected Letters. Ed. August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–76. 5 vols. McCormack, W. J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Mahmoud, Fatma Moussa. “Beckford, Vathek and the Oriental Tale.” In Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, ed. William Beckford of Fonthill: Bicentenary Essays. 1960. Rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972. 63–122. Mehrotra, K. K. Horace Walpole and the English Novel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1934. Melada, Ivan. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Page, Denys. The Homeric Odyssey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Twayne, 1998. Pollin, Burton R. “Godwin and Poe.” In Pollin’s Discoveries in Poe. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. 107–27. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 145–52. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: George Routlege & Sons, 1927. Redding, Cyrus. Memoirs of William Beckford. London: Charles J. Skeet, 1859. 2 vols. Robert, Marie. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. London: Routledge, 1990. Sage, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Scott, Sir Walter. “Introduction to The Castle of Otranto.” In Three Gothic Novels. New York: Dover, 1966. 3–15. ———. The Lives of the Novelists. London & New York: Dent/Dutton (Everyman’s Library), 1928. ———. “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” In Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction. Ed. Ioan Williams. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. 312–53. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Simpson, Louis. James Hogg: A Critical Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962. Smith, Albert B. Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic. University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1977. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Stovall, Floyd. “Poe’s Debt to Coleridge.” In Stovall’s Edgar Poe the Poet. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969. 126–74. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Thompson, G. R. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. Thornton, Weldon. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Tr. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Press of Case Western University, 1973. Visiak, E. H. The Mirror of Conrad. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1955. Weinstein, Lee. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Supernatural Interpretation.” Studies in Weird Fiction no. 4 (Fall 1988): 23–25.
Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
. . . I wondered for a second what icy and intolerable weight oppressed my heart and suffocated me with the unutterable horror of the coffin-lid nailed down on the living. —Arthur Machen, “Novel of the White Powder” . . . for the next three hours I was immersed in a gulf of unutterable horror. —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness”
Preface Anyone with a knowledge of the extent of supernatural literature during the period covered by this volume will understand that nothing approaching comprehensiveness of discussion can be achieved short of a book two or three times the length of this one, so I trust I will be pardoned for focusing on what I believe to be the most notable authors and works of this period and, specifically, those authors and works who are central to the supernatural tradition. Certain authors who have attained celebrity or critical acclaim—such as Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Tim Powers, to name only three—have been regretfully omitted in the realisation that their work lies largely outside the realm of supernatural literature as somewhat narrowly understood, and that space restrictions required a clear focus on those authors who have addressed themselves to the supernatural as opposed to fantasy, alternate-world history, and other adjacent literary modes. I have also, with great regret, decided to eschew discussion of two other subgenres that many critics have regarded as a branch of weird fiction. One of these is Southern Gothic, typified by the work of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and others. But to my mind this subgenre—which is almost entirely non-supernatural—is only remotely related to the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is more vitally allied to mainstream fiction with its concern for the portrayal of characters and the interplay of character and history in the culture of the American South. I may perhaps be more subject to censure for ignoring magic realism, embodied in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, and many others; but I believe this subgenre is really a branch of fantasy, since the display of the supernatural in an objectively real environment is rarely the focus, nor is terror a central component.
There is an added difficulty in discussing contemporary writers, in that it is impossible to know how many of these, even among those who are currently popular or eminent, will endure for any foreseeable period of time. Posterity is a ruthless winnower of the mediocre and the transient, although on occasion it can also brush the genuinely meritorious under the rug; but posterity has, necessarily, yet to act in regard to contempoary writers, so my own critical judgment as to the aesthetic supremacy of any given writer must be my guide to what might be called tentative canonisation. As in the previous volume, my bibliography lists only those works and editions that I have actually quoted in the text. In this volume, unlike its predecessor, I have not seen the need to supply the actual first publication of short stories and poems; in many cases, only the year of first publication is cited. It would seem that I have cited secondary sources even more rarely than in the first volume, but that does not mean that I have not benefited from the pioneering critical work of those many critics and reviewers who have addressed the authors and works I have discussed here. My bibliographical essay gives some suggestions as to further reading about the subjects covered in this book. —S. T. J. Seattle, Washington January 2012
IX. The Titans The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of four titanic figures—Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869– 1951), Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), and M. R. James (1862–1936)—who, with their great disciple, H. P. Lovecraft, transformed supernatural literature in as profound a way as Edgar Allan Poe had done a half-century earlier. Their simultaneous appearance was in some senses an accident, but in other senses was the manifest product of a century or more of weird writing— from the Gothic novels through Poe to the Victorian ghost story writers— whereby the supernatural had become a literarily viable mode that could serve to express a writer’s deepest moods, images, and conceptions in a manner that could not be accommodated by mimetic realism. It is not simply that these four writers produced work that is of transcendent merit; it is that each endowed his work with a philosophical and aesthetic vision that causes it to cohere as a tightly woven unity, thereby expressing a compelling worldview that allows it to become more than the sum of its parts. These writers also expanded the range of supernatural writing beyond mundane ghosts and goblins—tropes that were already becoming hackneyed through overuse—and thereby lent supernatural literature a renewed lease of life that carried it boldly into the new century.
i. Arthur Machen: The Evils of Materialism Arthur Machen’s own life is perhaps his greatest creation; for it is exactly the life we might expect a poet and a visionary to have lived. Born in 1863 in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales (the site, two millennia earlier, of the Roman town of Isca Silurum and the base of the Second Augustan Legion), Machen was fascinated since youth by the Roman antiquities in his region as well as the rural Welsh countryside. He attended Hereford Cathedral School, but in 1880 he failed an examination for the Royal College of Surgeons; he felt he had no option but to go to London to look for work, where he hoped that his ardent enthusiasm for books might land him some literary work. But only poverty and loneliness were his portion. Dragging out a meagre existence as a translator (his translation of the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre [1886] long remained standard, as did his later translation of Casanova’s memoirs), tutor, and cataloguer, he knew at first hand the spiritual isolation that his alter ego, Lucian Taylor, would depict so poignantly in The Hill of Dreams (1907). In his first autobiography, Far Off Things (1922), he speaks of this period with a wistfulness that scarcely conceals his anguish. Although Machen published a few works during this period—The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884), an owlishly learned disquisition on various types of tobacco; the picaresque novel The Chronicle of Clemendy (1886)—they were commercially unsuccessful and are today not highly regarded. But the death of Machen’s father in 1887 suddenly gave him, for the next fourteen years, the economic independence he required to write whatever he chose, without thought of markets or sales. And yet, one of his first works of fiction of this period—“The Great God Pan” (1890)—created a sensation, especially when it appeared in book form in 1894. It shocked the moral guardians of an enfeebled Victorian culture as the diseased outpourings of a decadent mind; but the reviewers who condemned it as sexually offensive could not know that Machen shared the very inhibitions he seemed to be defying. This tale—as well as the infinitely superior “The White People” (1899)—succeeds largely because Machen himself, as a
rigidly orthodox Anglo-Catholic, crystallised his horror of aberrant sexuality by giving it a supernatural dimension. In “The Great God Pan” we are asked to believe that a scientific experiment performed upon a young woman of seventeen results in her “seeing” the Great God Pan; she instantly loses her mind and becomes an idiot. Some years thereafter a strange woman named Helen Vaughan plagues London society, causing a rash of suicides and destroying the lives of several prominent men about town. In the end we learn that Helen is in fact the daughter of the young woman, born nine months after the fateful experiment. Without so much as hinting it, Machen has conveyed to astute readers that the young woman had done more than merely “see” Pan; she had been (somehow) impregnated by the great god of Nature. (This is the point of the Latin inscription at the end of the second section: “And a devil was made incarnate. And a human being was produced” [Three Impostors 14].) But the way in which Machen portrays Pan—and, by extension, Nature itself— is interesting, especially in contrast to his great contemporary Algernon Blackwood, a pantheist for whom Nature was pure, uncorrupt, and unadulterated by the pollution of human civilisation. Machen takes a precisely opposite view. For him, the life-principle itself was inherently horrific, and can be made acceptable only by the rigid repression of civilised society This is why Helen Vaughan’s activities cause the greatest disturbance among the refined aristocrats of London. The scientist, Raymond, confesses toward the end that “I broke open the door of the house of life” (Three Impostors 50)—in other words, that he has broken down the barriers that separate human life from all other life on the earth. But the result is only horror; and Helen Vaughan’s death-throes—whereby she transmogrifies “from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast” (Three Impostors 50)—convey Machen’s own horror of untamed, uncontrolled, uncivilised life. Throughout the novella Machen hints at illicit sex in a way that to us seems coy but to his original readers would have appeared suggestive to the point of obscenity. The young Helen is once seen in the company of a “strange naked man” (no doubt Pan himself, perhaps in his traditional guise as a man with the legs of a goat). Another young woman, Rachel, is found weeping and “half undressed” (Three Impostors 13) in her room: clearly she has been raped by Pan. Mercifully, she dies shortly thereafter. Helen herself,
a young woman in London, is said to be guilty of “nameless infamies” (Three Impostors 41)—no doubt of a sexual nature. All this would have titillated Machen’s Victorian audience, and indeed did so. All this makes Machen sound like the Erica Jong of his day, but this reaction was only to have been expected in the final decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. H. P. Lovecraft, although at one point heaping scorn on Machen’s horror of sex—“The filth and perversion which to Machen’s obsoletely orthodox mind meant profound defiances of the universe’s foundations, mean to us only a rather prosaic and unfortunate species of organic maladjustment—no more frightful, and no more interesting, than a headache, a fit of colic, or an ulcer on the big toe” (Selected Letters 4.4)— was himself highly reserved and puritanical in matters of sex, so it is no surprise that he adapted Machen’s notion of a “god” impregnating a mortal in his own tale, “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Another scientific experiment is at the focus of “The Inmost Light,” written in 1892 and first published in 1894. Here we find that a doctor has persuaded his own wife to allow him to extract her soul and place it in a gem—the “inmost light” in that gem is her soul. The result is that the woman continues to live, but presents—like Helen Vaughan—a visage of mingled beauty and horror. One man who sees her in a window thinks of her as a “satyr” (Three Impostors 56). To one of Machen’s conventional religiosity, a person without a (Christian) soul can only appear as a figure of pagan antiquity. “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), aside from continuing the adventures of Mr. Dyson, the pseudo-detective who was introduced to us in “The Inmost Light,” is one of Machen’s first expositions of what might be called his “Little People mythology.” Although it features a spectacularly potent scene in which the stunted, primitive denizens of Britain—now dwelling in caves, having been driven out by successive waves of fully human peoples— perform a hideous ritual around a pyramid of fire, “The Shining Pyramid” is perhaps too much of a detective story to be fully effective as a weird tale. But the “Little People mythology” is of some interest in itself. Machen makes it clear that he himself believed in the former existence of just such a race of creatures as he depicts in these stories: Of recent years abundant proof has been given that a short, nonAryan race once dwelt beneath ground, in hillocks, throughout
Europe, their raths have been explored, and the weird old tales of green hills all lighted up at night have received confirmation. Much in the old legends may be explained by a reference to this primitive race. The stories of changelings, and captive women, become clear on the supposition that the “fairies” occasionally raided the houses of the invaders. (“Folklore and Legends of the North” [1898], Line of Terror 31) This was written more than two decades before the publication of Margaret A. Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which gave a momentary stamp of approval to the thesis. But Machen knew that the really adventuresome aspect of his theory—or, rather, the radical extension of it which he made for fictional purposes—was that “the people still lived in hidden caverns in wild and lonely lands,” something he maintained was “wildly improbable” (“On Re-reading The Three Impostors and the Wonder Story” [unpublished ms.], cited in Three Impostors xv). But behind all this speculative anthropology is the symbolism of the Little People. They are horrible and loathsome, to be sure, but they have at least one advantage over modern human beings: they have retained that primal sacrament (perverted, of course, by bestiality and violence) which links them with the Beyond. There is something of awe mingled with the horror experienced by the narrators when they witness the “Pyramid of fire” (Three Impostors 94) summoned by the Little People in “The Shining Pyramid,” and this signals the truth uttered by the protagonist of “The White People”: “Sorcery and sanctity . . . these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life” (White People 62). Probably Machen’s most sustained weird work is The Three Impostors, published in 1895. Also poorly received, it was criticised for being excessively imitative of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is commonly believed that the model for the novel—both in its episodic structure and in its flippant and jaunty style—is Stevenson’s The New Arahian Nights (1882); but the true model is that novel’s sequel, The Dynamiter (1885), written by Stevenson in conjunction with his wife, Fanny van de Grift Stevenson. Machen ultimately acknowledged this criticism, and for the next two years he worked with difficulty, even agony, to hammer out his own style; the result is that luminous novel of aesthetic sincerity, The Hill of Dreams.
What is The Three Impostors? On the surface, it appears to be a random collection of episodes strung together with the flimsiest kind of narrative thread. One episode—“Novel of the Iron Maid”—had in fact been written and published in 1890, and for copyright reasons it and its introductory segment (“The Decorative Imagination”) do not appear in many American editions of the novel. Other episodes—notably the celebrated “Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”—have been abstracted from the narrative fabric and reprinted as self-standing stories. This occurred on several occasions during Machen’s lifetime, and he appears to have registered no great complaint; but Machen was scarcely in a position to do so, as the period between 1901 and 1932 (when he received a Civil List pension of £100 a year) was of considerable poverty for him, and he could ill afford to pass up any revenue his writings yielded. Both the title of The Three Impostors and its subtitle (“or, The Transmutations”—frequently omitted from reprints) may provide the clue to the interpretation of the novel. Who are the “three impostors” of the title? Who can they be but the two men and a woman we encounter in the prologue, who have at last captured and perhaps killed the “young man with spectacles” they have evidently been pursuing? For it is they who, under a series of guises, tell the various “novels” (from the French nouvelle, or tale, especially one of a romantic or fantastic character) scattered throughout the work. Their sole audience is a pair of friends, Mr. Dyson and Charles Phillipps, who wage an ongoing philosophical battle on the nature of reality and the nature of fiction, and it becomes gradually clear that the tales spun by the “three impostors” may be entirely fictitious, being instead somewhat laborious contrivances meant to dupe Dyson and Phillipps into leading them to the spectacled young man. Toward the end it begins to dawn upon the two gentlemen that the stories they are hearing are perhaps not entirely reliable; Dyson finally resolves to “abjure all Milesian and Arabian methods of entertainment” (Three Impostors 213)—a reference to the Milesian tale (the Greek version of the tall tale) and, of course, to the Arabian Nights. This connects with a theme that runs throughout The Three Impostors and Machen’s work as a whole—the fantastic nature of the metropolis of London. A Fragment of Life (1904), a pensive short novel on the borderline of the weird, conveys this conception poignantly: “London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted
lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe” (White People 168). But what purpose could Machen have in seemingly dynamiting the seriousness and power of the episodes in The Three Impostors by putting them in the mouths of dubious characters? There may be no clear answer to this question, but perhaps some clues can be provided by considering Machen’s general philosophy. I hesitate to call his view of the world a philosophy, for really it was a set of dogmatic prejudices that changed little through the whole of his long life; but at its essence was a violent hostility and resentment at what he perceived to be the growing secularism and “scientism” of the modern world. To Machen, the religious mystic, the triumphs of nineteenth-century science were anything but victories; instead, it seemed to him that science was coming to rule all aspects of life, even those aspects—the spiritual life and its corollary, art—where it had no place. In The Three Impostors, Phillipps clearly espouses the hard-headed scientific scepticism Machen wishes to combat. It is no surprise that the woman who calls herself Miss Lally tells him the “Novel of the Black Seal”; for in this story it is Professor Gregg who embodies what Machen believes to be the genuinely scientific attitude of open-mindedness to unusual phenomena: “Life, believe me, is no simple thing, no mass of grey matter and congeries of veins and muscles to be laid naked by the surgeon’s knife; man is the secret which I am about to explore, and before I can discover him I must cross over weltering seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years” (Three Impostors 143). Indeed, it seems quite likely that Miss Lally tells Phillipps this story only in order to overcome his innate scepticism; for Phillipps “required a marvel to be neatly draped in the robes of Science before he would give it any credit” (Three Impostors 131). Perhaps the subtitle of The Three Impostors provides a further clue. Exactly what transmutations are in question? To be sure, on a superficial level the various “novels” and other episodes transmute scenery, as we flit from the suburbs of London (“Novel of the Iron Maid,” “Novel of the White Powder”) to the wilds of the American West (“Novel of the Dark Valley”) to the “wild, domed hills” of Wales (“Novel of the Black Seal”). Miss Lally casually notes that “I looked out of my window and saw the whole landscape transmuted before me” (Three Impostors 149). But the
reference here is merely to topography; elsewhere there are much more profound transmutations going on. When Professor Gregg finally decodes the cryptic black seal that appears to confirm his theory of the “Little People,” he states with awed solemnity: “I read the key of the awful transmutation of the hills” (Three Impostors 172). Here it is not landcape but Gregg’s entire outlook on life that has been transmuted. The “Novel of the White Powder” confirms this view. Miss Leicester, who tells the tale (and who is presumably identical to the Miss Lally of the earlier narrative), speaks offhandedly of “the transmutation of my brother’s character” (Three Impostors 198) after he begins taking the strange drug from a careless apothecary’s shop. But what really happens to the hapless student is the transmutation of his very being, physically and morally, leading a doctor to write harriedly, “my old conception of the universe has been swept away” (Three Impostors 208). This is the ultimate transmutation. That doctor, in effect, gives voice to Machen’s own view of the world: “The whole universe . . . is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working” (Three Impostors 209). It was this view that Machen was determined to convey to his audience over a lifetime of writing. The final years of Machen’s “great decade” of fiction writing produced several of the works for which Machen is known today. Even excluding the marginally weird novel The Hill of Dreams (written in 1895–97 but not published until 1907), we are faced with such works as “The Red Hand” (1897), the prose poems collected in Ornaments in Jade (1924), “The White People” (the second-greatest horror tale ever written, according to Lovecraft, next to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”), and the unclassifiable short novel A Fragment of Life. Had Machen written nothing else, these works alone would be sufficient to grant him a place in weird literature—or in literature as a whole. “The Red Hand” (written in 1895) is a pendant to The Three Impostors, resurrecting the two central figures in that novel, Phillipps and Dyson, as they continue their intellectual dispute over the nature of reality while becoming involved in what proves to be an exceptionally clever supernatural detective story. Dyson, the mystic (hence the stand-in for Machen), evokes a “theory of improbability” (White People 18) to account
for the remarkable series of coincidences that leads him to the solution of the case; but this is less interesting than the overall philosophical thrust of the tale, in which Machen utilises the tools of rationalism (specifically, the forensic analysis of evidence in regard to the murder at the heart of the case) to undermine rationalism and thereby to “prove” to his satisfaction that the matter can only be accounted for by appealing to the supernatural— in this case, the continued existence of “little people.” Of the prose-poems in Ornaments in Jade it is difficult to speak in detail. These delicate vignettes may in some sense be pendants to The Hill of Dreams—not in terms of plot, but in terms of style and substance. Comparable only to those of Clark Ashton Smith as the finest in English, they complete Machen’s transformation from clever imitator to independent artist. If there is any dominant theme that unites them, it is the constant contrast between mundane modernity and the hoary past—a past that is simultaneously terrifying in its primitivism and awesome in its suggestions of intimate, symbolic connexions with the essence of life and Nature. However brutalised modern people are by the dominant materialism of the age, their sense of spirituality can well up in spite of themselves in the practice of ancient rituals. As for “The White People,” in a sense it returns to the theme of “The Great God Pan” (1890) in its emphasis on illicit sex. For Machen, the orthodox Anglo-Catholic, sexual aberrations represented a kind of violation of the entire fabric of the universe. This is the substance of the remarks by Ambrose at the beginning of the tale, especially his comment that sin is “the attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden [my italics] manner” and “the effort to gain the ecstasy and knowledge that pertain alone to angels” (White People 65). This story—in which a young girl unwittingly reveals in her diary her inculcation into a witch-cult and, evidently, her impregnation by some nameless entity—transmogrifies illicit sex into a cosmic sin that will either lift us up into the ranks of the angels or plunge us down into the company of demons. And yet, Machen’s exposition of the details of the matter (especially the sexual element) are so indirect that many readers have been puzzled as to the exact nature of the scenario. One such reader was the young J. Vernon Shea, who asked his friend H. P. Lovecraft to elucidate the tale. Lovecraft did so, concluding: “On account of a sympathetic action like that described in the prologue, the nowadolescent child—though without contact with any creative element—
became pregnant with a Horror, to whose birth (knowing what she did of dark tradition) she could not look forward without a stark frenzy far beyond the fear of mere disgrace. Thus she killed herself” (Selected Letters 3.439). In the absence of contrary evidence, this interpretation must be accepted. Machen’s single sentence at the end (“She had poisoned herself—in time” [White People 97]) is the only clue this repressed Victorian writer can provide to the sexual anomalies of the situation. And yet, Lovecraft was manifestly inspired not by the mechanics of the plot of “The White People,” but by its magnificent allusiveness and subtlety. The diary in which the girl tells of her initiation into the witch-cult is a masterstroke: we know what is happening, but she in her naïveté does not. And those chilling hints of nameless rituals that the girl provides (“I must not write down . . . the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs” [White People 70]) carries hints of hideous suggestion that are the more potent for their being so ill-defined. A Fragment of Life is an altogether different proposition. If this short novel is only on the very edge of the weird, it deserves far wider recognition as one of Machen’s most finished works. The exquisitely gradual way in which the stolid bourgeois couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, slowly awaken to their sense of wonder and abandon London for their native Wales is one of Machen’s great literary accomplishments. Amidst all the mundane details of the small-scale social life of the Darnells, we receive hints that their love of beauty has not been entirely destroyed, as it has for so many who live too fully in the modern world. Machen delivers an unanswerable criticism of the narrowing of vision that such a life engenders: “So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life” (White People 121). And yet, something so simple as birdsong heard by Edward (“That night was the night I thought I heard the nightingale . . . and the sky was such a wonderful deep blue” [White People 117]) provides an anticipation of the coming change. Mary, too, although seemingly more hard-headedly practical than Edward, senses the alteration in her being (“one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew not what great wonder was to be revealed” [White People 132]). The entire novel is a kind of instantiation of the critical theories in Machen’s
idiosyncratic treatise, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), in which he criticised such writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot for being too closely tied to mundane reality and failing to include that modicum of “ecstasy” which ought, in Machen’s eyes, to inform all literature. We may well believe that Machen was insufficiently attuned to the “ecstasy” that is in fact present in the work of the social realists he disdains, but we can hardly gainsay that he himself has flawlessly embodied his own principles in A Fragment of Life. After writing this novel (which was itself worked on sporadically over five years, 1899–1904), Machen appeared to lose focus as far as fiction writing was concerned. In 1907 he wrote the curious novel The Secret Glory (a satire on the British school system that was not published until 1922), but that was the extent of his creative output between 1904 and 1914. With his inheritance gone, Machen was forced to produce mountains of journalism; the book publications of his fiction—specifically The House of Souls (1906) and The Hill of Dreams (1907)—brought him fleeting attention, but not much in the way of income. It was only in 1914 that he resumed fiction writing—but he did so in a peculiar way. Machen had, since 1910, been serving on the staff of one of the leading newspapers in London, the Evening News, as reporter and columnist. At least two of the four stories that comprised The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915)—“The Bowmen” (29 September 1914) and “The Soldiers’ Rest” (20 October 1914)—appeared in the Evening News. The well-known story of how “The Bowmen”—a tale about the ghosts of mediaeval British soldiers who come to the aid of a beleaguered British unit at the battle of Mons in late August 1914—came to be regarded as a real occurrence, with angels rescuing the soldiers and supposedly first-hand accounts by the soldiers themselves testifying to the miracle—need not be discussed in detail; Machen himself recounts the matter in the introduction to The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. His repeated protestations that the story was entirely a product of his imagination went for naught; the outbreak of the European war—which had commenced less than two months prior to the publication of “The Bowmen”—was so traumatic that the emergence of such legendry was inevitable. Machen himself alludes to Kipling’s “The Lost Legion” as a central literary influence on the tale, although other literary sources reaching back to Herodotus’ Histories have recently been postulated. But what is more significant is Machen’s own
attempt to pull off a kind of hoax with “The Bowmen.” The mere fact that it was published in a newspaper—even though newspapers at this time published more fiction than they do now—and the fact that it was written with the plain-spoken sobriety expected of factual articles, suggest that Machen is not wholly blameless in the subsequent furore caused by his little tale. Much the same could be said for “The Great Return,” which also appeared in the Evening News (21 October–16 November 1915) and was subsequently published in book form by a religious publisher, the Faith Press. Here Machen seeks no more than to present, in the most orthodox repertorial manner, a series of curious incidents in Wales that, to his mind, suggest the actual rediscovery of the Holy Grail. Once again, as in “The Red Hand,” although in a somewhat cruder way, Machen seeks to use the tools of rationalism to undermine rationalism: here the outwardly sceptical newspaper reporter—who is none other than Machen himself, with no attempt made to establish a distance between author and persona—becomes gradually convinced of the reality of the phenomena described. Machen is content to present a scenario whereby something miraculous might have happened: this is sufficient for his current purpose of attacking the godless materialism of his age. The European war was obviously a highly disturbing event to Machen. Already alienated from his time by his religious mysticism, so much in contrast with the prevailing scientific rationalism of the later nineteenth century, he found his own faith shaken by a war in which Christians were killing other Christians with great gusto. Toward the end of the conflict he wrote a series of sophistical articles attempting to justify the ways of God to man; they were collected as War and the Christian Faith (1918). But Machen’s work of fiction revolving around the war is of course The Terror, a short novel that has inspired a host of imitations of its basic plot—animals turning against human beings. The Terror reveals several features characteristic of Machen’s later fiction. The first, perhaps, is frank autobiography. Not only does the firstperson narrative voice seem to be Machen himself, but he plays upon his own role as a journalist and reporter—something we will find again in the later tale “Out of the Picture.” Indeed, it is not insignificant that The Terror was also first published as a serialisation in the Evening News (16–31 October 1916), under the title “The Great Terror.” Is Machen attempting to
pass off the narrative as a “true” story? To be sure, there is no deliberate intent to deceive; but the circumstantiality of his account, and its generally reportorial tone, make one wonder whether Machen is hoping to convey a deeper truth—the truth that the brief, fitful, and ultimately temporary “revolution” of the animals against humanity’s reign over the earth is a signal that human morals are collapsing as a result of the hideous and unprecedented warfare that had broken out two years earlier. Machen wrote relatively few actual works of fiction in the 1920s, aside from a few stories for anthologies edited by Cynthia Asquith. In the 1930s he resumed somewhat greater productivity in fiction-writing and published two late collections, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool, in 1936. The former volume contains stories written over a wide period, but the latter is an original collection of previously unpublished tales. They are, however, a sadly uneven mix, and some stories—such as “N,” “The Exalted Omega,” and “The Tree of Life”—are among his poorest work. But Machen could on occasion still wield the magic that makes his earlier works so shuddersomely memorable. In particular, “Out of the Picture” and “Change” seem to be among the final instalments of the “Little People mythology”; it is possible that “The Bright Boy” also belongs to this cycle. Then there is The Green Round (1933), a short novel later reprinted by Arkham House. But this insubstantial account of a man who goes to a quiet resort in Wales, only to be plagued by a strange, stunted being whom others can see but he cannot, is a disappointment in more ways than one. It is, really, a novella or even a short story stretched out to novel length, and its thinness of inspiration, verbosity, and failure to come to a satisfying conclusion must condemn it as a false start. Machen himself dismissed The Terror as a “shilling shocker,” but that short novel stands leagues higher than the only other novel-length work of the supernatural that emerged from his pen. In a career that spanned more than six decades, Arthur Machen produced some of the most evocative weird fiction in all literary history. Written with impeccably mellifluous prose, infused with a powerful mystical vision, and imbued with a wonder and terror that their author felt with every fibre of his being, his novels and tales will survive when works of far greater technical accomplishment fall by the wayside. Flawed as some of them are by certain crotchets—especially a furious hostility to science and secularism—that disfigure Machen’s own philosophy, they are
nonetheless as effective as they are because they echo the sincere beliefs of their author, whose eternal quest to preserve the mystery of the universe in an age of materialism is one to which we can all respond.
ii. Algernon Blackwood: Nature as God and Refuge Algernon Blackwood lived his work as few authors have ever done. On the most superficial level, this means that he incorporated abundant autobiographical elements into his tales and novels, especially from his wide-ranging travels—from the wilds of the Canadian backwoods to the parched sands of Egypt; from the snowy crags of the Alps to the forbidding remoteness of the Caucasus Mountains. But there is far more to it than that. Virtually every one of the central figures in Blackwood’s fiction is a thinly disguised self-portrait, and of the most intimate sort—a self-portrait that probes the depths of his own complex and mystical temperament at the same time that it depicts the interaction of that temperament with the people and lands he encountered over a lifetime of unceasing wandering. What is more, Blackwood writes with so powerful a belief in what he is saying that he inexorably induces belief in the reader as well. However fantastic his imaginings, one gains the impression that Blackwood always means exactly what he says. Algernon Blackwood was born on March 14, 1869, at Wood Lodge, Shooter’s Hill, Kent. He was the son of Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, who served in the Crimean War and subsequently became permanent secretary to the Post Office; he received a knighthood in 1887. Stevenson had become a fervent and evangelical Christian in 1856 and devoted much of his time to lay preaching; accordingly, young Algernon—whose family moved several times in his early childhood, finally settling at Shortlands House, Beckenham, Kent—grew up in a household of extreme religious strictness, with an emphasis on personal salvation and the heavy burden of sin. Matters were not helped by the year (1885–86) Blackwood spent in the overly strict discipline of the School of the Moravian Brotherhood in the Black Forest of Germany, a period he would later depict vividly in the John Silence story “Secret Worship.” Blackwood escaped the oppressive religiosity of his family environment in a number of ways. Chief among them was his discovery, in 1886, of
Buddhism, as embodied in Patanjali’s Yogi Aphorisms; shortly thereafter he was absorbing books on spiritualism and theosophy. But these rebellions were only preliminary to his discovery of Nature (always with a capital N in Blackwood), a discovery that ultimately formed the core of his entire outlook on life: By far the strongest influence in my life . . . was Nature; it betrayed itself early, growing in intensity with every year. Bringing comfort, companionship, inspiration, joy, the spell of Nature has remained dominant, a truly magical spell. Always immense and potent, the years have strengthened it. The early feeling that everything was alive, a dim sense that some kind of consciousness struggled through every form, even that a sort of inarticulate communication with this “other life” was nossible, could I but discover the way— these moods coloured its opening wonder. (Episodes Before Thirty 36–37) In a sense, Nature subsumed or incorporated all his other interests in occultism and spiritualism; for all these were merely vehicles toward the achieving of an “extended or expanded consciousness” (“Author’s Preface” to Selected Tales 8) that would lend to a kind of mystical bond with Nature. As Blackwood’s narrator describes Terence O’Malley in The Centaur (1911): For the moods of Nature flowed through him—in him—like presences, potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused probably by,a spiritual remoteness from their mood. The Cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and Nature’s moods were transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these singular states of exaltation and expansion. She pushed wide
the gateways of his deeper life. She entered, took possession, dipped his smaller self into her own enormous and enveloping personality. (10) The spell of Nature was not long in asserting itself: brief trips to Switzerland and Canada in 1887 and a walking tour in northern Italy in 1889 were only foretastes of what was to come. By the early 1890s Blackwood found himself in New York. It might be thought that the American megalopolis would be just about the last place for such a Nature worshiper as Blackwood, but he felt confident in his ability to secure work and even to find happiness of a sort. But the inevitable occurred: although, by the fall of 1892, he had become a reporter for the New York Sun, the cumulative effect of his stay in New York could only be called psychologically devastating: I seemed covered with sore and tender places into which New York rubbed salt and acid every hour of the day. It wounded, not alone because I felt unhappy, but of itself. It hit me where it pleased. The awful city, with its torrential, headlong life, held for me something of the monstrous. Everything about it was exaggerated. Its racing speed, its roofs amid the clouds with the canyon gulfs below, its gaudy avenues dripping gold that ran almost arm in arm with streets little better than sewers of human decay and misery, its frantic noise, both of voices and mechanism, its lavishly organized charity and boastful splendour, and its deep corruption in the grip of a heartless and degraded Tammany—it was all this that painted the horror into my imagination as of something monstrous, non-human, almost unearthly. It became, for me, a scab on the skin of the planet, brilliant with the hues of fever, moving all over with its teeming microbes. I felt it, indeed, but half civilized. (Episodes Before Thirty 124–25) One suspects that Blackwood would have had this reaction even if a number of other events had not conspired to render his early days in New York even more wretched: a painful illness that incapacitated him for weeks; extreme poverty that compelled him to subsist largely upon dried
apples (when eaten with water they would expand in his stomach and thereby ease his pangs of hunger); and, most phantasmagoric of all, his tortuous relationship with a thief and scoundrel, Arthur Bigge (disguised as “Boyde” in Episodes Before Thirty), who robbed Blackwood of what little money he had and whom Blackwood ultimately hunted down like an animal and had arrested. By early 1899 Blackwood felt a yearning to return to his homeland, and by March he had resettled in England. But the wanderlust that remained an essential part of his nature was not slow to exert itself: in 1900 and 1901 he spent much of the summer canoeing down the Danube—trips that would ultimately be transmogrified into his most memorable weird tale, “The Willows.” Blackwood’s travels for the period 1902–05 are not entirely clear; he appears to have gone to France, returned to the Black Forest and the school of the Moravians, and travelled throughout England, again absorbing impressions that would find their way into his later tales. Blackwood’s first published volume, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, appeared in late 1906 and was well received. The Listener and Other Stories—containing several of Blackwood’s most notable tales, including the title story, “The Willows,” “Max Hensig,” and “The Woman’s Ghost Story”—came out the following year. But it was John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908) that definitively launched Blackwood on a literary career. Thanks to a clever advertising campaign, the volume became a bestseller and allowed Blackwood the freedom to devote the next six years to writing, without the need to worry about an income. He decided to settle in Switzerland, and in the next half-decade produced some of the most remarkable work in the history of weird fiction: the collections The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910), Pan’s Garden (1912), and Incredible Adventures (1914); the novels The Human Chord (1910) and The Centaur (1911); and the children’s fantasies Jimbo (1909) and The Education of Uncle Paul (1909). It is difficult to generalise about these very diverse works; suffice it to say that they all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Awe is perhaps the dominant motif; Blackwood is somehow able to invest the simplest events—or even his characters’ psychological reactions to those events—with a portentous grandeur, as if the very fabric of the universe is involved. That, indeed, is exactly what is involved in The Human Chord, a novel with one of the most distinctive
premises in all weird fiction: the possibility that a “human chord” sung by four seemingly ordinary individuals could somehow reorganise all the matter in the cosmos. Or consider the several tales that Blackwood wrote after his 1912 visit to Egypt, among them “Sand” (in Pan’s Garden) and “A Descent into Egypt” (in Incredible Adventures). The latter’s climactic scene is nothing more than the tableau of three characters sitting around waiting for the dawn; and yet, few tales have ended more grippingly, as we see two hapless figures literally subsumed by the spell of Egypt: I witnessed the disappearance of George Isley. There was a dreadful magic in the picture. The pair of them, small and distant below me in that little sandy hollow, stood out sharply defined as in a miniature. I saw their outlines neat and terrible like some ghastly inset against the enormous scenery. Though so close to me in actual space, they were centuries away in time. And a dim, vast shadow was about them that was not mere shadow of the ridges. It encompassed them; it moved, crawling over the sand, obliterating them. Within it, like insects lost in amber, they became visibly imprisoned, dwindled in size, home deep away, absorbed. (331) And who can forget the imperishable climax of “Sand,” where we learn that “the desert stood on end” (329)? John Silence is to some extent based on a schtick—the fusion of detective fiction and supernatural fiction, as John Silence becomes a “psychic detective” probing cases beyond the bounds of natural law—but a few of the segments represent Blackwood at his height. Whether he was much inspired by E. and H. Prichard’s Flaxman Low (for which see the next chapter) is unclear; probably he merely adapted the Sherlock Holmes formula to his own purposes, and in so doing laid the groundwork for a multitudinous progeny of psychic detectives, by William Hope Hodgson, Margery Lawrence, and many others. But such a tale as “Ancient Sorceries”—where a man stumbles into a small French town where all the inhabitants turn into cats at night—is a masterwork of subtlety and cumulative horror; the fact that John Silence remains offstage for most of the tale is a great benefit. Unfortunately, he acts as a simple deus ex
machina in “Secret Worship,” rescuing the protagonist from the ghostly phenomena at the last moment. As it is, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” (in The Lost Valley) will remain the pinnacles of Blackwood’s work in supernatural horror. Nature is, manifestly, the true hero of both these narratives—but it is a Nature that appears malevolent to humankind only from our limited perspective. The narrator of “The Wendigo” becomes aware of “that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man” (84). And consider the Swede’s comment in “The Willows”: “There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us” (53). It would require a laborious analysis to specify the exact manner in which Blackwood builds cumulative suspense and terror in these long stories; but his capturing of the mingled horror and wonder of the Danube (“The Willows”) and of the Canadian backwoods (“The Wendigo”) is imperishable. It is, indeed, interesting that pure horror is as prevalent as it is in these works. In “The Regeneration of Lord Ernie” (in Incredible Adventures), a character remarks of a sinister forest along a mountainside: “There’s evil thinking up there, but by heaven it’s alive; it’s positive, ambitious, constructive.” He immediately qualifies this by saying: “Evil? . . . How can any force be evil? That’s merely a matter of direction” (21, 23). Horror turns to awe in the four long tales in this volume, although the former is by no means absent. The horror of “The Damned” comes not from the damnation of the souls of the wicked—but precisely from the conventional religious belief in such damnation. The hideous multitude of ghosts that haunt a house in England—with “yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead,m frozen by the horror of vain pity” (207)—are those damned by the bigoted religion of the house’s previous occupant. Pan’s Garden, with its deceptively bland subtitle—“A Volume of Nature Stories”—also contains some powerful tales of awe, none greater than the short novel “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” in which a man quite literally is subsumed into the forest of trees that surround his country house. This tale, along with the earlier “The Eccentricity of Simon
Parnacute” (in The Lost Valley), reveal a delicacy of touch that brings Lord Dunsany to mind. Parnacute is a prototypical Blackwood character who burns with indignation at seeing birds locked in a cage: this perversion of Nature is deeply offensive to his spirit. His freeing of the birds becomes a deeply symbolic act, for when he himself dies, this is what we are told of him: “The human cage was empty. Someone had opened the door” (328). The Centaur, whose poignant and delicate evocation of the vitality of Nature makes it the centrepiece of Blackwood’s work, is the key to the understanding of both his oeuvre and his philosophy. What does the mysterious Russian (never named), whom O’Malley encounters on a steamer heading from Marseilles to the Caucasus Mountains, symbolise? He is a “Cosmic Being” (209), one so close to Nature that his very presence in this civilised company of tourists seems anamalous and even vaguely frightening. He leads O’Malley into the Caucasus—exactly as Blackwood himself went on a trip there in the summer of 1910—to what appears to be a herd of centaurs; more, not only the Russian but O’Malley himself seem, momentarily, to become centaurs. For O’Malley it is a moment of spiritual transformation: “The Garden now enclosed him. He had found the heart of Earth, his mother. Self-realization in the perfect union with Nature was fulfilled. He knew the Great At-one-ment” (214–15). Blackwood spent much of the first two years following the outbreak of World War I in adapting his children’s fantasy A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) into a musical, The Starlight Express, with music by Edward Elgar. Although he wrote a number of works for or about children, only Jimbo, The Education of Uncle Paul, and the much later novel The Fruit Stoners (1934) are notably successful. It is clear that he himself was a genial “Uncle Paul” to a variety of nieces and nephews, as well as to the children of some of his friends. Children, like animals, had an instinctive psychological bond with Nature that rendered their world of imagination immediately comprehensible to Blackwood. Consider the nature metaphors used to describe the child Nixie in The Education of Uncle Paul: . . . . the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed
sand with easy and gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods, a creature of the elements. (52–53) Blackwood was rarely able to reach this level of unsentimental pathos in his later works for children. In a sense, the war marked the definite end of one stage—and, perhaps, the most vital and significant stage—of Blackwood’s career. The hostility to science and material civilization that Blackwood revealed through O’Malley (“And I loathe, loathe the spirit of to-day with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship” [40]) was only augmented by the war, a product of the destructive forces that were taking all humanity farther and farther away from Nature. Julius LeVallon (1916), a novel of reincarnation, is confused and unfocused, and its sequel, The Bright Messenger (1921), is still more so, made interesting only by an increasing strain of pessimism: “The recent upheaval has been more than an intertribal war. It was a planetary event. It has shaken our nature fundamentally, radically. The human mind has been shocked, broken, dislocated” (166). In Blackwood’s short story writing, inspiration appears to have been drying up. The tales in Day and Night Stories (1917) are, on the whole, slight; The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories (1921) consists of stories whose plots were in large part derived from Blackwood’s shared experiences with his old friend Wilfrid Wilson, who is listed as a coauthor; Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches (1924) is also disappointing. This was his last original collection of stories until Shocks (1935). In the latter half of the 1920s, Blackwood returned to writing for children. A multifarious array of works were produced during this period, but none are particularly distinguished aside from Dudley and Gilderoy: A Nonsense (1929), a delightful fable about the adventures of a parrot and a cat as they stray out of their home, board a train, and perform other surprising antics. Several stories in Shocks, inspired by his absorption of the mystical philosophy of Georgi Gurdjieff and his disciple Pyotr Ouspenskii, show that Blackwood had not entirely finished having his say in the realm of supernatural horror, while other tales in that volume, notably “Elsewhere and Otherwise” and “The Man Who Lived Backwards,” both inspired by J.
W, Dunne’s theories of serial time, could be almost classified as science fiction. In The Centaur O’Malley, after his transcendent experience in the Caucasus, yearns to tell the world of what he has felt and learned—he thinks it will save humanity from sinking into an imaginationless morass of materialism and cynicism. His sympathetic but sceptical friend, Stahl, warns him: “You will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. You will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. What is the use, I ask you? What is the use?” (267–68). But O’Malley is determined to persevere. And so was Blackwood. Perhaps in his later years he felt that the cause was lost; that science and material comforts had advanced so far that the awe and wonder of Nature were things of the past. In the essay “Dreams and Fairies” (1929) he nevertheless held out a faint hope that technology might not entirely crush our perception of the mysteries of the cosmos: Ariel as a personified wave-length we listen to in our drawingrooms, the “sightless couriers of the air” as waves of ether bringing us sound or pictures through a machine costing so many pounds— these, though wonderful, hold no wonder of the spirit. The wonder of the spirit is not the wonder of the well-read mind. The purchaser questions, but he does not tremble with delicious and unearthly awe. To-day our winds seem thin of voices, our woods and forests emptying, our glens feed streams where dance no flashing feet. The haunting music of that older world is stilled and no wings dart across the moonlight that once was populated with haunting glory. It may be, however, that the glamour is but changing and that the poet’s creative heart will extract a more stimulating Wonder from the newer “facts” of life. Mystery, of course, there must always be. The change is worth underlining: it will be a Wonder that instructs; a Wonder that teaches before it beautifies. (175) It is not entirely clear what is meant by that last remark; it could almost be seen as a justification for science fiction, a literary mode Blackwood never approached save in a few late works. Nevertheless, it is evident that he himself retained his sense of wonder to the end, and sought to convey it to
others in as earnest and powerful a fashion as he could. Even if his best works were written in a relatively short period encompassed by the first two decades of the twentieth century, every one of his novels, tales, plays, and even essays and reviews seeks to uncover those layers of mystery that lurk behind the façade of the known—the mystery of forests, of deserts, of snow-capped peaks, and, most significant of all, of the human psyche.
iii. Lord Dunsany: Fantasy and Terror It may seem an anomaly to treat the work of Lord Dunsany in this book, but his work came at a critical juncture in the history of supernatural fiction. By the end of his long career, it could be said that Dunsany had effected the definitive separation of pure fantasy from supernatural horror, so that the former was carried on by such of his successors as Mervyn Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien; the latter’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) emerged before Dunsany’s passing and was clearly influenced by his early work. And yet, Dunsany remains integral to the tradition of the supernatural in literature as well, and not only for his decisive influence on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, his most notable disciple; his own work possesses a richness of texture that makes it inexhaustibly rewarding. The notion that Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, who became the eighteenth Baron Dunsany (pronounced Dun-SAY-ny) upon his father’s death in 1899, would become a central figure in twentieth-century fantasy would have struck the author himself as little short of fantastic. Certainly there was little in his background or early upbringing to suggest that Dunsany would be anything other than an average scion of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His birth in London on July 24, 1878, is not insignificant, for it highlighted the fact that Dunsany would remain Anglo-Irish to the end of his days, with perhaps a slightly greater emphasis on the first element of that compound. A devoted Unionist who loathed the Nationalists who wished to tear Ireland away from Great Britain (in later years he would speak bitterly of the “Disunited Kingdom”), Dunsany regularly alternated his living quarters from Dunsany Castle in County Meath to his home at Dunsall Priory, Shoreham, Kent. During his early education, at Eton and Sandhurst, he showed no particular literary bent; and his first published work, a mediocre poem in the Pall Mall Magazine for September 1897, did little to indicate that Dunsany would, in the course of a fifty-year career, produce dozens of novels and plays and hundreds of short stories and poems, and would receive accolades from both sides of the Atlantic and from critics ranging from Rebecca West and Graham Greene to H. L. Mencken and William Rose Benét.
But then, in 1904, Dunsany took it into his mind to write The Gods of Pegana. Because he had no literary reputation, he was forced to subsidise its publication by Elkin Mathews the next year; but never again would Dunsany have to pay for the issuance of any of his work. This very slim volume, scarcely 20,000 words in length, created a sensation among both readers and critics—especially after a favourable review by the poet Edward Thomas in the London Daily Chronicle—and could well be said to have introduced something quite new in literature. What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods—a cosmogony, however, whose aim was not the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s immortal dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” (preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray). For Dunsany, who was probably an atheist, the creator god ManaYood-Sushai was not a replacement for either the jealous god of the Old Testament or the loving god of the New, but a symbol for the transience and ephemerality of all creation: it is not through any conscious act that Mana brought the worlds into existence; those worlds are, instead, merely the dreams that arise in his mind, ruled over by “small gods” who, nevertheless, exercise awesome power over their little realms. One day Skarl, whose continual drumming keeps Mana asleep and dreaming, will cease to pound his drum, and Mana will wake, and the worlds will vanish like bubbles in the air. . . . What could possibly have led Dunsany to fashion such an extraordinary universe of pure imagination? The literary influences operating on his work are difficult to specify, especially since Dunsany, although the author of three substantial autobiographies, is himself rather cagey in speaking of his literary antecedents. It has long been recognised that both the archaic cast and the stately cadences of Dunsany’s prose style derive from his thorough familiarity with the language of the King James Bible. But the multiplicity of gods in Dunsany’s pantheon, as well as their creation in a spirit of tenuous beauty rather than cosmic truth, may also suggest the influence of Graeco-Roman mythology, and Dunsany himself admits as much. His inability to master Greek in youth left me with a curious longing for the mighty lore of the Greeks, of which I had had glimpses like a child seeing wonderful flowers
through the shut gates of a garden; and it may have been the retirement of the Greek gods from my vision after I left Eton that eventually drove me to satisfy some such longing by making gods unto myself, as I did in my first two books. (Patches of Sunlight 30) But a philosophical influence can also be conjectured. Dunsany read Nietzsche in 1904, just around the time he wrote The Gods of Pegana, and we can detect the presence of the German iconoclast in numerous conceptions and perhaps even in its ponderous phraseology, so similar to the prose-poetic rhythms of Thus Spake Zarathustra. In effect, Dunsany was seeking to fuse the naïveté and spirit of wonder that had led primitive humanity to invent its gods with a very modern sensibility that recognised the insignificance of mankind amidst those incalculable vortices of space and time that modern science had uncovered. Dunsany went on to produce, over the next decade and a half, perhaps the most remarkable body of fantasy literature that the twentieth century can claim: the story collections Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), Fifty-one Tales (1915), The Last Book of Wonder (1916), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), and two collections of plays, Five Plays (1914) and Plays of Gods and Men (1917). These volumes are, however, far from constituting a uniform or monolithic body of work. It is true that Time and the Gods is an avowed sequel to The Gods of Pegana, elaborating upon the Pegana mythology and emphasising the transience of the gods themselves in the face of the unrelenting scythe of Time; and several tales in other volumes—notably “The Sword of Welleran” and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”—could be said to have initiated the subgenre of sword and sorcery, in which heroic battles in fantastic lands are the focus. But in a substantial proportion of other tales the “real” world begins to encroach insidiously upon the realm of pure imagination, and it is this dynamic fusion of reality and fantasy that frequently engenders some of the most evocative and and poignant moments in Dunsany’s early work. And yet, that “real” world was never absent from Dunsany’s imagination, if we are to take him at his own word. In noting how, at an early age, he saw a hare in the garden of Sir Joseph Prestwich, Dunsany goes on to remark in his first autobiography, Patches of Sunlight (1938):
If ever I have written of Pan, out in the evening, as though I had really seen him, it is mostly a memory of that hare. If I thought that I was a gifted individual whose inspirations came sheer from outside earth and transcended common things, I should not write this book; but I believe that the wildest flights of the fancies of any of us have their homes with Mother Earth. (9) A little later he writes more generally: The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far behind these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them. (20–21) Many of Dunsany’s devotees, who have cherished his early work precisely because of its otherworldly remoteness, will be startled by these passages; but these words will gain still more relevance when we consider the long course of Dunsany’s later writing. The most remarkable feature of Dunsany’s early tales and plays is their prose style; but the essence of that style has frequently been misconstrued. Dunsany’s style is not nearly as dense or adjective-laden as of other writers of poetic prose—John Lyly, Sir Thomas Browne, William Morris, Oscar Wilde (especially in his fairy tales), Arthur Symons, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. Instead, Dunsany’s most powerful effects are engendered by a daring use of symbol, metaphor, and simile. In “In the Land of Time,” an army quixotically seeks to beard Time in his lair, but Time hurls a handful of years at them—“and the knees of the army stiffened, and the beards grew and turned grey” (In the Land of Time 66). In this sense much of Dunsany’s work aligns itself with the tradition of the fable, especially in its use of a transparent moral and its paring away of all extraneous narrative features (including, in many cases, character or landscape description) that do not bear upon the tale’s outcome. An important feature of Dunsany’s style is his
singularly felicitous invention of imaginary names—names not devised at random, but carefully coined to create dim echoes of Greek, Arabic, Asian or other mythologies, and so to convey implications of antiquity, holiness, and exotic beauty. Although the books of Dunsany’s first fifteen years as a writer established his fame throughout the English-speaking world—especially after his tales began appearing in the London Saturday Review and in H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set—one can also detect a certain shift in Dunsany’s own attitude toward his work. This shift becomes most evident in The Book of Wonder. The stories in this volume—inspired by paintings by Sidney H. Sime, whose imaginative illustrations to Dunsany’s early books were in no small part responsible for their popularity—reveal a wry, owlish humour that constitutes a virtual parody of the “gods and men” scenarios that had enraptured his early readers. In story after story, characters of dubious honesty receive a fitting comeuppance at the hands of the gods. It is a matter of taste whether one likes this development in Dunsany’s manner. One of those who did not was H. P. Lovecraft, whose appreciation for Dunsany’s work generally bordered upon the idolatrous. In a letter he commented astutely: As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity. He was ashamed to be uncritically naive, and began to step aside from his tales and visibly smile at them even as they unfolded. Instead of remaining what the true fantaisiste must be—a child in a child’s world of dream—he became anxious to show that he was really an adult good-naturedly pretending to be a child in a child’s world. This hardening-up began to show, I think, in The Book of Wonder. (Selected Letters 5.354) It is also possible that the outbreak of World War I had something to do with this evolution. The preface to The Last Book of Wonder suggests that Dunsany—who had already seen action in the Boer War at the turn of the century and had enlisted in the Coldstream Guards—did not expect to survive the conflict. He did indeed have a close brush with death, but it occurred during the Dublin riots of 1916, when his car was ambushed and he was hit in the face by a rebel’s bullet. In the end Dunsany did not get
sent overseas, but his visits to some of the battlefields in France were recorded in the poignant and lugubrious volume Unhappy Far-Off Things (1919). After the war, a change seemed to be in order. Following Tales of Three Hemispheres Dunsany wrote almost no short stories for the next five or six years. A spectacularly successful American lecture tour in 1919–20 cemented his reputation—a reputation, incidentally, that now rested largely on his plays. His early dramas had been staged in both Ireland and England to great success, and in 1916 a Dunsany craze swept the United States, as each one of the Five Plays was simultaneously produced in a different offBroadway theatre in New York. The Gods of the Mountain remained Dunsany’s most popular play, and it may well be his greatest; in its depiction of seven beggars who boldly strive to pass themselves off as the green jade gods on the top of a mountain, it comes close to capturing the gravity of Greek tragedy, but not without a certain Nietzschean awareness of the passing of the divine from human affairs. If (1921), his only fulllength play, is an exhilarating meditation on time and chance. Later volumes—Plays of Near and Far (1922), Alexander and Three Small Plays (1925), and Seven Modern Comedies (1928)—also contain outstanding work. But Dunsany himself felt the need to strike out in new directions. He abandoned the short story for a time and turned to novel writing. After producing a charming but insubstantial picaresque tale, The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922), he wrote the gorgeous otherworldly fantasy, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), in a splendid return to his early manner. Both The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) and The Blessing of Pan (1927) have their distinctive charms; the latter in particular is a lost jewel of fantastic literature in its simultaneous depiction of the triumph of nature over modern civilisation and the triumph of paganism over Christianity. These novels constitute, in their greater emphasis on character portrayal and the complexities arising out of a sustained narrative, a development from his early fantasy work. One particular concern that began to develop around this time was what might be termed the conflict of humanity and nature. Even his early, otherworldly fantasies could be said to have as their focus the need for humanity’s reunification with the natural world; but with the passing of the years Dunsany felt he had to convey the message more forcefully. Mankind
in the twentieth century was heading in the wrong direction—a direction that might, in the end, lead to its destruction, or what is worse, its merited overthrow by the rest of the natural world. Industrialisation and commerce (with its accompanying prevalence of advertising, one of Dunsany’s bêtes noires) were threatening to rob the world of its stores of wonder and fantasy, and both the animal and the plant kingdom were within their rights to throw off the shackles that subjugated them to a race that no longer merited its superiority. One of the chief ways Dunsany conveyed this topos was by the use of a nonhuman perspective. At its most innocuous, this means the attempt to capture the world as viewed through the eyes and minds of an animal; hence we have the delightful short novel My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), in which a clergyman, when sufficiently plied with wine, speaks of his firm belief that in a past life he was a dog. Years later this novel was writ large in another lost classic of fantasy, The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950), in which a bluff, no-nonsense British officer, having offended an Indian swami in his club, finds his spirit lodged in a bewildering succession of nonhuman bodies—a fox, an eel, a cat, a mountain goat, even a jinn. The wondrous felicity with which Dunsany seems to capture the exact sentiments of the animals in question makes this work a delight in spite of its seemingly random structure. A sharper edge, however, is found in many other of Dunsany’s works of this kind. In the play The Old Folk of the Centuries (1930) a butterfly who is magically turned into a little boy quickly finds the life of a human being far too constricting for comfort, and he finds a convenient witch to transform him back into a butterfly. Another play, Lord Adrian (written in 1922–23 but not published until 1933), comes close to misanthropy. Here an elderly nobleman is injected with the glands from an ape and, rejuvenated, produces an offspring, Lord Adrian; but Adrian’s partial animal ancestry leads him to plan an overthrow of the human race, since “I regard the domination of all life by man as the greatest evil that ever befell the earth” (Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer 336). Even the otherwise mildmannered Colonel Polders, like Gulliver, gradually gains a “distiaste for the human race” (13) after repeated deadly encounters with humans. Perhaps the greatest of all instances of this misanthropy occurs in a short play, The Use of Man (in Plays for Earth and Air, 1937). Here the spirit of a not very bright young man is summoned to a council of the spirits of animals
somewhere in space, and he has an extraordinarily difficult time justifying the “use” of the human race in the natural scheme of things. He finds that no animal, aside from the slavishly devoted dog, will stand up for his species: the crow doesn’t like man’s guns; the bear resents the fact that he is locked up in zoos; the mouse hates man’s traps. At the very last a single animal comes to man’s rescue: the mosquito finds a “use” in man—he is its food. From the very earliest of his works, Dunsany occasionally took pleasure in envisioning the eventual extirpation of the human race. Several of the exquisite prose poems in Fifty-one Tales have this as their focus, although in many cases it seems part and parcel of the “cosmic” perspective that Dunsany had adopted at this juncture. In later works it is industrialism that will bring a fitting doom to our race, ridding the world of a dangerous menace and leaving the earth free for the animals to resume their sway. The potent one-act play The Evil Kettle (in Alexander and Three Small Plays) may be Dunsany’s most effective embodiment of this idea. Here the wellknown anecdote of the young James Watt looking at a steaming teakettle and envisioning therefrom the awesome power of steam is given a nightmarish twist: at night the Devil comes to Watt and forces him to glimpse a hideous vision of the future with its “dark, Satanic mills” and the earth’s natural beauty corrupted by mechanisation. But the Devil casts a spell over him and makes him forget what he has just seen, and we are left with a haunting sense of historic inevitability. Dunsany’s later treatments of this theme—notably his late novel The Last Revolution (1951), which depicts machines revolting from humanity’s control—are, regrettably, much inferior to this concentrated bit of venom. One of the subtlest of Dunsany’s treatments of the man-versus-nature theme occurs in what is probably his finest novel, The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). This work is his first novel set entirely in Ireland. Although some of his early stories had appeared in such Irish periodicals as the Shanachie and the Irish Homestead, Dunsany himself frequently admitted that he preferred to invent his myths out of whole cloth rather than to adapt existing ones. And yet, he could hardly be unaware that a literary revival was going on in Ireland at exactly the time he began writing. His early plays had been produced at the Abbey Theatre, and he himself was enthusiastic about the plays of J. M. Synge and others. He was well acquainted with James Stephens, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and other prominent figures in
Irish literature. Yeats assembled a slim volume, Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany, for publication by the Cuala Press in 1912, in the introduction to which he expressed the following pensive regret: When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany’s work I thought that he would more help this change [i.e., the Irish literary revival] if he could bring his imagination into the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not have made Slieve-naMon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have changed the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and scientific. (Prefaces and Introductions 140) This is remarkably perspicacious, and it turned out to have been prophetic: Yeats seems to have sensed that Dunsany would have to renounce his devotion to otherworldly fantasy before he could treat the real world of Ireland in his fiction. There is a gradual decline of the purely fantastic element throughout the entiire course of his work, to the point that such later novels as Up in the Hills (1935), Rory and Bran (1936), Guerrilla (1944), and His Fellow Men (1952) have nothing fantastic or supernatural in them, although they nonetheless retain that ethereal delicacy that remained Dunsany’s keynote. The Curse of the Wise Woman is a poignant novel that explores the numerous conflicts in Irish life—Catholic and Protestant, city and country, progress and tradition, political stability and violence—in a scenario in which the supernatural is reduced to the vanishing point, and may not come into play at all: a “wise woman” (witch), enraged at the threatened destruction of a bog by a development company, seems to summon up the power of nature and bring about a ferocious storm that wipes out the company’s machines and saves the bog. Dunsany wisely neglects to clarify
whether the wise woman actually summoned the storm of whether the storm came by a lucky accident. The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939) is another superb Irish novel, touchingly describing the fate of a young woman who thinks she is a child of the fairies and finds herself working unhappily in a factory far from the fields and bogs she loves. It is perhaps the chief example of what might be called Dunsany’s late renunciation of fantasy. At the very outset we know clearly that Mona is not a child of the fairies but the offspring of an illicit sexual encounter between Lady Gurtrim and an Irish labourer; but the strength of Mona’s belief creates a kind of ersatz fantasy atmosphere as distinctive as it is compelling. Other tales written around this time— including numerous short skits written for Punch in the 1940s—are much less flattering to Irish self-esteem, and may have had some role in what appears to be a deliberate avoidance of Dunsany’s work on the part of Irish writers and critics. The culmination is reached in “Helping the Fairies” (Strand Magazine, May–June 1947), in which an Englishman casually cuts down a thorn tree that the local residents believe was sacred to the fairies; when no disaster falls upon the Englishman’s head, the locals take matters into their own hands and kill him. How did a writer so well known in his time, and so showered with critical acclaim, lapse so far into obscurity? A number of factors having nothing to do with the merit, or lack of it, of Dunsany’s work conspired against him. First, fantasy has always been relatively restricted in its appeal, and in the course of the twentieth century it gradually dropped out of mainstream fiction and became a narrow “genre” somewhere between science fiction and horror fiction, and incurring the critical disdain that those literary modes suffered. Second, Dunsany’s ambiguous involvement with his Irish literary compatriots—to say nothing of his Unionist sympathies at a time when most leading Irish writers were Nationalists— caused his work to be either scorned or deliberately ignored by those who should have been acknowledging it as a distinctive contribution to the national literature. And third, Dunsany, like so many writers, wrote too much. Although to my mind he maintained a remarkably high consistency over a lifetime’s work, he had the misfortune to write what many regarded as his best work quite early in his career—those tales of bejeweled fantasy that we designate by the adjective “Dunsanian”—so that even his devotees,
such as H. P. Lovecraft, found his later work not entirely to their taste and failed to champion it. But Dunsany’s presence as an influence upon contemporary literature is not entirely insignificant. His plays may have fallen out of fashion, but they were appreciated by no less a figure than Pirandello; as late as 1950 Brooks Atkinson, reviewing a New York revival of The Gods of the Mountain, was noting that Dunsany’s dramatic work was by no means deserving of the oblivion that had overtaken it. The sword-and-sorcery tradition he had initiated was developed by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. And Lovecraft’s worshipful discussion of Dunsany in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” did much to inspire interest in his work among later devotees of Lovecraft, so that such editors as Lin Carter and Darrell Schweitzer strove to bring some of the best of it back into print. Dunsany was, however, not one to confuse popularity with merit. To the end of his life he remained convinced of the high calling of the genuine artist, and he knew that artists must sometimes toll in obscurity, and in the face of prevailing public opinion. In the early essay “Nowadays” (1918) he speaks of the poet’s function: It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one’s own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God. (Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer 138) By these criteria, Dunsany, although doing his best work in prose, was a poet indeed.
iv. M. R. James: The Pinnacle of the Ghost Story In one sense, it is exceptionally odd that M. R. James would become the leading twentieth-century author of ghost stories; in another sense— especially when we consider the sort of ghost stories James came to write— it seems eminently natural and inevitable. James led a double, perhaps a triple, life—first as one of the most distinguished scholars of mediaeval manuscripts and early Christianity of his time, second as a noted professor and administrator at Cambridge University and then at Eton College, and finally as a writer of ghost stories. It is no surprise that only that last body of work continues to attract the attention and fascination of readers worldwide: James’s scholarship, although fundamentally sound, has now been largely superseded, and in any event its audience is necessarily limited to a small cadre of the learned, whereas the ghost stories are of universal appeal and have never been surpassed by those many authors who have chosen to pay them tribute by imitation. James’s ghost stories were manifestly an amusement of his lighter hours, although they need not be esteemed lightly on that account. We may date the commencement of his supernatural writing to the rather frivolous tale “A Night in King’s College Chapel” (probably written in 1892), but it was not long before he produced weightier work. A celebrated meeting of the Chitchat Society (a literary and social group at Cambridge) on October 28, 1893, saw James read his two earliest ghost stories, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “Lost Hearts.” Thus began a long tradition, extending well in the 1920s, when James would read drafts of his tales to a succession of friends, collegians, and other groups, usually at Christmastime. Although these first two stories were published in magazines in 1895, James would very likely not have considered book publication of his tales had not a close friend, James McBryde, undertaken the task of illustrating several of them. McBryde’s sudden death in 1904, after completing only four illustrations, appears to have led James to issue Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904) as a tribute to his friend’s memory. His next collection, More Ghost Stories of
an Antiquary (1911), appeared during his relatively unhappy tenure as Provost of King’s College. It was at this time that a struggle between the “pious” and the “ungodly” began to emerge for control of Cambridge’s intellectual culture; James, manifestly on the side of the “pious,” was notably uncharitable toward such of his “ungodly” Cambridge colleagues as James George Frazer and Bertrand Russell. The war years were particularly stressful: Cambridge seemed emptied of its finest youths, many of whom (such as Rupert Brooke, whose participation in Cambridge theatricals had attracted James’s admiration) left their bodies on the battlefields of France. The return to Eton in 1918, this time as Provost, could only have been a relief. As Provost of King’s, James had been criticised for failing to be an intellectual pioneer; his scholarship seemed increasingly remote and unrelated to present-day concerns. A close friend, A. C. Benson, who had known James since his Eton days, wrote somewhat uncharitably in his diary: “his mind is the mind of a nice child—he hates and fears all problems, all speculation; all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous” (Cox 125). Eton was, however, exactly the place for James: his instinctive empathy with the enchantments and travails of schoolboy life, the unaffectedly avuncular or even grandfatherly air he exhibited, and the prodigious learning that he carried so unassumingly were perfectly suited to the education of British youth. Administrative mundanities were safely in the hands of a Head Master; James, although he faced the terror of dining with the King and Queen once every year, could devote himself wholly to nurturing his charges with quiet encouragement. It was during his provostship that his two final collections of ghost stories, A Thin Ghost (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), appeared, followed by the gathering of all four volumes, plus a few additional tales, as The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). Such important works of scholarship as The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), and such popular works as The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919) and Abbeys (1925), also appeared. James’s learning of the Danish language paid dividends when he translated some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales into English in 1930. It would be easy to pass off James’s ghost stories as light-hearted amusements; James himself lends some credence to this view in many of his own remarks. Indeed, many scholars on James have unwittingly belittled his work by asserting that “His stories are straightforward tales of
terror and the supernatural, utterly devoid of any deeper meaning” (Penzoldt 191), or that “his fiction . . . was simply the bagatelle for an idle hour, the construction of a delicate edifice of suspense with which to entertain the young people whose company he so much enjoyed” (Briggs 125). To be sure, a more exhaustive study of James’s life and scholarly work will shed additional light on some of the telling autobiographical elements in the stories—his wide-ranging travels as the source of the authentic local colour in such stories as “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “Number 13”; his pathological fear of spiders in “The Ash-Tree”; the extraordinary re-creation of mediaeval Latin in the opening of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” and of a seventeenth-century trial in “Martin’s Close”—but even this does not get us close to the philosophical thrust of the ghost stories. Richard William Pfaff maintained, correctly, that “Writers on ghost stories . . . fail not so much in praising MRJ’s stories too little—indeed, it might be argued that if anything the tendency is to overpraise them as a whole—but in paying little or no attention to the really remarkable thing about them, the brilliance of the antiquarian background” (415). But Pfaff himself may not have been quite as precise in this formulation as one might wish; for it is not merely the “antiquarian background” (which, in one sense, is merely utilised to create a patina of verisimilitude) that is remarkable, but the purpose to which James puts it. James was sufficiently well-read in the traditions of supernatural fiction to know that terror is most effective when emerging from the depths of history. Where he differed from his predecessors—especially the Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who actually set their works in the mediaeval era in order to enhance the reader’s suspension of disbelief in the supernatural manifestations they exhibited—was in suggesting the pervasiveness of the past’s influence upon the present: his tales, generally set only a few decades prior to their date of writing, establish a continuity between past and present in which the present is entirely engulfed and rendered fleeting and ineffectual in the face of the heavy cultural burden of prior centuries. Martin Hughes gets close to this idea when he writes: “the premiss of antiquarian stories is that records and relics are very important: when properly studied they are extremely revealing of all aspects of life in the past; moreover what they reveal is still important now” (81).
In conveying this conception, James’s protagonists are of central importance. It is a truism to say that James never engages in any detailed psychological analysis of the antiquarians who are the driving force of his tales: they are, in one sense, merely stand-ins for himself—uniformly male, scholarly, somewhat unworldly, and engaged in investigating the past largely to satisfy curiosity. Jack Sullivan has remarked of these figures: The characters are antiquaries, not merely because the past enthralls them, but because the present is a near vacuum. They surround themselves with rarefied paraphernalia from the past—engravings, rare books, altars, tombs, coins, and even such things as doll’s houses and ancient whistles— seemingly because they cannot connect with anything in the present. (75) There may not be sufficient textual evidence to support this interpretation, but it is provocative nonetheless. What has, however, gone largely unnoticed is that there is a subtle but unmistakable progression between these seemingly “innocent” characters (all of whom bring doom upon themselves by actively seeking to probe into ancient secrets that they know full well may be dangerous) and the avowedly “evil” figures who people some of James’s most memorable tales. The redoubtable Mr. Abney in “Lost Hearts,” who seeks prolonged life by eating the still-beating hearts of little children, is described as “a man wrapped up in his books” (Count Magnus 15), while Karswell, in “Casting the Runes,” is merely a scholar gone wrong—one who is so embittered at his failure to gain recognition as a man of learning that he turns to occultism as an act of revenge. It may be worth noting that the motif of supernatural revenge, very common in James’s stories, may itself have been a product of his own scholarly interests, specifically his interest in apocalyptic literature. Early in his career he had noted that this literature “operates on the principle that the punishment should fit the crime, with much attention to the often gory details by which this principle is worked out” (cited in Pfaff 109). It is here, I believe, that James’s ghost stories, his antiquarian scholarship, and his religion become inextricably fused. Shane Leslie, a longtime friend of James, made the seemingly startling remark that “his belief in ghosts marched parallel with his religion” (45), although he does not elucidate the statement. Another friend, Stephen Gaselee, has portrayed James’s religion as follows:
He was a man of simple and deep religious feeling. Learned biblical scholar as he was, he did not think much of the “higher criticism”, at any rate when it was destructive; and I have heard him say that the biblical documents were subjected to criticism not only unfair in itself, but of a kind that no one would ever have dreamed of applying to the secular literary remains of antiquity. (429–30) That last sentence is of the highest importance; for although James may not have been a dogmatic or fundamentalist Christian, his hostility to the intellectual ferment of his time in matters of religion—the shock-waves following Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859); the “Higher Criticism” that showed the evolution of Biblical texts over centuries and made it increasingly unlikely that they were direct revelations from God; the gradual but inexorable shift of intellectual opinion from unquestioned piety to agnosticism and even atheism—is evident. In his ghost stories, James uses such devices as occultism (the perversion of religion into impious magic and sorcery) and the misuse or misconstrual of Biblical passages as a warning on the dangers of straying from orthodoxy. The Bible’s own warnings on the dangers of being tempted by Satan are so frequent that it can easily lead the weak or the vicious—such as James Wilson, the redoubtable landowner of “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”—into becoming one of the Devil’s party. So much attention has been given to the technique of James’s ghost stories that insufficient attention has been paid to their deeper meanings. This is particularly the case with James’s ghosts. H. P. Lovecraft wrote pungently: In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man —and usually touched before it is seen. (S 86) All this is very entertaining and, indeed, by no means off the mark; but Lovecraft fails to probe the true symbolism of James’s ghosts. They are “lean, dwarfish, and hairy” because they thus embody the primitivism that
stands in stark contrast to the learned, rational, sceptical antiquarians who, for James, represented the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not insignificant that Somerton, in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “screamed out . . . like a beast” (Count Magnus 118) when encountering the horror in the well: contact with the primitive reduces even the most civilised to the level of the subhuman. Related to this whole motif is James’s array of lower-class characters. The fractured and dialectical English in which these characters speak or write is, in one sense, a reflection of James’s well-known penchant for mimicry; but it cannot be denied that there is a certain element of malice in his relentless exhibition of their intellectual failings. The illiteracy of Somerton’s valet in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”; the malapropisms of the bailiff, Mr. Cooper, in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”; the ignorance of the hapless librarian in “The Tractate Middoth”—all these and other characters are made figures of fun, the butt of jests from a man whose own learning is unassailable. And yet, they frequently occupy pivotal places in the narrative: by representing a kind of middle ground between the scholarly protagonists and the aggressively savage ghosts, they frequently sense the presence of the supernatural more quickly and more instinctively than their excessively learned betters can bring themselves to do. Another aspect of James’s characterisation is his women characters—or, rather, their virtual absence from his tales. Even in his own lifetime James, the lifelong bachelor, suffered from accusations of misogyny: in 1896 he opposed the granting of degrees to women at Cambridge, and in 1916–17 he attacked with unwonted viciousness a paper on comparative religion by Jane Harrison in the Classical Review that he regarded as disrespectful to Scripture. Several women appear to have pursued James for his hand in marriage, but he resisted each time. James’s defenders point to his cordial friendships with any number of women, notably Gwendolen McBryde, the widow of his friend James McBryde; but the world of James’s fiction is as devoid of significant female characters as H. P. Lovecraft’s. This need not be regarded as a flaw: James was not writing mimetic fiction that claimed to present a well-rounded portrayal of society at large. He was writing of what he knew—the world of (male) antiquarian scholarship. And yet, the sardonic view of marriage that we find in such a story as “The Rose Garden,” or the annoying Lady Waldrop in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance,” seems to go a bit beyond mere whimsy. What, then, are we to
make of the fact that several of the ghosts in James’s tales create fear through a hideous parody of affection? Who can forget the thing in the well in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” which “slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck” (Count Magnus 117; James’s emphasis)? And yet, it may well be said that for James, as Austin Warren has observed, “It is places, not persons, which are hauntable” (98). In this sense, “Number 13,” otherwise as far as possible from the standard “antiquarian ghost story” that James initiated, is prototypical in its display of a haunted hotel room. Although the locus of horror in James is chiefly situated in cathedrals, abbeys, and other sites where centuries of religious tradition have engendered an inevitable backlash of unorthodoxy among a select band of heretics, horror can also manifest itself in any locale where the long reach of history has had free play—a rose garden, a hedge maze, even a library. The mundanity of these settings is vital to James’s methodology of the ghost story, which (as he wrote in the preface to his second collection) is designed to elicit the reader’s awareness that “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!” (Count Magnus 255). It is generally agreed that the tales in M. R. James’s final two collections of ghost stories, A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), to say nothing of the stories that he gathered only in his Collected Ghost Stories (1931) or did not collect at all, are generally inferior to those of his earlier volumes. And yet, for a writer as accomplished as James, even his lesser work—and this includes essays, fragments, and even letters—remains of compelling interest. A Thin Ghost and Others appeared shortly after James became Provost of Eton in 1918. The war was over, much to James’s relief; there is some evidence that he felt a certain guilt at pursuing arcane scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, while others were dying in the battlefields of Europe. Unlike the stories in his first two collections, which take for their settings a large segment of the European continent, from France and Germany to Sweden and Denmark, his later tales stay pretty close to home. All are set in England, most of them in out-of-the-way rustic sites where disproof of the supernatural phenomena on display is difficult. It is as if James himself, after spending much of his youth and early adulthood in wide-ranging travels for scholarly and antiquarian purposes, felt the need to re-establish his roots with the country of his birth—especially with the rural
countryside, where he manifestly felt far more at home than in the frenetic megalopolis of London. The extraordinary felicity that James displayed in devising fictitious names for his settings is enviable: it requires a careful consultation of a gazeteer of England to determine that none of the sites mentioned in “A View from a Hill”—Fulnaker Abbey, Oldbourne Church, Lambsfield, Wanstone, Ackford, and Thorfield—have any existence except in James’s imagination. But to say that the names of James’s locales are fictitious is one thing; it is a very different thing to say that they are purely imaginary. His extensive travels, by foot and by bicycle, throughout his native land had rendered every county familiar. It does not, perhaps, take much effort to determine that Seaburgh, in “A Warning to the Curious,” is a thin disguise for Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, or that, in “The Uncommon Prayer-book,” the imaginary towns of Stanford St. Thomas and Stanford Magdalene are probably based upon Stanford on Teme and Stanford Bridge, in Hereford and Worcester. What all this suggests is that James was becoming increasingly disinclined to mask the autobiographical details that form the core of genuine experience at the foundation of many of his tales. This feature may be exhibited most clearly in some of the tales he gathered only in his Collected Ghost Stories or did not collect, or publish, at all. It is scarcely to be denied that James himself is the narrator of “Wailing Well,” a tale that sent shivers through the Boy Scout troop to whom he read it in 1927. “The Fenstanton Witch,” although set in the eighteenth century, draws clearly upon James’s intimate familiarity with the history and topography of King’s College, where he was successively a King’s Scholar, Fellow, Dean, and Provost. James’s later tales appear to display a fascination with the technique of the ghost story—specifically, with the attempt to render the supernatural plausible in light of the increasingly militant materialism and secularism that was dominating intellectual thought in his day. Naïve exhibitions of ghosts and vampires were clearly out of the question; extreme indirection now had to be employed. This focus on technique perhaps reaches its apex in “Two Doctors,” which even so devoted a partisan as Michael Cox calls “one of Monty’s least successful stories” (143). And yet, this story hardly deserves the bad press it has received, for it proves to be an extraordinarily clever supernatural detective story (James was devoted to mystery and detective tales, to the extent that in one of his articles on ghost stories he
makes a casual and unexplained reference to Captain Hastings, the sidekick of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot) in which all the pieces of the puzzle are laid out for the reader clever enough to place them in their correct sequence and bestow upon them their correct significance. (For a plausible reconstruction, see Lance Arney’s article in Warnings to the Curious.) Another device much used by James in his later tales to create verisimilitude, and to overcome the hard-headed sceptic’s natural incredulity in the face of the supernatural, was narrative distancing. This device is carried perhaps to excess in such a tale as “The Residence at Whitminster,” in which a first-person narrator, acting as a kind of editor, redacts the notes of a Dr. Ashton, letters by Mary Oldys (the niece of Henry Oldys, Dr. Ashton’s successor at the collegiate church at Whitminster), the diary of a Mr. Spearman (Mary’s fiancé), and other documents, all in the effort to present with the utmost indirectness, and with what politicians might later term plausible deniability, the supernatural phenomena on display. It is possible that this obsession with technque was the result of James’s exhaustive study of the history and theory of the ghostly tale, a work chiefly undertaken in the 1920s as a concomitant to his fascination with one of the leading Victorian practitioners of the weird tale, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. James testifies that he pored through entire runs of such periodicals as the Dublin University Magazine and All the Year Round in the hunt for previously unattributed works by Le Fanu; and although he erred in a few cases, his work did result in the addition of several tales to the Le Fanu corpus, as exemplified by James’s landmark edition of Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923). It is very likely that this work led James to reformulate, or at any rate refine, his own nebulous views on what constitutes a ghost story and how it should best be told. His first words on the matter occur in the brief preface to More GhostStories of an Antiquary. Here, in a very short space, he manages to outline three principles of ghost story writing: 1) “the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day”; 2) “the ghost should be malevolent or odious”; 3) “the technical terms of ‘occultism’ . . . tend to put the mere ghost story . . . upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than imaginative” (Count Magnus 244). In his later writings on the ghost story— such as his introduction to V. H. Collins’s Ghosts and Marvels (1924),
“Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” (1929), and “Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!” (1931)—James does not so much revise as lend further nuance to these principles. And yet, there is a question as to how faithfully James himself adhered to his own dicta when writing ghost stories. The notion of “familiarity,” especially as regards characterisation and setting (both of time and of place), was for James a matter of some elasticity. Although he remarks that a setting as remote as the twelfth or thirteenth century is not likely to induce a reader to remark, “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!,” we quickly see that any number of James’s tales are set, or at least begin, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or early nineteenth century. James of course does not require absolute contemporaneity: he does remark in the introduction to Ghosts and Marvels that For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. “Thirty years ago,” “Not long before the war,” are very proper openings. If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it; or . . . you may set the scene directly in the desired epoch, which I think is hardest to do with success. (Haunted Dolls’ House 248) It can readily be seen that James has adopted each of these options in his various tales. And yet, I believe that James’s own antiquarianism allowed him to believe that even the seventeenth century was a period of relative recency that requires only the citing of certain telling historical details to elicit the reader’s sense of vital reality. Whether the passing of another full century since the writing of James’s earliest ghost stories—and, perhaps more significantly, the collapse of historical learning even on the part of many readers who claim to be well educated—has rendered this conception a bit more dubious is something for which James cannot be held responsible. But James exemplified brilliantly in his own work his corresponding principles of “atmosphere and a nicely managed crescendo.” He goes on to state: “Let us be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and into this calm environment let the ominous
thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage” (Haunted Dolls’ House 248). Here James may have been combating the luridness that he censured in many of the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a luridness whose recrudescence he would also censure in some of the pulp magazine fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Aside from Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, no writer of supernatural fiction has achieved such celebrity on such a relatively small body of work as M. R. James. Even the least of his ghost stories exhibits a craftsmanship and attention to detail that must be the envy of more hasty and prolific scriveners, while the fertility of conception that allowed him to ring so many ingenious changes upon the one topos of the ghost or revenant can only elicit our admiration. James and his disciples have attracted a small cadre of devotees intent on preserving their work, if only by means of the small press, and, more valuably, on explicating its smallest particulars. But James’s ghost stories are far more than the property of a coterie: by revealing to the full the possibilities of aesthetic achievement in the tale of supernatural horror, they become a contribution to the literature of the ages. James would no doubt have been surprised at the literary legacy he fostered. This legacy is exhibited not so much in the work of those friends and colleagues of James who tended to produce uninspired pastiches of his style and manner as in certain other writers who used the antiquarian ghost story as the springboard for imaginative creations of their own. The three Benson brothers—A. C., E. F., and R. H.—all wrote supernatural tales, and E. F. was present at the legendary meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893 when James read his first tales; but the tales of E. F. Benson, the best of the three, although not written with quite the meticulous precision of James’s, tend to be of broader range and theme. It can by no means be claimed that such writers as Walter de la Mare, L. P. Hartley, Oliver Onions, L. T. C. Rolt, Russell Kirk, or Robert Aickman are in any sense merely imitators of James; indeed, one suspects that the greater emphasis that many of these writers place upon the psychological analysis of ghostly phenomena, especially as they affect the victim of them, is a direct result of James’s apparent lack of interest in this regard. In any event, one would like to think that James—whose views of his predecessors and contemporaries in the realm of supernatural fiction were not always charitable—would have taken some pride in the tradition he instigated, for all his deprecation of his own
work as merely an exercise in pleasant shudder-coining. There is much to be said for the scholarly reserve, indirection, and subtlety of James’s tales, so strikingly in contrast to the loud, brash, and frequently vulgar effusions that clutter the supernatural field today. That his stories have survived a century or more while those of his noisier successors seem destined to lapse into merited oblivion should itself be regarded as “a warning to the curious.”
X. Other Early Twentieth-Century Masters Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and James were only the pinnacles of a remarkable outpouring of weird writing in the first four decades of the twentieth century—a period that, even more than the later nineteenth century, can qualify not merely as a “deluge” of supernaturalism but, in many ways, a high-water mark such as the field never saw before or since. The number of authors who extensively addressed the weird, and the bewideringly wide array of their work, make it difficult to summarise or classify beyond the broadest parameters. It is possible that new markets, both among book publishers and among magazine outlets, had something to do with this efflorescence, although in my judgment a more significant factor was merely the accumulated heritage of weird fiction—a heritage in which the centrality of Poe’s conception of the short story, to say nothing of his dynamism in the use of supernatural tropes, was finally realised. Still, markets had some bearing on the matter. In the United States, the Munsey magazines—notably the Argosy (founded in 1882 as the Golden Argosy)—as well as other magazines such as the Black Cat (1895–1922) provided occasional havens for weird matter; in England, the Strand pioneered the publication of both weird and detective fiction. And yet, it is surprising to note that the prodigality of weird writing in this period was very largely a British phenomenon; so many British writers, from D. H. Lawrence to Walter de la Mare, contributed to the form that Americans were left in the dust; when they finally began producing their own work, they chiefly did so in Weird Tales (1923f.) and other pulp magazines—a phenomenon we shall take up in chapters XII and XIII.
A sign of the definitive arrival of weird fiction as a recognised genre may be found in the prevalence of noteworthy anthologies during this period. Such landmark compilations as Julian Hawthorne’s Lock and Key Library (1909), Joseph Lewis French’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1920), and Dorothy L. Sayers’s three volumes of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928–34; published in the United States as The Omnibus of Crime) are only the tip of the iceberg of the many anthologies that sought to canonise the most significant examples of weird writing; this work reached a capstone in the still-unexcelled Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944), edited by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser.
i. The Evolution of the Ghost Story The ghost story continued to find adherents, although in the course of the decades the form evolved significantly, so that by the end of this period any naive or straightforward presentation of ghostly phenomena was by common consent regarded as beneath consideration. Very little need be said of the work of the various conscious imitators of M. R. James—E. G. Swain (The Stoneground Ghost Tales, 1912), R. H. Malden (Nine Ghosts, 1943), A. N. L. Munby (The Alabaster Hand, 1949), and several even lesser lights. If James’s own work occasionally descends to tameness, the work of his imitators is by and large so feeble and uninspired as to make his own work shine the more conspicuously by comparison. Only the most fanatical devotees of the English ghost story need trouble themselves with the likes of these. Bernard Capes (1854–1918) wrote a number of ghost stories even before M. R. James, although there is no compelling evidence that any of them influenced James—or anyone else, for that matter; for Capes’s work was rapidly forgotten after his death, and only in recent years has it been resurrected. It is far from contemptible and shows greater imaginative range than that of many others who worked in the ghost story tradition at this juncture. Capes’s weird work may have failed to gain traction because it was never concentrated in discrete volumes but scattered among several collections of his tales, including At a Winter’s Fire (1899), From Door to Door (1900), Plots (1902), Loaves and Fishes (1906), Bag and Baggage (1913), and The Fabulists (1915). I do not pretend to have read the full range of Capes’s supernatural work, but two stories strike me as particularly notable. “An Eddy on the Floor” (in At a Winter’s Fire) presents one of the most distinctive ghosts of the period. This richly textured story of ghostly revenge tells of Major James Shrike, who runs a prison. For some reason, room 47 of the prison is off limits, and the narrator at length ascertains why: it had been occupied by a man (not named in the story, oddly enough) whom the major had for various reasons considered his enemy and who had been allowed to starve and die in that grim cell. The manner in which the
prisoner subsequently manifests himself is highly unusual, as the narrator (an acquaintance of the major) relates: I looked, and saw twirling on the floor, in the patch of radiance cast by the lamp, a little eddy of dust, it seemed. This eddy was never still, but went circling in that stagnant place without apparent cause or influence; and, as it circled, it moved slowly on by wall and corner, so that presently in its progress it must reach us where we stood. (176) The symbolism of the eddy of dust is never explicitly stated: can it suggest the parched throat of the hapless inmate as he is left to die both of starvation and of thirst? The other especially noteworthy tale by Capes is “The Green Bottle” (in Plots). Once again, the moral premise is routine supernatural revenge—a glassblower, Ephraim Ellis, kills a coworker, Riddick, whereupon the latter haunts him—but in a clever twist, the souls of both individuals are trapped in a bottle that Ellis was blowing at the very moment of his death: It was an ordinary claret bottle, but distorted at the neck. The light struck into and through it. And I looked, and saw that its milky-greenness was in never-ceasing motion. . . . A little palpitating, shuddering blot of terror, human and inhuman, now distended, as if gasping in a momentary respite; now crouching and hugging itself into a shapeless ball, and always steadily, untiringly followed and sprung upon by the thing that had the appearance, through the semi-opaque glass, of a shambling, fatlidded . . . (122) The narrator trails off, unable to face the truth that two human souls have been caught in this hideous fashion. But Capes mars several of his tales by rambling and unfocused narration. Capes died in the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 and probably could have produced good work had he lived. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944) also wrote some creditable ghost stories before M. R. James, although these too were scattered among many
of his volumes and have been collected only recently. By and large, they are distinguished by their variety of tone and motif, their elegance of diction, their vivid evocation both of the English landscape—especially of the Cornwall that was their author’s native region—and of a variety of historical epochs, and perhaps most impressively of all, their quiet professionalism. As we read these stories we are fully aware that they are the product of a noted short story writer, novelist, critic, and scholar—in short, an author thoroughly the master of his trade. Quiller-Couch was chiefly known as a literary scholar—he was also chosen to edit The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), an enormously influential volume that achieved nearly canonical status in the first several decades of the new century, and in 1912 he was appointed the first King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge—but today little but his weird work is read. That work is scattered among no fewer than ten of his short story collections, from his first, Noughts and Crosses (1891) to one of his last, News from the Duchy (1913). Wandering Heath (1895) and Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts (1900) perhaps contain the greatest proportion of weird work, but even these volumes are filled with stories of other types. In reading his stories we are struck by the fact that Quiller-Couch has utilised a great many of the tropes and elements known to weird fiction: the standard ghost of course appears frequently, but so does the witch (“The Lady of the Ship”), reincarnation (“A Blue Pantomime”), metempsychosis (“Psyche,” “The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem”), the “familiar” or “brownie” (“The Laird’s Luck”), and personality exchange (“Mutual Exchange, Limited”). This last story is of particular interest, in that it points to a recurring motif in Quiller-Couch’s work. The anomalous melding of two personalities is also the subject of a story in Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts, “The Room of Mirrors”: this account of two men who hate each other precisely because they are so much alike in temperament is a gripping suspense tale with only the faintest hint of the supernatural (one man, who has just seen his nemesis kill himself, seems to see his own face on the corpse). However, this topos becomes frankly supernatural not only in “Mutual Exchange, Limited” but in Quiller-Couch’s last completed novel, Foe-Farrell (1918), where two implacable enemies do in fact exchange personalities.
Quiller-Couch is also a master of tonal variation. Such a tale of brooding horror as “Old Æson”—inspired by the birth of his son Bevil— can be placed next to the grotesquerie of “Widdershins,” the macabre humour of “My Grandfather, Hendry Watty,” the self-parodic humour of “John and the Ghosts,” and the delicate wistfulness of “The Talking Ships.” Understandably, Quiller-Couch frequently melded the supernatural into the other modes of fiction in which he habitually worked—the adventure story in “The Haunted Dragoon,” “The Seventh Man,” and “The Haunted Yacht,” the historical tale in “The Horror on the Stair” and “The Lady of the Ship,” and the military narrative in what is perhaps his most famous and perhaps finest weird tale, “The Roll-Call of the Reef.” Throughout all his fiction Quiller-Couch eschewed the idea of a “message.” His tales and novels were meant to provide entertainment, nothing more. As a result, his weird tales rarely have any overarching philosophy; but now and again some deeper concerns appear. “Oceanus” is, plainly, a religious allegory, attempting to answer the question that has perplexed countless generations of Christians: Why is there death and suffering in the world, if God is both omnipotent and benevolent? Whether the answer Quiller-Couch provides here is acceptable to all readers is beside the point; what is relevant is the author’s intent to probe the question, and to do so by means of the supernatural. Such a story as “The Magic Shadow”— in which a boy’s shadow, in the shape of a girl, is in the end seen to be a metaphor for the poet, with his androgynous soul—seems to me distinctly in advance of its time. Tales of this kind may represent a minority in Quiller-Couch’s output, but their mere existence demonstrates that the author saw weird fiction as a viable vehicle for metaphorically treating profound questions of morality and existence. Very little attention need be paid to the ghost stories of Kate (1851– 1935) and Hesketh Pearson (1876–1922), a mother-son literary team who, in Ghosts: Being the Adventures of Flaxman Low (1899), had the dubious distinction of creating the first “psychic” detective. In twelve stories, first published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898–99, the Pearsons devised Low, an irritatingly pompous and know-it-all detective who mechanically arrives at some haunted British manor house, sniffs out the ghost, and comes up with the (usually predictable) story of how and why the ghost is plaguing the place. The stories are written in a flat, prosaic manner entirely lacking in tensity of atmosphere, and their almost uniformly identical size suggests
that they were written to fill a given space in a magazine rather than to express any kind of aesthetic impulse. Mercifully, such later writers as Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson managed to infuse some literary merit in this unwieldy fusion of the detective story and the horror tale, but not many others in the decades since then have done so. Probably the greatest writer of pure ghost stories during this period, next to James, was E. F. Benson (1867–1940). His four collections of weird tales—The Room in the Tower (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and More Spook Stories (1934)—contain much good work, and other horror tales are scattered among his other collections. Benson, of course, has gained a surprising celebrity on the basis of his pungent society novels of the “Mapp and Lucia” series, which feature a kind of proto– Evelyn Waugh satirical bite that is augmented by a soupçon of perfectly delightful misanthropy. But it is probably his ghost stories on which his fame as a writer will reside. The range of his ghostly writing—covering more than two decades in a literary career that spanned almost five—must testify to the persistence of a sense of the weird in Benson. And yet, he does not appear to have had a very exalted or carefully worked-out view of the writing of ghost stories. In his autobiography, Final Edition (1940), he writes offhandedly, “Now ghost stories . . . are a branch of literature at which I have often tried my hand”; going on merely to speak of certain fairly obvious points of technique (“The narrator, I think, must succeed in frightening himself before he can hope to frighten his readers” [258–59]). Benson was, at least in his own mind, pretty much of a traditionalist in the ghost story tradition—a fact emphasised by his presence at a celebrated meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893 at which M. R. James read some of his earliest ghost stories. It would be nearly twenty years before Benson’s own first weird volume would appear, by which time James had already published the first two of his collections; and yet, I do not believe that Benson can be passed off merely as an imitator of James, or even one who followed very closely in his footsteps. The curious thing about Benson is that, almost in spite of himself, he modernised or updated the Jamesian ghost story in several ways. James’s tales always hark backward, sometimes to the very distant past, as is perhaps fitting for an authority on mediaeval manuscripts; Benson’s tales rarely do so, and are sometimes aggressively set in the present. One of his
earliest stories, “The Dust-Cloud,” involves the ghost of a motor-car (“Seems almost too up-to-date, doesn’t it?” one character remarks [13]). In “The Confession of Charles Linkworth,” the ghost of a man who has been executed for murder communicates by telephone to a chaplain, pleading for absolution; “In the Tube” takes place in the London underground. Other stories, in order to introduce the weird subtly and covertly, are written in that archly sophisticated manner found in his society novels, but in so doing they create a “modern” atmosphere precisely analogous to contemporary writers’ setting weird tales at rock concerts or nightclubs. The opening pages of “The Shootings of Achnaleish” involve a comic banter and emphasis on the mundane (“Rent only £350!” [56]) that suggest anything but the weird, so that the supernatural phenomenon is the more striking and powerful when it finally does emerge. But there is more to this than merely using the observable tokens of the present in a tale. It must be declared that Benson was a confirmed spiritualist—his brief discussion of ghost stories in Final Edition is prefaced by a perfectly serious account of an apparition he and a friend claim to have seen—and many of his tales present elaborate pseudoscientific justifications of ghosts and other weird phenomena on spiritualistic grounds. This also serves to “modernise” his tales, and in two ways: first, Benson is riding a wave of spiritualism that gathered strength after the first world war; and second, Benson’s very need to account for his apparitions by means of philosophy or science (or what for him passes for such) betrays his unconscious absorption of the positivism of his day, whereby spiritualistic phenomena could not be accepted on their own but required a (usually specious) “proof” to overcome the scepticism that had already become ingrained in the majority of intelligent people. It should be pointed out that Benson is not exactly an occultist, in spite of his passing mention in “The Dust-Cloud” of “occult senses” by which the supernatural can be perceived. But his tales (as well as some of his otherwise mainstream novels) are full of ouija boards, séances, and other paraphernalia of the spiritualism popular in his day, and there is no question —in spite of the flippancy of some of his treatments of these matters—that he took the whole subject quite seriously. The canonical spiritualistic/philosophical “defence” for the weird occurs in “The Other Bed”:
“Everything that happens,” he said, “whether it is a step we take, or a thought that crosses our mind, makes some change in its immediate material world. Now the most violent and concentrated emotion we can imagine is the emotion that leads a man to take so extreme a step as killing himself or somebody else. I can easily imagine such a deed so eating into the material scene, the room or the haunted heath, where it happens, that its mark lasts an enormous time. The air rings with the cry of the slain and still drips with his blood. It is not everybody who will perceive it, but sensitives will.” (147–48) This is all very elegant, even though upon analysis it devolves into mere poetic metaphor instead of science or philosophy. But it neatly accounts for the “haunting” of a given spot (which in nearly all Benson’s stories is the product of a crime—usually murder or suicide—committed there) and for why only “sensitives” can perceive it rather than most of us hard-headed materialists. In effect, what Benson is arguing for is (as he says in an another story, “Outside the Door”) “how inextricable is the interweaving between mind, soul, life . . . and the purely material part of the created world” (134)—an utterance, incidentally, that betrays the flaw in Benson’s thinking at this point in its invalid distinction between “mind, soul, life” and what he fallaciously takes to be “dead” matter. But let that pass; the mere fact that Benson felt the need for such justifications—rather laboured on occasion—is telling. No longer could the weird be presented merely as such, without at least the gesture of rationalisation. The truth of the matter is that some of Benson’s most successful tales are not ghost stories at all (note that he never used that phrase in the titles of any of his collections, as James did for his first two) but pure “weird tales” where the phenomena are of a much more unclassifiable sort. Already in “Between the Lights,” an early tale, Benson is declaring, “The paraphernalia of ghosts has become somehow rather hackneyed” (123). His best tale may be “The Man Who Went Too Far,” in which a young man, Darcy, seems to have developed some unnatural sense of communion with the natural world. And yet, phrased this way, it becomes clear that what Darcy has actually done (whether from psychic possession by Pan or not) is to have sloughed off the “unnatural” encumbrances of civilisation and
returned to the purity of Nature. But because Darcy has adopted a perhaps one-sided view of Nature as pure benevolence and joy, he is overwhelmed by the revelation of the violent side of creation. “The Man Who Went Too Far” is a tale that wondrously combines ecstasy, awe, and horror into an inextricable union. Other non-ghost stories are nearly as effective. “Mrs. Amworth” is a classic vampire tale; “Caterpillars” introduces us to an image—huge writhing slugs—that Benson uses frequently in his tales; “‘And the Dead Spake’” chillingly tells of a scientist who has found some way to “tap” into the brains of the dead; in “The Horror-Horn” we find a hideous race of dwarfish quasi-human beings said to live in caves in the Alps; elementals are put on stage in “‘And No Bird Sings’”; and so on. Later tales utilise seemingly conventional ghost-story scenarios to convey moral or social messages, usually the anguish of marital discord, a theme to which the lifelong bachelor Benson recurs with anomalous frequency. Then there is the delicate “Pirates,” a poignant story of a lonely elderly man recovering his childhood. An autobiographical reading can scarcely be avoided here. One of Benson’s most celebrated tales is “Negotium Perambulans . . .,” but it is not one of his stellar works. The surprisingly explicit religious premise of the story—a house has been built on the ruins of a church and occupied by a succession of degenerate and impious individuals, whose blasphemies induce a hideous sluglike creature to attack and kill them—is weak and implausible, and the story’s development is rushed and predictable. The ghost stories of Oliver Onions (1873–1961) would deserve to be ranked with Benson’s and James’s if only he had been able to focus his undoubted talents to the actual matter of working out the supernatural manifestations in a meticulous and compelling way. But, in spite of a luminous prose style, a penetrating insight into character far beyond what James or even Benson could have imagined, and an uncanny ability to develop cumulative fear and suspense in his best work, Onions’s work must take a back seat to that of several figures far less literarily gifted than he. Nevertheless, two or three of his tales are of transcendent brilliance rivalled only by the best work of Walter de la Mare. Onions’s weird work is contained in the collections Widdershins (1911), Ghosts in Daylight (1924), The Painted Face (1929), and The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions (1935), a volume that gathers up nearly all the tales in his earlier volumes and adds several more. The fact that Onions
himself compiled this book suggests that he felt his work in this vein was done, even though he lived an additional two and a half decades and continued writing into the 1950s. But if Onions had written nothing but “The Beckoning Fair One,” he would deserve to be remembered. This exquisitely modulated novella tells a story that melds poignancy and terror in an inextricable fusion. The supernatural premise is very simple: a female ghost, never named, becomes jealous of the female friend, Elsie Bengough, of a writer, Paul Oberon, who occupies an ordinary-seeming flat in London. This skeletal outline cannot begin to convey the extraordinary subtlety with which Onions portrays not only the two (living) protagonists of the tale but the gradual revelation of the supernatural—manifested unequivocally, after a number of ambiguous hints, by “a sort of soft sweeping rustle” (32)—which Oberon comes to realise is “the sound of a woman brushing her hair” (33). And yet, the ghost’s jealousy extends in another direction, for she causes Oberon to lose interest in the female protagonist of his novel-in-progress (who may or may not have been intended as a stand-in for Elsie), to the point that, as Oberon gradually degenerates both physically and mentally, he burns the manuscript. It is likely that “The Beckoning Fair One” was inspired in part by Robert Hichens’s “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (for which see the next section), for that tale was revolutionary in its depiction of a ghost who is motivated by emotions quite apart from conventional revenge. But Onions’s tale is equally remarkable in its nearly total absence of physical violence: Elsie initially suffers minor mishaps in the apartment, as she comes to realise that her presence is not welcome there; and at the end she is found dead there. The question as to whether the ghost herself killed Elsie or incited Oberon to do so is unanswerable; and as a result, the story becomes authentically ambiguous. But it is a literary triumph in every way. Had Onions written more stories of the calibre of “The Beckoning Fair One,” his stature as a supernatural writer would be much higher. But although this story and “Phantas”—a haunting tale in which Abel Keeling, the captain of a derelict ship, encounters another ship that proves to be from the future (i.e., our present), leading one to query who is ghostly and who is real—are the jewels of Onions’s first collection, his subsequent work by and large fails to measure up. “The Rosewood Door” is of some interest in its suggestion that a door taken from an old Tudor house and installed in a
modern dwelling incites an occupant (a soldier) to access the lives of past soldiers reaching back to Roman times; but the story is unsatisfactorily long-winded and provides no adequate account of how the doorway acquired this supernatural property. “The Painted Face,” a virtual short novel, is a tender story of the emotional maturation of a young Italian woman, but the supernatural element in the story (a vague suggestion that the woman is the reincarnated soul of an ancient goddess) seems adventitious. More can be said about the powerful tale “Master of the House.” Here we come upon an old man, Ambrose Laban, who rents out much of his manor house while living in a separate wing with his servant, Binian, and a dog, Jacomb. Gradually we are led to believe that both lycanthropy and tantric magic (manipulated by the servant, who comes from India) are involved: sometimes Binian’s soul occupies the body of the dog, sometimes that of Laban himself. This raises the question: Who, really, is the “master of the house”? “‘John Gladwin Says . . .’” is a delicate story of a man who, finding himself in a deserted village, goes into a derelict church and has visions of his past life, including his marriage, the birth of two boys, their death in the war, and so on. It is a fine example of the supernatural serving fundamentally mainstream literary purposes. But if any other tale by Onions than “The Beckoning Fair One” deserves high marks, it is “Hic Jacet.” Whether or not Onions deliberately intended this as a Henry James pastiche, it has a remarkably Jamesian texture, with an emotive power that James himself did not always achieve in his ghostly tales. Here again the basic plot can be stated simply: Harrison, a popular detective writer, is tasked with writing the biography of a deceased painter, Michael Andriaovsky, whom he had once known well but had fallen out with when Harrison had gained success while Andriaovsky had languished in obscurity. This scenario somewhat echoes that of another and less effective Onions tale, “The Accident,” and makes one wonder whether Onions is expressing regret that he himself was forced to write popular fiction to make a living. In any event, the finely modulated pace of the tale—where Harrison gradually senses the presence of his dead friend as he experiences increasing difficulties in writing the book—makes this tale a magnificent triumph of character portrayal, one in which the supernatural is reduced to the barest minimum.
It is clear that Onions himself was inclined to use the supernatural quite sparingly. The brief “Credo” he affixes to the Collected Ghost Stories makes little secret of his disdain for conventional ghostly fare—“the class of story so plainly labelled ‘ghost’ that it cannot be mistaken for anything else.” In such a tale, “the spectre is apt to be swamped by the traditional apparatus that makes the stock illustration for the Christmas Number, and there is little to be said about this region except that here the ghostly texture is found at its coarsest” (ix). “Coarse” is the very last descriptive that could be applied to Onions’s tales, and we should be grateful that in at least a few instances he raised the ghost story to aesthetic levels reached perhaps only by Hichens and Walter de la Mare. Other British ghost story writers of the period can be dispensed with quickly. The Death Mask and Other Ghosts (1920) by Mrs. H. D. Everett (1851–1923) has apparently gained a certain cachet because of its rarity (although it has now been reprinted in an inexpensive paperback), but the tales themselves are lifeless and uninspired, with the tamest of supernatural manifestations and quite unremarkable character portrayal. The best that can be said of them is that they are written in grammatical English. Some of Everett’s novels, generally written under the pseudonym “Theo Douglas,” have weird elements. More—but not much more—can be said of the ghost stories of A. M. Burrage (1889–1956), who wrote thousands of tales of all different sorts and whose chief collections of ghost stories, Some Ghost Stories (1927) and Someone in the Room (1931), are only the tip of the iceberg of his weird work, which now fills four or five volumes in modern editions. But most of his tales amount to very little. The appropriately bland title of his first book contains very few notable specimens, and the inexplicably celebrated “Nobody’s House” is not one of them. This entirely predictable story of a man who returns to a deserted house twenty years after apparently shooting his friend, intent on ascertaining whether he actually did the deed, can perhaps be classified as ambiguous, in that the ghostly traces evidently left by the murdered man may be the result of hallucinations on the part of both the protagonist and the caretaker, Mrs. Parks, who tells the story. The really distinctive tales in Some Ghost Stories are “The Yellow Curtains”—an unwontedly grim account of both the pathos and the horrors of war—and “Between the Minute and the Hour,” which proves to be a striking fantasy in which, as a result of a curse, a man experiences several
instances of time-dislocation as he steps out of his shop in the minute before midnight. The story may have been inspired by Lord Dunsany’s “The Shop in Go-by Street,” but is an able venture nonetheless—not least because it eschews the conventional ghost in a manner that Burrage rarely achieved elsewhere. Someone in the Room contains little of note, as the presence of a relatively conventional ghost in nearly every story becomes mechanical; the tales are also virtually uniform in size, as if Burrage knew that the magazines in which he published had a fixed amount of space allotted to him, and he was anxious not to exceed it. The result is that, even when Burrage comes up with a potentially interesting conception, he fails to develop it adequately. “The Case of Mr. Ryalstone” contains a highly ingenious premise: in conscious contrast to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (cited by name in the story), where one man has two separate personalities, we are here dealing with two clearly distinct individuals with a single personality. But this conception—which might well have been the subject of a fine novel by someone like Ramsey Campbell—instead merely peters out: one of the individuals dies, prompting the other to die as well. H. R. Wakefield (1888–1964) also lived a long life and wrote a prodigious sheaf of ghost stories, one volume of which appeared as late as 1999 after having been lost for decades. His chief work appeared in They Return at Evening (1928), Old Man’s Beard (1929; U.S. title Others Who Returned), Imagine a Man in a Box (1931), The Clock Strikes Twelve (1939), and Strayers from Sheol (1961). Lovecraft enjoyed several stories from his first two collections, but many of them are undistinguished, such as “The Red Lodge,” a routine story of a house haunted as a result of murders committed in the past; “‘He Cometh and He Passeth By,’” a shameless rip-off of M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes” and clearly meant to portray the moral evil of Aleister Crowley; and “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster,” in which a wood near a golf course apparently has evil properties, for no ascertainable reason. Some later tales reveal moments of interest. “A Black Solitude” presents the fascinating conception of the spirits of two evil dead people who have fused into one entity. The protagonist of the story, Apuleius Charlton, appears to be a kind of melding of Crowley and Oscar Wilde. In “The Triumph of Death” we find an effective portrayal of a vicious sadist, one Miss Pendleham, who has driven several companions to death by
forcing them to experience hauntings in her house. “A Kink in Space-Time” involves a man who sees his own ghost, but it is somewhat clumsy in execution. “‘Immortal Bird’” is a rather grisly tale of a man who appears to be able to command birds to do his bidding. Some of Wakefield’s later work does exhibit an engaging misanthropy (and, perhaps less appealingly, also misogyny), but overall his work is not nearly as meritorious as his small legion of ardent followers appear to believe.
ii. Walter de la Mare: The Psychological Ghost Story The work of Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) represents a watershed in the history of weird fiction, and specifically the ghost story. It constitutes— along with the tales of Oliver Onions, L. P. Hartley, and some lesser writers —the definitive transition from the orthodox Victorian ghost story, which reached its pinnacle with M. R. James, to the psychological ghost story, where the events of a tale cannot be definitively ascribed to supernatural agency but must rather be seen as emerging from the disturbed psyches of the protagonists; even in cases where the supernatural comes into play, it is usually fused with an intense focus on the psychological aberration of key characters in such a way that clear metaphysical distinctions between supernatural and psychological horror are, by design, impossible to make. Our chief difficulty with de la Mare is in delineating the precise scope of his weird writing. Of the dozens of stories he wrote over his long career —including such collections as The Riddle and Other Stories (1923), The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926), On the Edge (1930), The Wind Blows Over (1936), and A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)—and excluding his many works for children, which are probably to be classified as fantasy, no two readers will agree on which are weird and which are not. A corollary of this difficulty is the frequent ambiguity and allusiveness of de la Mare’s entire approach to writing—an approach that not only links him to such of his predecessors as Henry James (an author for whose ghostly tales he expressed early admiration [Whistler 130]) but looks forward to the equally murky but transcendently brilliant work of Robert Aickman. Matters are not helped by de la Mare’s relatively few writings about the weird. His long introduction to his son Colin de la Mare’s splendid anthology They Walk Again (1931) offers only the dimmest of hints. Much of the introduction is devoted to a perspicacious discussion of both the similarities and the divergences between the detective story and the ghost
story. Among the latter de la Mare singles out the emphasis of the ghost story on the emotions of the reader: Facts as mere facts . . . are not the quarry of the ghost story. We must be made to believe in it. At its best it gives us imaginative truth. As with all fine fiction its illusion is its sovereign charm. To be informed in a brief epilogue that such a story is even so much as founded on fact is nothing but a shattering anti-climax. “Atmosphere”, then, is all important. (20–21) De la Mare goes on to note that the essence of the ghost story “is the gradual conviction that this workaday actuality of ours—with its bricks, its streets, its woods, its hills, its waters—may have queer and, possibly, terrifying holes in it” (21). That may be the most we can get as to de la Mare’s theory of the weird. To be sure, his interest in the ghostly was of early origin. His very first published story, “Kismet” (1895), is, albeit non-supernatural, intensely terrifying. A sailor returning home after, apparently, several years at sea cadges a ride with a man driving a wagon; he is looking forward to meeting his wife again after his prolonged absence. But the wagon is no ordinary wagon; it is in fact picking up the coffin of the sailor’s wife. His own riding of the wagon brilliantly heralds his own sudden death at the end of the tale. “Kismet” was one of the tales reprinted in a posthumous collection, Eight Tales (1971), assembled by Edward Wagenknecht, who asserted that another story in the book, “A: B: O.,” had appeared in the Cornhill. It in fact did not do so, and evidently de la Mare forwarded the manuscrupt of the story to Wagenknecht (or to August Derleth, the publisher of the volume). It is, at any rate, another early story (probably dating to 1896), and is unusually grisly for de la Mare. The initials of the title are found on a metal chest that a man and his friend dig up in his property—and they stand for “abortion.” The mere sight of it is loathsome: “There lay the wretched abortion:—it seems to me that this thing is like a pestilent secret sin, which lies hid, festering, weaving snares, befouling the wholesome air, but which, some day, creeps out and goes stalking midst healthy men, a leprous child of the sinner” (2.512).
These early stories are quite crude by de la Mare’s later standards, and it is no surprise that he did not wish them reprinted in his lifetime, as Wagenknecht had proposed. The later stories are occasionally powerful, but are also occasionally frustrating in the excessive ambiguity of their implications, or sometimes of their bare events. De la Mare was so taken with indirection and subtlety, and so focused on the shifting psychological perspectives of his characters, that the tales often lack a powerful climax or a coherent resolution of any kind. Their literary artistry is never in question, but on occasion they can seem a trifle academic and even a bit pretentious. “Seaton’s Aunt” (1922) is, however, an unquestioned masterpiece. Like many of de la Mare’s tales, it is narrated by an adolescent—in this case, a boy named Withers, who has imprudently agreed to spend a half-term holiday with his friend Seaton and his aunt. What we have here, as de la Mare suggests in what for him are unusually clear hints, is the psychic prowess of the aunt over her nephew. Is she some kind of ghoul or vampire? This is never clarified, but the aunt’s domination—symbolised by the fact that, over a meal, she “enjoyed and indulged an enormous appetite” (1.58) —is evident at every stage. Seaton himself thinks his aunt is “in league with the devil” (1.60), but there is never any reason to assume that the aunt is receiving any infernal aid; Seaton is more accurate when he admits harrowingly, “She just sucks you dry” (1.63). Years later, when Withers makes another visit, he is disturbed to find that the aunt’s appetite is still “Gargantuan” (1.70). It was on this occasion that Seaton had announced his engagement; but as more time passes and Withers wonders why he was never invited to the wedding, he learns that Seaton had died just before the marriage was to take place. De le Mare frequently repeats this pairing of two individuals in conflict, with many variations. It is not entirely clear that “The Tree” (1922) is a weird tale, but it has frequently been taken to be one. Here a prosperous fruit merchant pays a visit to his half-brother to collect a debt owed to him —the half-brother, an impoverished painter, has apparently just sold a painting for a significant sum of money, so the fruit merchant feels that the time for repayment has come. The portrayal of the money-grubbing merchant is surprisingly crude for de la Mare, but the upshot of the tale is more than a little murky. The immense tree in the painter’s front yard—a tree that the merchant had always found frightening—appears to hold something anomalous: “a kind of huddling shape up aloft there” (1.123).
Can the painter have hanged himself? But the painter is found within, old and wizened, and surrounded by countless drawings of the tree. I confess to be not entirely clear as to the direction of this tale, but its atmosphere of strangeness is unmatched. A bit clearer is “Mr. Kempe” (1925), where a traveller in search of antiquities must skirt a perilous path along a cliff-edge to reach the home of Mr. Kempe, who lives near an ancient circular stone building that may once have been a chapel, as there are graves nearby. Here the psychological focus is on Mr. Kempe, who is fanatically determined to ascertain that human beings have souls—is he terrified of death and clinging irrationally to an outmoded theory of the afterlife? At any rate, there is the suggestion that he has killed several other visitors in pursuit of his theory. “All Hallows” (1926) might be considered a kind of psychological variant of the antiquarian ghost story pioneered by M. R. James. Here the focus is on a cathedral called All Hallows—but this one is apparently “open . . . to attack of [a] peculiar and terrifying nature” (1.349), for reasons that are never clarified: is it the declining faith of the local denizens that has induced the legions of the infernal world to take it over? Whatever the case, the result is that the cathedral is being supernaturally restored by unknown hands; as the verger notes with terror: “Why, I am speaking not of dissolution, sir, but of repairs, restorations. Not decay, strengthening. Not a corroding loss, an awful progress. I could show you places—and chiefly obscured from direct view and difficult of a close examination, sir, where stones lately as rotten as pumice and as fretted as a sponge have been replaced by others fresh-quarried—and nothing of their kind within twenty miles.” (1.350) Later a visitor sees that “some small animal—a dog, a spaniel, I should have guessed—had suddenly and surreptitiously taken cover behind the stone buttress nearby” (1.359). “All Hallows” is a masterwork of cumulative horror, and next to “Seaton’s Aunt” is de la Mare’s most powerful weird tale. As for “A Recluse” (1926), its very plot is not entirely clear. The narrator, a traveller, sums up the matter himself in discussing the title
character: “all that I can say about Mr. Bloom can be only vague and inconclusive” (2.3). The traveller is forced to take refuge at Mr. Bloom’s lavish estate because he cannot find the gear-key of his car; he had meant only to stay a short time to examine the imposing abode, but is forced to spend the night there. Bloom tells him of the occult experiments that he and a secretary—now dead—had engaged in, although he refuses to specify their nature; are we to gain some impression of them from Bloom’s offhand comment about death (“It is as well to remember there is more than one way of dying. There is first the body to be taken into account; and there is next—what remains” [2.13])? And what are we to make of the fact that, after a number of disturbing episodes at night, the traveller finds the following: But on the pillow—the grey-flecked brown beard protruding over the turned-down sheet—now showed what appeared to be the head and face of Mr. Bloom. With chin jerked up, I watched that face steadily, transfixedly. It was a flawless facsimile, waxen, motionless; but it was not a real face and head. It was an hallucination. How induced is quite another matter. No spirit of life, no livingness had ever stirred those soap-like, stagnant features. It was a travesty utterly devoid—whatever its intention—of the faintest hunt of humour. It was merely a mask, a life-like mask (past even the dexterity of a Chinese artist to rival), and—though I hardly know why—it was inconceivably shocking. (2.26–27) I hardly know why either. I think the implication of the story is that Bloom is in fact dead—and, more specifically, a body without a soul that is nonetheless somehow ambulatory. The “mask” really is not a mask, in spite of the traveller’s desperate rationalisations—it is Bloom’s actual face. De la Mare’s most sustained contribution to the weird is the novel The Return, first published in 1910 and issued in a revised edition in 1922. One of the finest examples of the psychic possession motif, the novel features one of the most harrowing opening scenes in supernatural literature: a man, Arthur Lawford, awakes from sleeping on the tomb of an eighteenthcentury pirate, Nicholas Sabathier, and comes home to find that his face has become entirely different from his own—in other words, it has become the
face of Sabathier. The critical question, broached but never fully answered in The Return, is whether the physical change in Lawford’s features reflects, or is the vanguard of, a deeper psychological change. At first Lawford feels exactly himself; but a little later he senses “that other feebly struggling personality . . . beginning to insinuate itself into his consciousness” (42). Of course his personality is affected by the change—whose would not be? Indeed, at the very moment of the transformation he seems a far more vigorous and energetic person than he was before; and he himself later wonders whether the illness he had been suffering, not to mention his generally “feeble hold on life” (101), did not make him a prime candidate for this bizarre victimisation. But the true extent to which Sabathier’s actual personality usurps Lawford’s remains a tantalisingly unsettled question throughout the novel. Grisel, the sister of Lawford’s neighbour Herbert Herbert, although appearing only for a few chapters of the novel, is perhaps its critical figure. During long walks taken with Lawford, she accepts him for what he is and urges him to carry on. Should we then be surprised that Lawford, even after his face has once again become his own, professes love to Grisel? Certainly, Grisel has shown him more unaffected sympathy than anyone except his own daughter—certainly more so than his wife, Sheila, who reacts to Lawford’s transformation with selfishness and conventional fears of social disgrace. But could it also be that Grisel is herself a supernatural figure— the avatar of the woman Sabathier loved and because of whom he took his own life? More so even than Lawford or Sabathier himself, Grisel is the enigmatic key to the novel. The Return is about many things at once—physical (and perhaps psychic) possession, domestic trauma, unrequited love, philosophical reflection—and one of the secrets of its greatness is the seamlessness with which all these elements fuse together into a unified whole. But most of all, the novel is about the existential horror of losing control of one’s own being. “You can’t possibly realise what a ghastly change it really was” (129), Lawford says simply but keenly at one point. Elsewhere he ponders his plight: Round and round in dizzy sickening flare and clatter his thoughts whirled. Contempt, fear, loathing, blasphemy, laughter, longing: there was no end. Death was no end. There was no meaning, no
refuge, no hope, no possible peace. To give up was to go to perdition: to go forward was to go mad. And even madness—he sat up with trembling lips in the twilight—madness itself was only a state, only a state. (109) It is moments of quiet desperation like this that make The Return the triumph that it is.
iii. Other British Masters The neglect that has engulfed the weird work of Robert Hichens (1864– 1950) is as inexplicable as it is undeserved. Had Dorothy L. Sayers not reprinted “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” in her first Omnibus of Crime (1928) and thereby ensured its status as a much-reprinted classic, it is likely that Hichens would now be virtually forgotten as a weird writer, just as his prolific and best-selling mainstream work has all but fallen into oblivion. And yet, Hichens is far more than merely a “one-story” writer: if “Professor Guildea” does indeed remain his finest weird tale, there are numerous others that deserve to be ranked just below it. His collection Tongues of Conscience (1900) can stand next to any single volume by Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, or H. P. Lovecraft as a compendium of powerful, finely crafted horror fiction. The ignorance of most of Hichens’s weird work is in some sense understandable, for not only are the best of his tales long—some would say overly long—novelettes difficult to accommodate in anthologies, but many of them return obsessively to a single idea: the transference or survival of the soul after the death of the body. It is difficult to know how seriously Hichens took this idea: did he believe in it himself, or was he merely using it as a literary device? The number of tales in which this idea recurs, even with significant variations, points to actual belief, as does the following passage from his autobiography, Yesterday (1947), where Hichens reports his early interest in spiritualism: At that time I was interested in “spiritualism,” as it was called . . . and I attended several séances, and knew various people who claimed to have occult powers. I have never been convinced that the souls of those we call dead are able to communicate with the living, and have expressed my lack of conviction in at least one book and been taken to task for it. But on the other hand, some have called me credulous. For I believe that certain people, specially endowed, are able at times to foretell the future correctly, and to foresee what is coming to those whom they call their “clients,” or for friends who
consult them. And I have no doubt at all that apparitions of the dead have been many times seen haunting the places in which they have formerly lived and loved and perhaps—though not always— suffered. I have myself lived for a time in a house which was haunted by its former owner, a famous Englishman. I never saw the apparition of him, but an intimate friend of mine did on at least four occasions. And it was, I believe, seen in daylight by a famous actress when she was staying with me. (77) The concluding part of this passage appears to suggest the inspiration for Hichens’s first weird tale, “The Return of the Soul,” published in the Pall Mail Magazine in 1895 (as “A Reincarnation”) and reprinted in The Folly of Eustace (1896). The soul-transference theme is also evident in this tale as well as Hichens’s two weird novels, Flames: A London Phantasy (1897) and the powerful The Dweller on the Threshold (1911). Hichens was never content to write merely a spook story: he never wished merely to send a shudder up a reader’s spine. The title of his collection Tongues of Conscience—containing “Sea Change,” “The Cry of the Child,” “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” and “The Lady and the Beggar”—is apt, for it suggests that it is the protagonists’ guilt or unease over some past action that brings down the supernatural manifestation upon them. A painter unwittingly lures a young boy to perish at sea; a scholar causes the death of his own child by excessive and single-minded study; a hard-hearted professor is plagued by a ghost that loves him; a woman is haunted by a beggar whose pleas for charity she cruelly ignored: these are the scenarios in which Hichens finds a wealth of human torment and misery, and it is the slow, meticulous accumulation of details—both supernatural and emotional —that allows each character in these tales to gain the fully rounded humanity that brings them to life. And it is this same attention to detail—as, for example, in “Professor Guildea,” when the ghost is first suspected by the bizarre actions of a parrot—that creates the uncanny realism of the supernatural events Hichens etches so subtly and delicately. Hichens requires the expansiveness of the novelette to convey the richness of his weird scenarios, and some of them attain a cumulative power that creates that rarest fusion in literature—the fusion of horror and pathos. Hichens utilised the soul-transference theme by way of animals in “The Charmer of Snakes” (in Bye-ways), in which a woman’s soul appears to
have entered the body of a snake, and “The Black Spaniel” (in The Black Spaniel and Other Stories, 1905), a gripping story in which the soul of a man’s dead enemy has entered the body of a dog. “The Hindu” (in SnakeBite and Other Stories, 1919) is, however, a long and unconvincing story that suggests the supernatural—a man believes he is being pursued by the spirit of a dead Hindu who may or may not have had an affair with his wife —but is impausibly explained naturalistically. Hichens continued to write weird tales sporadically up to his latest story collection, The Man in the Mirror (1950), but he rarely achieved the almost unbearable intensity of “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” or “The Cry of the Child,” which in my estimation rank as two of the finest weird tales of their era. The weird fiction of Barry Pain (1864–1928) constitutes a distinctive element in the work of a writer whose focus was largely elsewhere. Pain early gained a reputation as a comic writer: from as early as 1890 he contributed to some of the leading middlebrow publications of the day— Punch, To-day, Black and White, the Idler, the Sketch, and numerous others. He, W. W. Jacobs, and Jerome K. Jerome were quickly branded the New Humourists—a term initially coined in derision because it was believed by highbrow critics that these writers (all of whom, curiously, wrote the occasional weird tale) were deliberately seeking to satisfy the lowbrow tastes of the rapidly increasing British middle class. His first book, In a Canadian Canoe (1891), chiefly contained humorous tales, but does include one grim tale of psychological terror, “‘Bill,’” in which a lower-class boy struggles to deal with the death of his infant sister. It is a searing portrayal of the wretched fate to which British society condemned its working classes at that juncture in history. The volume was the first of nearly sixty books that Pain published in a career that spanned nearly four decades; his uncollected tales and sketches (the great majority of them humorous, but with apparently a few weird items buried among them) number in the hundreds. Stories and Interludes (1892) contains two weird tales that contain more promise than fulfilment—“The Glass of Supreme Moments” and “Exchange”—and, sadly, much the same can be said for Stories in the Dark (1901), a choice item for the weird collector but one that doesn’t quite deliver on the potential of some of its premises. This slim collection—it is well under 30,000 words—features a number of tales with powerful ideas that are not executed quite as effectively as one would wish. “The Diary of
a God” could have been a powerful tale of psychological horror in its depiction of a man who becomes increasingly isolated from humanity and develops a fierce misanthropy, but its development is crude. “This Is All” is a somewhat more effective sketch of the universal fear of death, and “The Magnet” is another non-supernatural tale that underscores a scarcely less universal fascination with tragedy and catastrophe. But even the volume’s lengthiest and most impressive story, “The Undying Thing,” leaves us vaguely unsatisfied. It powerfully etches a generational curse in its account of an anomalous creature, born of one of the ancestors of the owners of a venerable English castle, that dwells in the woods near the estate; but Pain’s refusal to specify the nature of this entity seems less an instance of artistic restraint than a failure of imagination. The description of the birth of the creature is highly tantalising: As Sir Edric waited at the top of the staircase he heard suddenly from the room before him a low cry. He put down the candlestick on the floor and leaned back against the wall listening. The cry came again, a vibrating monotone ending in a growl. . . . “Yes,” said the doctor, “it is in there. I had the two women out of the room, and got it here. No one but myself has seen it. But you must see it, too.” He raised the candle and the two men entered the room—one of the spare bedrooms. On the bed there was something moving under cover of a blanket. Dr. Dennison paused for a moment and then flung the blanket partially back. (80) But this is excessively vague, and never in the remainder of the story do we get a concrete idea of the creature’s nature or attributes. The suggestion is that the birth came about because the mother was terrified by wolves that were kept on the estate, but it is not even clarified whether the creature is in fact a werewolf or something else. The final story in Stories in the Dark, “The Gray Cat,” is a powerful tale of metempsychosis—a theme that Pain had already treated in a different way in “Exchange”—and perhaps set the stage for his novel-length working out of the idea, An Exchange of Souls (1911). That novel is clearly the
pinnacle of Pain’s weird work and one of the most powerful treatments of the motif of soul or personality exchange. The scientist Daniel Myas has devised a machine whereby he can exchange his “Ego” with that of his fiancée, Alice Lade; but in the course of the experiment the machine is destroyed and Daniel’s body is killed; his “Ego” or soul is in the body of Alice. What exactly Pain means by “Ego” is not entirely clear, for it appears that Daniel’s Ego has forgotten the manner in which the machine was constructed, so that it must laboriously pore through his old notes in an attempt to rebuild it; the effort proves futile, and in the end Alice kills herself, thereby releasing Daniel’s Ego. The novel fuses poignancy and terror into an inextricable amalgam, although Pain does not deal as forthrightly as we moderns might wish with the baffling conundrum of a man’s “Ego” trapped in a woman’s body. Pain went on to do more supernatural work, chiefly in the short story. “The Unfinished Game,” in the collection Here and Hereafter (1911), is a routine ghost story about billiards, while “The Unseen Power” is a scarcely less conventional tale of a haunted house. Stories in Grey (1912) contains two powerful specimens. “Smeath,” the longest of Pain’s weird short stories, is a richly complex tale about hypnotism and clairvoyance, with a grisly ending that even today’s splatterpunk devotees can relish. “Linda” is a powerful and moving tale of love and terror that again broaches the metempsychosis theme. The untitled volume of short stories published in the series “Short Stories of Today and Yesterday” (1928) contains some of Pain’s most assured work; it is regrettable that it appeared in the year of Pain’s death, for it augured an impressive seriousness of conception and ability to handle complex interplays of emotion that Pain might have used in later weird work. “The Tree of Death” is perhaps the most curious item in Pain’s weird repertoire, a kind of Eastern fantasy in the manner of the Arabian Nights, told in a stately and archaic diction that is highly evocative and convincing. “Not on the Passenger-List” is a powerful tale of supernatural revenge that brings the earlier tale “The Widower” to mind. “The Reaction” vaguely echoes Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the White Powder” in its account of a strange drug that has unexpected effects, while “The Missing Years” is a strange and apparently non-supernatural narrative about amnesia. The Shadow of the Unseen, a novel that Pain published in 1907 in collaboraton with James Blyth, is worth some attention. Little is known
about Blyth (1864–1933), a British novelist who also wrote about agriculture, and there is no way to tell the exact degree of each collaborator’s contribution to the novel. It is an interesting experiment in hybridisation—an attempt to mingle the society novel, the romance novel, even the comic novel, with the tale of the supernatural. As such, it has a different texture from that of almost any other supernatural novel ever written. In spite of its generally light and bantering tone, The Shadow of the Unseen develops a cumulative power in its indirect and insidious suggestion of witchcraft, as embodied in the figure of Judith Jennis, a descendant of a purported witch of the same name, who now seeks to avenge what she believes to be the unjust death of her ancestor. Whether Judith has any actual supernatural powers is never clarified; the one genuinely weird episode—Judith’s apparent ability to depict the future by means of a mysterious substance poured into a silver cup—passes relatively quickly. Nevertheless, there is a pervasive atmosphere of weirdness in the work, even if the most powerful scene in it is a purely physical scene of a man in a death-struggle with Judith’s huge black goat. Like Pain, E. Nesbit (1858–1924) gained celebrity for work of a very different sort—in her case, children’s fantasies such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and Five Children and It (1902); but early in her career she produced two volumes of weird fiction, Something Wrong (1893) and Grim Tales (1893), most of the contents of which were reprinted in Fear (1910). The stories are a mixed bag, both thematically and qualitatively. On the whole, they do not suggest any distinctiveness in the selection of weird motifs, although there is occasional power in their treatment. “From the Dead,” for example, is a grim and emotionally intense tale of a dead wife who rises up and asks forgiveness of her husband for the wrongs she inflicted upon him in life. Two stories involving drugs are of some interest. In “The Five Senses,” a scientist has discovered a drug that can intensify the five senses in animals; will it also work on man? There are five drugs, one for each of the senses. Somewhat imprudently, the scientist tries them all at once. He appears to die, but in fact the drugs have merely “paralysed every muscle” (30). As a result, he experiences his own funeral: He could not raise a finger, stir an eyelash. More, he could not breathe, nor did his body advise him of any need of breathing. And
he had lain thus immobile and felt his body slowly grow cold, had heard in thunder the voices of Parker and the doctor; had felt the enormous hands of those who made his death-toilet, had smelt intolerably the camphor and lavender that they laid round him in the narrow, black bed; had tasted the mingled flavours of the drug and its five mediums; and, in an ecstasy of magnified sensation, had made the lonely train journey which coffins make, and known himself carried into the mausoleum and left there alone. (30–31) But in the end, the scientist manages to cry out to his girlfriend, in spite of his fear that in so doing she might drive her mad, and, having been revived, he gives up science and settles down to a placid domesticity. “The Three Drugs” is somewhat less effective, chiefly because Nesbit’s efforts to augment the suspense of the narrative are clumsy and obvious. A man named Roger Wroxham, being pursued by thugs, takes refuge with a surgeon who, in his search for the elixir of life, has devised three drugs that will apparently bestow immortality: “The first excites prematurely the natural conflict between the principles of life and death, and then, just at the point where Death is about to win his victory, the second drug intensifies life so that it conquers—intensifies, and yet chastens. Then the whole life of the subject, risen to an ecstasy, falls prone in an almost voluntary submission to the coming super-life” (304). The surgeon takes the drugs himself—but, in a highly artificial plot device, Wroxham is unable to come to the doctor’s aid when the second drug must be administered, and so the doctor dies. Nesbit’s most celebrated weird tale is “Man-Size in Marble,” about two man-size statues that come to life, but it is a bit rambling and predictable. As it is, the chief virtue of her weird work is the vaguely science-fictional premise of her two tales about drugs, although in regard to the scientist of the first tale it is rightly remarked: “Like all imaginative scientists, he was working with stuff perilously like the spells of magic” (26). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) continued to write weird short fiction in the early decades of the twentieth century, almost up to the time of his death; but much of this work treads very close to the burgeoning realm of science fiction, so it cannot be treated in detail here. Indeed, even the more conventionally supernatural tales of this period are on the borderline between weird fiction and science fiction. Consider “The Horror of the
Heights” (1913), one of the best of his weird tales. This story capitalises on contemporary interest in aviation, then an invention scarcely two decades old, by portraying an aviator who ascends up to the astronomical height of 41,000 feet and encounters fabulous creatures there: “Conceive a jelly-fish such as sails in our summer seas, bellshaped and of enormous size—far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St. Paul’s. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long, drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon its stately way. (24) This is a fine exercise of the fantastic imagination; but Doyle augments it by depicting still more bizarre, and malignant creatures—envisioned as “a purplish patch of vapour . . . [with] two vast, shadowy, circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyes, and a perfectly solid white projection between them which was as curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture” (25)—that emerge in the hundreds out of space and pursue the hapless flier. A more or less plausible scientific explanation is also provided for the “great shaggy mass” (83) that is seen emerging from a cavern in the earth—partially carved out by the Romans—in the English countryside in “The Terror of Blue John Gap” (Strand, August 1910). And the late Sherlock Holmes tale “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (Strand, January 1924) makes a clever play on the vampire myth, which Holmes ridicules at the outset in its standard form. Needless to say, nothing supernatural happens here, but even the existence of a psychologically disturbed vampire—a mother who appears to be compelled to drink the blood of her own infant child, somewhat along the lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Olalla”—is explained away ingeniously. As for the Professor Challenger stories—the short novels The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), and The Land of Mist (1926), along with a few short stories—they are entirely within the domain of science
fiction, or at best of science-fantasy. There are, to be sure, moments of terror in all of them—The Lost World compellingly depicts the continued existence of dinosaurs in the Amazon; The Poison Belt appears to envision the virtual end of humanity, as the earth passes through a belt of poisonous ether; and The Land of Mist is a venture into spiritualism typical of Doyle’s post–World War I work—but, except perhaps for the last, clear scientific rationales are provided for all the bizarre events in them. The same can be said for the short novel The Maracot Deep (1929), which depicts the existence of an entire civilisation of humanoid creatures—evidently the survivors of the destruction of Atlantis—dwelling on the ocean floor. Once again, as with Doyle’s earlier work, there is relatively little aesthetic substance to these tales—they are entertaining stories, no more. The figure of Professor Challenger, in particular, is a lamentable yielding to popular convention, being the very type of the irascible scientific genius. They all help to pass the time, but they fail to broaden or deepen one’s understanding of the world. Like Doyle, the Scottish writer John Buchan (1875–1940) persistently broached the weird in novels and tales alike, especially in such story collections as The Watcher by the Threshold (1902), The Moon Endureth (1912), and The Runagates Club (1928). But in much of his work we find a vexing imprecision or excessive reticence in the very crux of the story— specifically, the nature and ramifications of the supernatural phenomenon. Consider the early story “The Watcher by the Threshold.” Here we read of one Robert Ladlaw, a Scotsman who appears to be terrified by—something. But in the course of this long narrative we never learn exactly what it is, as Buchan continually dances around this critical issue. There are vague suggestions that Ladlaw’s fear stems from the terror of unbounded Nature or—what he evidently regards as the same thing—the un-Christian remnants of paganism as embodied in the Roman conquest of Britain. If there is any dominant theme in Buchan’s weird writing, it is this notion of a conflict between paganism and Christianity, with Roman Britain frequently at the core of the conflict. “The Grove of Ashtaroth” is an intermittently effective treatment of the idea, portraying a man fascinated by a grove near his house in South Africa that features an ancient conical temple. This man, Lawton (the narrator takes care to note that he is part Jewish), begins a worship of Ashtaroth, the suggestion being that he is heeding the call of the ancient Hebrews who occasionally indulged in this
kind of idolatry. A friend comes to destroy the grove. This seemingly elementary resolution in favour of Christianity is, however, rendered interestingly problematical by the friend’s rueful lament that he has perhaps removed something wonderful from the face of the earth. Even Buchan’s most celebrated, and probably best, weird tale, “The Wind in the Portico,” in The Runagates Club, is subject to the criticism of excessive imprecision. Here a man has built a pseudo-Roman temple on his estate, where an anomalous hot wind blows for no apparent reason. There had actually been a Roman temple on the site, dedicated to the worship of Vaunus, a (fictitious) Romano-British god who is purportedly “the tutelary deity of the vale” (3.188). When the owner, Dubellay, terrified of the blasphemy of worshipping a pagan god, attempts to covert the pagan temple to Christian use (finding a formula for such in the ancient writer Sidonius Apollinaris), the temple is set ablaze from below. It is the vengenace of Vaunus. This story is on the whole effective, but even here Buchan fails to engender as powerful and cataclysmic a climax as he could have done. Much the same criticism can be leveled at two other celebrated stories in The Runagates Club, “The Green Wildebeest” and “Skule Skerry.” The former, also set in South Africa, tells of a green wildebeest “as big as a house” (3.84) that has been unwittingly released from confinement by a white man. But, aside from the fact that we never gain any true sight of the hideous entity, the moral or symbolic purpose of the creature is also vague. The narrator’s comment that the beast somehow embodies an “infinite power for evil” (3.93) is little short of fatuous. “Skule Skerry” takes us to a remote island north of Scotland where birds congregate in great numbers. A bird watcher goes there to view them; and the narration effectively portrays his sense of remoteness and isolation. Then a hideous fish-creature seems to emerge—but, in a woeful anticlimax, it proves to be nothing more than a walrus. Buchan approached the weird in two substantial novels. Witch Wood (1927) is a long non-supernatural account of witchcraft in seventeenthcentury Scotland, at the height of the witch craze. The novel is a fusion of the historical tale, the love story, and the weird, although there is never any suggestion that the instances of witchcraft that the superstitious natives attribute to the lover of the protagonist, the rationalist minister David Sempill, are in fact supernatural. The Gap in the Curtain (1932) might perhaps be considered an early science fiction novel in its premise that time
is not linear—a group of individuals participate in an experiment whereby they glimpse an issue of the London Times a year in the future—but the working out of the idea is not without its terrors. Buchan’s interest in the anomalies of time go back to an early and, until recently, uncollected story “The Knees of the Gods” (1907), where a man appears to dream of the future, although this is chiefly a political satire. Marjorie Bowen (1886–1952) also fused the historical tale and the supernatural in her best work—chiefly scattered stories in such volumes as Curious Happenings (1917), Dark Ann and Other Stories (1927), and The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949). “Kecksies,” for example, is the striking tale of a man who comes back from the dead and kills a woman’s husband (his former rival) and makes love to his wife. Set in the eighteenth century, the tale contains unusually explicit sexual imagery. This tale is, however, surpassed by “Scoured Milk,” which fuses the historical tale (it is set in 1733), the detective story, the conte cruel, and the ghost story. In the end nothing supernatural occurs, although the deflation of the ghostly element engenders no anticlimax. Humphrey Orford’s wife has apparently died in 1713. In 1733 he wants to marry a young woman of his fancy, but she finds his house vaguely disturbing, even hideous. Orford is later found stabbed in the back in his study, a room that was locked on the inside. Can the ghost of his wife, jealous of her husband’s intent to remarry, have killed him? In fact, the wife is still alive, having been confined in a narrow space around the chimney for two decades, her tongue having been cut out. Bowen’s most celebrated tale is “The Avenging of Ann Leete,” but it is inferior to the two tales described above. The only novelty here is the nature of the supernatural manifestation. Ann Leete is loved by two men. One of them kills her; the other, through force of will, forces the spirit of the killer to leave his body and betray the existence of the corpse. The killer is acquitted in a trial but later commits suicide. This idea of the ghost of a living person has something of originality to it. Bowen also combines history and supernaturalism in the early novel Black Magic (1909), but the emphasis here is heavily on the former rather than the latter. This long-drawn-out tale based on the legend of Pope Joan, the female pope who purportedly reigned for a few years in the Middle Ages, features incidental witchcraft as the female Pope, Ursula, seeks to consolidate her power; but the novel is marred by diffuseness and lack of focus.
The work of M. P. Shiel (1865–1947) is difficult to treat in small compass, not only because of its wide diversity of theme and subject-matter, but because so much of it is only on the borderline of the supernatural or of the weird altogether. And yet, Shiel is of undoubted importance, both because of the intrinsic power of at least a small proportion of his work and also because of his apparent influence on some of the writers who followed in his wake. Shiel is very much an acquired taste, for he himself acquired a convoluted, almost tortured prose style that is the absolute antithesis of the lapidary but occasionally atmosphereless prose of, say, Conan Doyle and which, in such tales as “Xélucha,” is undoubtedly effective in creating a kind of incantatory effect of hallucinatory weirdness. Shiel’s short weird fiction is restricted to two early collections, Shapes in the Fire (1896) and The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911), the former of which contains “Xélucha,” a powerful statement of the hypnotic effect of women on certain male sensibilities, manifestly influenced by Poe’s “Ligeia.” Even more powerful, and by all odds Shiel’s best weird tale, is “The House of Sounds,” originally appearing under the title “Vaila” in the former collection and extensively revised, with some of the verbal excesses pruned back, and retitled in the latter collection. Lovecraft was fond of noting that this tale is “vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’” (S 56)—not a very helpful comment, but one that suggests the underlying theme of both stories: the psychic fusion of a house and its occupant. Here the fusion is far more explicit than in Poe’s story, for the remote and forbidding house in the Orkneys where one Harfager dwells is constructed in an anomalous manner: a kind of clock periodically emits little lead balls, and a family legend tells that when all the balls are expelled the house and the family line will perish. Accordingly, Harfager has developed morbidly acute hearing as he harrowingly listens to the descending lead balls counting out the term of his life. This is an extraordinarily bizarre conception, fully matched by the telling of the tale: the atmosphere of topographical remoteness, with the small island constantly buffeted by storms, is matched by the mental agitation of Harfager and the other inhabitants of the doomed household; and the story culminates in a tremendously potent and cataclysmic conclusion. This conclusion displays both the virtues and the drawbacks of Shiel’s orotund style:
At one point, where the largest of the porticoes protruded, the mansion began at every revolution to bump with grum shudderings against some obstruction: it bumped, and while the lips said onetwo-three it three times bumped again. It was the maenadism of mass! Swift—still swifter—in an ague of flurry it raced, every portico a sail to the gale, racking its great frame to fragments. I, running by the door to a room littered with the ruins of a wall, saw through that livid moonlight Harfager sitting on a tomb—a drum by him, upon which, with a club in his bloody fist, he feebly, but persistingly, beat. (73) And so on and so forth. Nothing else by Shiel, at least in the short form, comes close to matching this tale in power and intensity. “Huguenin’s Wife” deals with metempsychosis, as the wife of the title, after being murdered by her husband, returns as a cheetah; “The Great King” anticipates Dunsany’s play The Queen’s Enemies in treating of the Egyptian queen Nitocris, although in a supernatural vein; and “The Bride” deals hideously with a woman, cast aside by her lover, Walter, for her sister, who comes back from the dead on the couple’s wedding night and enters Walter’s bed. Of Shiel’s many novels, only The House of Sounds (1901) is worth detailed study. Even this novel may be only on the borderline of the weird, and many have considered it a landmark work of apocalyptic science fiction, dealing as it does with the virtual extinction of humanity as a result of a a volcanic eruption that has released poison gas throughout the world. An explorer, Adam Jefferson (his first name is no accident), has managed to survive because he was at the North Pole at the time of the eruption; and as he canvasses the world in search of any surviving human life, he develops a spectacular megalomania as he realises that he is the effective ruler of the planet, able to indulge in the most extravagant cuisine (what is left of it) and the most gorgeous habitations at his will. He spends years in tasks that are both destructive and constructive: on the one hand he sets many of the world’s cities aflame, and on the other hand he constructs an immense building out of gold. Shiel has brilliantly captured the mental aberration that stems from Adam’s bizarre circumstance—for he believes himself the last man on earth.
Eventually Adam does stumble upon another living human being—a young woman whom Adam names Leda. Some critics, among them Lovecraft, believe that the novel suffers a letdown at this point, as in some senses it becomes a tale of domestic conflict in which Adam, after years of life alone, struggles to accommodate this other individual into his life; but in fact this section of the work replays the dichotomy of construction vs. destruction that was on display earlier in the text. It is perhaps a concession to popular taste that Shiel ultimately has Adam yield to Leda and begin the propagation of a new human race; but the manner in which this conclusion is reached is psychologically acute and powerfully dramatic. Like “The House of Sounds,” The Purple Cloud was substantially rewritten and pruned down for a 1929 reprint: not only have 10,000 words of the 103,000-word original text been removed, but the revision has occurred on a sentence-by-sentence basis, with the result that the revised version does flow more easily. But there will always be those who, as with “Vaila,” prefer the earlier and more florid (or, to be more charitable, engagingly flamboyant) version. The Purple Cloud appears to comprise a loose trilogy with two novels, The Lord of the Sea (1901) and The Last Miracle (1906), but these latter two are not weird in any meaningful sense. The unifying feature in them is apparently the existence of a kind of Nietzschean superman figure. Shiel also devised two peculiar detectives, Prince Zaleski (featured in the three stories in Prince Zaleski, 1895) and Cummings King Monk (featured in three stories in The Pale Ape). Most of Shiel’s other novels are mystery or adventure stories of a more or less eccentric cast. Shiel has always had a relatively tiny but devoted following that refuses to let his work die; and interest in his work has been augmented by H. P. Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for it, although its influence on Lovecraft’s own work is largely indirect. Several writers of a slightly later period are worth consideration. W. F. Harvey (1885–1937) wrote a number of volumes of predominantly weird short stories, including Midnight House and Other Tales (1910), The Beast with Five Fingers and Other Tales (1928), Moods and Tenses (1933), and the posthumous Midnight Tales (1946). There is, frankly, nothing particularly distinctive about either Fryer’s selection of weird tropes or his handling of them, and many of his tales fall lamentably flat; but two or three are worth discussion. The most celebrated—justly so—is “The Beast with Five Fingers,” published in an early version in 1919 and revised for
the 1928 collection. This story manages to tread the line between humour and horror in a delightful fashion. For the “beast” in question is nothing but a severed hand that is apparently possessed by the spirit of its dead owner— one Adrian Borslover, a blind man who had developed skill at automatic writing. Adrian’s nephew, Eustace, taking over the property upon Adrian’s death, finds himself plagued by the pestiferous appendage, which contrives to slide down banisters and do other surprising feats of prestidigitation. Even after the hand is nailed to a board, it manages to escape and eventually burn the house down. It is no surprise that the tale was very loosely adapted into a 1946 film (which, presumably, also triggered the story collection of that year), as the scenario works better visually than in print. Harvey’s other celebrated tale, “August Heat” (1910), is something of a trick. Here an artist, James Clarence Withercroft, draws a sketch of an immensely black man on trial for murder—and is unable to determine why he has produced such a portrait, so out of keeping with his usual magazine artwork. Later he comes upon the very man—a mason who is chiselling (for an exhibition) a marble gravestone . . . with Withercroft’s name and life and death dates (the latter being that very day) on it. All this is highly contrived, and of course Withercroft’s plan to stay overnight with the mason in order to keep alive has the very opposite result. There is otherwise little worth singling out in Harvey’s work. “Miss Cornelius” (1928) is a not uninteresting treatment of poltergeists; “The Tool” (1928) intriguingly melds psychological and supernatural horror in portraying a man who seems to have “lost” a day and begins to worry that he killed a man during that time; “Miss Avenal” (1928) is a predictable tale of a psychic vampire, where an old woman draws strength from her increasingly enfeebled nurse; and “Mrs. Ormerod” is a not ineffective conte cruel about a cook-housekeeper who dominates her various employers. Of somewhat greater interest is Thomas Burke (1886–1945), much of whose bountiful work is of consuming interest for its lush and evocative prose, and a small proportion of which deals with supernatural and psychological terror. Some critics are fond of labelling Burke’s signature volume of tales, Limehouse Nights (1916), and its sequel, More Limehouse Nights (1921), as at least tangentially weird; but the very essence of these volumes is their grim realism, focusing as they do on the lives of the impoverished residents (many of them Chinese) in the Limehouse district of London. There may be a certain sentimentality in Burke’s treatment of his
down-and-outers, and the tales are certainly full of murder, lust, and mayhem; but weird they are not. In reality, Burke’s weird fiction is restricted almost entirely to the volume Night Pieces (1935), and even this volume is not exclusively weird. Its most celebrated tale—and a marvel it is, if perhaps only because of its novel narrative strategy—is “Johnson Looked Back,” a tour de force in second-person singular narration. Here Johnson finds himself being pursued by a blind man with no hands. There are only the faintest hints of what Johnson did to earn this loathsome pursuer (“And you know that it was your work that robbed him of his hands and left him to use his feet as hands” [107]); and it is perhaps no great surprise when the pursuer proves to be Johnson’s “other self” (107). As an adaptation of Poe’s “William Wilson” the tale is undoubtedly effective. Some of Burke’s other tales are open to the same criticisms of excessive authorial trickery that we saw in Harvey’s “August Heat.” Consider “Miracle in Suburbia.” Here a man asks the protagonist, Joe, to take back a valuable Chinese goblet from another man, saying that he can provide Joe magical protection. He demonstrates it by cutting Joe’s wrist with a knife— but no wound appears. Sure enough, Joe engages in a fight with the man who has the goblet, the latter slitting Joe’s throat—but nothing happens. Later the man of magical powers dies—whereupon Joe’s throat suddenly opens up. (But then, why didn’t his wrist also reveal a cut?) The story is clever without being in the least profound. Still more trickery can be detected in the sentimental story “Yesterday Street,” where a middle-aged man goes back to the street where he grew up along with his three best friends. He meets all three—they are still children. Only later does he learn that they (implausibly) all died the previous day. Another instance of benign supernaturalism is the touching tale “The Gracious Ghosts,” where the ghosts of a young couple appear in a house: they seem very much in love, and they are finally dispelled by the appearance of the living couple, now fifteen years later, who have now reconciled after a quarrel that separated them. “The Black Courtyard” is another ingenious fusion of the psychological and the supernatural. A man who becomes obsessed with killing an old man for his money finds himself returning repeatedly to the courtyard where the old man lives. A doctor urges him to confront his fears by going to the
courtyard. He does so—and kills the old man. He is thus relieved of his anxiety—but the police arrive the next day to arrest him. Occasionally Burke is a trifle clumsy in his handling of supernatural phenomena. In “The Man Who Lost His Head,” a man wakes up with someone else’s face, which proves to be that of a murderer. He is unable to prove to the authorities that he is not in fact the murderer. But there is not the remotest explanation for why this transformation should have occurred, as there is in, say, de la Mare’s The Return. In “Events at Wayless-Wagtail” a man, Stern, has visions of a murder taking place in the future. He manages to track down the location of the future murder and prevent it from occurring; then, a year later, the potential murderer himself dies when he makes another attempt at killing his victim. This is not the first, nor the last, story to fall victim to the determinism paradox: If Stern had actually seen the vision, there is nothing he could have done to stop it (or, rather, any actions he took would only lead to the very fulfilment of the vision); if the act depicted in the vision, by whatever means, was thwarted, then Stern could not have seen it in the first place. Next to “Johnson Looked Back,” “The Hollow Man” may be Burke’s most effective weird tale. A powerful evocation of horrors out of Africa, it tells of a man called Nameless who had killed one Gopak in Africa fifteen years earlier; but Gopak is revived by a Leopard Man and now seeks out Nameless—not to gain vengeance upon him, but to ask for his help. Initially, Nameless is unclear what kind of help Gopak wants; but at last he realises that Gopak wants Nameless to kill him again, so that he may finally achieve rest. The image of the decaying Gopak, sitting around Nameless’s house for weeks on end, is imperishable. As it is, it is quite obvious that Gopak is nothing but the externalisation of Nameless’s guilt at committing murder; indeed, he becomes fearful that his second killing of Gopak might bring down the punishment that he had evaded the first time, but Gopak’s body turns to dust when Nameless stabs him with a knife. The work of John Metcalfe (1891–1965) is similarly flawed but interesting. The best of his work is contained in his collections The Smoking Leg and Other Stories (1925) and Judas and Other Stories (1931), although neither is exclusively weird. In general, Metcalfe employed venerable weird motifs, not always bringing much novelty or distinction to them: “The Smoking Leg” is the tale of a curse; “No Sin” is the tale of a love triangle, where a deceased wife manages (by way of a marble statue of her that a
sculptor has fashioned) to kill her husband and his ward, whom she suspected of being in love. “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania” has an ingenious premise—a man feels, but does not see, a kind of snout projecting from his face, a “mania” that is traced to his seeing a picture of the ibis-headed Thoth as a child—but the execution is unsatisfactory: even though the appendage eventually becomes visible, the tale is so crippled by verbosity that the dénouement is anticlimactic. Lovecraft enjoyed “The Bad Lands,” chiefly because of his fondness for topographical horror; but Metcalfe never satisfactorily explains why the region in question is said to have the evil qualities that several characters sense in it. Later work by Metcalfe is still more unsatisfactory. “Brenner’s Boy” (1932) is a celebrated ghost story about a misbehaving boy, but the exposition is confused and prolix. The Feasting Dead (1954) is an incredibly bad novella about a psychological vampire. It was published by August Derleth’s Arkham House, and Derleth regularly included stories by Metcalfe in later anthologies, even after Metcalfe’s death; but these tales amount to little. Of the prodigious output of Sax Rohmer (pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883–1959) we are obliged to take some note. I say this reluctantly, because Rohmer is without question a third-rate hack whose popularity in his lifetime stemmed precisely from his ability to cater to relatively crude literary tastes. His most celebrated series of books, the Fu Manchu novels, are mercifully beyond the purview of this study, as they are strictly crime/suspense tales. Somewhat closer to the weird is The DreamDetective (1920), featuring the psychic detective Morris Klaw. Even more pompous and insufferable than Flaxman Low, Thomas Carnacki, and other of his predecessors, Klaw boasts the power to visualise the last things seen by a dead man—a quality that conveniently allows him to solve the various cases in which he becomes involved. But in spite of this supernatural premise, the cases themselves are straight mysteries. Rohmer wrote an abundance of stories in such collections as Tales of Secret Egypt (1918), The Haunting of Low Fennel (1920), Tales of Chinatown (1922), and Tales of East and West (1933), playing upon English-speaking readers’ purported fascination with exotic locales; but well under half of the stories are supernatural and still fewer are of any account. In Tales of Secret Egypt a number of stories are of the “explained supernatural” type, some of them reasonably clever. “Breath of Allah,” for
example, features a character who sees a scream emerging from a man’s mouth—but it turns out that he has been drugged by a cloud of hashish. “Lord of the Jackals” not ineffectively combines weirdness and romance: the protagonist, a Frenchman named René de Flassans, falls in love with a twelve-year-old Bedouin girl (he assures us that “The Bedouin girl is a woman when a European woman is but a child” [180]); facing inevitable pursuit by her clan, he is saved by a wizard who, by singing a song, causes hundreds of jackals to emerge from their caves to protect the Frenchman. In “The Valley of the Sorceress” legions of cats continually rebury the partially excavated tomb of Queen Hatasu, reputed to have been a sorceress. Tales of Chinatown contains the celebrated tale “Tchériapin,” but it is at best a mixed success. Here a painter, Colquhoun, kills the celebrated violinist Tchériapin for stealing his girl. Meanwhile, a chemist, Kreener, has devised a formula for rendering any vegetable or organic substance as hard as diamonds; and so he and Colquhoun subject the body of Tchériapin to this treatment—but since the formula does not work on dental enamel, they are obliged to pull his teeth first. But curiously, Tchériapin’s body is shrunk in the process to miniature size—in spite of the fact that other objects subject to the treatment were not so shrunk. Of Rohmer’s many novels, Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918) has gained a certain cachet because of Lovecraft’s praise of it, but it is a very inferior work. It focuses on the figure of one Antony Ferrara, the adoptive son of a celebrated Egyptologist who performs various supernatural shenanigans in order to gain his foster-father’s estate. In the end it is revealed that Ferrara is in fact the offspring of a “witch-queen” of ancient Egypt. As a tale of Egyptian horror, the novel is much inferior to Marsh’s The Beetle or Stoker’s Jewel of Seven Stars—not that those works are stellar contributions to literature either. Other novels by Rohmer—The Quest of the Sacred Slipper (1919), The Green Eyes of Bast (1920), She Who Sleeps (1928), The Bat Flies Low (1935)—have various supernatural elements, but they amount to little. Rohmer’s work is so uniformly crude and mediocre that a little of it speaks for the whole.
iv. The American School It would perhaps be misleading to suggest that American writers were less assiduous than their British or European counterparts in probing the weird; but, as I have stated earlier, it appears that a substantial number of Americans chose to publish in the pulp magazines in the 1920s, or their antecedents in the Munsey magazines dating back to the later nineteenth century. However, a number of mainstream magazines like Cosmopolitan and Collier’s were open to weird contributions, and several American shortstory writers filled their pages, and their story collections, with interesting supernatural matter. O. Henry (the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910) wrote nearly 300 short stories in little more than a decade (1898–1910), attaining spectacular popularity. Only a few of O. Henry’s stories can be said to be supernatural. The Four Million (1906) contains what many believe are his two best tales, the sentimental fantasy “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) and “The Furnished Room” (1904). In the latter, a man seeking a lost lover comes to stay in a boarding-house in the lower West Side of Manhattan. A whiff of perfume convinces him that his lover had been there, but the landlady denies it. In despair, he commits suicide. We later learn that the woman had in fact stayed there, having committed suicide herself. Roads of Destiny (1909) contains the historical fantasy “Roads of Destiny” (1903), suggesting three widely divergent fates depending upon the road a man chooses to follow, and “The Enchanted Kiss” (1904), set in San Antonio and revealing a man who claims that eating the flesh of young women is the secret to eternal life. In this tale, as in “A Ghost of a Chance” (1903; in Sixes and Sevens [1911]), the supernatural is explained away as hoax or hallucination. The same appears to be the case in “The Door of Unrest” (1904; in Sixes and Sevens), in which the editor of a small-town newspaper meets a man claiming to be the Wandering Jew; but O. Henry here leaves open the possibility that the man really is what he says he is. O. Henry’s reputation has been dogged by accusations that his writing is facile, shallow, and meretriciously clever, his very popularity seen as confirmation of the poor literary taste of the general reading public.
Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944) specialized in humorous short stories but wrote a small number of supernatural tales over the course of a long career. At one time, in fact, Cobb considered assembling his tales of horror, the supernatural, and the grotesque into a volume, but never did so; the volume, however, would have included several tales of mystery, suspense, and psychological terror that have nothing to do with the supernatural. Perhaps only three stories can qualify as supernatural, the best of them being the celebrated “Fishhead” (1913; in The Escape of Mr. Trimm [1913]), involving a man named Fishhead who lives near a lake at the TennesseeKentucky border, and who not only physically resembles a catfish but seems to have an uncanny rapport with the catfish that lurk in unusual numbers in the lake. It is one of many stories in which Cobb etches with unsparing realism the crudeness and half-barbaric savagery of the poor whites of the South. “The Unbroken Chain” (1923; in On an Island That Cost $24 [1926]) is a tale of atavistic memory: a Frenchman with a small admixture of negroid blood is struck by a train and utters African cries identical to those spoken by a distant ancestor who had died when attacked by a hippopotamus. Atmospherically powerful, the story is marred by ugly racism. “The Second Coming of a First Husband” (in Snake Doctor and Other Stories [1923]) is a humorous tale of the ghost of a deceased first husband who upbraids his erstwhile wife for distorting the truth of their tumultuous marriage. Cobb was able to simulate the supernatural effectively in several tales. In “The Gallowsmith” (in From Place to Place [1920]) a phlegmaticseeming hangman, Tobias Dramm, is disturbed by the curses of a man he has just hanged and thinks he sees the shadow of a man thrashing on the gallows on the wall of his bedroom (in fact, it is the shadow of a rat he had killed earlier). “Snake Doctor” (1922; in Snake Doctor and Other Stories) tells of a man who dies when he thinks he has been bitten by a poisonous snake; in fact, the snake was a toy. The influence of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Man and the Snake” is evident here. Cobb’s tales reveal considerable fertility of invention and psychological insight, but aside from the tautly written “Fishhead” they seem subject to suspicions of prolixity. It is evident that horror and the supernatural were never far from his temperament, although he chose to express them in only a random group of stories.
Gouverneur Morris (1876–1953) published widely in popular magazines of the first three decades of the twentieth century. His first collection, The Footprint and Other Stories (1908), contains three grim tales: the title story, a novelette about five white men who steal a rubyencrusted box from a group of Chinese people in California and die hideously as a result; “The Execution,” a rather contrived tale about a blind man who unwittingly kills his own son (who, facing execution, had escaped from prison and come home); and “The Crocodile,” in which an incantation uttered over the body of a tiny crocodile appears to resurrect a man’s longdead wife. But Morris’s best-known horror tale is the much-reprinted “Back There in the Grass” (1911; in It and Other Stories [1912]), where we encounter an entire colony of foot-high people found on a Polynesian island. These people turn out to be a kind of snake, with poison sacs attached to fangs in their mouths. As in his other tales, Morris’s clipped yet lyrical prose makes this tale a potent atmospheric vignette. An uncollected tale, “Derrick’s Return” (Cosmopolitan, December 1923), is an allegory about a soul’s adventures in the afterlife. It is a pity that Morris did not broach the weird in more of his tales, as he could easily have become a master of the form. Perhaps Edward Lucas White (1866–1934) would be irked if he knew that, amidst the mass of his literary productions spanning more than three decades, virtually the only works that are remembered are his tales of supernatural horror. His early training in Latin, Greek, and ancient history were put to good use in such historical novels as The Unwilling Vestal (1918) and Andivius Hedulio (1921); but his literary reputation will continue to rest on his two weird collections, The Song of the Sirens and Other Stories (1919) and Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927). Several of the tales in these collections were written very early in the twentieth century but failed to find lodgment in magazines despite repeated submissions. “The Flambeau Bracket,” for example, was written in January 1906 but was rejected by 75 magazines over a 51-month period, finally landing in Young’s Magazine (the date of publication is uncertain; it probably appeared in late 1910 or early 1911). The story is a remarkable testament to Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on White. He had been a devotee of Poe since his early teenage years, and late in life he made the confession that “I have had to banish from my home every scrap of [Poe’s] printed writings, else I should waste my time and fuddle myself and reread him when I should be doing
other things” (quoted in Wetzel [I], p. 98). He also confessed that he destroyed nearly every scrap of his work that was influenced by Poe, but “The Flambeau Bracket” survived: although based upon a dream, White admits that the dream itself was largely triggered by “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is White’s solitary excursion into non-supernatural horror. It is difficult to convey in small compass the distinctive qualities of White’s weird tales. Aside from their inspiration from dreams, their most salient feature is perhaps the sheer bizarrerie of their weird manifestations. Rarely do we find the conventional ghost in White’s work; instead, we come upon the female ghoul in “Amina,” the hideous growth that plagues the protagonist in “Lukundoo,” the monster that is Hengist Eversleigh in “The Snout,” and so many others. Even when a ghost is present—as perhaps is the case in “The Message on the Slate”—it exhibits itself in a piquant and novel way. White admitted that he had renounced all religious belief as early as the age of fourteen, and this very lack of belief may have contributed to the effectiveness of his tales. It is this sentiment that lends a poignancy to the charlatan clairvoyant’s confession, in “The Message on the Slate,” that the supernatural phenomenon he has just experienced “has demolished the entire structure of my spiritual existence” (198). There is perhaps a reason to complain that White’s development of his narratives is at times a bit slow and drawn-out. Indeed, it would appear that several of his lengthier tales were rejected largely on the grounds of length; “The Song of the Sirens” was first published only in a heavily abridged form. But in most instances, White’s leisurely narration is designed to build up an insidious atmosphere of horror by the slow accretion of bizarre details, and in the end we find that few of his tales are open to the charge of prolixity. He had learned well from his early idol Poe, and adhered fully to Poe’s conceptions of the “unity of effect.” White was able to mingle his love of classical antiquity and his love of the weird only in “The Song of the Sirens”; but his tales feature other interesting bits of autobiography. The ship Medorus that is the setting for “The Song of the Sirens” is a clear reflection of the Cordorus, on which he sailed in 1885. “Sorcery Island”—a weird and ambiguously supernatural tale that uncannily foreshadows the “Prisoner” television series—may also owe something to White’s travels. “The House of the Nightmare” evokes the rural setting of his early years in New York state.
White’s most famous story, “Lukundoo,” is worth considering in some detail. He makes the interesting comment that, although the story was based on a dream, he would never have had that dream if he had not read H. G. Wells’s “Pollock and the Porroh Man.” That story is, as we saw in the previous volume, a powerful tale of the revenge of a “Porroh man” upon an imprudent Englishman, but there is no need to resort to a supernatural explanation to account for its various incidents; indeed, at the end Wells suggests that the entire scenario is largely a series of hallucinations brought on by Pollock’s fear of the Porroh man’s supposed powers. In “Lukundoo” White has duplicated only the barest outline of the plot of Wells’s tale—the curse inflicted upon a white man by an African sorcerer. “Lukundoo” is, however, manifestly supernatural, and is still more terrifying in that the curse actually invades the explorer Ralph Stone’s body, resulting in hideous small heads emerging on his chest and elsewhere—heads that actually speak to Stone. And yet, both tales are fundamentally tales of revenge, and in both tales we find the victims overcome by remorse at their mistreatment of African natives and inexorably losing their very will to live. It is not surprising that H. P. Lovecraft and others enjoyed “Lukundoo,” for it foreshadows the explicit horror and novel supernatural premises that formed the core of their own work, as will be detailed in later chapters.
XI. Novelists, Satirists, and Poets
i. William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds One of the most distinctive voices in early-twentieth-century supernatural fiction was the British writer William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), whose promising career was cut short on a battlefield in Belgium toward the end of the Great War. Although Hodgson wrote dozens, perhaps hundreds, of short stories, the chief interest in his work rests with his four novels, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land (1912). It was these novels that were the focus of a Hodgson revival that began in the 1930s, led by Herman C. Koenig and H. P. Lovecraft and culminating with August Derleth’s reissue of them in an immense omnibus volume, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (1946). Of Hodgson’s short stories much can be said. He wrote short stories prodigally but made relatively little attempt to gather them in collections: only four, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1913), Men of the Deep Waters (1914), The Luck of the Strong (1916), and Captain Gault (1917), appeared in his lifetime. This work has both its virtues and its drawbacks. Like many short story writers, Hodgson wrote too much, and his tales are in some instances marred by repetetitiousnes of conception, slipshod writing, and a certain monotony of setting, as he overused the sea topos that forms the most recognisable feature of his overall output. Hodgson appears to have had a relatively small body of distinctive short story ideas, and he often wrote several tales on the same basic premise with only slight variations in tone, setting, and execution. Moreover, his tales fall into several discrete categories, with relatively little overlap. The Carnacki stories, utilising the “psychic detective” scenario popularised by Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908), form a class by themselves, as do the lesser-known Captain Gault stories, recounting the adventures of that genial smuggler. Other tales are purely stories of adventure, whether on sea or land. But a substantial residue feature the core element that infuses at least three of his four novels (The Night Land being put aside as an
unclassifiable cosmic fantasy): the supernatural. More specifically, a number of short stories provocatively address whether the supernatural does or does not come into play, and do so in such a way as to fall variously into such rubrics as the clearly supernatural, the “explained supernatural,” the ambiguously supernatural, and even a few proto-science fiction specimens. That the great proportion of Hodgson’s tales, of whatever type, take place in a maritime setting suggests that Hodgson, himself a former seaman, saw in such a setting a convenient means for effecting that “willing suspension of disbelief” so critical to the success of a supernatural tale. Because the sea—especially in its more remote stretches, as in the immensities of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean—is a relatively unknown quantity to most readers, and because of the known existence of unusual creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean, a sea setting can be the locus of horrors that, on land, might appear too incredible for belief. This technique is no different in kind from other weird writers’ use of remote locales, and Hodgson incorporates within his zone of mystery not only the inaccessible reaches of the sea itself but those hapless islands of humanity—ships—that dare to venture upon it. One of the means by which Hodgson seeks to convey a sense of the supernatural, even if in the end the supernatural does not actually come into play, is by the seemingly elementary use of the word Thing. The fact that Hodgson would use such titles as “The Thing in the Weeds” and “The Thing Invisible” points to the importance of this formulation in his aesthetic of the weird. What might seem like a kind of cop-out—an inability or unwillingness to describe in detail the entity in question—becomes instead a device for the segregation of the non-human (or the no-longer-human), or even the non-animal, from the known animate species that populate the earth. It is exactly in the indefinability of the “Things” encountered by Hodgson’s protagonists that is the source of terror in these tales; they inspire fear because, at least initially, they resist easy classification within the realm of biology, and their almost uniform aggressiveness and hostility to humanity renders them a far from abstract intellectual conundrum. To be sure, Hodgson is variously successful at conveying the inimical qualities of his “Things.” In the early tale “A Tropical Horror” (1905) an immense monster that comes on board the deck of a ship is labelled a “Thing” (CF 3.146), but later it is identified as a “serpent” (CF 3.147). It is not entirely clear whether the serpent is actually a supernatural entity or
merely a large sea-snake: Hodgson, as frequently in his tales and novels, relies on the increased dramatic pace of his narrative—many of his tales become adventure stories in which frenetic action must be taken against the hostile force, whether natural or supernatural, that is menacing the protagonists—to distract the reader from questioning too closely the reality or plausibility of the entity in question. In “A Tropical Horror” the entire absence of any plausible rationale for the serpent’s existence renders the tale unconvincing and preposterous. Similarly, in “The Call in the Dawn” (1920) the “Thing” (CF 1.227) encountered by a ship in the Sargasso Sea proves to be “some kind of devil-fish or octopus” (1.227)—presumably non-supernatural, even if “The thing was enormous” (1.228). The Sargasso Sea stories, indeed, engage in a subtle dance between supernaturalism and non-supernaturalism. In several tales the supernatural does not appear to come into play, unless we are to assume that the very existence of this weed-choked realm is itself a supernatural phenomenon. Hodgson sometimes suggests that there is a kind of double remoteness associated with the site: not only is it in an unknown stretch of the Atlantic Ocean (where, theoretically, almost anything can breed and emerge), but those all-pervading weeds themselves provide an added layer of obscurity beneath which “Things” can lurk. In the two-part “From the Tideless Sea” (1906–07) we learn that “There was some dread Thing hidden within the weed” (CF 1.148), but this turns out to be an octopus. The hapless Arthur Samuel Philips, who, with his wife, is trapped aboard a derelict caught in the weeds, states, “I have grown to believe this world of desolation capable of holding any horror, as well it might” (1.156); but there is little justification for his alarm until he discovers that a pig that he had on board has been killed by “some monstrous thing” (1.165). But even this baleful entity proves to be “a gigantic crab, so vast in size that I had not conceived so huge a monster existed” (1.172). But when Philips, seeing an entire herd of crabs large and small, remarks that “the mystery [was] solved” and that “with the solution, departed the superstitious terror which had suffocated me” (1.172), we are to understand that no actual supernatural phenomenon has occurred. The ambiguity of the ontological status of Hodgson’s monsters—are they supernatural or natural?—is maintained in a great many of his nonSargasso Sea stories as well. “The Silent Ship”—evidently a variant ending of The Ghost Pirates—presents entities that are manifestly humanoid but,
also, manifestly supernatural, in keeping with the nautical ghosts of the novel: “I saw Things coming out of the water alongside the silent ship. Things like men, they were, only you could see the ship’s side through them, and they had a strange, misty, unreal look” (CF 1.138). In “The Stone Ship” (1914) the eponymous ship appears to be the locus of a succession of supernatural phenomena: members of the crew that lands on the ship seem to see immense faces peering at them underwater, are pursued by what seem to be strings of red hair, and the like. But the narrator, Duprey, systematically explains all these phenomena: the strings of red hair prove to be nothing more than “some kind of big-hairy sea-caterpillar” (CF 1.302), while the faces are those of drowned men whose tissues have been swollen by what is explicitly noted as a “natural process” (1.303). All this lends credence to Duprey’s expostulation, “The natural wonders of the sea beat all made-up yarns that ever were!” (1.301). There is little reason to doubt that “The Voice in the Night” (1907) is Hodgson’s most accomplished tale of supernatural horror. What distinguishes this story, aside from the gradualness and subtlety of its supernatural manifestation, is an element of religious criticism that is rare in Hodgson’s work. We learn that the protagonist—named only John—and his fiancée (never named), having survived the sinking of the Albatross (a name that immediately recalls Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem of supernatural horror that is itself heavily laden with religious imagery), find themselves stranded on a lagoon. Initially they “thanked God” (CF 3.160) for their apparent salvation, especially when they found that there were edible foodstuffs on a foundered ship near the lagoon, at which point John “thanked God in my heart for His goodness” (3.161). But the lagoon is nearly entirely covered with a curious grey fungus, which also grows on the foundered ship. A short time later a bit of the fungus is found growing on John’s fiancée’s hand—then on John’s own face. At this point the couple seem resigned to their fate (“God would do with us what was His will” [3.163]), but after several months in which their food has been reduced to virtually nothing, the woman takes to eating the fungus. Later John encounters a hideous creature—perhaps a man—covered with the fungus. Finally, John capitulates and eats some of the fungus himself. As in Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” (1927), which features a somewhat analogous phenomenon, we are left to wonder at both the physical and the psychological degradation of the couple—and we are not surprised that
John, in seeking help from a ship that has sailed nearby, refuses to allow the crew members to catch a glimpse of him. What is puzzling, however, is John’s insistence that “it is God’s wish that we should tell to you all that we have suffered” (3.159). The motivations of a God who would allow the creatures of his special care to experience such a loathsome fate can only be wondered at. Although perhaps the best known of Hodgson’s short stories, the tales involving the psychic detective Thomas Carnacki do not, as a group, rank high in his overall output, as they are marred by the crude stylistic formulae customary in popular fiction—the mechanical use of a recurring character, a verbose drawing out of the plot beyond its natural parameters, certain irritating habits of speech by Carnacki himself (especially his repeated query, “Can you understand?” when dealing with apparent supernaturalism), the contrived use of occultist mumbo-jumbo (“electric pentacles,” the “Saaamaaa Ritual,” etc.), and so forth. That Hodgson was attempting to capitalise on the success of Blackwood’s best-selling John Silence is evident, as the Carnacki tales began appearing in the Idler only two years after the appearance of that volume. And yet, where the Carnacki tales gain their interest is in their constant fluctuating, exactly as Hodgson’s other tales do, between supernaturalism and non-supernaturalism. In the first story, “The Thing Invisible,” Carnacki declares that “I am as big a sceptic concerning the truth of ghost tales as any man you are likely to meet” (CF 2.138). Carnacki goes on to say that he is an “unprejudiced sceptic,” by which he means that “I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle’, as I have found many idiots prone to be . . . I view all reported ‘hauntings’ as un-proven until I have examined into them; and I am bound to admit that ninety-nine cases in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy” (2.138). The proportion is not by any means quite that high in the nine Carnacki tales, but a surprising number of them resolve themselves non-supernaturally: in “The Thing Invisible” it turns out that the dagger that has apparently hurled itself through the air and nearly killed a man has been operated by a secret mechanism; in “The House among the Laurels” the seemingly supernatural phenomena in a deserted castle have been staged by a group of squatters who may have lived in the place for years; “The Find” is an explicitly nonsupernatural story of a forged rare book. Conversely, “The Gateway of the Monster,” “The Whistling Room,” “The Haunted Jarvee,” and “The Hog”
are unequivocally supernatural, although several are spoiled by incomprehensible occultist pseudo-science. This leaves the two stories, “The Searcher of the End House” and “The Horse of the Invisible,” in which many but not all of the “supernatural” phenomena are resolved naturally: Carnacki, at the end of both stories, insists that a slim residue of genuine supernaturalism may still remain. The first tale is set in a house being rented by Carnacki himself and his mother; and it is plagued with strange odours, inexplicable rappings, and so forth. Although Carnacki discovers that many of the occurrences were engendered by a Captain Tobias, a smuggler, he is unable to identify Tobias as the source of the most striking phenomena—the ghosts of a woman and a child, seen variously by Carnacki himself and others. Carnacki is compelled to conclude: “I can only suppose that fear was in every case the key, as I might say, which opened the senses to an awareness of the presence of the Woman” (CF 2.230). Similarly, in “The Horse of the Invisible,” while it is determined that a man named Parsket has dressed up as a horse in order to scare away a naval officer named Beaumont who is engaged to Miss Hisgins (Parsket being in love with her himself), Carnacki believes that “there was something more at work than [Parsket’s] sham-haunting” (CF 2.252) and concludes tentatively that “Parsket had produced what I might term a kind of ‘induced haunting,’ a kind of induced simulation of his mental conceptions, due to his desperate thoughts and broodings” (2.254). The suggestion in both stories is that intense emotions can of themselves produce quasi-supernatural phenomena even when other phenomena are convincingly explained away as the product of deceit and trickery. As for Hodgson’s novels, one of the most incredible things that can be said of them is that—as the research of Sam Gafford has established—they were written in almost reverse order of publication, with the immense apocalyptic fantasy The Night Land written first, as early as 1903, followed by The House on the Borderland (1904), The Ghost Pirates (1904–05), and The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1905). There is perhaps no great surprise in this, for it is difficult to credit that a relatively unknown author could have published such an enormous and difficult novel as The Night Land as his first book; indeed, it becomes clear that Hodgson, having his novels repeatedly rejected, settled for a more accessible style with “Glen Carrig,” a routine tale of weird phenomena encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship.
As a contribution to weird fiction, The House on the Borderland ranks as Hodgson’s most substantial work; but it too is marred by defects. The text purports to be portions of a manuscript written by a man living with his sister in a remote house in Ireland, but it is fraught with conceptual difficulties and awkwardnesses of execution. The manuscript opens with the narrator’s mental voyage to an area he denotes as the Plain of Silence; in some unexplained fashion, this voyage opens the gates to hideous swineentities and other creatures that besiege him in his lonely abode. These monsters are of impressive loathsomeness, and Hodgson is able to generate an almost intolerable atmosphere of horror and oppression; but he conveniently uses the fragmentary nature of the manuscript to veer off into another direction entirely, depicting the (admittedly fascinating) voyage of the man’s mind into cosmic realms that involve the far future, perhaps the end of the solar system itself. This is, again, one of the finest set-pieces in horror literature, but it does not seem to have any integral connexion with what preceded it, or with what follows. Overall, The House on the Borderland succeeds as a series of horrific interludes but not as a unified novel. The Ghost Pirates can be dispensed with quickly, as it is a relatively conventional tale of hauntings at sea. The Night Land would be worth extended discussion if visionary fantasy were within the scope of this volume, but sadly it is not. Nevertheless, this novel is certainly Hodgson’s most sustained venture into pure imagination. We are now dealing with the remote future, where the pitiful remnants of humanity are by and large restricted to an immense metal pyramid known as the Great Redoubt, which is besieged by monsters not unlike those in The House on the Borderland. The protagonist detects the presence of a female human being in a remote region called the Lesser Redoubt and undertakes the arduous journey to rescue her and bring her back to the Greater Redoubt. The Night Land qualifies, as I have suggested, as fantasy or perhaps even as proto-science fiction, but it does contain its share of horrific episodes and is well worth the herculean effort of reading it. That effort would have been considerably eased if Hodgson had not made the colossal blunder of writing it in what he believes to be seventeenth-century English (by the implausible means of having an Englishman of that era reincarnated in the far future), but which is in fact a nearly unreadable gibberish of his own devising. Why Hodgson resorted to this grotesquely unwieldy device,
which also results in oceans of nauseating sentimental romance that sorely tries the reader’s patience, is beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, this work, as with Hodgson’s as a whole, represents a substantial contribution to the literature of the weird, and no devotee can afford to overlook it.
ii. The Horror Novel One interesting development during this period is the seemingly sudden re-emergence of the horror novel as a viable aesthetic venue. This tendency does not necessarily contradict the general predominance of the short story as the preferred vehicle for expressing supernatural terror, but could instead be seen as an expansion of the overall genre to incorporate scenarios complex and substantial enough to require the novel for proper execution. There is not much evidence that the recrudescence of the horror novel was in any way a return to the outmoded Gothicism of a century earlier, since those Gothic novels had largely been forgotten and their aesthetic shortcomings plainly evident. The fact that many of the current batch of novels were compact, tightly written works suggests that they are in large part merely expanded short stories. Hodgson’s work quickly fell into obscurity following his death, and there is little suggestion that he exerted much of an influence on his successors until at least the 1930s. One early and, until very recently, utterly forgotten work that may betray Hodgson influence is The Hole of the Pit (1914) by British writer Adrian Ross (pseudonym of Adrian Reed Ropes, 1859–1933). Ross was actually a popular writer of musical theatre, but his one novel (dedicated to M. R. James) seems distinctly Hodgsonian, both in its sound imitation of seventeenth-century prose (as opposed to the botched archaism of The Night Land) and in its evocation of horrors from the sea. The Hole of the Pit tells of a strange slimy creature that dwells in a marsh near a castle, victimising a small band of Royalists (the novel is set in 1645) who are defending themselves against a siege by an army of Roundheads during the English Civil War. The archaic diction is flawless, the characters fully realised, and the horror kept in the distance until the very end. And yet, the book was forgotten until Ramsey Campbell reprinted it in his anthology Uncanny Banquet (1992). Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) attained celebrity by a series of children’s books—including Old Peter’s Russian Tales (1916), Swallows and Amazons (1930), and Peter Duck (1932)—that featured liberal doses of fantasy. As a literary critic he attained prominence with such works as Edgar Allan Poe:
A Critical Study (1910) and Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912). His one excursion into supernatural horror, The Elixir of Life (1915), is by no means to be despised, although until its recent reprinting it was a work of extreme rarity. The basic theme is, of course, rather venerable and speaks of the continuing if attenuated strength of motifs derived from the Gothic novels of a century or more before. Ransome’s baleful hero-villain, Killigrew, poignantly records in his diary his gradual moral corruption as he continues to seek eternal youth—something that can only be achieved by murder. Of the two werewolf novels written during this period, only one deserves extended discussion. The Door of the Unreal (1919) by Gerald Biss (1876–1922), a British journalist and crime writer, is so drearily mediocre that one is left baffled by Lovecraft’s relatively cordial assessment of it. Much superior is The Thing in the Woods (1913/1924) by “Harper Williams.” Perhaps the most interesting thing about this work is the author herself. Harper Williams is the pseudonym of British writer Margery Williams Bianco (1881–1944), who like Ransome also wrote several popular works for children. The novel was published in England in 1913 under the name Margery Williams and, in slightly revised form, in the United States in 1924 under the name Harper Williams. In spite of the author’s English background, The Thing in the Woods is set in rural Pennsylvania and vividly evokes both the chilling remoteness of the setting and the complex interplay of emotions involved in the case of two halfbrothers, one of whom is a werewolf. Two short novels by Americans—Sinister House (1919) by Leland Hall (1883–1957) and The Thing from the Lake (1921) by Eleanor M. Ingram (1886–1921)—are worth more than passing notice. Sinister House, set in upstate New York and dealing with ghostly phenomena surrounding a lonely house, has some fine moments of supernatural terror but is on the whole thin and unsubstantial. The Thing from the Lake appears a striking anticipation of Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial monsters in its depiction of an entity in a lake that appears to have come from another dimension; but the resemblances are far fewer than they appear on the surface. The cause of the supernatural manifestions proves to be an eighteenth-century witch named Desire Michell who summoned the entity in a spirit of vengeance, and who is again evoked by her present-day namesake. Two substantial novels by British writers appeared in the mid-1920s. Cold Harbour (1924) by popular writer Francis Brett Young (1884–1954)
suggests the supernatural but ultimately resolves naturalistically. The novel is focused on Humphrey Furnival, a domineering and sinister man who lives at a house in the Midlands called Cold Harbour. The house is reputedly haunted, and many of its inhabitants or guests—including Furnival’s wife, Jane, and her various relatives—have witnessed bizarre phenomena (bloodstains, dead bodies on the floor, etc.). There is some suggestion that sinister forces may lurk in the house as a result of its construction upon Roman foundations. Ultimately, it is learned that Furnival’s powers of hypnosis have engendered the “supernatural” phenomena in the minds of those who witnessed them in Cold Harbour. The novel’s weird atmosphere, up to the time it is dissipated by the naturalistic explanation, is impressive, but it is never clarified why Furnival is undertaking his hypnotic experiments. The Remedy (1925), by H. B. Drake (1894–1963), better known under its American title, The Shadowy Thing (1928), has been both lauded and condemned; but on the whole it is a substantial work in spite of awkwardnesses in prose and narration. It is one of the finest stories of personality exchange, although inferior in this regard to Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911). A man, Avery Booth, reveals powers of hypnosis to such a degree that he can oust the mind or personality from the body of another person’s body and occupy it. Booth appears to do just that, possessing a weak-willed schoolmate, Gaveston, who is confined in an insane asylum as a result of his aberrant behavior. Moreover, Booth’s powers appear to extend beyond the grave: although apparently killed during World War I, his personality seems to survives and to oust the body of another soldier who has himself been horribly maimed. Although weighed down by verbosity and an extraneous romance element, The Shadowy Thing is an able supernatural novel. Two novels by the American Leonard Cline (1893–1929) are of considerable interest. Some rank his first novel, God Head (1925), as his greatest weird tale; but, firstly, it is weird only indirectly, dealing with a man’s quest for immortality by ruthless domination of others, and, secondly, its reliance on Finnish myth as found in the Kalevala renders it more than a little esoteric—a feature augmented by Cline’s rather recherché and faintly pretentious prose style. There is no reason to doubt that Cline’s premier novel, and contribution to the weird, is The Dark Chamber (1927). Immortality of a sort is also at
the core of this work, as a man, Richard Price, seeks to preserve his entire past by the compulsive setting down of every memory he can recall, with the result that he erects an immense library or archive containing thousands or millions of documents. In the process, Price resorts to the use of drugs, music, and other stimulants to aid in his recovery of memory; and, fascinatingly, he begins to experience hereditary memory—memory of the lives of his remotest ancestors. As such, he begins a reversal along the evolutionary scale, to such an extent that his own dog, Tod (German for “death,” as anyone with elementary linguistic knowledge will have deduced), kills him at the end. The powerful conceptions in this novel, harnessed in this case with a prose style of unmatched elegance and suppleness, will cause The Dark Chamber to remain a permanent contribution to the weird. Cline’s own fate, however, was less happy: a month before the publication of the novel, he was convicted of manslaughter and spent a year in jail, dying of heart failure shortly after he was released. Skirting the supernatural but powerfully suggesting it is The Place Called Dagon (1927) by Herbert Gorman (1893–1954), an American novelist and biographer who wrote the first book on James Joyce. Gorman’s novel is set in a rustic locale in central Massachusetts and centers on a strange individual named Jeffrey Westcott, a student of the occult. Westcott is fascinated by “the place called Dagon,” which turns out to be a valley deep in the woods where the bones of the Salem witches were buried by relatives who settled there from Salem; he believes it has power to evoke the “old gods” if a proper ritual be enacted there. This ritual, involving the sacrifice of a virgin, is interrupted, and Westcott later dies in a fire. The supernatural may not actually come into play, but there are enough suggestions of it to make The Place Called Dagon a substantial contribution to supernatural literature, especially in its powerful evocations of the ancient Puritan heritage of the region, its crisply realised characters, and its skilfully handled climax. Leading British critic and novelist J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) surprisingly contributed to weird fiction with Benighted (1927), published the following year as The Old Dark House and filmed by James Whale in 1932 under that title. The focal character of the novel appears to be Sir Roderick Fenn, who has been portrayed as a half-mad invalid confined to his room, but the true villain turns out to be his entirely insane brother Saul.
Saul finally emerges, threatening to set fire to the house; but he is stopped by others from doing so. The novel simultaneously etches the postwar sentiment of decadent nihilism in England along with an atmosphere of weirdness. Two novels by E. H. Visiak (1878–1972) are studies in contrasts—both in quality and in subject-matter. I wish to study the second, Medusa (1929), before the first, The Haunted Island (1910), because the former strikingly and dismayingly exhibits flaws that the latter avoids. Medusa has gained cachet as a lost classic of supernatural literature, but it is in fact quite mediocre. Large portions of it babble on tediously to no purpose, and when the novel’s purported subject finally gets underway, almost at the very end, the reader’s patience has already been exhausted. The premise of the work is the voyage undertaken by one Huxtable to find his son. It takes considerable verbiage to establish that this son was kidnapped by pirates in the area of China and held hostage; Huxtable, who was also on the ship, was allowed to return to England to raise a ransom. At long last Huxtable’s ship comes into contact with the pirate ship—but it is deserted. Later it is discovered that a “little plump man” (175) still survives on the ship—he is the ship’s surgeon, Mr. Vertembrex. All of a sudden a monster appears: “’Twas squat and shaggy dark, having prodigious great limbs and hands and feet, that were webbed as a fish’s fins, or a manatee’s flappers; but his face, with its dwindled high peaked forehead, and great globular black glistering eyes, was like to that dreadful apparition I vaguely beheld three several times before, in manner related and described” (188). This monster promptly jumps overboard. Finally the sailors come to a strange island whose most prominent characteristic is an immense pillar of black rock; more monsters appear, and they take the narrator, Will Harvell, into an underground chasm, from which he finally emerges after glimpsing yet another immense creature of undetermined sort. That is how the novel ends: there is not the slightest shred of explanation of any of the weird phenomena, nor is Huxtable’s son ever recovered. Medusa may well have been an ill-conceived attempt to rewrite The Haunted Island, for the latter features many of the same details; but in this case the narrative is much more concise and compelling, for Visiak never fails to keep the putatively supernatural premise—an island that is haunted by a monster that is guarding a treasure of immense value—in the forefront of the reader’s mind while writing a thrilling sea-adventure story about the
efforts of two brothers, Francis and Dick Clayton, to reach the baleful place. Even though the supernatural premise—the appearance of an immense human figure as the haunted island comes into view—is ultimately dissipated (the figure proves to be an enormous face carved on a high rock), the narrative has by this point picked up such force that the reader’s interest is maintained. The subtitle of this compact little work, “A Pirate Romance,” would seem to make it ripe for reprinting in an age in which pirates, both real and fictional, have surprisingly returned to public attention. Of the delicate novel The Lady Who Came to Stay (1931) by American writer R. E. Spencer (1896–1956) it is difficult to speak without superlatives. The “lady” of the title is Katherine (no surnames are provided for any characters), who with her young daughter Mary comes to stay with her four sisters-in-law, Phoebe, the twins Lucia and Emma, and Milly, after the death of her husband. Dying of illness after protesting the mistreatment of her daughter, Katherine becomes a ghost who “stays” in the house far longer than her living form; indeed, she causes the death of the evil Phoebe, who had hated her. Ten years later a young man, Richard, seeking convalescence, senses Phoebe’s ghostly presence in her old room. He marries Mary and six years later they are forced to leave their young child, Dicky, in the house alone. He senses both Phoebe’s presence and Katherine’s, as the latter struggles to protect her grandson from the harm that Phoebe seeks to cause him. Emma herself dies while protecting Dicky, and she too manifests her ghostly self to Lucia, now alone in the house. Lucia finds that the only way to foil Phoebe’s continuing plans to destroy Mary’s family is to set the house on fire; she does so, dying in the process. The novel is clearly inspired by Henry James’s careful dissection of every nuance of character and emotion. Some note should be taken of American novelist Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933), although it is not quite as good as its devotees suggest. Somewhat rambling and unfocused, the novel purports to identify the origin of werewolves—or, at least, of one particular werewolf, Bertrand Caillet—in the acts of his remote forbears. His mother, an orphan named Josephine, was raped when she was a teenager by a corrupt priest, Father Pitamont; but this act itself was only the proximate cause of Caillet’s lycanthropy, which goes back several centuries to an earlier Pitamont who had been trapped in a dungeon and forced to eat raw meat. All this is an interesting adaptation of conventional Gothic motifs, and Endore augments
the sociological significance of the novel by setting its central scenes in the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, suggesting that the horrors of war far eclipse the random depredations of his werewolf, who repeatedly regrets his loathsome condition and strives valiantly, but usually in vain, to battle against it. At times the novel—based on the real case of Sergeant Bertrand, a Frenchman who was convicted of graverobbing and mutilation of corpses in the 1850s—reads like a poor translation from the French, but it does manage to develop a certain cumulative power toward the end. On the whole, however, it is by no means superior to Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf on purely aesthetic grounds.
iii. Horror and Satire Ambrose Bierce was perhaps the first writer of weird fiction to link horror and satire in a meaningful way: much of the horror engendered in his work is a direct product of his low view of humanity (a view, as I have argued, not precisely equivalent to full-throated misanthropy, although it can easily be mistaken for such); at a minimum, Bierce’s pungent satire of human folly, weakness, and hypocrisy add a sharp tang to the supernatural or psychological terror of his scenarios. In the early twentieth century, three British writers appeared to follow Bierce’s example after a fashion, although there is no compelling evidence that any of them were directly influenced by him. If anything, all three made brilliant use of Poe’s theories of the short story in writing tales whose concentrated venom occasionally crossed the line into actual terror. Burmese-born Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), who disguised himself under the pseudonym “Saki” (a word derived from the last stanza of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), wrote hundreds of compact tales as well as three short novels and several plays before succumbing to an early death in World War I. Of the six collections of tales that he published in his lifetime, four—Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), and The Toys of Peace (1919)—contain some horror content. Not all his horror stories are explicitly satirical: “Gabriel-Ernest” is a relatively straightforward tale of a boy who turns into a werewolf, while “The Music on the Hill” tells of a woman killed by Pan. Saki’s chief claim to celebrity in horror fiction rests on two stories, “Sredni Vashtar” and “The Open Window.” Both are clever and amusing, but no more. The former deals with a ten-year-old boy, Conradin, who secretly keeps a “polecat-ferret” (137) in a disused toolshed; he names it Sredni Vashtar, and he comes both to fear and to worship the creature. On one occasion, his loathed guardian, Mrs. Kopp, goes into the shed, where the ferret kills her. Saki maintains a distinctively British reserve even in describing this grisly turn of events (“out through that doorway came a long, low, yellow-and-brown beast, with eyes a-blink at the waning daylight, and dark wet stains around the fur of jaws and throat” [140]). In
“The Open Window,” an impish fifteen-year-old girl tells a guest at her house that her aunt has been driven mad by the death of her husband and his two brothers, who died in a bog while hunting, and whom the aunt expects at any moment to return from the dead; sure enough, three men lumber in, driving the guest to flee. In fact, the girl has been pulling the guest’s leg. This climax should have been predicted by any astute reader, so the tale’s celebrity—and the frequency of its inclusion in horror anthologies— remains somewhat of a mystery. A later story, “The Hedgehog,” is a kind of mirror-image of “The Open Window.” Here a psychic, staying at a country house, claims to have seen the ghost of a huge white hedgehog. The owners convince her it was a trick they engendered to bamboozle her: they do not wish to acknowledge the existence of a ghost, because it would give the house a bad reputation. And yet, while this outline suggests that, in contrast to “The Open Window” (where the supernatural is suggested but deflated), the supernatural is here proposed as “true” even if denied by the protagonists, there are hints in the narrative that the psychic’s vision of the hedgehog was in fact a hallucination. That humour rather than horror was Saki’s dominant concern is made evident by any number of other stories, such as “The Peace of Mowsle Barton,” about witches in the English countryside; “Laura,” a comic treatment of the metempsychosis motif; and “Tobermory,” a tale of a talking cat. A recent collection, Sredni Vashtar: Sardonic Tales (2008), contains much that falls well outside the domain of weird fiction, and it must be confessed that Saki’s total contribution to the genre is slight. One does not really know what to make of A. E. Coppard (1878–1957). While his many short stories—collected from as early as Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921) to as late as Lucy in Her Pink Jacket (1954)—are models of craftsmanship and piquant in style, they are somewhat of an acquired taste, and in a number of senses they are not entirely satisfactory from the perspective of weird fiction. Coppard’s weird tales were collected in one of the early Arkham House publications, Fearful Pleasures (1946), but their emphasis on pure fantasy, and their generally flippant tone, lessen their power as ventures into terror. There is also a bit of authorial deception here and there. One of his most celebrated tales, “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” is subject to this criticism. Here we appear to be dealing with a man with the odd name Jaffa Codling
who purportedly has an out-of-body experience, possibly also involving the future. But at the end it is announced that the man is named Gilbert and that he appears to have had a vision regarding the birth of his son. But if so, why was he named Jaffa Codling at the outset? “Old Martin” seems to have promising weird elements, but Coppard’s treatment is very curious. Martin’s niece, Monica, dies, and he is beset by an old superstition that “The dead do not rest. The last-comer serves the lost souls” (55). How can Martin relieve Monica from fetching and carrying for the dead? Perhaps he should kill himself—but in doing so, he would have to disguise the fact of his suicide, as otherwise he would not be buried in the consecrated plot where Monica rests and therefore could not relieve her of her posthumous burden. Even more alarming, Martin learns that the churchyard in question is full, so that it appears that Monica will have to be a servant to the dead for all eternity. But later a parson dies and is buried beneath the pavement of the church; evidently, this is close enough to the churchyard that Monica is now relieved of her duties. The general morbidity of the scenario, and its appeal to primitive superstition, would seem to make this a prototypical weird tale; but Coppard’s narrative is, by design, entirely devoid of terror. Much the same could be said of several other stories. “Polly Morgan” tells of a woman who wants a ghost to make love to her; when Polly’s niece drives the ghost away, it kills the niece’s fiancé. In “Ahoy, Sailor Boy!” a sailor meets a young woman in a small village in the evening. She claims she is a ghost, but he refuses to believe her, whereupon she sheds her clothes and disappears. Coppard is here explicitly playing on the notion that real ghosts cannot be wearing clothes, since that would imply the ghosts of clothing. The same idea is taken up in the whimsical, almost flippant story “The Kisstruck Bogie.” The one story where Coppard focuses on terror is a masterful one. “Gone Away” tells of three British tourists, two men and a woman, in France. Bizarre events increasingly overtake them: first their car’s odometer goes haywire; when they come to a small town, one of them, Anson, vanishes when looking for a newspaper; then Mary Lavenham disappears while looking for Anson; then their car disappears while Mary’s husband, John, is being interrogated at the police station. Finally, in a spectacular climax, John himself disappears. This mad, irrational story builds
splendidly to its grim climax, and one only wishes Coppard had engaged in this type of narrative more frequently. Coppard is adept at non-supernatural horror as well, if the single instance of “The Gruesome Fit” is any gauge. Here a man who is terrified that he might one day commit a murder finds that he does that very thing, killing a tramp who had become a bit too annoying. He gains his just desserts when he sets fire to the house containing the body of the tramp, but crazily rushes back into it when set upon by charging cattle. Coppard’s work is perhaps not satirical in the strictest sense, but the general tone of levity and pungent whimsy that characterises his work would seem to place him within the class of horrific satirists for lack of any better placement. In his introduction to Fearful Pleasures he unwittingly betrays some of his failings as a supernatural writer when he notes that, although “I have not the slightest belief in the supernatural,” he enjoys dipping into the mode on occasion, “for with its enchanting aid a writer can ignore problems of time and tide, probability, price, perspicuity, and sheer damn sense, and abandon himself to singular freedoms on the aery winds of the Never-was” (vii). Evidently he would not agree with L. P. Hartley’s wise dictum, in the introduction to Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book (1955), that in a weird tale “Chaos is not enough. Even ghosts must have rules and obey them” (viii). Hartley (1895–1972) is, indeed, the most accomplished horrific satirist since Bierce, and his strong emphasis on both horror and satire gives his work a power and pungency far beyond that of Saki or Coppard. Like both these writers, Hartley produced a succession of distinguished story collections—Night Fears (1924), The Killing Bottle (1932), The Travelling Grave (1948), The White Wand (1954), Two for the River (1961), and Mrs. Carteret Receives (1971)—and, like Coppard, had a volume (The Travelling Grave) published by Arkham House. In a sense, of course, this short story work was a sideline in comparison to his distinguished mainstream novels —specifically, the “Eustace and Hilda” trilogy (1944–47) and The GoBetween (1953)—but his weird tales continue to be appreciated by those who value subtlety, and not a little covert malice, in favour of explicit bloodletting. Weird themes claimed Hartley’s interest throughout his short-story writing career. Nearly half of his sixty-three (or more) stories are at least on the borderland of the weird, and some—notably “A Visitor from Down
Under” and “The Travelling Grave”—are among the most distinguished and frequently reprinted horror tales of their time. And yet, it may have been from external encouragement that Hartley actually entered the realm of supernatural horror. Although a number of tales in Night Fears skirt the weird, it was not until Cynthia Asquith asked him to write an original story for The Ghost Book (1926) that Hartley produced an authentically supernatural story. This was “A Visitor from Down Under,” later collected in The Killing Bottle and The Travelling Grave. Other Hartley stories appeared in Asquith’s second (1952) and third (1955) Ghost Books as well (“W. S.” and “Someone in the Lift,” respectively); he also wrote “The Cotillon” for Asquith’s When Churchyards Yawn (1931). I have already cited one element of Hartley’s theory of weird fiction, as discussed in his introduction to The Third Ghost Book. Another important point he makes there is his assertion that the modern ghost appears in many more forms than his chain-clanking predecessor. Hartley does not appear to have been entirely sympathetic to this extension of the ghost’s functions or manifestations, and he remarks a little wryly that “Now their liberties have been greatly extended; they can go anywhere, they can manifest themselves in scores of ways. Like women and other depressed classes, they have emancipated themselves from their disabilities” (viii). What this really means is that the ghost is now capable of appearing in a tale in such a way that we scarcely realise it is a ghost until the last moment; indeed, oftentimes the fact that a character is a ghost, and not an ordinary human being as we have up to that point assumed him to be, forms the climax of a Hartley tale. As he says in his introduction: “There must come a point, and it must strike the reader with a shock of surprise and horror, a tingling of the spine, at which we realise that he is not one of us” (viii–ix). These basic principles—the manifestation of the weird as governed by some internally consistent set of “laws,” and extreme subtlety in the presentation of the supernatural—are all we need to understand the bulk of Hartley’s weird tales. Both his supernatural and his non-supernatural tales are much concerned with the analysis of aberrant mental states, and in many instances we are not certain until the very end whether the supernatural actually comes into play; in some tales this uncertainty is never resolved, nor is it intended to be. The graveyard humour that Hartley can create when his characters talk at cross-purposes in some particularly hideous context is no better displayed
than in his celebrated tale, “The Travelling Grave.” This is entirely nonsupernatural, but pungent satire raises it to the level of horror. Richard Munt has developed a peculiar penchant for collecting coffins, but his friend Valentine Ostrop, one of the guests invited to spend a weekend with him, is unaware of this predilection, and by misunderstanding the dialogue of the other guests assumes that Munt collects baby perambulators. One can imagine the consequences. Valentine’s remark that “They perform at one time or another . . . an essential service for us all” (102) is particularly succulent. A great many of Hartley’s weird tales are tales of supernatural revenge. This, I think, is what he meant when he said that the weird writer must “invent laws” for his supernatural phenomena. It is not enough to have a ghostly manifestation that serves no purpose; but if the ghost is on a mission to avenge some wrong, either against himself or against others, then the scenario gains that internal or aesthetic logic that satisfies the reader. It is remarkable how many of Hartley’s tales are of this one type; but he has rung enough changes on the theme in scene and atmosphere to produce a handful of weird masterpieces. “A Visitor from Down Under” once again displays a macabre wit, this time in its punning title: the disheveled man who hunts down Mr. Rumbold in his elegant London hotel is indeed from Australia, but is also from some other place “down under.” The plot of this story is extremely simple— Rumbold has killed his colleague in Australia, presumably for gain, and the colleague comes back to avenge his murder—but the brilliance of the tale rests in the extraordinarily subtle manipulation of details and symbolism. Mr. Rumbold is seen lounging contentedly in his hotel, revelling in “his untroubled acceptance of the present and the future” (63). As he lapses into a doze, he seems to hear a radio programme in which a children’s game is being broadcast. This programme is narrated at anomalous length, and a number of peculiarities in the account finally make us realise that it is in fact a sort of dream or hallucination on Rumbold’s part; it is also prophetic, as it tells ingenuously of some horrible revenge about to take place. When the dead man arrives at the hotel, dripping icicles, he demands to see Rumbold; the latter tries to evade him, but finally throws caution to the winds and has the porter tell him: “‘Mr. Rumbold wishes you to Hell, sir, where you belong, and says, “Come up if you dare!”’” (73). The outcome is inevitable, and the tale ends on one final hideous detail as seen by the porter
in Rumbold’s room: “But what sickened him and kept him so long from going down to rouse the others was the sight of an icicle on the window-sill, a thin claw of ice curved like a Chinaman’s nail, with a bit of flesh sticking to it” (73). One of Hartley’s most powerful tales of supernatural revenge is “Podolo.” Actually, doubt is retained to the end as to whether the supernatural comes into play: all we know is that something horrible has occurred. This exquisitely modulated story tells of an English couple, Angela and Walter, who wish to visit an uninhabited island, Podolo, off the coast of Venice. When they arrive, Angela comes upon a scrawny cat who has evidently been abandoned on the island. She immediately takes pity on the cat, feeds it some scraps of chicken, and tries to capture it to take it back with them. But the cat proves surprisingly feisty, refusing all Angela’s attempts to catch it. Frustrated, Angela makes a hideous resolve: “‘if I can’t catch it I’ll kill it’” (77). Mario, the Italian boatman who took them to the island, remarks wistfully, “‘She loves it so much . . . that she wants to kill it’” (78). No one can dissuade Angela from her twisted mission, but night falls as she scours the island alone hunting down the cat. Walter and Mario begin to worry about Angela, and then see some dark figure in the distance. Mario remarks: “‘There is someone on the island . . . but it’s not the signora’” (80). Mario and Walter get out of the boat and explore the island; they find the crushed head of the cat, then one of Angela’s slippers. Mario, wandering off alone, finds Angela, apparently on the point of death. The tale ends in tantalising inconclusiveness: it is clear that the entity on all fours has avenged the death of the cat by killing Angela, but what is the nature of that entity? Is it human (but if so, how did it get to the island?— there is no other boat aside from Mario’s)? Is it some hideous Darwinian ape-thing? Hartley wisely refrains from resolving the issue. Another fine tale is “Fall In at the Double,” a grim narrative of ghostly soldiers who, in life, took revenge on their cruel colonel. “The Two Vaynes” is interesting in being a sort of pseudo-Doppelgänger tale in which a statue appears to exact vengeance on its creator. A number of Hartley’s best tales are so unclassifiable that they must be placed in the weird only by default. Here the supernatural may or may not come into play, and yet the stories develop such an atmosphere of the bizarre that they present an excellent case for the extension of the weird to encompass tales of psychological terror. “Night Fears” is among the best of
these. Here a night watchman encounters a strange derelict who repeatedly torments him about the disadvantages of this type of work: the pay is bad, it is difficult to sleep in the daytime (“‘Makes a man ill, mad sometimes. People have done themselves in sooner than stand the torture’” [227]), you don’t get to see much of your children, you don’t know what your wife is doing (“‘You leave her pretty much to herself, don’t you? Now with these women, you know, that’s a risk’” [228]). The pacing of the story is masterful, and it may be a textbook instance of the conte cruel. While there is gruesome physical horror here—the derelict ultimately kills the night watchman and leaves him dead at his post—Hartley also manages to leave the subtlest hint that the derelict himself is some otherworldly creature. Other Hartley stories are perhaps too nebulous for detailed analysis: “Home, Sweet Home,” a strange, dreamlike tale that tells of a couple who return to their long-deserted home and find the ghosts of disturbed children who had been interred there; “The Shadow on the Wall,” perhaps a conscious nod to the story of a similar title by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, in which a woman has a peculiar encounter in her bath with a man who may be a ghost; “Conrad and the Dragon,” a twisted fairy tale; “Feet Foremost” and “Monkshood Manor,” stories of supernatural curses; “Three, or Four, for Dinner,” a somewhat obvious tale of a man who returns from the dead; and several others. All these tales, some more effective than others, testify to Hartley’s pervasive interest in the weird, an interest that must be regarded as central to his entire literary work. The virtues of Hartley’s weird fiction, as of his work as a whole, speak for themselves: a polished, fluid, exquisitely restrained style; an attention to fine nuances of character portrayal; a penetrating awareness of the psychological impact of the weird upon human consciousness; and an elegant nastiness that only the British seem capable of getting away with. Hartley’s actual weird scenarios are on the whole very simple, but are narrated with such oblique subtlety, and with such attention to atmospheric tensity, that many can stand as models of weird writing. One should probably discuss here The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), by the American writer Charles G. Finney (1905–1984). This highly eccentric short novel tells a simple story: a strange circus run by a Chinese man, Dr. Lao (who speaks alternately in perfect English and grotesque pseudoChinese pidgin English), comes to the (imaginary) town of Abalone, Arizona, and proves moderately engaging to the local denizens. The novel
is peculiarly static—not much happens except that some of the more unusual exhibits (a unicorn, a sphinx, a satyr, a gorgon, Apollonius of Tyana, a mermaid, a chimera, and so forth) engage in amusing dialogues with the locals, providing fleeting glimpses of their history. Toward the end, Apollonius summons a witches’ sabbath during which Satan appears. The overall satirical thrust of The Circus of Dr. Lao is difficult to specify. The most one can say is that it is a satire on the average American’s stolid indifference to fantasy and wonder, since the Arizonans are only mildly surprised at the exhibits, nearly all of which constitute stupendous violations of natural law and a recrudescence of ancient myth into the modern world. Apollonius, in speaking to a widow and predicting a dismal future of loneliness and frustration for her, utters a pungent barb—“I cannot fathom your place in life’s economy” (85)—that perhaps sums up the novel’s scorn of bourgois mediocrity.
iv. Horror and the Mainstream In the nineteenth century, such distinguished practitioners of mainstream literature as Charles Dickens and Henry James dabbled occasionally in the weird. This tendency continued in the first decades of the twentieth century, where a host of writers chiefly known for their ventures into social or psychological realism found occasion to employ the supernatural to convey some conceptions beyond the bounds of mimetic realism. Possibly inspired by the example of Henry James, William Dean Howells (1837–1920) produced two volumes of weird stories, Questionable Shapes (1903) and Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907). But the element of terror, or even the supernatural, in these stories is so attenuated —and, more significantly, so subordinated to the exploration of social and psychological niceties—that the overall effect is a kind of pale-pink weirdness entirely in keeping with the era in which they were written. Like many mainstream writers, Howells merely uses terror and the supernatural —in these cases, ghosts or the fear of death—as springboards for the study of character. As examples of weird fiction, these tales amount to little. Another distinguished American novelist, Theodore Dreiser, published a volume misleadingly titled Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916), but there is no supernaturalism or even terror in these largely political plays. A very different American writer, Jack London (1876–1916), danced around the supernatural in a number of works but did not actually engage in it, with the possible exception of one or two minor stories. Some of London’s tales have rightly been seen as foreshadowings of science fiction, but it would seem that his predominantly realistic temperament prohibited him from venturing into the supernatural. Such grim tales as “To Build a Fire” (1902/1908) and “A Piece of Steak” (1909) have sometimes been included in anthologies of horror fiction, but their chief virtue is the chillingly realistic treatment of human endeavour at its extremes, and the supernatural has no place in them. The relatively early tale “Even unto Death” (1900) may be typical of London’s inexperience in handling the supernatural, as it is an unoriginal
supernatural revenge story of a dead man who returns to exact vengeance on a faithless fiancée. “Planchette” (1906) is interesting in reflecting contemporary interest in spiritualism, as the item in question—a device used to generate automatic writing—appears to produce genuine messages from the deceased parents of Lute Story, both of them pertaining to her fiancé, Chris Dunbar. Although Dunbar himself argues strenuously for the psychological origin of these messages, the implication that they in fact emerged from the dead parents is strong. The tale is, however, weakened by prolixity. Some of London’s proto-science fiction tales border on the weird, although there is no great emphasis on the element of terror. “A Thousand Deaths” (1899) tells of a man whose own father has devised a means for reviving from death and compels his son to die many deaths—by poisoning, suffocation, and far more dreadful means—so that he can revive him and thereby prove the validity of his invention. “The Red One” (1916)—based on a plot by London’s friend, the poet George Sterling (1869–1926), who apparently also wrote some of the prose—tells fascinatingly of an immense red sphere from outer space that is apparently the herald of an extraterrestrial race. One of London’s novels, Before Adam (1906), may be worth considering. It is a compelling tale of hereditary memory, in which a man of the present has dreams of the life of his remote ancestor in primitive times. The same plot was used in the later story “When the World Was Young” (1910). Several other novelists of social realism produced the occasional supernatural or horrific novel in the early twentieth century. W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) admitted that the central character of his novel The Magician (1908), Oliver Haddo, was based upon the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, whom he had met sporadically during his years in Paris in the early twentieth century. In the novel, Haddo, a fat, repulsive, but strangely compelling figure, is thought to be conducting strange experiments involving the creation of life from dead matter: he had often spoken of how the mediaeval alchemists had come close to, and perhaps stumbled upon, the creation of homunculi. The protagonists later find hideous evidence of these experiments. Crowley wrote a scathing review of the book in the London Vanity Fair (30 December 1908).
Of Crowley (1875–1947) himself there is little need to speak in detail. He continues to attract a following among occultists, probably because they secretly wish they had the courage to follow him in his amoral and hedonistic indulging in sex, drugs, and occasional torture; but, if nothing else, he represents the culmination of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in occultism and spiritualism—a movement directly engendered by the monumental advances in human knowledge effected by the scientists of the period, which to many weak minds represented a diminution of the wonder and mystery of the universe. We have already seen that Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, in their varying ways, subscribed to this idea, and it is no surprise that both of them, along with Crowley, were for a time members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the most celebrated of the numerous spiritualist or occultist organisations of the period. Of Crowley’s own fleeting ventures into weird fiction it is best to pass over in merciful silence. The three tales in The Stratagem and Other Stories (1929) amount to little, although the long story “The Testament of Magdalen Blair” (1912) is a moderately interesting excursion into sadism; and the novel Moonchild (1917) is really nothing more than a lightly fictionalised treatise about his own theory and practice of Black Magic. Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), best known for novels and plays that keenly dissected class-bound British society and investigated the influence of history and landscape on the development of character, wrote two novels in quick succession, one before and one after his most celebrated novel, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908). The Ghost (1907)—its title says it all, as it deals with the ghost of a dead lover—is frankly a potboiler and lacks the careful attention to character and topography typical of Bennett’s other work. The Glimpse (1909)—an elaboration of a short story of the same title (New Age, 4 November 1909)—is a very different proposition. A writer on music, Morrice Loring, suffers a heart attack and appears to die. His soul leaves his body and experiences the wonders of the afterlife: it sees thoughts as different colors emerging from bodies, it communes with other souls, and— in a scenario somewhat reminiscent of Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908), although it is unlikely that Bennett was actually influenced by that work—it somehow traverses the universe and gains a comprehension of the very origin of all entity. Morrice’s soul is about to experience some further revelation (the “glimpse” of the title) when it is
abruptly summoned back into his body: Morrice had only undergone what would later be termed a near-death experience. In the final chapters of the book Morrice tells of his mental transformation now that he is aware of what awaits the soul after death. A serious, poignant work, with finely drawn characters and a keen sense of the complexity of human emotion, The Glimpse can take its place as an unusual contribution to the literature of the cosmic. It is curious that the more advanced novelists of the period—especially those of the Modernist movement of the 1920s—generally fared more poorly in the writing of supernatural or horrific work than their more stodgy compeers in social realism. Take the case of E. M. Forster (1879–1970). In his two short story collections, The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928), there is in fact only a single story—“The Story of a Panic,” the opening story in the former volume—that can be considered genuinely supernatural. It is, indeed, a fine specimen, telling of a teenage English boy vacationing in Italy who is evidently possessed by the spirit of Pan and therefore becomes transformed, behaving with the natural freedom of an animal and scorning the hidebound social conventions of his fellow English tourists. The story is not notably subtle, as the underlying theme is hammered home again and again. Other stories in the two collections are either whimsical fantasies or narratives that draw even more explicitly upon Greek myth, but not in a way that renders them genuinely horrific. “The Machine Stops” is an interesting riposte to the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Violet Hunt’s Tales of the Uneasy (1911) is almost a textbook for the failings of a mainstream writer in attempting to generate supernatural menace. Hunt (1862–1942) was one of the most literarily well-connected writers in English literature, graduating from her early involvement with the Pre-Raphaelites and Oscar Wilde to such notables as Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Rebecca West. But for all her elegance of diction and sharpness of observation, not a single one of her purportedly weird tales is a success. “The Operation” tells of the symbiotic relationship between two women, one of whom had stolen the husband of the other, but the overall effect is marred by prolixity. The premise of “The Prayer” would seem to be promising: a woman whose husband died a year after their marriage had uttered a prayer that he come back to life, and he does; but he is quite literally “a walking funeral” (117), lacking the vigour and spirit he
possessed in life. But the atmosphere of the story is more of melancholy than terror. Hunt’s most celebrated weird tale is “The Coach,” but this story is more a parable, even an allegory, than a work of supernatural horror. As the narrative unfolds, it quickly becomes evident that the coach in question is picking up the recently dead, and in the course of the tale they simply tell of their lives and deaths in a more or less undistinguished manner. Hunt lets out the secret so early in the game (as in her reference to “the Coach of Death” [142]) that no suspense or terror can attach to the events she is relating. As for “The Witness,” it is a not incompetent tale of psychological horror, as a woman who had stolen the husband of another and who then killed her is overcome with terror of her new spouse’s dog, who had witnessed the dreadful proceedings. Hunt wrote a second collection, More Tales of the Uneasy (1925), but there are no supernatural specimens in it. As for “The Haunted House” (1921) by Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), it is a more or less inscrutable tale of a ghostly couple who recall their past life in the house in which they dwelt. This extremely brief narrative is effectively impressionistic in the telling, but its overall effect is ephemeral. Much the same can be said of the occasional weird work of Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), confined to about a half-dozen to a dozen of her short stories. No one is likely to dispute the high artistry of Bowen’s writing as a whole; but there is a serious question as to whether she ever intended to terrify her readers even in those scenarios that might suggest the horrific. Only three of her tales need to be discussed. “Telling” (1927) speaks of a young man who kills a woman but who is regarded as so ineffectual that no one believes him when he confesses the crime. As a psychological case study it is of some interest. “The Cat Jumps” (1929) is a disappointingly crude story of a couple influenced by the spirit of the previous occupant of a house, a murderer; as with Virginia Woolf’s “The Haunted House,” the frequency with which this tale has been included in horror anthologies only points to editors’ desire to elevate the tenor of their selections with the inclusion of some standard writer from the mainstream. The only tale of Bowen’s that genuinely inspires fear—and it indeed does so effectively—is “The Demon Lover” (1941), where a whiff of supernaturalism is strong in the account of a woman whose dead lover—he perished in the first world war—comes back to her twenty-five years later in the form of the driver of a taxicab:
The driver braked to what was almost a stop, turned round and slid the glass panel back: the jolt of this flung Mrs Drover forward till her face was almost into the glass. Through the aperture driver and passenger, not six inches between them, remained for an eternity eye to eye. Mrs Drover’s mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets. (666) Not bad—but even here Bowen’s overriding concern with reticence and elegance of diction mutes what could have been a powerfully horrific moment. Bowen was encouraged by Cynthia Asquith to contribute to several of the latter’s original anthologies of horror tales, and she even wrote the introduction to The Second Ghost Book (1952), in which she speaks interestingly of how “ghosts have grown up” (vii) in the modern age; but her own biases are revealed when she remarks that “Almost all the ghosts in these stories build themselves up out of the neuroses of those who see them” (ix) and that “the world of the ghost should inspire, when it impacts on our own, not so much revulsion or shock as a sort of awe” (ix). The weird work of Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) is also generally disappointing, chiefly because of its lack of imaginative innovation. A sizeable volume of his supernatural tales, Tarnhelm (2003), has appeared, consisting chiefly of stories from such of his collections as The Silver Thorn (1928) and All Souls’ Night (1933); the tales range from 1913 to 1948, bespeaking a pervasive interest in terror, but very few items are in any way notable. Perhaps the best of the lot is “The Silver Mask” (1932), an effective conte cruel in which a beggar, with a wife and baby, insidiously ingratiates himself into the life of a lonely middle-aged woman, Sonia Herries, and eventually takes over her house and assets. The tale keenly etches the woman’s weakness and desperate need to feel useful. Otherwise, we have such specimens as “Tarnhelm” (1929), an obvious and telegraphed tale of a shape-changer; “The Little Ghost” (1922), a reasonably effective story about a man who takes pity on the ghost of a little girl who is frightened by the noisy children in the house she used to occupy; “Mrs. Lunt” (1927), an unremarkable tale of a vengeful ghost; and “The Tiger” (in
The Silver Thorn), a curious tale about an Englishman in New York City who is terrified at the appearance of a tiger that he sees repeatedly and thinks will pounce on him (evidently the tiger symbolizes the speed and danger of the big city). “The Snow” (1929) is worth a little more consideration: a powerful and intense tale of marital discord, its scenario of a second wife being overwhelmed by the ghost of the first wife appears to symbolize the husband’s inability to overcome the loss of his first spouse. Walpole’s novel Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (1925) has sometimes been regarded as a horror novel, but it is really an adventure story about a man who seeks to rescue a young woman who is being terrorised by her father-in-law, the “man with red hair” of the title. There are some interesting passages in which the red-haired man expounds a kind of philosophy of sadism, but that is as close to terror as we get. Much more powerful and skilled in mingling mainstream and weird motifs is May Sinclair (1863–1946), whose two collections of supernatural tales, Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931), contain much good work. Sinclair’s family life cannot be said to have been happy: her father suffered from bankruptcy and alcoholism, some of her five brothers died when she was in her teens or twenties (several of them had a congenital heart defect), and she herself never married. This last fact may or may not be of some significance in the assessment of her weird work; for much of it relies on the evocation of a horror of sex—or, at the very least, of what is perceived as sexual irregularity. Consider the most effective tale in Uncanny Stories, “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched.” This remarkably potent item tells the compact story of some thirty-five years of a woman’s life, as she successively faces various disappointments in love—but after her death, she continually revisits those sites that were associated with her brief involvement with a married man with whom she had had an affair when she was thirty-two. This is, of course, her hell, as evoked in the biblical allusion in the title (“Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”: Mark 9:44, 46, 48)—but the “fire” could also refer to the unholy fire of immoral sexuality. This may be a somewhat curious attitude for one who associated with such daring modernists as Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—but Sinclair was born in the height of the Victorian era, and no doubt her sexual attitudes were shaped early in life both by her cultural milieu and by her troubled family life.
Various elements of sexuality also appear in other tales in Uncanny Stories, such as “The Token” (where a wife comes back from the dead to make sure that her husband truly loved her); “If the Dead Knew” (where a man feels remorse for wishing his mother dead so that he could have money to marry; when she does die and he marries, he is unable to have sex with his wife because he senses his mother’s presence); and “The Nature of the Evidence” (a rather crudely executed tale of a man’s first wife who prevents her husband from becoming intimate with his second wife). The long story “The Flaw in the Crystal” also indirectly addresses this same issue. Here a woman, Agatha Verrall, has gained some kind of healing power and finds that she can heal Harding Powell, the husband of a close friend; but in so doing she loses her hold on Rodney Lanyon, a married man to whom she is attracted and who clearly wants to commit adultery with her. When Agatha relinquishes her healing power over Harding, he immediately falls ill again. The whole story is a bit long-winded and nebulous, for the exact nature and parameters of Agatha’s healing power is never satisfactorily addressed. “The Intercessor” (1911) should probably have been included in Sinclair’s earlier volume, for it may have been the first of her weird tales; but for some reason it was postponed until her second. It is indeed a powerful story about the ghost of a little girl who, having been denied love from her own mother, perpetually haunts the mother’s house, banging pitiably on the door of her bedroom to be let in. Garvin, a local historian staying with the family, acts as the intercessor between the ghost and the mother, seeking to overcome her fear and receive the ghost, which only wants love. It is a touching story, but also goes on a bit too long. Moreover, Sinclair’s psychological analysis of the characters is a bit too cold and clinical to be genuinely moving; in this sense the story as a whole is markedly inferior to Robert Hichens’s “The Cry of the Child,” which similarly seeks—successfully—to evoke pathos and horror at the notion of a love-deprived child. The other stories in The Intercessor can be dealt with quickly: “The Mahatma’s Story” is a tale of metempsychosis, as an Indian guru manages somehow to switch the souls of two rival painters; but this is a makeshift ploy to study the interpersonal conflicts of the painters and their wives. “Heaven” is a clever story of a man who seems to have ended up in a very peculiar and not particularly appealing heaven; it transpires that he is only in the heaven envisioned by his domineering mother. “The Villa Désirée” is one more instance of Sinclair’s apparent horror of sex. Mildred
Eve is staying at the villa of her fiancé, Louis Carson, whose first wife died on their wedding night. At one point she senses a presence in the bedroom —but it is of Louis, not of the ghost of his first wife. This figure is for some reason “unfinished” (217), and it turns out that Louis was something of a roué and had a long string of women staying at the villa. Why exactly this should cause him to appear as a quasi-ghost in his own villa, when he is still alive, is anyone’s guess. Sinclair’s prose is nothing if not elegant and refined, and her mingling of mysticism (she belonged to the Society for Psychical Research) and psychological analysis (she was an early student of Freud) can be engaging. Her utilisation of the supernatural for social and moral purposes is emphatic, if at times a bit crude and obvious. Her preoccupation with sexual irregularities is something I will leave to her biographers. A little surprisingly, one of the most successful mainstream writers to tackle the weird and supernatural was D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). Nearly a dozen of his tales, long and short, could be considered weird. The first such venture, “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (1911), is perhaps nothing more than an expression of Lawrence’s loathing of death—a loathing that had come to him through a kind of Nietzschean affirmation of the wonders and glories of life intensely lived. Its setting among the miners of Selston, a village in Nottinghamshire, is manifestly autobiographical. “The Prussian Officer” (1914), although apparently written before the outbreak of World War I, is clearly influenced by Frieda Weekley (whom Lawrence married on July 13, 1914, after a two-year European tour), but also reflects Lawrence’s own conflicted views of class distinctions in its depiction of an orderly who kills his high-born superior officer. The long story “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925), where a European woman becomes enmeshed in primitive rituals in the American Southwest, is a product of Lawrence’s decision to emigrate to Taos, New Mexico, in 1922. The story shares thematic links with the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), with its implications of the revival of ancient gods. It was around this time that Lawrence was contacted by Lady Cynthia Asquith to contribute to her anthology, The Ghost Book (1926). Why Asquith, who had known Lawrence from as early as 1913, decided to invite him to contribute is not entirely clear. It is possible that she read his story “The Border Line” (1924), which might qualify as his first actual supernatural tale: its account of the ghost of a first husband who prevents
his former wife from saving the life of her second husband stresses many of those elements of liminality—the border between life and death, strength and weakness, and (in its locale) Germany and France—that were central to Lawrence’s thought. In any case, Lawrence wrote “Glad Ghosts” for Asquith, but she rejected it, ostensibly because it was not sufficiently ghostly. But some critics believe that Asquith saw that the story was in fact about her and her husband, Herbert Asquith, son of the prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith. “Glad Ghosts” presents two sets of ghosts: the first, the ghost of Lucy (Cynthia Asquith), the first wife of Colonel Hale, who plagues the colonel because of his fear of physical love, and the second, the ghost of Lathkill, who is “laid” (in every sense of the term) by the narrator, Paul Morier (probably a stand-in for Lawrence), who awakens the sexual feelings of the young Carlotta Lathkill. In any case, Lawrence took the rejection of “Glad Ghosts” in stride, quickly writing “The Rocking-Horse Winner” instead. This is probably the most celebrated story in The Ghost Book, and it is Lawrence’s most widely reprinted weird tale. It is, however, extraordinary chiefly on account of its psychological acuity. Even if we are to assume that the young boy’s ability to predict winners of horse-races is a supernatural capacity (although there is some suggestion that it is merely a product of lucky guesswork), the riveting aspect of the story resides in the grim, even hideous psychological portrait of a boy who consumed with the prospect of his family’s imminent poverty that he rides his hobby-horse to death. Can we again detect an autobiographical implication? Are we to see in the harried boy a reflection of Lawrence’s own memories of his hardscrabble upbringing? Asquith subsequently asked Lawrence to contribute to another anthology, The Black Cap (1927), and he obliged with “The Lovely Lady,” a compelling story of a domineering woman who, it is suggested, has sucked the life out of her dead son, Henry, and is about to do the same to her other son, Robert. A little earlier Lawrence wrote “The Last Laugh” (1925). Just as “The Border Line” was a thinly disguised account of J. Middleton Murry (the weak second husband, Philip), Katherine Mansfield (the surviving wife, Katherine), and Lawrence himself (the ghost of the strong first husband, Alan), so “The Lovely Lady” depicts a triangle between Lorenzo (Lawrence himself), Marchbanks (Murry), and Miss James (Dorothy Brett, a deaf painter). The supernatural manifestations here are very subtle, as they are in the short but powerful tale “Smile” (1926),
which also appears to feature Middleton Murry and his grief over the death of Katherine Mansfield. Of Lawrence’s weird work it is difficult to speak in small compass, largely because it is of widely varying character—ranging from tales of psychological terror to pure ghost stories to stories that fuse supernatural and psychological elements. There is also a question of definition, or more precisely of inclusiveness: exactly what constitutes a “weird tale” in Lawrence’s work? Only four or five stories involve a readily recognisable supernatural phenomenon, chiefly a ghost or revenant; but even here, the ghosts are largely symbolic, serving to enhance the interpersonal conflicts that are at the heart of Lawrence’s entire work. And what do we make of “The Woman Who Rode Away,” a splendid tale by any right, and one that seemingly lifts the supernatural from symbolism to myth? “The Blind Man” (1920) has no supernatural element, but it generates substantial terror from what seems a very simple and possibly innocuous act—a blind man’s touching of another man’s face. It is plain that Lawrence was not interested in supernaturalism for its own sake, but instead employed ghosts, revenants, and similar elements as particularly potent tools to convey his core aesthetic and philosophical conceptions—the sexual tension between men and women, the power of a dominant personality to tame and even crush those within its scope, the conflict created by distinctions of class, race, religion, and nationality. What can scarcely be denied is that a writer of Lawrence’s immense talent—and immense insight into human personality—has produced more than one monument to the literature of the supernatural, and for that we must remain forever grateful. The degree to which weird conceptions entered into purely mainstream work during this period may be best exemplified by the curious novel Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978). In what is largely a character study, the novel depicts the varied stages of Lolly’s life —living with her father on a rural estate until the age of twenty-eight, then spending the next twenty years in London with her brother and his family, then revolting against her sense of uselessness by returning to the country and living alone in a village called Great Mop. Here she believes she has become a witch and has made a pact with the Devil. Up to this point it appears clear that this suggestion of the supernatural is entirely in Lolly’s mind, but a final conversation with what appears to be the Devil himself turns the story on its head. And yet, Lolly justifies her transition to a witch
as a kind of feminist gesture (“Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives” [234]). There is not the slightest trace of terror in Lolly Willowes—a point made not to criticise the novel but merely to characterise it. It is a powerful work, but it is not, fundamentally, a weird tale. In the United States, Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) wrote two celebrated tales suggesting the supernatural, both included in the collection Among the Lost People (1934): “Mr. Arcularis” (1931) and “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” (1932). In the latter, Paul Hasleman, a twelve-year-old boy, finds himself increasingly mesmerised by the thought of snow engulfing the town in which he lives. Gradually his fascination with this “secret snow” leads to daydreaming and declining schoolwork, and his parents have him examined by a doctor. Threatened by the loss of his private snowstorm, Paul retreats still further into his own self and, in an ambiguous ending, is found either asleep or dead in his room. Paul’s visions of the deadening snow are metaphors for the alienation he feels from his parents and his schoolmates, suggesting also a desire for his own death and perhaps the death of all life around him. Rod Serling produced a haunting adaptation of it for “Night Gallery” (20 October 1971). In “Mr. Arcularis” the title character, a Bostonian, is about to undergo a serious heart operation. After its apparent conclusion, Arcularis, although weak, seems improved and sets off on a sea voyage to recover his health. There he meets a woman who reminds him strikingly of one of his nurses, and he slowly falls in love with her; but he is frequently disturbed both by the increasing cold (even though it is June) and by his apparent fits of sleepwalking. In a surprise ending surely derived from Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” we learn that Arcularis did not in fact survive the operation and that his entire experience on the ship was a hallucination on the operating table. In a play version written years later, Mr. Arcularis (1958), Aiken elaborates the basic plot but adheres to its essentials, making clearer the fact of Arcularis’s hallucination by having the same actors play the parts of the doctors and nurses at the hospital and various passengers on the ship. Aiken also wrote a splendid horrific poem, “La Belle Morte,” included in his early collection The Jig of Forslin (1916), Another poem, “The Vampire: 1914” (1924), employs strikingly bloody imagery as a symbol for the world war and its aftermath. The poem is not found in standard editions of Aiken’s collected poetry.
The ghostly work of Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) deserves some consideration, if only for one superlative specimen. “The Shadowy Third” (1916), the title story of Glasgow’s 1923 collection, exquisitely conjoins horror and pathos in depicting the ghost of a little girl who was killed by her stepfather, Dr. Maradick, a prominent physician, in order that he might gain access to his wife’s assets. Glasgow brilliantly allows the supernatural to enter before we are even aware of it by having the new nurse of Mrs. Maradick see the child before we learn that she is dead; it turns out that no one but she and Mrs. Maradick ever catch a glimpse of the ghost, because they are the only ones who are in sympathy with it. Later Mrs. Maradick dies, and the nurse delivers a chilling epitaph on her: “My own belief is that she died simply of the terror or life” (68). Unfortunately, Glasgow repeated this scenario—a ghost that is glimpsed only by select indviduals—not once but twice, first in “The Past” (1920) and in “Whispering Leaves” (1923). The latter is an effective tale that again fuses terror and poignancy. Here a woman sees the black nurse (Mammy Rhody) of her small cousin, Pell, although no one other than Pell does so. In the climactic scene, Mammy saves Pell from a burning house and hands him to the cousin—an obvious piece of symbolism, since the cousin had earlier expressed a wish to save Pell from his unhappy environment. “Dare’s Gift” (1917) also features the supernatural in its suggestion of psychic possession—the ghost of a woman in Virginia who betrayed the Confederacy causes a woman of the present to commit a similar act—but is crippled by verbosity. Like D. H. Lawrence, Glasgow was manifestly not interested in the supernatural as such but only in its ability to foster metaphorically the analysis of character and society, especially of Southern society, that dominates her novels; but in “The Shadowy Third” she produced one authentic masterwork, so her work deserves at least some attention here. One wishes the same could be said for the weird work of Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943), but, in spite of the celebrity of certain items, it is almost uniformly mediocre. Surprisingly, the most effective item is what appears to be Benét’s first story, “Elementals” (1925), a remarkably grim conte cruel in which a wealthy man dares an impecunious professor to test his love for his fiancée: they are both to go without food for a week, and then a single piece of bread is to be placed between them: can they prevent themselves from fighting over the scrap of food? In spite of its happy
ending, the tale is cumulatively powerful. It is of interest that Benét never gathered the story in any of his collections: its intensity of expression would seem out of keeping with the rather mawkish whimsicality of his other prose work. I refer specifically to his most celebrated venture into weirdness, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936), which depicts the celebrated orator and lawyer as defeating the Devil with surprising ease when the latter demands the soul of an impoverished farmer. In spite of the occasional tart comments by the Devil as to his suitability as a citizen of the new country (“When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck” [173]), the tale quickly lapses into vapid patriotism and sentimentality. Even worse is “Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent” (1937), a purportedly comic story in which Webster uses a female sea serpent who has fallen in love with him as a bargaining chip for a treaty with England. As for “The King of the Cats” (1929), this whimsical tale of a celebrated musician who conducts an orchestra with his tail, and who turns out to be a cat, is one of the best arguments one can possibly offer as to the aesthetic disaster that can result in combining humour and horror.
v. Some Europeans French and German supernaturalism attained notable heights with a few chosen authors of this period—authors who worked successfully in both the short story and the novel. One work needs to be discussed if only to dismiss it from our enquiry. The film adaptation of Le Fantôme de l’opéra (1910; translated into English as The Phantom of the Opera, 1911) by Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) has become a canonical work of early horror cinema, but the novel itself is much less of a weird tale than the film, and perhaps not a weird tale at all. Throughout the early parts of the work there is frequent citation of an “Opera Ghost”—a skeleton wearing dress clothes— who has a private box in the Paris Opera House. There is some suggestion that the Phantom somehow caused a diva’s voice to break so that her talented understudy, Christine Daaé (whom the Phantom lusts after), can take over the role, and there is also an incident (based upon an actual occurrence) where a chandelier crashes down upon the audience, killing one person; but none of this is presented as supernatural. Indeed, the Phantom is not in fact a skeleton but merely a horribly disfigured human being; as Christine herself says, “he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all” (109). Although the celebrated 1925 silent film copies the book when Christine pulls off the Phantom’s mask to reveal his hideous face, the film goes on to make the overall scenario much more horrific than the book itself. Other features in the narrative—an influx of rats in the underground chambers of the opera; a kind of torture chamber in which those who are trying to rescue Christine from the Phantom’s clutches are temporarily confined—are, at best, instances of natural rather than supernatural horror. The novel is much more of a detective story than a horror tale—fittingly so for the author of the classic mystery novel Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; translated as The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1908). The most prominent Francophone writer of weird fiction during this period is the Belgian Jean Ray (pseudonym of Raymond Jean Marie de Kremer, 1887–1964), although he also wrote in Flemish. His several story collections—Les Contes du whisky (1925; Whisky Tales), La Croisière des ombres (1931; The Shadow Cruise), Le Grand Nocturne (1942; The Great
Nocturne), Les Cercles de l’épouvante (1943; The Circles of Terror), and Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944; The Final Canterbury Tales), contain much good work amidst an array of failures and false starts. Ray’s greatest problem—an ironic one given that he gained the nickname of the “Belgian Edgar Allan Poe”—is a diffuseness and lack of focus that mars his weird conceptions. “House of the Storks” (“Storchhaus, ou la maison de la cigogne,” 1960) tells of an inn that is alive and appears to eat its occupants, but the execution lacks tightness and rigour. “The Marleyweck Cemetery” (“Le Cimetière de Maryweck,” 1943), set in a kind of fantasy London, is a more effective story of headstones and statues in a cemetery coming to life. It features a distinctive fusion of cynical humour and horror, something Ray handled with surprising success. The celebrated tale “The Mainz Psalter” (“Le Psautier de Mayence,” 1930) deals with a ship of that title that sets sail north of Glasgow and appears to enter another dimension, whereupon sailors disappear, other entities seem to board the ship, and so forth. The tale is deliberately chaotic in treatment, but somehow succeeds in its manifest purpose of shaking the reader’s grip on reality. Ray’s other famous tale, “The Tenebrous Alley” (“La Ruelle ténébreuse,” 1931), tells of an apartment house that appears to be besieged by invisible presences. One tenant disappears—one of dozens around the city that have done so overnight. The narrator, a woman, befriends one creature by feeding it milk—a point that makes one realise the manifest influence of Maupassant’s “The Horla” on the tale. Ray’s short novel Malpertuis (1943) highlights many of his virtues and weaknesses. The deliberately fragmented narration perfectly suits the bizarre nature of the scenario. Here an old man has left a will requiring his potential heirs—both members of his family and others—to occupy a house named Malpertuis in order to collect his inheritance. They do so, with the result that Malpertuis becomes a kind of self-contained world (not entirely unlike what Shirley Jackson would do fifteen years later in The Sundial) where the social, romantic, and sexual tensions among the various inmates become exaggerated and baleful. One by one the occupants die off—will there be anyone left to collect the inheritance? It proves that the old man, Cassave, was a Rosicrucian who was attempting to bring back the ancient Greek gods. However, after so many years of neglect, the gods have become decayed from their pristine condition in classical antiquity, with the result that they have turned into
monsters. Some of the apparently human figures in Malpertuis are actually lesser Greek gods in disguise; one of them, Eisgengott, is none other than Zeus himself. Later, the Furies appear in the form of three sisters. All this is a reasonably effective attempt to infuse horror into classical mythology, but overall the treatment of the theme falls victim to Ray’s customary inability to focus on the theme at hand. Another French writer whom we must treat, if again only tangentially, is Maurice Level (1875–1926). Level, as is well known, became celebrated for the plays he wrote for the Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris, dating to as early as 1906; many of these plays were based on the more than 800 short stories he wrote in a relatively brief career, only a small number of which have been translated into English. Level is the prototypical practitioner of the conte cruel, “in which” (as Lovecraft wrote) “the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalisations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors” (S 41). And yet, in spite of the complete absence of supernaturalism in Level’s work, it is difficult to deny him at least a toehold in the realm of horror literature. If nothing else, Level’s tales have all the compactness and “unity of effect” that Edgar Allan Poe believed was the signature feature of the short story. Level’s immediate literary influences in this regard were probably Guy de Maupassant (who is cited in the novel Those Who Return [L’Ombre, 1921]) and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the master of the conte cruel whose work preceded Level’s by a few decades; but these two writers themselves drew extensively upon the structural perfection of Poe’s short stories as models for their own work, and Level manifestly did so as well. Without a wasted word, Level’s tales progress from the first scene to the last in a manner that fully exhibits the conflict of emotions that is at their heart, but without the flabby digressions and irrelevancies that often mar even the most accomplished of novels. Level’s tales reveal such an economy of means that nothing could be added to or extracted from them without destroying their very fabric. The emphasis on terror, even if it is of an unambiguously nonsupernatural sort, makes the reading of Level’s tales at times an excruciating experience. It is not that there is any excess of physical violence involved: “The Last Kiss” is probably the most extreme in this regard, with its unflinching display of the hideous effects of acid when thrown upon a man’s (and, later, a woman’s) face. “The Kennel” is loathsome in its suggestion of a corpse being fed to hungry dogs. But
beyond this, the terror in Level’s tales is chiefly psychological: the terror of an impoverished prostitute being forced to service the executioner of her lover; the terror of a man coming upon definitive evidence that his lover was buried alive; the terror that a mother feels when she suspects that her new-born baby is the child of a madman. . . . Many of the scenarios Level constructs may seem a trifle contrived and artificial, but his purpose to study the emotional extremes of those who find themselves confronted by madness, guilt, and paranoia. There is a considerable social element in many of Level’s tales—an element that similarly links them to the Grand Guignol’s concern for naturalism, a literary movement that emphasised the plight of the outcast and impoverished and sought to display the harshness and injustice of a social fabric built upon radical inequities in wealth and social position. Many of Level’s stories feature beggars or other characters on the margins of society who plunge into crime to exact vengeance upon a society that has left them no other means of combating economic injustice. “The Beggar” is prototypical in this regard: a beggar tries to bring help to a man who is being crushed by an overturned cart, but he is driven away by the man’s family because they believe he is only looking for a handout. In the end, the beggar can only express a certain wry satisfaction that the man’s own family effectively caused his death. Overall, few authors have displayed greater psychological acuity, greater craftsmanship in the manufacture of short stories, and a more unflinching gaze at the grotesque crimes that human passions are capable of engendering; and few have exhibited those crimes and those passions with loftier artistry. In German literature we are also faced with a number of writers who are, from our perspective, on the borderline of the weird; none more so than the Austrian Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Kafka’s earliest short stories date to the 1910s, and “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”) was written in 1912. “The Metamorphosis” contains one of the most famous opening lines in all modern literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect” (89). (It has commonly been assumed that Gregor has turned into a cockroach, but the word that Kafka habitually uses—Ungeziefer—really means “vermin,” and at one point the charwoman calls him a dung beetle.) Gregor had been a young man dutifully going to an office every day,
supporting his parents and his younger sister, and his chief concern throughout the tale is how his family is now going to get enough money to live on. Failing to exhibit anything but repugnance, shame, or irritation at his transformation, Gregor’s parents treat him abusively: his father seriously injures him by pelting him with an apple; his room is used to store excess furniture; less and less attention is paid to feeding him properly or keeping his room tidy. Eventually Gregor crawls back into his room and dies. His family insouciantly looks forward to a better life, finally rid of the inconvenience of housing a gigantic insect. As with all Kafka’s work, the events in the tale are symbols for broader concerns. Numerous interpretations of the story have been put forward; e.g., that Gregor’s metamorphosis is a metaphor for his unconscious desire to slough off financial responsibility for his family, or that it points to the dehumanization of the industrial proletariat. Kafka, although at the outset he states bluntly, “It was no dream” (89), is clearly intent on incorporating the imagery of nightmare into his narrative, as he does in much of his other work, especially his three novels. In the end, the story will remain capable of sustaining multiple interpretations. Its basic scenario is quintessentially supernatural, although Kafka himself does not appear to have been very familiar with previous works of fantasy and horror; and it will remain an imperishable parable of victimisation and the crisis of identity. This tale is, however, only one of several that speak of transformations between human being and animal, or are presented from the viewpoint of an animal. “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (1917; translated as “A Report to an Academy”) tells of an ape who is captured in Africa and realises that his only means of escape is to imitate human beings, with the result that he becomes virtually human. “Forschungen eines Hundes” (1931; translated as “Investigations of a Dog”), “Der Bau” (1931; translated as “The Burrow”), and “Josephine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (1924; translated as “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) are told from the standpoint of a dog, a badger, and a mouse, respectively. In “Der Dorfschullehrer” (1931 [written 1914–15]; translated as “The Village Schoolmaster”), a giant mole appears in a village, but much of this satirical narrative is spent in pedantic debates between a schoolmaster and other characters as to who should receive credit for the discovery of the creature. “Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle” (1946 [written 1915]; translated as “Blumfield, an Elderly Bachelor”) is a harrowing tale of a man plagued by two bouncing
balls that seem to follow him all around his room—a symbol for the uncontrollable irrationality that inevitably enters modern life. Kafka’s three novels, all published posthumously and none of them quite complete, hint at the supernatural without ever including any scene or phenomenon that could definitively be termed supernatural. Amerika (1927) deals with the adventures of a young German, Karl Rossmann, in the United States. Kafka had never been to America, and his work accordingly becomes a kind of topographical fantasy where almost anything can occur. Der Prozess (1925; translated as The Trial, 1935) is the celebrated account of Joseph K., who is accused of an unspecified crime and is forced to spend much of his time in legal manoeuvring to clear himself; it might be termed weird only because every character—including, at times, Joseph K. himself —acts in an implausible or irrational manner. As for Kafka’s greatest novel, Der Schloss (1926; translated as The Castle, 1930), it might be thought that the basic scenario—a character named only K. seeks entry into the castle of Count Westwest, only to fail after innumerable attempts—might suggest the Gothic castle, although there is no evidence that Kafka was familiar with any of the major works of Gothic literature. Kafka’s work is so complexly symbolic and metaphorical that its surface events become insignificant save as pointers to the philosophical, political, religious, and sociological messages he is seeking to convey. It would be misleading to consider him a contributor to the supernatural tradition, but his imperishable exhibition of the absurdity and futility of modern existence may well have influenced subsequent writers of horror and supernatural fiction. More central to the weird tradition is the bountiful work of Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), author of many novels and tales of the supernatural. It is perhaps unfortunate that his most celebrated work is Der Golem (1915; translated as The Golem, 1928), for this is by no means his most concentrated venture into supernaturalism. Indeed, it is not clear that anything supernatural happens in the novel at all. The putative subject of the book, derived from the Jewish cabbalistic tradition—the Golem is an artificial creature made of clay and animated by a magic charm placed between its teeth—ends up playing little actual role in the work, and the Golem figure never actually appears. Instead, the text focuses upon Athanasius Pernath, a gem cutter who lives in the Jewish ghetto of Prague (he himself is not Jewish), who is arrested for the murder of a man named
Zottmann, spending months in a hideous jail reminiscent of the dungeons of old-time Gothic fiction. But, in all honesty, the novel is simply too diffuse and unfocused to be effective; Meyrink is trying to do too much, bringing in occultism, local colour, psychological analysis of the numerous characters, and much else. I am not even sure what the ultimate point of the work is, especially when it is revealed at the end that the whole scenario was simply a dream. Other novels by Meyrink are more concretely supernatural, but even they tend to be discursive and rambling affairs. Das grüne Gesicht (1916; The Green Face) is a potpourri of horrific themes; E. F. Bleiler, in his introduction to The Golem, gives some idea of what is involved: “the Wandering Jew, the embodied soteric personality of the universe, supernatural judgments, the gods of ancient Egypt, reincarnation, prophecy, madness, voodo, glamour, doppelgängers, eternal life in death, confrontation with the female principle of the universe, Cabbalism, and many other motives” (xiii). Walpurgisnacht (1917) returns to Prague for its setting, weaving a bizarre mix of magic, telepathy, and reincarnation. Der Engel von westlichen Fenster (1927; The Angel of the West Window) flits between the sixteenth century and the present and involves black magic, alchemy, and drugs, and could be Meyrink’s greatest weird novel. All these novels were translated in the 1990s by Mike Mitchell and are well worth seeking out. Although Meyrink wrote some “strange stories,” the master of German weird short fiction was Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871–1943), whose reputation suffered a collapse when he briefly associated with the Nazi party. His three most important collections of tales—Das Grauen (1907; Horror), Die Besessenen (1908; The Possessed), and Nachtmahr (1922; Nightmare)— contain much good work. Several of Ewers’s tales reveal a cheerful morbidity, such as “Gentlemen of the Bar,” in which various prisoners about to be guillotined tell of how they had reached that unenviable position; and “My Burial,” a literal tale of graveyard humour in which a recently buried man tells, in the first person, of the buffooneries that occurred during his own funeral. But the most characteristic stories by Ewers provocatively treat supernaturally of sexual themes in a manner that remains bold even today. Consider “The Death of Baron Jesus Maria von Friedel,” in which the Baron finds himself occasionally taken over by a strange female creature
within himself; the different personalities are represented by radically different diary entries. In an ending reminiscent of “William Wilson,” the Baron shoots himself—but it remains unclear who shot whom. In “The Tophar Bride” a character mummifies the girlfriend of his roommate so that she becomes a Tophar Bride—the wife of a pharaoh who, by Egyptian tradition, is mummified alive. In “The Typhoid Mary” one Marie Stuyvesant is summoned to an informal trial by six men who accuse her of being a kind of spiritual typhoid Mary, corrupting all who come into contact with her. This tale is not so much a weird tale as a moral debate, and Marie presents a compelling case that she herself is an amoralist and that her various “victims” would probably have been corrupted anyway. Ewers’s most celebrated tale, “The Spider” (“Der Spinne,” 1907), concerns a medical student, Richard Bracquemont, who becomes fascinated by an attractive young woman dressed entirely in black. She is spinning, and “The threads she spins must be infinitely fine” (158–59). On a whim he names her Clarimonde—and no reader can fail to catch the reference to Théophile Gautier’s celebrated tale of seductive vampirism, “La Morte amoureuse,” whose protagonist is named Clarimonde. Richard is increasingly distracted by Clarimonde, finding himself unable to pay attention to his studies. At last he kills himself—and a dead spider is found crushed between his teeth. It is later discovered that the apartment across the street has been vacant for months. This tale would seem to be nothing more than a highly artful account of a femme fatale were it not for an apparent digression in which Richard tells of seeing a male and female spider on a web outside his apartment building. The male is weak, but nevertheless manages to make love with the large and imposing female spider; but afterward, as he is attempting to escape, she pounces upon him and “sucks out the young blood of her lover in deep draughts” (165). It is evident that we are to regard the mysterious spider-woman as at least a figurative, and perhaps actual, vampire. Although the narrative does not suggest that Richard’s own blood has been literally sucked, his hapless obsession with the woman points at a minimum to psychic vampirism. It is not clear that we need give much attention to Ewers’s various novels, well-known as some of them are. Der Zauberlehrling (1907; translated as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1927) is the first novel of a trilogy about the Nietzschean figure Frank Braun. It bears almost no relation to the poem of that title by Goethe, which inspired the symphonic poem by Paul
Dukas and the 1940 Disney film; instead, Braun hypnotises a young woman into believing she is a saint, and she is ultimately crucified. There is no reason to think that anything supernatural has occurred here. The same can be said for Alraune (1911; translated in 1929), where the female creature of the title is the product of artificial insemination of a degraded prostitute by a vicious sex murderer. The final novel of the trilogy, Vampir (1920; translated as Vampire, 1934), is, in spite of its title, even less fantastic than its predecessors.
vi. The Development of Weird Poetry One of the more surprising developments in early twentieth-century weird fiction is the apparently sudden proliferation of weirdness in poetry. Following the profoundly influential work of the Romantics, culminating in Edgar Allan Poe, weird poetry became an occasional pastime for any number of poets; indeed, it is difficult to find a major poet of the later nineteenth century who didn’t produce at least a single weird specimen, ranging from Tennyson (“The Kraken”) to Longfellow (“Haunted Houses”), Browning (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”), Swinburne (“The Witch-Mother”), Yeats (“The Phantom Ship”), and even Lowell (“The Ghost-Seer”) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (“The Broomstick Train; or, The Return of the Witches”). Many minor poets, from William Allingham to George MacDonald to W. E. Henley, also contributed weird verse, while such proponents of weirdness in prose fiction as Ambrose Bierce (“A Vision of Doom” among others) and Guy de Maupassant (“Horror”) also extended their range to cover weirdness in verse. But it was only in the early twentieth century that we find some poets specializing in horror poetry. The American poet and fiction writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) is a surprising example, and a number of his poems utilise terror and weirdness to probe deeper questions of human life and death, as in the pensive “Apparitions”: “Is it more strange the dead should walk again / Than that the quick should die?” (All quotations in this section are from my anthology Dreams of Fear.) The little-known American poet Madison Cawein (1865–1914) also generated much weird verse among a prodigally large output, especially in such poems as “The Forest of Shadows” and “The Night-Wind” in The Vale of Tempe (1911). The young poet Park Barnitz (1878–1901) published The Book of Jade (1901) only a few months before his early death—a book that relentlessly emphasises the omnipresence of death and the futility of human life. But it was the American poet George Sterling (1869–1926) who may have been the first poet since Poe to focus on the weird. His bountiful poetry—which includes a number of striking verse dramas, particularly Lilith (1919) and Rosamund (1920), which have their elements of terror—
cover a wide range and for the most part are lyric and elegiac; but in the early long poem A Wine of Wizardry, written so early as 1902 but not published until it appeared in Cosmopolitan in September 1907, is a riot of fantastic imagery, especially in its most celebrated couplet, “The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, / Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.” Bierce took Sterling under his wing and strove for years to find a home for this remarkable excursion into poetic fantasy. Sterling also pioneered the writing of “cosmic” poetry, and the long poem The Testimony of the Suns (written in 1901–02 and published in The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems, 1903) is similarly a masterwork of the imagination in its depiction of the cosmic conflict of the stars and its echo in the human realm. Sterling himself became the mentor for Clark Ashton Smith, who can easily claim the title of the greatest weird poet in literary history; his work will be treated in a later chapter. Such homespun poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost found in ghosts, haunted houses, and other elements of the supernatural the perfect metaphors for the themes of human isolation and despair they wished to convey. The pensive narrator of Frost’s “The Ghost House” (in A Boy’s Will, 1913) finds the “lonely house” in which he dwells populated with a brood of nameless ghosts whom he, in his loneliness, ultimately welcomes: They are tireless folk, but slow and sad— Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad— With none among them that ever sings, And yet, in view of how many things, As sweet companions as might be had. Walter de la Mare augmented his substantial corpus of weird fiction with a number of powerful specimens of weird verse. “The Listeners” is the most celebrated of these, but it is only one of many poems that provide almost clinical but potent examinations of the psychology of terror. “Fear”
(in Poems, 1906) expresses in short lines of pungent iambs the dread of isolation: I know where lurk The eyes of Fear; I, I alone, Where shadowy-clear, Watching for me, Lurks Fear. These works constitute only the tip of the iceberg of the weird poetry of the period. The poets associated with H. P. Lovecraft—Samuel Loveman, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Donald Wandrei—also devoted a substantial portion of their poetic talents to terror, and their work will also be dealt with elsewhere. Each poet who contributed weird verse, whether a single specimen or an entire corpus, did so for aesthetic reasons of their own. In the broadest terms, it can be said that these poets—especially those who might otherwise be thought not to have been attracted to the supernatural, among them John Masefield (“Haunted”), A. E. Housman (“Hell Gate”), Paul Laurence Dunbar (“The Haunted Oak”), Edward Thomas (“Out in the Dark”), Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (“The Whisperers”), Siegfried Sassoon (“Goblin Revel”), and Robert Graves (“The Haunted House”)—found in the supernatural a means to convey themes, conceptions, and imagery not amenable to treatment by means of mimetic realism; and the increasing frequency with which these and other poets found the supernatural a viable mode of expression speaks well of the aesthetic potentialities of the form. The extent of weird writing during the first four decades of the twentieth century is so immense, and of such richness and diversity, that it becomes difficult to encompass it in anything like a small space. The period between the wars was, in particular, a time when even mainstream
publishers seemed inclined to issue the occasional eccentric work of fiction that bordered upon the weird. David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922) is a delightfully whimsical short novel whose title tells the whole story. Two other novels published in that year are worth notice: E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, an intoxicating mix of fantasy, supernaturalism, and even proto-science-fiction (the action purports to take place on Mercury); and Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare, whose preface is perhaps the pinnacle of cynical misanthropy and whose narrative deals with a jaded man who believes he has murdered his wife, a young gypsy woman, and when he sees her still in his house believes she is a figment of his perverse imagination. Hecht wrote a quasi-sequel, The Kingdom of Evil (1924), in which a strange fog appears to have wiped out the entire city in which Mallare lives, and perhaps the rest of the world; the remnants of humanity survive on an unnamed island. Under the guidance of a Doctor Sebastien, the people build a Kingdom of Evil, featuring such things as a temple (which turns out to be an immense flower) as well as a god, which the men appointed to the task construct after making a succession of horrible monsters. Then there is Thorne Smith’s Topper (1926), an excursion into humorous supernaturalism about a man’s adventures with a ghostly couple; it and its sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (1932), served as the basis for films and television shows alike. One curious sub-theme is the frequency with which some detective writers took to the supernatural in short stories or even novels. The most celebrated of them all, Agatha Christie (1890–1976), included several such tales in her early short story collection, The Hound of Death and Other Stories (1933). Of the twelve tales in this volume, seven are definitely supernatural and testify to Christie’s fascination with occultism and psychic phenomena. Perhaps the best is the title story (about a nun who possesses the power to kill or destroy with her mind) and “The Call of Wings,” a wistful and poetical account of a millionaire who, after hearing music played by a legless street musician in London (who, it is suggested, is actually Pan), feels a sense of soaring and becomes oppressed by a sense of imprisonment by worldly goods. “The Fourth Man” (1925) deals with psychic possession; “The Lamp” is a fine haunted house tale; and “The Last Séance” (1926) is a gripping tale of a medium. But Christie’s work in this vein (and, for that matter, in the mystery field) is, on the aesthetic level, surpassed by the American John Dickson
Carr (1906–1977). Although adhering, in more than seventy novels and dozens of short stories, to the most orthodox canons of the “fair play” detective story (he was a master of the “locked-room” mystery), Carr was fond of suggesting the supernatural as part of the engagingly overcoloured atmosphere of many of his novels; the “haunted house” in particular is featured in such novels as Hag’s Nook (1933) and The Crooked Hinge (1938), although the supernatural never comes into play. But Carr also wrote a remarkable tour de force, The Burning Court (1937), in which he plays tricks with the expectations of readers who think they are reading only a murder mystery with a false patina of the supernatural. Marie Stevens is thought by the people of a small town in Pennsylvania to be a witch responsible for several murders, but the detective, Lieutenant Brennan, manages to contrive a natural solution to the case; in a stunning epilogue, however, Marie subtly reveals herself to be a 200-year-old witch. Carr later wrote “historical mysteries” that appear to involve the supernatural. In three novels—The Devil in Velvet (Harper, 1951), Fear Is the Same (Morrow, 1956), and Fire, Burn! (Harper, 1957)—modern characters travel back in time to participate in events of up to two and a half centuries before; but this is only a ploy to get the plot moving. A few of Carr’s short stories also involve the supernatural. As noted in the previous chapter, a substantial number of American writers found in the pulp magazines welcome havens for their copious weird writings. The next two chapters will study the most prominent of these, chief among them H. P. Lovecraft, whose work continues to cast its influence far and wide to the present day.
XII. H. P. Lovecraft and His Influence
i. Lovecraft and the Pulps Just as Edgar Allan Poe is the central figure in the history and development of weird fiction in the nineteenth century, so H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) is —or, more precisely, has become—the dominant figure in twentiethcentury weird fiction. This circumstance would have surprised no one more than Lovecraft himself, for in his excessively unworldly and humble way he resolutely denied any merit to his tales except that of “sincerity” (“Some Notes on a Nonentity”; CE 5.210) and felt that he worked in the shadow of such of his admired predecessors as Poe, Bierce, Machen, Dunsany, and Blackwood. But a case could easily be made that his intensity of vision, his prodigiously bizarre imagination, and his immense influence on the work that followed him places him at the very pinnacle of the entire genre of weird fiction; his only viable rivals would be Poe himself, Blackwood, and Ramsey Campbell. But Lovecraft’s emergence as a weird writer cannot be separated from the rise of the pulp magazines in the decades before, during, and after his time. There is a pungent irony in Lovecraft’s very association with the pulps —notably Weird Tales—since he himself, as something of a literary snob who boasted of his classical learning, resolutely asserted his status as a gentleman-author who wrote only for the love of writing and who relentlessly (and accurately) condemned most pulp writing as subliterate rubbish, but was compelled to publish in the pulps because of very specific and timebound market conditions that prevented his work from being deemed acceptable to more mainstream markets. That Lovecraft was then, both during and after his lifetime, held in disdain precisely because of his appearance in the pulps only heightened the irony. The history of pulp magazines—usually costing anywhere from a dime to a quarter, and therefore accessible to the pocketbooks of the working class—is highly involved, but its roots can be traced to 1882, when Frank A. Munsey launched the Golden Argosy (later the Argosy) as the first allfiction magazine. He later established numerous other fiction magazines, and his chief claim to fame resides in his discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose first Mars novel (Under the Moons of Mars) and first
Tarzan novel (Tarzan of the Apes) both appeared in 1912. By that time, Street & Smith had gotten into the act with Popular Magazine, and other publishers contributed their own ventures. It was in the pulps that the genres as we know them—the western, the horror story, the detective story, the love story, the science fiction tale—all became viable forms of popular writing. Each of these genres has a history —and often a distinguished history in “high” literature (such as Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, the “scientific romances” of H. G. Wells, and so on)—that extends well before the pulps of the early twentieth century, but it was the pulps that lent them widespread popularity among the masses. Indeed, it was exactly at this time that mainstream or “slick” magazines tended to banish genre fiction (particularly the horror, detective, and science fiction tale) from its pages, except when written by especially eminent authors. The end result was the ghettoisation of these genres for decades; even today certain snobbish critics still disdain this work on principle. To be sure, much of the writing in the pulps was very poor and deserves permanent inhumation, but given the difficulty of selling work to other venues, such now canonical writers as Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury had little option but to appear in its pages. This period—roughly the first half of the twentieth century—constituted the first occasion in which, in both the United States and Europe, a mass audience for entertainment products existed; and it was, somewhat fortuitously, the same time that other modes of mass entertainment aside from printed matter emerged—the radio, the movie, popular music (including the musical drama), and later television. The result, as far as the economics of the entertainment industry (of which books, even bestsellers, constituted a relatively small portion) was concerned, was inevitable: media outlets began a wholesale shift in their output to cater to the relatively crude and ill-formed tastes of the mass public. What else could they do? That was where the money was. In sheer numbers, the mass audience dwarfed the now tiny elite of the educated to such a degree that the latter were rendered insignificant as consumers. Lovecraft saw this at first hand, as he wrote to a colleague in early 1937: Bourgois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a deathblow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that
intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved & crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercialsatellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the countinghouse a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify—& they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (Selected Letters 5.397–98) This assessment may be a trifle harsh, but in essentials it is largely valid. The plain fact is that even those who have received college educations are rarely taught to make the fundamental critical distinctions that would allow them to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to art—the original from the hackneyed, the distinctive from the trite, the sincere from the calculated, and so on. In terms of the weird tale, it is a still unanswered question whether the emergence of the pulps caused mainstream magazines to scorn weird fiction (except by the most celebrated of authors, such as Dunsany or Blackwood) or whether the departure of weird fiction from mainstream magazines led to or fostered the development of the pulps. There is no question that the simultaneous dominance of literary modernism (T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence) and the development of the novel of social realism (Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Arnold Bennett) resulted in a general disdain
among mainstream readers and critics for the incursion of fantasy or the supernatural within a literary work; some of these writers did delve into the weird as a sideline, but only sporadically. The upshot was that, for someone like Lovecraft, the pulp magazines—notably Weird Tales, founded in 1923 and lasting an incredible thirty-one years, finally folding in 1954—were the only viable venues for his fiction. Pulp fiction, like other forms of popular fiction, is rightly scorned because it tended to foster the cheapest literary techniques: wooden and stereotyped characterisation, artificial cliffhanger endings to chapters, a generally overheated and excessive use of action and incident, flat, mundane prose that is easily digestible by the simple-minded reader, and so forth. Only a tiny proportion of writers were able to overcome these jejune conventions to produce genuine literature—and Lovecraft, for his part, quickly found that his evolving conceptions of the nature and purpose of weird fiction were so far beyond what was considered acceptable to pulp markets that he suffered painful rejections of exactly those tales that today are regarded as his greatest contributions to literature.
ii. The Life of a Dreamer Lovecraft’s life is of unusual relevance for the assessment of his work and influence, not only because his fiction is an intimate outgrowth of his life experience and general worldview, but because his wide-ranging correspondence allowed him to become the nexus of an entire generation of weird writers who carried his legacy into the decades that followed. Because of that immense body of surviving correspondence, Lovecraft’s life can be told in meticulous, almost painful detail; he is by far the most self-documented figure in the entire history of weird fiction. Only the bare outlines of his life can be told here. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent all but a few years of his life, Howard Phillips Lovecraft came from a distinguished family (on his maternal side) that was in the throes of a genteel decline; on his father’s side, his ancestors were British immigrants, and to the end of his life Lovecraft clung to a devout Anglophilia. The early death of his father caused him to be raised chiefly by his mother and maternal grandfather; the death of the latter, in 1904, resulted in his departure from his beloved birthplace, resulting in a near-suicidal trauma. Lovecraft, highly sensitive, shy, introspective, and beset with physical and psychological maladies, had only a highly sporadic formal education, remedied by immense readings in his family library. He gained an early interest in both the sciences and in literature, and the former may be of even greater significance than the latter. Chemistry and astronomy were his early loves, and astronomy led to his adoption of a distinctively “cosmic” attitude: The most powerful sensations of my existence are those of 1896, when I discovered the Hellenic world, and of 1902, when I discovered the myriad suns and worlds of infinite space. Sometimes I think the latter event the greater, for the grandeur of that growing conception of the universe still excites a thrill hardly to be duplicated. . . . By my thirteenth birthday, I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance, and by my
seventeenth . . . I had formed in all essential particulars my present pessimistic cosmic views. (“A Confession of Unfaith” [CE 5.147]) Lovecraft later modified his “pessimism,” declaring himself an “indifferentist”: “Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces ssurrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process” (Selected Letters 3.39). Lovecraft’s taste for the weird was also of early development, and he was writing stories as early as the age of six. By the age of eight he had discovered Poe, an author whose work permanently coloured his entire approach to weird fiction. Lovecraft ultimately came to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the weird literature prior to his day, although he never found much value in the plethora of English ghost-story writers of the decades preceding him; instead, he seized upon the highly imaginative work of such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany (both discovered in 1919), Arthur Machen (discovered in 1923), Algernon Blackwood (discovered in 1924), and others. A kind of nervous breakdown caused Lovecraft to withdraw from high school in 1908; he failed to gain a diploma and go on to college, spending the next five years in virtual hermitry. By a series of accidents he discovered the little world of amateur journalism—a group of writers, chiefly in the United States and England, who wrote for and published humble magazines and distributed them to other members. Lovecraft joined both of the leading amateur organisations of the day: the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in 1914, and the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) in 1917. It was just the right place for a diffident and reclusive figure to be: his undoubted literary talents could be appreciated by a sympathetic audience, and the camaraderie that the associations provided eventually drew Lovecraft out of his shell. He held several important offices in both the UAPA and the NAPA, and with the passage of time he began venturing out into the world. His mature fiction-writing career began with “The Tomb” and “Dagon,” both written in 1917. (In this section, dates in parentheses indicate dates of writing, not publication.) Many of his early stories appeared in the amateur press, but with the founding of Weird Tales Lovecraft was encouraged by
others to submit to it; his tales were readily accepted, and he quickly became a star contributor to the magazine. The great majority of his stories appeared in Weird Tales over the next decade and a half, although the magazine’s main editor, Farnsworth Wright, pained Lovecraft by rejecting some of his best work. Lovecraft refused to cater to the low standards of the pulp magazines, scoffing at Wright’s pleas to make his tales more in line with pulp convention; either they were to be published as written or not at all. It is this aesthetic integrity that, along with the immense talent he displayed in the writing of weird fiction, that has ensured his literary stature while consigning the hackneyed work of his contemporaries to merited oblivion. The celebrity that Lovecraft achieved in Weird Tales allowed him to become the hub of an intricate network of friends and colleagues, including such writers as Frank Belknap Long (who first came into contact with Lovecraft in the amateur press, in 1920), August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, Henry S. Whitehead, Robert Bloch, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, and dozens of others. Lovecraft even became a ghostwriter of weird tales for would-be authors, such as Zealia Bishop and Hazel Heald; and some of these tales complement his own work, although they are generally inferior to it. And yet, fame in Weird Tales did not translate into fame in the general literary world. Lovecraft never had a book of stories published in his lifetime, and his negotiations with leading publishers—Putnam’s, Vanguard, Knopf, and others—were pitiably unsuccessful. Aside from being a very poor marketer of his work (a legacy of his not entirely affected stance as an eighteenth-century gentleman), Lovecraft was already facing general prejudice by publishers against collections of short stories; and Knopf rejected him only when it failed to receive confirmation from Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales that the magazine could sell a certain number of copies on its own. Wright appears to have been excessively cautious, but with the onset of the depression he seems to have felt he had no choice. In the end, only a single, wretchedly printed edition of The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936) emerged from a small press a few months before Lovecraft’s early death. The history of Lovecraft’s posthumous literary resurrection is itself a weird tale full of bizarre features. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei were so fervent in their belief in Lovecraft’s greatness that they formed a
publishing company, Arkham House, initially for the sole purpose of preserving Lovecraft’s work in hardcover. They quickly expanded their operations to include other writers, many of them from the pulps, and Arkham House long remained the leading specialty publisher of weird fiction. The early Arkham House editions were met with some praise and more than a little scorn—the latter emerging particularly from Edmund Wilson, who, as a devotee of social realism and disdainer of fantasy and the imagination (he thumbed his nose at Tolkien also), wrote a fiery review of various Lovecraft volumes in a 1945 issue of the New Yorker that seemed to constitute a kind of literary inhumation. But Lovecraft refused to fade away, and paperback editions of his work gained increasing popularity. By the 1960s his work was being adapted into film, and by the 1970s an explosion of paperback sales caused even the staid Time magazine to take notice of him in its 11 June 1973 issue. Around that time, a cadre of scholars (eventually including myself) began taking Lovecraft more seriously, and decades of work by these individuals resulted in Lovecraft’s slow ascent along the literary ladder, to the point that his work is now enshrined in editions by Penguin Classics and, preeminently, by a volume of Tales from the Library of America (2005). Decades after his death, Lovecraft has been canonised—and no one would be more startled by the development than himself.
iii. The Theory of the Weird Tale What sets Lovecraft apart from virtually all his predecessors (and, for that matter, successors) in weird fiction is that he developed a detailed and ever-evolving theory of the weird tale that, to be sure, structured his own work but whose cogency makes it a compelling theoretical construct for the entire genre. Some critics have maintained that this theory is largely selfserving—a justification of the specific brand of weird tale he himself was writing—but, aside from a possible overemphasis on the “cosmic” (Lovecraft’s signature contribution to the field), it is capable of far wider application. One of the earliest expressions of his “cosmic approach”—one that fuses his philosophical understanding of the insignificance of humanity in a universe of infinite extent in both space and time—occurs in the so-called In Defence of Dagon essays of 1921: I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. (CE 5.53) Although perhaps himself unaware of it, Lovecraft has by this statement created a manifest distinction between himself and nearly all the literature, weird or mainstream, that preceded him. Lovecraft emerged at a critical juncture in the history of supernatural fiction. His wide readings among his predecessors, and his profound knowledge of science and philosophy, led him to conclude that many of the standard tropes and motifs of weird fiction were stale and played out. It is noteworthy that there is not a single instance of the standard ghost, vampire, witch, werewolf, or haunted house in any of Lovecraft’s tales; where these
motifs are used, they are usually modified almost beyond recognition and, more significantly, updated so that they can pass aesthetic muster in an age whose immense strides in scientific knowledge had rendered these conceptions virtually unusable because of their reliance on outmoded religious presuppositions. Lovecraft, as a lifelong and resolute atheist, could not bring himself to subscribe to such conceptions, and this fact alone represents an immense break with previous literary tradition. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lovecraft’s most important contribution, as far as the history of weird fiction is concerned, is a fusion of the supernatural with the burgeoning field of science fiction. For all its anticipations in the work of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, science fiction has canonically been thought to commence with the publication of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in 1926. Lovecraft himself published “The Colour out of Space” (1927) in Amazing in 1927, and late in life he published two of his most impressive “cosmic” narratives, At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35), in 1936 issues of another leading science fiction pulp, Astounding Stories. The stories of Lovecraft’s first decade of mature fiction-writing (1917– 26) are on the whole conventional, although with a few striking specimens. They indicate his slow and unsystematic departure from conventional Gothicism into a distinctive amalgam of horror and science fiction. “The Tomb,” theoretically set in New England but really in a never-never-land of his own imagination, could have been written by Poe; it even includes a poem (a drinking song—anomalously for one who was a lifelong teetotaller) reminiscent of the poems in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But “Dagon,” written only a month or so later, already foreshadows his later work: a strikingly cosmic tale of an undersea mass that emerges to the surface of the Pacific as the result of an earthquake, it suggests the existence of an entire civilisation of undersea creatures who threaten the very existence of the human race: “I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed . . . I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascent amidst universal pandemonium” (F 27).
Lovecraft’s discovery of Lord Dunsany in 1919 in some sense represents a deviation from the supernatural realism that would become his dominant mode of writing: in the two years that followed, Lovecraft produced an array of obvious Dunsany imitations that, although several are noteworthy in their own right, are on the whole slight and derivative. Ultimately, Lovecraft came to absorb the Dunsany influence and meld it with his evolving worldview; indeed, as we shall see, he eventually attributed to Dunsany the core inspiration for the pseudomythology that has become the most recognisable feature of his work. During this period Lovecraft continued to write tales of supernatural horror, some of them powerful. Three can perhaps be singled out: “The Picture in the House” (1920), “The Outsider” (1921), and “The Rats in the Walls” (1923). “The Outsider” is worth discussing first, for it is manifestly a backwardlooking tale that, as Lovecraft himself admitted, “represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height” (Selected Letters 3.379). This broodingly atmospheric tale of a man who appears to emerge out of the tower of a castle that is, paradoxically, underground and finds that his entry into a brightly lit room causes fear and consternation among a group of partygoers features a climax that is perhaps not entirely unexpected: the man himself is the monster that he sees reflected in a mirror. Nevertheless, the poignancy of the concluding paragraph cannot be gainsaid: “For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass” (F 169). The tale is capable of multiple interpretations, of which the psychologically devastating effects of knowledge—a theme that Lovecraft utilised in many subsequent tales—is perhaps the most pertinent. “The Picture in the House” is one of the first tales where Lovecraft made extensive use of his deep knowledge of New England history and culture. As a Rhode Island rationalist and atheist, Lovecraft saw only horror in the crabbed psychology of the witch-hunting Puritans of Massachusetts, and “The Picture in the House” is a searing portrayal of the grim effects that ignorance, isolation, and inbreeding can engender. It is the tale that introduces us in passing to the city of Arkham, the first of an entire
constellation of imaginary locales in New England that have themselves taken on a life of their own in subsequent literature, and which marks Lovecraft as a noted regionalist. His use of an archaic New England dialect, placed in the mouth of the hideous denizen of the remote house, who has prolonged his life unnaturally by cannibalism, is chillingly effective. With “The Rats in the Walls” Lovecraft attains the pinnacle of his work in the old-time Gothic tradition. Although set in England, it is a kind of fusion of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and The House of the Seven Gables. An American industrialist, Delapore, returns to England to reclaim an ancestral estate but finds that a nameless army of rats—which only he and his cat can hear—are infesting the place; but in the end he learns something far more horrifying: his own family has for generations been a family of cannibals—a revelation that causes Delapore himself to regress instantly upon the evolutionary scale, until he is found crouching over the half-eaten form of a friend. The sheer narrative artistry of the story—one of the most flawless short stories in all weird fiction—may deflect our attention away from its richness of theme and substance. Far from merely being the story of a supernatural curse, the tale is aggressively modern in its pungent depiction of the truth of Darwin’s theory—something that can be seen as early as the juvenile tale “The Beast in the Cave” (1905), as well as in “Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1920), where a staid English nobleman discovers his ancestry from an ape. This use of modern science reaches a pinnacle, during this period, in “The Shunned House” (1924), ostensibly another House of the Seven Gables imitation but in reality something very different. The tale has been thought to be a kind of vampire story, but the vampire in question is very unorthodox. What exactly has been causing the frequent deaths over generations in a colonial house in Providence? The protagonist and his uncle ultimately learn the truth: a descendant of a purported werewolf, Jacques Roulet, of Caude (an actual individual whom Lovecraft found discussed in John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers [1872]), came to Providence and resided in the house. But this apparent conventionalism masks a profoundly new and quasi-scientific approach to the whole vampire legend: We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known
universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in threedimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage point, may never hope to understand. . . . Such a thing was not surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic science. (F 305–6) This is an immensely important statement, for it translates the entire story to the realm of science fiction—as does the dispatching of the hideous entity, not by a cross or a stake through the heart, but by a dousing with hydrochloric acid. These stories set the stage for the most representative phase of Lovecraft’s literary career—the stories of his final decade of writing, which, although remarkably few in number, effected a revolution in the weird tale.
iv. The Lovecraft Mythos What is so important about “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) is not merely its exponential leap in quality over Lovecraft’s previous work, but its clear instantiation of the core elements of his cosmic philosophy. That philosophy is most cogently articulated in a celebrated utterance made in a letter to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, to whom he resubmitted the story in July 1927 after it was initially rejected: 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 vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadowhaunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold. (Selected Letters 2.150) On the surface, this remark deals with a relatively narrow point of fictional technique—the depiction of extraterrestrial entities—but I believe it has a much broader application. In it, Lovecraft emphatically declares moral and aesthetic independence from the “humanocentric” pose he condemned as early as 1921. “The Call of Cthulhu” itself may not exemplify this stance quite as unambiguously as one might wish, for there are times when Lovecraft cannot help declaring that the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu—a vaguely octopoid creature who is trapped in his underwater city of R’lyeh
in the South Pacific but who, by a series of accidents, momentarily emerges to the surface—is endowed with a relatively conventional lust for destruction and mayhem: “After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight” (F 377). But “The Call of Cthulhu” contains, in all its essentials, the core features of what came to be called the Cthulhu Mythos: a band of cultists who dwell on the underside of human society and who seek to bring about the return of the “Old Ones” (the “gods” who they believe rule the universe), but who in reality have next to no power to effect such a transition; an ever-growing library of occult books (preeminent among them the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred) that purportedly contain information on these “gods”; a narrative that often begins with a meticulously realised New England topography but rapidly expands to encompass the world and the universe; and, above all, a sense of cosmic doom hanging over the earth and its inhabitants, who are nothing but the playthings of these “gods” (really extraterrestrials) who by accident intrude upon our world. Many of these elements have gained outsized importance in the hands of Lovecraft’s imitators, but they were really plot devices to foster his cosmic narratives, and they underwent frequent change in the course of his final decade of writing. “The Colour out of Space” (1927) may be Lovecraft’s most detailed and triumphant working out of the moral declaration of independence he had made—it was written only a few months prior to that utterance. In this novelette, now regarded as a classic of science fiction, a meteorite bearing a mysterious entity (or entities) lands on the property of a Massachusetts farmer and insidiously corrupts everything with which it comes into contact; but at no point can we ascertain the motives or purposes of the strange creature(s) inhabiting the meteorite—a message articulated by the farmer, Nahum Gardner, as he lies dying: “Nothin’ . . . nothin’ . . . the colour . . . it burns . . . cold an’ wet . . . but it burns . . . [. . .] everything alive . . . suckin’ the life out of everthing . . . in that stone . . . it must a’ come in that stone . . . pizened the whole place . . . dun’t know what it wants . . . [. . .] it beats down your mind an’ then gits ye . . . burns ye up . . . [. . .] ye know summ’at’s comin’, but ’tain’t no use . . . jest a colour . . .” (F 608)
Edmund Wilson’s grudging praise of the story that it anticipates the effects of atomic radiation is of course quite irrelevant: the story in fact is the pinnacle of Lovecraft’s depiction of the “shadow-haunted Outside.” Lovecraft’s progress from the conventionally macabre to the cosmic was not linear, and just prior to writing “The Colour out of Space” he wrote the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), his most exhaustive treatment of old-time Gothicism. Although there are faint traces of the newer approach here (the cosmic entity Yog-Sothoth is first cited here, to little purpose), the novel is otherwise a rich tapestry of Gothic terror in its central figure, the alchemist Joseph Curwen—who, having already gained the secret of eternal life, now seeks to extract the “essential saltes” of human and other creatures in a nebulous plan that will somehow (in the words of Charles Dexter Ward, a descendant of Curwen who revivifies him) endanger “all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe” (F 551). This sounds succulently cosmic, but it is never clarified how Curwen’s resurrection of such celebrated individuals as Benjamin Franklin will have the cataclysmic effects Ward fears. In any case, the novel is not only Lovecraft’s paean to the history and topography of his native Providence, but a masterful working out of Gothic tropes— alchemy, eternal life, perhaps psychic possession—for a twentieth-century audience. It is a pity that Lovecraft never prepared the novel for publication. The Cthulhu Mythos, although its importance as a tool for understanding Lovecraft’s work may be exaggerated, can nonetheless not be dismissed out of hand. There really is something going on in the tales of Lovecraft’s final decade of writing—a complex series of cross-references and common themes, scenes, and characters that allows them to become more than the sum of their parts. (As we shall shortly see, several of Lovecraft’s colleagues began to elaborate upon the Mythos in his own lifetime, adding to its verisimilitude as an esoteric body of occult lore.) It is, indeed, this sense of a kind of shared universe in which each tale is a component that has been the key element in the fascination with which Lovecraft’s works were received in his day down to our own: for all that the tales are self-standing, they seem to share a commonality of tone and mood that render them segments of one long novel—a novel whose purpose is, in spite (or perhaps because) of its prodigal display of “gods,” to display the
brutal fact of humanity’s insignificance and transience in an indifferent cosmos. There is no way to “justify the ways of God to man”—because there is no god or gods, only extraterrestrials whose casual and accidental brushes with humanity are cataclysmic to ourselves but of vanishingly small interest to the entities who rule the universe. This development, too, is not uniform in Lovecraft’s work, and for a variety of reasons he sometimes failed to realise his own stated goals in fiction writing. “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) is a signal failure in depicting a naive good-vs.-evil scenario in which valiant human beings (led by a bombastic librarian, Dr. Armitage) triumph over “wicked people and wicked cults” (F 667) who have sought to bring in Yog-Sothoth from another dimension. This tale, manifestly inspired by Machen’s “The Great God Pan” in its general scenario (a woman impregnated by a god), is one of the most disappointing of Lovecraft’s later tales for its conventionality. Even its haunting portrayal of backwoods Massachusetts cannot redeem it. There is some evidence that Lovecraft wrote the story deliberately to cater to the tastes of Weird Tales readers; but the end result, in spite of the tale’s continuing popularity, is an aesthetic disaster. Substantially better, but flawed in other ways, is the rich novella “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), which unforgettably etches the rural landscape of Vermont in its tale of extraterrestrial entities (the fungi from Yuggoth, a planet identified with the newly discovered Pluto) besieging a hapless farmer. Here the several fascinating conceptions—notably, the ability of the fungi to extract a human brain and send it on cosmic voyagings throughout (and perhaps beyond) the known universe—are marred by an unwittingly comical cowboys-and-Indians scenario where the fungi battle the farmer, who resists with guns and dogs, and by the credulity shown by the protagonist, Albert N. Wilmarth, who has come into correspondence with Akeley and strives to aid him. Little but praise can, however, be directed at At the Mountains of Madness (1931), perhaps the acme of Lovecraft’s fusion of science fiction and horror. This wondrously detailed short novel about an Antarctic expedition that uncovers the frozen bodies of barrel-shaped extraterrestrials called the “Old Ones”—who came to this planet millions of years ago and who, aside from building an immense stone city in the Antarctic, “created all earth-life as jest or mistake” (F 739)—is a masterpiece on every level. Lovecraft’s knowledge of the sciences is on impressive display in his
detailed portrayal of every phase of the expedition; and the climax of the story, when the human protagonists encounter a shoggoth—a beast of burden, in the form of a shapeless mass of protoplasm, whom the Old Ones had created to build their cities, but who overthrew its masters—may be as chilling as any passage in supernatural literature: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train— a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly selfluminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. (F 802) On a very different level in terms of plot, but no less cosmic in its implications, is “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), which unforgettably depicts the decaying Massachusetts backwater of Innsmouth, a town that saw an influx of hybrid creatures, half-fish and half-frog, who began mating with the inhabitants to create a loathsome race of entities who collectively bear the “Innsmouth look” and who ultimately take to the sea in a kind of grotesque parody of the quest for eternal life. The unsparing realism of Lovecraft’s portrayal of the town and its inhabitants, and the insidious manner in which he reveals the appalling climax—the narrator, a young student seeking genealogical data, after valiantly struggling to flee from the horrible creatures, learns that he is related to them—cause this tale to rank very high in the Lovecraft corpus. The narrator’s final decision not to kill himself but to join his relatives in the deep, where “we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever” (F 858)—a hideous parody of the Twenty-third Psalm—is a masterstroke that only intensifies the horror of the narrative. After two relatively mediocre tales—“The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932), in which the Salem witchcraft is reinterpreted in light of advanced mathematics, and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933), a relatively conventional tale of psychic possession—Lovecraft produced another triumph with “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35), whose cosmicism matches that of At the Mountains of Madness. A member of the Great Race —a group of minds who are capable of spanning space and time and
thrusting themselves into the bodies of virtually any creatures in the universe—exchanges his mind with that of the narrator, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, whose mind is thrust into the body of a grotesque cone-shaped entity in Australia about 150,000,000 years ago. There he writes a history of his own time while the mind in his own body seeks to learn all it can of the human civilisation of that time. After his mind is returned to his own body, Peaslee is dogged by dreams of his life in the body of the cone-shaped being—and he finally comes upon evidence that the “dreams” were in fact real, especially when, in one of the most cataclysmic moments in weird fiction, he comes upon the history he must have written millions of years ago, buried in the rubble of the Australian desert. Lovecraft’s final original story, “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935), is a lighter specimen: it was inspired by Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” (Weird Tales, September 1935), in which a character obviously based on Lovecraft is dispatched horribly; Lovecraft responded by having Robert Blake be the victim of the cosmic entity Nyarlathotep (or his avatar). Lovecraft wrote less and less with the passing of the years, his selfconfidence shattered by rejections of his work (especially by book publishers) and, in some cases, by less than enthusiastic responses by his own friends and colleagues. Doubtless he died in 1937 believing that his work would fade away into oblivion.
v. Characteristics of Lovecraft’s Work What distinguishes Lovecraft’s work from that of his predecessors (and, in many regards, his successors) is his skill at incorporating core elements of his distinctive “cosmic” philosophy—rooted in atheistic materialism— into fiction that is inexhaustibly rich, complex, and vital. It is easy to be misled both by Lovecraft’s somewhat florid prose style and by his exhibition of an array of outlandishly named creatures—Cthulhu, YogSothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth—with equally outlandish properties, chiefly ropy tentacles: these flamboyant externals mask a profound understanding of the psychology of fear and, most significantly, a profound seriousness of purpose in making horror fiction a legitimate contribution to literature. His prose—a unique fusion of the verbal richness of Poe and Dunsany with the precision of a scientific report—was inaccurately declared to be “verbose” or “turgid” by critics of an earlier generation raised (as Lovecraft himself rightly declared) on the “machine-gun fire” (Selected Letters 4.32) of Hemingway: The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, or poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and waht an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight. (“The Call of Cthulhu,” F 377) What many have failed to note is that a passage like this comes only at the end of a long build-up of atmosphere, so that this apocalyptic revelation,
expressed in terms suitable to its subject-matter, can bear the emotional weight it deserves. Lovecraft is, indeed, one of the premier technicians of the short story—he took to heart Poe’s strictures on the “unity of effect” and meticulously constructed his tales to proceed inexorably from beginning to end with the maximum emotive impact. Even though, for Lovecraft, “atmosphere” (CE 2.177) more than plot was the desideratum, his tales are invariably worked out so that their full potential is realised. Lovecraft deliberately downplayed the role of human characters in his tales, leading some critics to believe that he couldn’t draw character at all, or that his use of dialogue (virtually non-existent in most of his tales) was weak. But, firstly, Lovecraft was well aware that, for the type of cosmic fiction that he was writing, strong or distinctive human characters might militate against the effects he sought; and secondly, he was careful to depict the gradual and insidious accretion of fear that his characters—deliberately bland so that they can serve as conduits of emotion to the reader—feel as they become increasingly enmeshed in the bizarre. The spectacular transformation of the protagonist of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” who proceeds from fear and loathing of his hybrid pursuers to an ecstatic embrace of them and of his fate, is a triumph of psychological analysis that has few rivals in weird literature. The fusion of horror and science fiction that is Lovecraft’s greatest literary legacy received an interesting endorsement in a letter of 1931: The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a for not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (Selected Letters 3.295–96) This utterance was made while Lovecraft was writing At the Mountains of Madness, a preeminent instance of “non-supernatural cosmic art.” It arose out of a reading of Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper (1929), a somewhat lugubrious treatise that expressed dismay at the future of aesthetics at a time when science had seemingly destroyed so many of the
intellectual underpinnings of art—notably that of romantic love, which had been dissected by Freud and other psychologists. Lovecraft had been facing this dilemma since at least 1922 (see the essay “Lord Dunsany and His Work”), and it was one more weapon in his discarding of conventional weird motifs—the ghost, the vampire, the werewolf—in his work. He may not have adhered fully to the non-supernaturalism he seems to espouse here —there is plenty of relatively conventional supernaturalism in, say, “The Thing on the Doorstep”—but his expression of the principle is significant in linking him even more closely to the realm of science fiction. But for all Lovecraft’s alliance with the field of science fiction, he retains the perspective of the supernatural writer by his focus on the past— not merely the past of folklore, where ghosts and witches emerged, but an unthinkably remote past that saw the descent to earth of extraterrestrial entities from the remotest reaches of the cosmos. Even his two most science-fictional works, At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time,” have this backward-looking focus—a focus that for decades caused readers, writers, and critics of science fiction to regard Lovecraft with some dubiety. This perspective was part and parcel of Lovecraft’s cosmic outlook—an outlook that minimised human achievement by dwelling on the risible recency of the human race and its ultimate extinction. Lovecraft’s emergence at this juncture in the history of weird fiction is a testament to the substantial heritage the field already had to offer. Some critics have criticised Lovecraft for being overly derivative. To be sure, some of his early tales are too heavily influenced by Poe to be fully viable as aesthetic entities on their own, and the influence of Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and a host of lesser writers can be found in his work—chiefly because, in his letters, he makes no secret of the works he was reading or had in his library. But in his mature work Lovecraft radically transformed what he borrowed. He even claimed that his pseudomythology was initially inspired by the theogony of Lord Dunsany: “About 1919 the discovery of Lord Dunsany—from whom I got the idea of the artificial pantheon and myth-background represented by ‘Cthulhu’, ‘Yog-Sothoth’, ‘Yuggoth’, etc. —gave a vast impetus to my weird writing” (“Some Notes on a Nonentity” [CE 5.209–10]). But what Lovecraft fails to note here is that, in borrowing the notion of a pantheon of gods from Dunsany, he has transferred the entities from a never-never-land of the imagination to the objectively real
world—an aesthetic gesture of immense significance, because it shifts the focus of his tales from that of fantasy to that of supernatural horror. Lovecraft also took hints from Machen’s “little people”—the notion of secret cults on the underside of civilisation, seeking to overthrow it—but in doing so he “cosmicised” the notion, making the threat not merely local but worldwide. Lovecraft’s intimate connexions with a multitude of writers in the field was of immense importance in the subsequent progression of weird fiction: he was a kind of spider with an intricate network of webs connecting him to a wide array of figures who looked to him as the voice of authority and sought to elaborate upon his conceptions and themes. Many of these writers somewhat mechanically imitated the obvious externals of his Cthulhu Mythos; others focused on their own creations, but seemed frequently to use Lovecraft’s work as a touchstone or inspiration. Several of the more significant of these writers will now be treated.
vi. Borderline Weirdists: Howard, Smith, Merritt The two authors most closely associated with Lovecraft—as equals rather than as disciples—are Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936). Although both published extensively in Weird Tales, much of their work falls outside the domain of supernatural fiction as narrowly conceived, although it may be encompassed by the broader rubric of weird fiction. In particular, Smith developed from Dunsany and others the mode of imaginary-world fantasy, while Howard—also possibly picking up hints from Dunsany (“The Sword of Welleran”) but more likely inspired by his own conflicted psychological and sociocultural stance—was a virtual pioneer in the subgenre of heroic fantasy, in which larger-than-life figures, chiefly historical, battle foes both natural and supernatural. Although he was the younger man, Howard’s work is worth treating first, since he began publishing fiction at a very early age, a few years before Smith entered into the most representative phase of his fiction writing. Some caveats are in order in discussing Howard, since he has inspired a small cadre of overenthusiastic fans and scholars who appear to vaunt his work far above its merits (they feel, for example, that if Lovecraft is deserving of a Library of America volume, Howard is also, in spite of the substantial gulf in quality, substance, and influence between the two writers’ work) and who therefore take any criticism of their idol with hostility and umbrage. Many of them also seem animated by the same aggressiveness that can be found in Howard’s own fiction and letters—the latter of which regale us with vivid accounts of the antics of various gunmen of the old West, the titanic struggles of college football teams, and so forth. Howard, as a native of Texas and scion of pioneers who helped to settle that region, appears to have harboured something of a grudge against what he perceived to be effete East Coast (or European) intellectualism and civilisation, to the degree that he prized the freedom and even the violence of the frontiersman—an attitude that gradually metamorphosed into an
admiration for barbarians struggling against the dominance of Romans and other symbols of culture and learning. These views account for Howard’s invention of such heroes as King Kull (a warrior in the ancient land of Valusia), Bran Mak Morn (a Pict battling the Romans in Britain), Solomon Kane (a seventeenth-century Puritan who stumbles upon various horrors in his quest to spread his faith), and Conan of Cimmeria, Howard’s preeminent embodiment of the virtues of barbarism. While it is true that in some cases these heroes encounter supernatural entities in the course of their peregrinations, the emphasis is so much on physical conflict—whether it be set battles between hordes of barbarians against civilised armies or single combat with some formidable foe—that the supernatural element often fades into insignificance. This might also be said for an interesting subset of tales, chiefly written late in his short life, about his native Texas. When Howard did treat supernatural themes in relative purity, without the infusion of a heroic fantasy element, the result was oftentimes flat and conventional. Hence, “In the Forest of Villefère” (1925) is a routine werewolf story. “Wolfshead” (1926) is also a werewolf story, but here Howard provides a preposterous “origin of species” of werewolves in which the spirit of good has presumably entered man and the spirit of evil into animals; accordingly, werewolves team up with demons to wreak vengeance on their moral betters. “Rattle of Bones” (1929) uninterestingly displays a skeleton of a wizard that revives to avenge his death. In “The Noseless Horror” an Egyptian mummy (one, however, that proves to be only ten years old) comes to life. “Pigeons from Hell” (1938) is believed by many to be Howard’s best tale of supernatural horror, but it is far less imaginatively evocative and effectively written than Lovecraft’s best tales. Here we are somewhere in the South, where a character speaks of the horrors of witchcraft and voodoo in the region: “Voodoo!” he muttered. “I’d forgotten about that—I never could think of black magic in connection with the South. To me witchcraft was always associated with old crooked streets in waterfront towns, overhung by gabled roofs that were old when they were hanging witches in Salem; dark musty alleys where black cats and other things might steal at night. Witchcraft always meant the old towns
of New England, to me—but all this is more terrible than any New England legend—these somber pines, old deserted houses, lost plantations, mysterious black people, old tales of madness and horror—God, what frightful, ancient terrors there are on this continent fools call ‘young’!” (H 438) In the end, we are introduced to the concept of the zuvembie—a female zombie in the form of a mulatto servant who seeks vengeance upon her masters. The story is not entirely ineffective in etching the society of the post-slavery South, but as a horror tale it fails to deliver an effective punch. Two other stories have somewhat greater merit. “The Cairn on the Headland” (1933) takes us to Ireland, where the protagonist, James O’Brien, meets none other than Odin, who takes the form of a man. It turns out that Odin is buried under a cairn that O’Brien has come upon, and his resurrection is impressively awesome: Out of the cairn he rose, and the northern lights played terribly about him. And the Gray Man changed and altered in horrific transmutation. The human features faded like a fading mask; the armor fell from his body and crumbled to dust as it fell; and the fiendish spirit of ice and frost and darkness that the sons of the North deified as Odin, stood up nakedly and terribly in the stars. About his grisly head played lightnings and the shuddering gleams of the aurora. His towering anthropomorphic form was dark as shadow and gleaming as ice; his horrible crest reared colossally against the vaulting arch of the sky. (H 238) A much more modest specimen, “Old Garfield’s Heart” (1933), is the simple but powerful tale of a man who, suffering an injury, is treated by a mysterious Indian and ends up never growing older; when he dies, his heart keeps on beating. The stories that Howard wrote partially under Lovecraft’s influence— they first came in touch in 1930, although Howard was reading Lovecraft’s work in Weird Tales almost from the beginning and wrote a letter to the editor in praise of “The Call of Cthulhu”—are also a mixed bag. “The Children of the Night” (1931) drops the names of various Lovecraftian
names, but is concerned with a man who, by hereditary memory, goes back in time into the body of a remote ancestor in Pictish times. “The Black Stone” (1931) displays a reasonably effective use of Lovecraftian elements, dealing with a man who stumbles upon a monolith in Hungary and dreams of a hideous toadlike monster resting upon it. “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (1936) is perhaps Howard’s most successful attempt to fuse his own swashbuckling, action-adventure style with the Lovecraftian idiom. Set in the Middle East, the tale seems to promise a more than glancing treatment of Lovecraft’s motifs when the protagonists—the American Steve Clarney and some Arab compatriots— come upon an ancient deserted city and “believed it to be the ancient, ancient City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazred—the city of the dead on which an ancient curse rested” (H 45). The curse in question refers to a doom that would be activated if a valuable gem is removed from the hand of a skeleton clutching it. An Arab tells of an ancient magician, Xuthltan, who cried out “on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu and Koth and Yog-Sothoth” (H 472), and laid the curse. Steve in fact takes up the gem, whereupon, from a “hideous black well,” an “Invader from Outer Gulfs and far black reaches of cosmic being” (H 474) emerges. All this is quite effective, and represents Howard’s most able use of Lovecraftian motifs—but they are expressed in his own idiom, with fastpaced action and plenty of fighting. On the whole, however, Lovecraftian cosmicism does not seem to have come naturally to Howard, and he was wise to adhere to his own chosen form of heroic fantasy in the bulk of his tales. Of the tales that form loosely connected cycles, the Solomon Kane stories seem to have the greatest supernatural content. Howard’s portrayal of this Puritan swordsman is, however, highly implausible and contrived; but at least he makes no attempt to imitate seventeenth-century diction, thereby avoiding the colossal blunders that Hodgson made in The Night Land. For some reason, Kane finds himself repeatedly in Africa, encountering various instances of African magic but also allowing Howard to indulge in repulsive racism. The first Solomon Kane story, “Red Shadows” (1928), is about wizardry by a ju-ju man, N’Longa. This character recurs in several other stories, such as “The Hills of the Dead” (1930), where Kane and N’Longa encounter an entire city of vampires and, by a combination of fisticuffs and fire, defeat them. In “The Moon of
Skulls” (1930) Kane seeks “the vampire queen of Negari” (K 104); but in the end the story proves to be a non-supernatural save-the-damsel adventure story, as Kane strives (and, of course, succeeds) in rescuing a white woman from being the offered as a virgin sacrifice. In “Wings of the Night” (1932) Kane, again in Africa, encounters winged creatures that turn out to be the harpies of Greek myth. Racism is also at the fore in Howard’s tales of old and contemporary Texas. Consider “The Shadow of the Beast,” where we are told: “When a negro like him sets his mind on a white girl, nothing but death can stop him” (H 96). Sure enough, the negro is killed in a deserted house, but the white hero also encounters (curiously) the ghost of a gorilla who had been killed there twenty years earlier. In the late “Black Canaan” (1936), “swamp niggers” (H 383) are killing white men. Well, that can’t be allowed to stand, so a band of whites seek to kill the blacks’ leader, a “conjer man” whose “aim [is] to kill all de white filks in Canaan” (H 386). A sorceress is somehow also involved. The Bran Mak Morn stories are chiefly tales of battles between the Picts and the Romans, but in “Worms of the Earth” (1932) we are introduced to hideous creatures dwelling on the underside of civilisation: “The worms of the earth! Thousands of vermin digging like moles far below the castle, burrowing away the foundations—gods, the land must be honeycombed with tunnels and caverns—these creatures were even less human than he had thought—what ghastly shapes of darkness had he invoked to his aid?” (H 265). These worms are apparently analogous to the “little people” of Machen. This story is a powerful and haunting weird tale and may in fact be the pinnacle of Howard’s work in supernatural horror. The Conan stories also contain some supernatural creatures and episodes—a female vampire in “The Hour of the Dragon” (1932), an extraterrestrial entity in “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933), a witch in “A Witch Shall Be Born” (1934)—but, like the King Kull stories, these narratives are so remote in time and so overshadowed by the swordplay that is Howard’s chief focus that the element of terror does not always emerge as potently as it might. This is not meant as a criticism of Howard’s work, but merely as an explanation for why he does not, and should not, occupy as high a place as his supporters wish in the realm of supernatural horror. The same could be said of Clark Ashton Smith, who was also led by temperament—and, perhaps, a desire not to be seen merely as Lovecraft’s
disciple or imitator—to write tales very different from Lovecraft’s, in which the element of pure supernaturalism is also muted. Smith gained early celebrity for a spectacular volume of weird poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912), written largely under the tutelage of George Sterling; several other volumes cemented Smith’s reputation as a poet, at least in his native California. He came in touch with Lovecraft as early as 1922, but it was not until around 1929 that he began writing weird tales in earnest. (He had written some Arabian Nights tales as early as 1910, but these amount to little.) Smith also has a small legion of devotees and scholars who are seeking to lift him out of Lovecraft’s shadow—an effort that could easily succeed if Smith’s brilliant poetry is taken into consideration, but one that is more difficult of accomplishment in regard to his fantasy fiction, which was manifestly written, if not under Lovecraft’s direct influence, at least from Lovecraft’s example. Smith wrote a remarkable number of tales in a short period of time: from 1929 to 1935 he wrote well over a hundred stories of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, published in Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and other pulps. Smith’s chief motivating factor in writing these tales, however, was not abstract aestheticism but the practical need to support himself and his ailing parents, so that he was much more willing to compromise to editors’ demands for revision and, frankly, to write tales specifically suited for the markets he sought to enter. As a result, many of his tales are marred by haste, weak plots, and stereotyped characters. The great majority of Smith’s stories fall into the realms of fantasy and science fiction, hence are not of direct relevance to the field of supernatural fiction. As with Robert E. Howard, Smith’s stories can largely be grouped in loose subclasses—but rather than being focused on an heroic protagonist, they are generally classed by location: the mediaeval French province of Averoigne (a name clearly modelled on that of the actual region of Auvergne); Hyperborea, a land in the far north in the remote ages of the earth; Zothique, a continent of the far future; Atlantis, the sunken continent in the Atlantic; Mars and Xiccarph, planets near and remote from the earth; and so forth. Some of the stories that do not fall into these classes are set in the objectively real world, several of them in Smith’s native California. From the point of view of abstract quality, the Zothique stories are probably the pinnacle of Smith’s fiction-writing; from the point of view of relevance to supernatural fiction, the Averoigne stories come to the fore, but
regrettably they are among the poorest of Smith’s tales, being generally routine accounts of vampires, lamias, and the like. “The End of the Story” (1929) is of somewhat greater interest. (In this section, Smith’s tales are dated by date of composition, not publication.) Here we are introduced to the castle of Fausseflammes, where a monk from the nearby monastery of Périgon meets a seductive lamia, Nycea; and although she is routed by the use of holy water, the monk laments the loss of this symbol of paganism and sexuality and resolves to return to her. Other tales of Averoigne are of similar or lesser interest. In “The Maker of Gargoyles” (1931), demons who are marauding the province prove to be gargoyles manufactured by Blaise Reynard; but the climax of the tale is telegraphed almost from the beginning. “The Beast of Averoigne” (1932) tells of a monster who eats the marrow of people and animals; it transpires (implausibly) that the beast is from outer space, even though he occupied the body of an abbot during his depredations. Smith set a number of his earlier stories in California, and in some cases the local colour is effective, as in “The Ninth Skeleton” (1928), although this story is otherwise sadly anticlimactic; or “The Devotee of Evil” (1930), where a character posits “a monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness and disease” (1.156). It is not entirely clear what this is supposed to mean, but the character manages to create a machine that concentrates the vibrations of evil, leading to bizarre sensations: . . . there surged upon me an intolerable depression, together with a multitude of sensations which I despair of conveying in language. My very sense of space was distorted and deformed, as if some unknown dimension had somehow been mingled with ours. There was a feeling of dreadful and measureless descent, as if the floor were sinking beneath me into some nether pit; and I seemed to pass beyond the room in a torrent of swirling, hallucinative images, visible but invisible, felt but intangible, and more awful, more accurst than that hurricane of lost souls beheld by Dante. (1.159) This is a reasonably interesting attempt to fuse supernaturalism (or perhaps even science fiction) with psychological horror. In the end, the inventor
becomes an ebon statue. “The Face by the River” (1930) fuses a Californian setting with a rare use (for Smith) of purely psychological horror, as a man who has strangled his lover and thrown her into a river continually sees her face in the river, finally drowning himself. “Genius Loci” (1932) does not have an explicitly Californian setting, but is one of Smith’s more effective supernatural tales. Here a man named Amberville becomes fascinated with a sedgy meadow near his home, thinking it a locus of evil. Is it, indeed, a kind of “vampire” (4.164)? Insidiously, the meadow seems to engender the death of Amberville and his fiancée, apparently absorbing their lifeforce. For one of the rare times in Smith’s fiction, there is genuine psychological analysis of a character’s shifting reactions as he confronts the bizarre. “The Secret of the Cairn” (1932; published as “The Light from Beyond”) also has good realistic description of the Sierra foothills where the protagonist (like Smith) lives, before veering off into science fiction. The same could be said for one of Smith’s great imaginative triumphs, “The City of the Singing Flame” (1931). It is, indeed, surprising that Smith wrote as many realistic tales as he did, since he himself confessed in a letter to Lovecraft that he was “far happier when I can create everything in a story” (Selected Letters 108)—a prototypical act of fantasy. Indeed, some of Smith’s most effective tales of terror are those in which he mingles quasi-supernaturalism with fantasy or science fiction (the latter, given Smith’s relative lack of interest or training in science, should probably be referred to more accurately as science fantasy). The preeminent instance here is “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (1931), ostensibly set on Mars. This story may be nothing but a monster tale, but some of its touches are undeniably effective, as when the nebulous entity—in the shape of a hood or cowl—descends upon a hapless human victim: Cleaving closely as a tightened cloth, the thing enfolded Octave’s hair and brow and eyes, and he shrieked wildly, with incoherent pleas for help, and tore with frantic fingers at the cowl, but failed to loosen it. Then his cries began to mount in a mad crescendo of agony, as if beneath some instrument of infernal torture; and he danced and capered blindly about the vault, eluding us with strange celerity as we all sprang forward in an effort to reach him and release him from his weird incumbrance. The whole
happening was mysterious as a nightmare; but the thing that had fallen on his head was plainly some unclassified form of Martian life, which, contrary to all the known laws of science, had survived in those primordial catacombs. (3.88) Smith’s tales derived directly from Lovecraft are not among his stellar compositions. The most clearly Lovecraftian, “The Return of the Sorcerer” (1931), is nothing but an elementary revenant tale in which the dismembered corpse of the wizard Helman Carnby comes back to exact vengeance on his brother and murderer, John. Smith invented the god Tsathoggua in “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1929), but the fantastic setting of the tale (it is part of Smith’s Hyperborea cycle) lessens the supernatural effect of the hideous toad-god. Much superior is “UbboSathla” (1933), a brilliant tale of regression, in which a man of the modern world, Paul Tregardis, somehow goes back in time to inhabit a succession of increasingly remote human and animal forms until he finally unites with Ubbo-Sathla, “a mass without head or members, spawning the gray, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life” (3.223). Lovecraft was correct in believing that Smith felt the sense of the cosmic as keenly as he himself did—something spectacularly evident in his early poetry, as we shall presently see. Smith’s vocabulary—even more esoteric than Lovecraft’s—has been criticised as needlessly recherché, but this criticism again stems from an outmoded belief that Hemingwayesque spareness is the only manner in which prose should be written. Smith himself articulated a different aesthetic: “My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of proserhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation” (Selected Letters 126). Whether Smith was actually effective in his use of such methods is a legitimate inquiry; but that he adopted them with a full realisation of their emotive effects cannot be denied. It would be highly misleading to regard A. Merritt (1884–1943) as anything approaching an imitator or disciple of Lovecraft, or even a close colleague, although they did become acquainted in the 1930s. Merritt, of course, began his literary career some years before Lovecraft and gained
celebrity with a remarkable novelette, “The Moon Pool” (All-Story Weekly, 22 June 1918), that made him a fixture with the Munsey magazines and, ultimately, one of the highest-paid pulpsmiths of his time. Set in the Pacific, “The Moon Pool” tells a simple story of a monster uncovered by a scientific expedition—but that monster is of a highly unusual sort that testifies to the vibrancy of Merritt’s early imagination. A fusion of radiant, swirling globes, the entity (called the Dweller) eventually absorbs the head of the expedition: At the port-hole was a radiance; swirls and spirals of living white cold fire. It poured into the cabin and it was filled with dancing motes of light, and over the radiant core of it shone seven little lights like tiny moons. It gathered Throckmartin to it. Light pulsed through and from him. I saw his skin turn to a translucent, shimmering whiteness like illumined porcelain. His face became unrecognizable, inhuman with the monstrous twin expressions. (173) This is not unlike Lovecraft’s later conception of the colour out of space, and the story can also be shown to have exercised a significant influence on “The Call of Cthulhu.” But Merritt, lured by the sirens’ song of popularity and big money, corrupted his imagination and became a highly talented hack. His first catastrophic act was to purge “The Moon Pool” of precisely its most interesting features and stretch it out into a novel, The Moon Pool (1919). Subsequent works catered to popular tastes in ways that Lovecraft refused to do: valiant human heroes combating various evil figures or cults, cliffhanger plots, contrived happy endings, and a frequent inclusion of an adventitious romance element. But a large reason for the general failure of Merritt’s work to retain the allegiance of subsequent generations of readers and critics is his rather curious melding of a number of genres, oftentimes in somewhat haphazard fashion: supernatural horror, fantasy, science fiction, even the detective story. Because Merritt worked adequately but not brilliantly in all these genres, his work ultimately fell on deaf ears.
The majority of Merritt’s novels—almost all of which were serialised in the Munsey magazines before appearing in book form—begin in the objectively real world before departing into a never-never-land of fantasy that comes close to thrusting them into the subgenre of the lost race novel. This applies even in the case of Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), which some critics have plausibly seen as an homage to Lovecraft, specifically in its depiction of the monster-god Khalk’ru, a “Black Octopus” (22) that will one day rise and destroy the world—a fairly obvious allusion to Cthulhu. But the terror of this creature is muted by the fact that the narrative veers off from its initial setting in central Asia to a valley (evidently in Alaska) that is reached by descending through a mirage—an act that shifts the work from the supernatural to fantasy, even though a pseudo-scientific explanation of the mirage is later offered. This novel, like so many of Merritt’s, is weakened by a feeble romance element that occupies far too much of the narrative. Perhaps Merritt’s greatest imaginative triumph occurs in The Metal Monster, which exists in three very different forms: the initial serialisation in the Argosy (1920), another serialisation in Science and Invention (1927), and the book appearance (1946). It is arguable that the first is the best, in spite of its immense length. As Lovecraft once noted, it is a highly provocative attempt to imagine a life-form entirely separate from the carbon-based entities known to our world: The height of fifty tall men it rose; towering upon four slender, stilt-like legs made up of alternate spiked six-foot block and ball. These spidery legs supported a huge cylindrical body, from the top of which a quintet of the girdered cubes, each, I estimated, twenty feet long, abruptly thrust themselves. They radiated like a five-pointed star and over their length, swarming out of the body like bees from a hive, flashed scores of spheres and smaller blocks. With the same vertiginous rapidity that marked all the Protean changes of the Things while in combination, these clustered at the ends of the girders, shifted—at each end was now a monstrous thirty-foot wheel, their hubs the globular clusters, their spokes the cubes and their rims great, tetrahedron-tipped spheres! (79–80)
But Merritt’s continual tinkering with the novel bespeaks his dissatisfaction with it, and in the end none of the versions is without flaws.
vii. Disciples: Long, Derleth, Wandrei, and Others One of Lovecraft’s earliest literary colleagues—one whom he met even before he began publishing in Weird Tales—was Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (1901–1994), whose early work is full of fiery imagination but who, in the course of a long life, was compelled to write oceans of hack science fiction and even a few romance novels that did little to relieve the poverty that dogged his final years. Long came in touch with Lovecraft in 1920 in the amateur movement, and both were early contributors to Weird Tales. Many of Long’s early tales are sadly mediocre, but “Death Waters” (1924) and “The Ocean Leech” (1925) are powerful tales of horrors from the sea. Still better is “The Man with the Thousand Legs” (1927), perhaps Long’s greatest single horror tale. It uses the documentary style—a succession of diary entries, “statements” to the police, and even a “Curious Manuscript Found in a Bottle”—to convey its effects. The science fictional premise of the story—a scientist’s discovery that “etheric vibrations” (Rim of the Unknown 68) can cause bodily change, such as the growth of new legs—is merely the occasion for some spectacularly powerful scenes of sea horror, as a man turns into an unthinkably bizarre monster: For a moment the thing simply towered and vibrated between the two boats and then it made for the cutter. It had at least a thousand legs and they waved loathsomely in the sunlight. It had a hooked beak and a great mouth that opened and closed and gulped, and it was larger than a whale. It was horribly, hideously large. It towered above the cutter, and in its swaying immensity it dwarfed the two boats and all the tangled shipping in the harbor. (Rim of the Unknown 71) All these tales seem merely anticipations or preparations for what may well be Long’s greatest tale, “Second Night Out” (published in the October 1933 Weird Tales under the charmingly lurid title “The Black, Dead
Thing”). In this account of a nameless, monkey-faced creature that haunts a ship sailing to Havana, we are treated to a feat of verbal witchery Long has rarely matched elsewhere. The whole tale must be read to appreciate the finely modulated prose that carries the reader along from first sentence to last. Perhaps the only drawback is the utter lack of explanation as to the nature of the monkey-faced monster or the reason why it is haunting the hapless ship. Lovecraft’s direct influence on Long appears in three celebrated stories. “The Space-Eaters” (1928) is a a wild, histrionic, and rather ridiculous story. In its attempt to hint at Lovecraftian cosmicism—to “suggest a horror that is utterly unearthly; that makes itself felt in terms that have no counterparts on earth” (Hounds of Tindalos 62)—the story lapses into bathos in its idea of monsters eating their way through space. Substantially better is “The Hounds of Tindalos” (1929), which may perhaps betray the influence of Lovecraft’s “Hypnos” and “The Call of Cthulhu” in various particulars, but which nonetheless remains a breathtakingly cosmic narrative. Halpin Chalmers, repudiating Einstein and other modern astrophysicists, declares that it is possible to go back through time; and he does just that, seeing a vast panorama of history. The tale in its latter sections becomes acutely chilling when Chalmers unwittingly arouses the Hounds of Tindalos (“They are hungry and athirst!” [Hounds of Tindalos 101]) who move through the angles of space to pursue him. As for the short novel The Horror from the Hills (1931), it had best be passed over in merciful silence. Although including a verbatim extract from a Lovecraft letter, it is a confused attempt to interpret Lovecraftian cosmicism through the lens of the adventure story and the science-fantasy tale; its only novelty (if it can be called that) is the introduction of the entity Chaugnar Faugn, the elephant god of Tsang. The rest of Long’s voluminous work, sadly, does not require commentary. He wrote some able stories for John W. Campbell’s Unknown, notably “Dark Vision” (1939), a chilling tale of a man who suffers an accident in an electrical power plant and subsequently gains the unwanted power to probe other people’s subconscious thoughts; and “Johnny on the Spot” (1939), which in under a thousand words effects a marvellous fusion of the supernatural tale with the hard-boiled crime story. But Long, through economic necessity, was subsequently forced to churn out so much hackwork that his early tales are all that tend to be remembered; and even
these, in part, as with Long himself, are remembered largely because of their relation to Lovecraft. It would be difficult to find two individuals of such opposite temperaments as the two founders of Arkham House, August Derleth (1909–1971) and Donald Wandrei (1908–1987), who both came in touch with Lovecraft in 1926. Derleth is, perforce, the more significant literary figure, but Wandrei’s weird work is of substantially higher quality. Derleth, a larger-than-life persona who modestly declared himself the “Wisconsin Balzac,” was bluff, outgoing, filled with immense energy and selfconfidence, and a certain cocksure arrogance. He produced nearly 200 books in his lifetime, ranging from poetry to anthologies to children’s books to detective stories to novels to collections of tales. Still a renowned figure in his native state, he spread himself so thin in so many directions that he never attained the national reputation he craved. For Derleth, the weird was only a sideline, and it showed; so many of his tales—gathered in seven collections from 1941 to 1976, all published by Arkham House—are routine and mechanical that their sole purpose appears to have been to provide revenue so that he could generate the mainstream work for which he acquired a fleeting fame. That work—sensitive historical novels set in his native Wisconsin—are indeed of substantial merit, especially such early specimens (drafts of which Lovecraft read) as Place of Hawks (1935) and Evening in Spring (1941). Indeed, they are of such quality that one is almost dumbfounded that Derleth’s weird work could be so poor. What strikes one after reading the entire corpus of Derleth’s supernatural fiction is how remarkably conventional it is—and (at least in the tales not directly inspired by Lovecraft) how reliant it is on standard motifs, especially the supernatural-revenge motif embodied in a ghost that seeks to kill or victimise its murderer. So many of Derleth’s tales are of this sort that their plots become immediately recognisable after the initial scenario is established. Derleth also wrote so hastily that he failed to realise the promise of some potentially interesting tableaux: for example, “The House in the Magnolias” (1932) tells of dead slaves who are revived as zombies to work on a plantation in New Orleans—but there is not the slightest attempt to draw out the obvious sociopolitical implications of the situation. Slightly better is “Carousel” (1945), where a little girl develops a curious rapport with the ghost of a lynched black man.
Far and away Derleth’s best supernatural tale is “The Lonesome Place” (1948), a poignant display of a small boy’s fear of the dark, embodied in a “lonesome place” that he dreads to traverse when running some mundane errand. Derleth has ably captured, in language of admirable simplicity and elegance, the terror of his young protagonist: . . . up there, ahead of you, there was the lonesome place, with no house nearby, and up beyond it the tall, dark grain elevator, gaunt and forbidding, the lonesome place of trees and sheds and lumber, in which anything might be lurking, anything at all, the lonesome place where you were sure that something haunted the darkness waiting for the moment and the hour and the night when you came through to burst forth from its secret place and leap upon you, tearing and rending you and doing unmentionable things before it had done with you. (5) Derleth attempts to repeat this general scenario in “A Room in a House” (1950), but this tale is less successful. “Mara” (1948) is a fine account of a revenant, with a sexual frankness and emotive plangency rare in Derleth’s weird work (but common in his mainstream work). “The Dark Boy” (1957) —ably adapted on Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery”—is a similarly delicate tale of a schoolteacher who wins over the ghost of a dead boy by refusing to be afraid of him and showing him the affection and attention he seeks. Of Derleth’s specifically Lovecraftian work, almost nothing charitable can be said. It would be bad enough to point to the grotesque weaknesses of such collections of stories as The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) and The Trail of Cthulhu (1962), which subvert Lovecraft’s bleak cosmicism for a naive good-vs.-evil struggle whereby humans implausibly manage to triumph over the “evil” cosmic entities of the Lovecraft pantheon; it was far worse that Derleth generated more than a dozen “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft (now collected in The Watchers out of Time and Others, 1974) in which he took random entries from Lovecraft’s commonplace book and turned them into dreadful narratives—almost all of them “tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” with Lovecraft’s name at the top—that, like his own tales, unwittingly parody the work of the author he professed to admire. Derleth also did Lovecraft scholarship a severe disservice by propounding a
seriously erroneous view of Lovecraft’s work—a view that, because of Derleth’s eminence as Lovecraft’s publisher and champion, was accepted without question by all but a few readers and critics and hindered the proper understanding of Lovecraft’s work and thought for decades. It is evident that Derleth is significant in the realm of supernatural fiction not for his own writing, but for his editing and publishing. His numerous anthologies—Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), The Night Side (1947), and several others—helped substantially in establishing a canon of weird fiction. In the 1960s he pioneered the editing of anthologies of original fiction. The books he published in his more than three decades as director of Arkham House were on the whole judiciously selected, and in some cases pioneering, as in his publishing of the first books by Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Ramsey Campbell. The value of this work can easily allow us to forgive and forget Derleth’s other deficiencies—in his own writing and in his misguided championing of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Donald Wandrei was the polar opposite of Derleth: brooding, introspective, even misanthropic, he remained mostly in his native Minnesota except for occasional stints in New York, where he sought and failed to establish himself as a fiction writer and dramatist. After an initial burst of writing, he entered the army and then spent much of the rest of his life taking care of his ailing mother and sister, writing little and doing little for Arkham House except editing Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. Wandrei, like Derleth, began writing weird tales at an early age, and his science fantasy “The Red Brain” (1927) contains no little infusion of Lovecraftian cosmicism. Lovecraft recognised that Wandrei possessed an innate sense of the cosmic shared by few of his colleagues—a sense exhibited strikingly in the science fiction story “Colossus” (Astounding Stories, January 1934). Many of Wandrei’s early tales are full of powerful imaginative touches, even if the prose and execution are not always flawless. “The Lives of Alfred Kramer” (1932) tells of a man beset with racial memory, so that he becomes increasingly primitive and finally ends as a mass of protoplasmic slime. The story was published about the time that Clark Ashton Smith wrote “Ubbo-Sathla,” a very similar story; but there seems to be no influence one way or the other. In “The Man Who Never Lived” (1934) a man taps into the “universal mind” (115) and sees events of the remote past, all the way back to the beginning of the universe; he then disappears.
Much of the best of Wandrei’s weird work similarly straddles the line between horror and science fiction—inevitably so, as by the 1930s he recognised that he would have to expand his markets to the science fiction pulps to make a proper living as a writer. “When the Fire Creatures Came” (apparently written in the early 1930s but not published in Wandrei’s lifetime) speaks apocalyptically of fire creatures in a meteor (the influence of “The Colour out of Space” becomes evident) who seek the “life-current of human beings” (45) and ultimately kill millions before they are subdued when scientists induce titanic rain showers. Somewhat similar is “The Destroying Horde” (1935), where spherical jellylike creatures cause havoc, killing thousands; they are finally identified as immense one-celled amoebas. “Giant-Plasm” (1939) is one of Wandrei’s best tales, telling of a hideous grey-white substance that the crew of a shipwrecked vessel find on a volcanic island. Here Wandrei abandons the occasionally florid prose of his earlier work and narrates the tale simply and effectively. Wandrei’s single most powerful weird tale may be “The Eye and the Finger” (1936), published in the prestigious Esquire. This mad tale of a man who comes home to find a living eye on his bureau, and then a hand hanging in mid-air pointing at the window, suggests surrealism, and the lack of any explanation is the great virtue of the tale. Again, simplicity of narration is the key: He seized the hand, intending to hurl it far out the open window. The fingers instantly curled around his own, not fiercely, but tugging him along, pulling him toward the window. For a step he followed, hypnotized and unnerved. The hand felt neither living nor dead, neither hot nor cold. Its touch brought unrelieved terror, because it resembled nothing that he knew. It seemed most like the clasp of some fantastic alien, not of this or of any other imaginable world, but of a solidity beyond. It felt like a marginal thing, trapped midway between stone oblivion and tissue of life. (219) Of Wandrei’s specifically Lovecraftian work some words may be said. “The Tree-Men of M’bwa” (Weird Tales, February 1932) is often assumed to be a Lovecraftian tale, although on what grounds is by no means clear. Surely the unusual name in the title is not meant to evoke such a name as
R’lyeh; it is merely a coined name indicative of the African locale of the tale. M’bwa is a dead black man who “moves at the bidding of the master in the Whirling Flux” (55). This master is of “a different universe, a different dimension . . . He has communion with entities older than earth” (55). This is all pretty vague, and a later reference to the master as “the Evil Old One” (56) is scarcely less so. The tale grippingly depicts the transformation of human beings into trees by means of a drug or potion, but cannot be considered genuinely Lovecraftian in any meaningful sense. Dead Titans, Waken!—a novel that Wandrei wrote from 1929 to 1931 and, years later, published in a revised form as The Web of Easter Island— is an able specimen, somewhat superior in its earlier version than its later. It is crude in spots, but on the whole a compelling and spectacularly cosmic narrative, especially in its later portions, when the protagonist, Carter Graham, is sent millions of years into the future to continue his combating of the Titans’ return. It has a fundamental seriousness of tone and purpose lacking in Long’s The Horror from the Hills. It could stand, in fact, as the first genuine novel of the Cthulhu Mythos by someone other than Lovecraft. And Wandrei has achieved the feat without a single explicit reference to any Lovecraftian entity or place-name. R. H. Barlow (1918–1951) came in contact with Lovecraft in 1931 and was appointed his literary executor. Although his small corpus of fiction (at least six items of which were written with Lovecraft’s assistance) is predominantly fantasy in the manner of Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith, Barlow produced two outstanding weird specimens, “A DimRemembered Story” (Californian, Summer 1936), a brilliant tale of the far future, and “The Night Ocean” (Californian, Winter 1936), a brooding tale of a dimly glimpsed horror from the sea. Barlow could have done much good work in supernatural fiction, but he ultimately departed from the field and made a name for himself in Mexican anthropology. Then there is the curious case of American writer William Sloane (1906–1974). He is the author of two remarkable weird novels, To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939), that some scholars maintain were influenced by Lovecraft. The first would seem to be: this haunting and exquisitely written novel of a mysterious woman, Selena, who in succession marries an unorthodox mathematician, Professor Le Normand (who promptly dies by being burned to death in a bizarre manner), and the young Jerry Lister, one of Le Normand’s students, does not on the surface
appear Lovecraftian; but at the end we are led to believe that the remarkable qualities Selena exhibits (mind-reading, a curious lack of emotional affect) are the result of mind-exchange by an extraterrestrial. The subtlety and gradualness of this revelation are among the several signal triumphs of this compelling novel. But if there is a true Lovecraftian influence (from, say, “The Shadow out of Time”), Sloane appears to have worked pretty quickly, since Lovecraft’s novella appeared in Astounding at the very time when Sloane must have been writing his book. The Edge of Running Water is, to my mind, not Lovecraftian at all, and in its attempt to present a pseudo-scientific rationale for the survival of the soul after death—something Lovecraft himself would have found so implausible as to be aesthetically unusable—it presents a bit of a retrogression from To Walk the Night. Nevertheless, this novel too develops cumulative power in its keen character portrayal, although the notion that a machine could be fashioned to pick up the electrical impulses from the dead strains creduility to the breaking point. Sloane, for reasons unknown, wrote no more fiction after publishing these two splendid novels, although he edited a few anthologies of science fiction in the 1950s and worked in the publishing industry for many years. Had he written more, he could easily have become a major figure in the field.
viii. The Poetry of the Lovecraft Circle The remarkable outpouring of weird verse engendered by Lovecraft and his colleagues is a singular phenomenon not equalled in any period of literary history, past or present. Lovecraft himself claimed that he persuaded the first editor of Weird Tales, Edwin Baird, to accept weird poetry, especially that of Clark Ashton Smith. It was, indeed, Smith who became the preeminent weird poet in world literature; but his devotion to formal metre (even with the writing of several scintillating and metrically irregular odes in his early years) doomed him to relative insignificance in the wake of the Modernist poetry movement that championed Imagism, free verse, and the obscurantism of Pound and Eliot. But Smith, Lovecraft, Wandrei, Long, and others maintained their adherence to an older poetic model, and their work generally benefits from it. The wealth of Smith’s poetry—now on display in a new three-volume edition of his collected poetry and translations—is such that even a summary is difficult. Suffice it to say that he treated every phase of weirdness, from breathtaking cosmicism (“The Star-Treader,” “Ode to the Abyss”) to poems about baleful entities such as ghouls and witches (“The Medusa of the Skies,” “The Witch in the Graveyard”) to poems about weird locales (“The Eldritch Dark,” “The Kingdom of Shadows”) to dreamfantasies (“The Dream-Bridge”) to poems exquisitely fusing romance or eroticism and terror (“The Tears of Lilith,” “Lamia”). The linguistic exoticism that can seem at times strained in Smith’s prose becomes a natural and potent element in his verse, as we can see in “Desire of Vastness”: Supreme with night, what high mysteriarch— The undreamt-of god beyond the trinal noon Of elder suns empyreal—past the moon Circling some wild world outmost in the dark—
Lays on me this unfathomed wish to hark What central sea with plume-plucked midnight strewn, Plangent to what enormous plenilune That lifts in silence, hinderless and stark? The brazen empire of the bournless waste, The unstayed dominions of the brazen sky— These I desire, and all things wide and deep; And, lifted past the level years, would taste The cup of an Olympian ecstasy, Titanic dreams, and Cyclopean sleep. (Last Oblivion 42) Smith also excelled in the prose-poem, becoming perhaps its most accomplished practitioner in English. Many of his prose-poems are elegiac, lyrical, and philosophical, but a fair proportion are weird, and they constitute some of his most artistically finished work. Lovecraft was much inferior to Smith as a poet, because his rigid adherence to eighteenth-century metrical conventions crippled much of his early work by robbing it of vitality and sincerity. Late in life, however—and probably inspired at least in part by Smith’s example—Lovecraft at last shed his poetic archaism and wrote some striking weird verse, including such things as the flawless sonnet “The Messenger,” the brooding “The Ancient Track,” and the influential sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (1929– 30), where many stray conceptions, moods, and images found in his commonplace book were artistically versified. The direct inspiration for Fungi from Yuggoth was the cycle Sonnets of the Midnight Hours (1927) by his younger colleague Donald Wandrei, a striking sequence in which all the sonnets are written in the first person and all are inspired by Wandrei’s bizarre dreams. It is a matter of debate which
cycle is the more powerful or accomplished. Wandrei, like Smith (his first literary mentor), wrote some vivid prose-poems, and his collected weird poetry and prose poetry, Sanctity and Sin (2008), contains much sound work. Frank Belknap Long wrote a relatively modest body of weird verse, but much of it is meritorious. Long excelled in the ballad (“A Man from Genoa,” “The Marriage of Sir John de Mandeville”) as well as the sonnet: his sonnets to Lovecraft and Machen are among his most poignant works. Robert E. Howard wrote a substantial amount of lively, rollicking verse inspired by Kipling and other manly poets, but now and then a dark, brooding quality enters his poetry and results in powerful weird effects. Overall, his weird poetry may be aesthetically superior to most of his prose. Derleth wrote a great deal of poetry, but little of it is weird. His most significant achievement in this realm was the landmark historical anthology Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947), which exhibited the great wealth of weird verse from the Middle Ages to its own day. (Many of the selections, it appears, were actually made by Donald Wandrei, whose knowledge of weird poetry excelled Derleth’s.) Later, Derleth compiled Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1961), a newer anthology of weird poetry, but it is considerably more variable in quality. Derleth also published several worthy collections of weird verse with Arkham House— preeminently the work of Clark Ashton Smith, but also the work of Lovecraft, Wandrei, Long, Howard, Joseph Payne Brennan, Stanley McNail, and several others. H. P. Lovecraft has, in the past thirty years, inspired more criticism and scholarship than any other weird writer in history, including Poe. Much of this work is of substantial merit, revealing the inexhaustible depths of Lovecraft’s work and thought and justifying the high standing he now occupies in weird literature and general literature. Lovecraft’s influence extended not only to the writers treated in this chapter but to several younger colleagues who will be dealt with in the next chapter; and beyond that, his work has continued to resonate with writers throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries—not merely those who have, in many cases, rather mechanically elaborated upon his pseudomythology, but those who, especially in recent years, have probed the depths of his work and seen in it a reflection of the philosophical alienation of an insignificant
and transient human race lost in the vortices of space and time. Even those writers who have consciously eschewed the Lovecraft influence betray his significance in that very act. More so than even the titans Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and James, from whom he learned so much, H. P. Lovecraft is the inescapable figure in twentieth-century weird literature.
XIII. American Pulpsmiths
i. Weird Tales, Unknown, and Other Pulps Weird Tales did not, to be sure, have an exclusive monopoly on the weird fiction of the period, although it was the dominant player in the pulp field for this kind of work. The venerable Argosy and its satellite magazines (AllStory, Cavalier, etc.) published occasionally interesting supernatural work, none more so than that of Francis Stevens (pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884–1940?). The three-part serial “The Nightmare” (1917), in its depiction of hideous mutations of plant and animal life caused by radiation, exhibits the chief traits of her fiction—a mix of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and an action-adventure scenario with plenty of hair-raising escapes and a kind of proto-feminist spunkiness on the part of her female protagonists. This work set the stage for the more ambitious The Citadel of Fear (1918), a justly celebrated lost-race novel that similarly involves mutations, this time performed by human manipulation. Claimed (1920) and Serapion (1920) are more conventionally supernatural—the first involving an enigmatic artifact from Atlantis, the second dealing with the baleful effects of a seánce—but, accordingly, are less distinctive. Even during Weird Tales’s heyday, other rivals sprang up to challenge it for longer or shorter periods. Lovecraft was all too correct when he remarked of Ghost Stories (1926–32) that its only virtue was to prove that a magazine even lower on the literary scale than Weird Tales could exist—and this in spite of random contributions by Agatha Christie and Lovecraft’s own close friend Frank Belknap Long. Ghost Stories featured “true confession”-type stories of the “I Married a Ghost” sort—a subgenre not very amenable to literary artistry. Much more successful was Harry Bates’s Strange Tales (1931–33), which lasted for only seven issues but which was a serious concern to Weird Tales because it paid much better—all of 2 cents a word. Some meritorious work appeared in its pages. And we have seen that Amazing Stories (1926f.) and Astounding Stories (1930f.), especially when it was purchased by Street & Smith (1933), were not inhospitable to science fiction/horror hybrids. Then there were the “weird menace” pulps— notably Terror Tales (1934–41) and Horror Stories (1935–41)—but these specialised venues (whose premise—the suggestion of the supernatural
ultimately explained away as the product of trickery—oddly hearkened back to the “explained supernatural” of the early Gothic novel) gradually became mere exercises in torture and sadism, and their aesthetic value is nil. Not much more can be said for such things as Tales of Magic and Mystery (1927–28—whose only contribution of merit was Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”), Thrilling Mystery (1935–45), or Strange Stories (1939–41). Weird Tales was clearly the flagship venue for supernatural horror in the pulps. The curious thing was that its original owner, J. C. Henneberger, purportedly received promises from such established writers as Ben Hecht and Hamlin Garland (a mainstream writer with an inclination toward spiritualism) to contribute to it. They did not in fact do so, leaving the magazine to publish the work of newcomers and apprentices in many of its early issues; indeed, throughout its run it always remained more receptive to new writers than many other pulps. This policy had both its virtues and its drawbacks: it allowed amateurs like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith to enter its pages readily, but it also published a fearsome amount of rubbish that was subprofessional even by pulp standards. In the course of time, a number of writers became “regulars” at Weird Tales, attracting a loyal following. One of the most popular—certainly one of the most frequently published—was the prototypical pulpsmith Seabury Quinn (1889–1969), who, however, is worth not the slightest attention from a purely aesthetic perspective. Virtually the only story of his that is of any interest is the moderately competent werewolf tale “The Phantom Farmhouse” (Weird Tales, October 1923). Quinn became celebrated for the endless adventures of the psychic detective Jules de Grandin (the name is derived from Quinn’s middle name), who, with his colleague Samuel Trowbridge, marches stereotypically through more than 90 adventures, in which all manner of supernatural obstacles—vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies, and so forth—are encountered and, inevitably, defeated. Even more irritatingly than Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, de Grandin repeatedly laces his pompous broken English with elementary French expostulations. The utterly contrived and hackneyed plots and resolutions of the de Grandin stories consign them to aesthetic oblivion, but his small and dwindling number of devotees valiantly seek to find new readers for them. On occasion de Grandin meets with purely human threats, as in “The House of Horror” (Weird Tales, July 1926), in which a surgeon whose son was jilted by a woman develops a hatred for all women and,
after kidnapping more than a dozen of them, extracts their bones but keeps them alive to suffer hideous torments. If nothing else, the story is an impressive exercise in monomania and grisliness. Not much better is the early work of H. Warner Munn (1903–1981), who somehow gained fame for the story “The Werewolf of Ponkert” (Weird Tales, July 1925), which he himself boasted was inspired by a letter that Lovecraft published in the Weird Tales letter column. What Munn did not realise was that he seriously misconstrued the purport of the letter. Lovecraft was berating the moral conventionality of most popular fiction: Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. . . . Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology —the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace. Take a werewolf story, for instance—who ever wrote a story from the point of view of the wolf, and sympathising strongly with the devil to whom he has sold himself? (Miscellaneous Writings 509) Munn accordingly wrote the werewolf story—but had the werewolf repeatedly regret his condition (“these unnatural things, half man, half demonic beast!” [34]). Although the werewolf joins a pack of his fellow creatures and actually kills his wife after she sees him transformed, he then teams up with the villagers to kill the pack, although the leader escapes. This is exactly the “eternal and inescapable commonplace” that Lovecraft condemned. Munn’s sequel to the story, “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (Weird Tales, October–December 1928), is even worse. It is largely a romantic adventure tale: we are here concerned with Ivga, the daughter of the werewolf of the previous story, who is raised by a foster-father, one Dmitri Helgar. Predictably, Ivga is seized by the superstitious villagers and is about to be burned at the stake, but a young gypsy, Hugo Gunnar, who has fallen in love with her valiantly saves her. There is only minimal supernatural content in the story. Munn also wrote a rather grisly tale of physical horror,
“The Chain” (Weird Tales, April 1928), about a man who is tortured in various ways by an immense chain in the dungeon of a castle. It is a striking evocation of old-time Gothic atmosphere, but otherwise the tale is not notable. Munn later gained more deserving celebrity for the Arthurian fantasy Merlin’s Ring (1974), although probably his most impressive accomplishment was the historical novel The Lost Legion (1980). Considerably more formidable is Henry S. Whitehead (1882–1932), who at least could boast a prose style of admirable fluency and elegance, but who correspondingly had difficulty in summoning up the emotive intensity to create a powerful climax to his otherwise skilful narratives. Whitehead, having worked for nearly a decade as an Episopalian minister in the Virgin Islands, brought that region and its rich stores of superstition— especially the practice of voodoo—to life in many of his tales, a number of which feature what appears to be an autobiographical protagonist, Gerald Canevin. It is difficult to single out any tale by Whitehead that is any more noteworthy than others. “Passing of a God” (Weird Tales, August 1932) is of interest in betraying what appears to be a clear influence of Edward Lucas White’s “Lukundoo,” which also appeared in Weird Tales (November 1925). Here a white man has surgery for a growth (apparently a sort of tumour) in his stomach, but this proves to be a hideous entity that appalls the surgeon by breathing. The doctor relates what follows: “And then I saw that it had faint yellowish markings over the brown, and that what you might call its skin was moving, and—as I stared at the thing, Canevin—two things like little arms began to move, and the top of it gave a kind of convulsive shudder, and it opened straight at me, Canevin, a pair of eyes and looked me in the face.” (281–82) This is shuddersomely effective, but the tale ends anticlimactically. Another story suspiciously like it in basic plot, “Cassius” (Strange Tales, November 1931), was in fact inspired by Lovecraft, who had related to him the idea of a man who has a miniature Siamese twin, and the strange things that happen when the twin is surgically removed. (This idea was not inspired by “Lukundoo,” for Lovecraft came up with it in the summer of
1925 when he saw a freak at a circus in New York.) In “Cassius,” a black man does have “some kind of growth” (18) removed from his body, but the tiny creature remains alive and terrorises the household. A variety of pseudo-scientific explanations are offered to account for the entity, which is finally dispatched by the family cat. Lovecraft admitted that, had he written up the idea himself, “My story would have had none of the lightness, suavity, and humour of Whitehead’s, but would have been grim and terrible all through” (Selected Letters 5.33). Something should be said of the work of David H. Keller (1880–1966), a physician who specialised in psychiatry. Much of his weird fiction accordingly focuses on anomalous psychological states, with occasional effectiveness. The problem with much of Keller’s writing, however, is that his prose is so flat and mundane that the incredible events he narrates, even when they are non-supernatural, become preposterous and unbelievable. This problem afflicts even his most celebrated story, an otherwise fine fusion of psychological and supernatural horror, “The Thing in the Cellar” (Weird Tales, March 1932). Here a boy has seemingly developed an unreasoning fear that something is living in the cellar of his house, even though he has never been there. In an attempt to cure the boy of his neurosis, his father nails the cellar door open and leaves the boy, Tommy Tucker, in the kitchen nearby. Later Tommy is found dead—horribly mutilated. Was there something actually in the cellar (even though his parents never perceived it)? or is it the case that the boy’s very fear has created the monster? Keller was perhaps more effective in tales of pure psychological horror, where he could use his knowledge of psychiatry to good effect. “The Dead Woman” (Strange Stories, April 1939) tells of a man who is convinced that his wife is dead, even though she is ambulatory and doctors can find nothing wrong with her. It becomes fairly obvious that the man is delusional, but the intensity of the tale—culminating in the man’s killing of his wife—is notable. Even more gruesome is “The Literary Corkscrew” (Wonder Stories, March 1934), where a writer confesses that he can only write effectively when in physical pain, with the result that his wife tearfully twists a corkscrew in his back as he writes. Keller also wrote a substantial amount of science fiction as well as a curious religious fantasy, The Devil and the Doctor (1940).
Of later pulpsmiths, some—but not much—attention may be given to Carl Jacobi (1908–1997), whose work August Derleth charitably gathered in three slim volumes for Arkham House. One of Jacobi’s earliest tales, “Mive” (Weird Tales, January 1932), is among his best, if only for its relative success in inspiring fear at the prospect of a giant butterfly. “Revelations in Black” (Weird Tales, April 1933) is a moderately effective vampire tale that was likely inspired by the popularity of the 1931 film version of Dracula. “The Satanic Piano” (Weird Tales, May 1934) features the relatively novel idea of a piano that can play by itself any composition in the mind of a player: the instrument has trapped within it the soul of an obeah man from the West Indies. Jacobi’s work, sadly enough, became weaker and tamer with the passing of years; overall, he is an aesthetic nonentity. Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) seems to have garnered a high reputation in the field, although it is difficult to determine why, if his early weird tales are taken into account. They deal, for the most part, almost entirely with conventional supernatural motifs, and rarely do so in an innovative or distinctive manner. Although he wrote an early and rather frivolous pastiche of Lovecraft, “The Terrible Parchment” (Weird Tales, August 1937), his work of the 1930s and 1940s suggests that Lovecraft’s dynamism in weird conceptions was, as far as Wellman was concerned, all for naught. Accordingly, we have mundane or routine stories of vampires (“School for the Unspeakable” [Weird Tales, September 1937], “When It Was Moonlight” [Unknown, February 1940], “The Devil Is Not Mocked” [Unknown, June 1943]), zombies (“Fearful Rock” [Weird Tales, February– March 1939]), the Gaelic kelpie (“The Kelpie” [Weird Tales, July 1936]), and so forth. “When It Was Moonlight” curiously resurrects the idea that a vampire can be revived by moonlight—last seen in Varney the Vampire a century earlier. Wellman is, like Keller, hampered by a flat and prosaic idiom that renders his weird conceptions quite implausible. “For Fear of Little Men” (Strange Stories, June 1939) deals with tiny homunculi that attack the members of an Indian tribe. There is not the slighest attempt to account for these creatures except by appealing to the universal belief in “little people”—although Wellman’s entities, unlike the “little people” as conceived by most of the mythologies of the word, are the size of ants. Similarly, “Come Into My Parlor” (1949) is about a small house that proves
to be a kind of meat-eating plant, but the execution renders the idea entirely incredible. Wellman was prolific in the invention of psychic detectives or other heroes who battled the supernatural, but the tales in which these characters figure are not much more impressive than his other work. “The Hairy Ones Shall Dance” (Weird Tales, January–March 1938) is a werewolf story featuring Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, who appears in several other tales. A similar character is John Thunstone, who first appeared in “The Third Cry to Legba” (Weird Tales, November 1943), “The Dead Man’s Hand” (Weird Tales, November 1944), and other narratives. In the 1950s Wellman invented a character who came to be called John the Balladeer, although he appears merely as John in the tales collected in the Arkham House volume Who Fears the Devil? (1963). John is probably the most appealing of Wellman’s hero-figures—a gentle, soft-spoken singer, always carrying a trusty guitar with silver strings, who comes upon weirdness in his (and Wellman’s) native South. The landscape and culture of the South are captured felicitously in these tales, although their supernatural elements are no more distinguished than in other Wellman stories, and the implausibility of some of the manifestations is so extreme that the tales collapse of their own absurdity. Decades later, Wellman wrote several novels about John. Another Southern writer deserving some attention is Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1911–1994), who published thirty-three stories in Weird Tales from 1933 to 1953, along with a few tales in other pulps or later magazines —including, amusingly enough, one in the 1980s reincarnation of Weird Tales as a paperback book. A British edition of her collection Half in Shadow (1964) was followed by a 1978 Arkham House volume of the same title but with differing contents. In all honesty, much of Counselman’s is disappointingly conventional, dealing with routine ghosts, haunted houses, curses, and the like, such as the inexplicably celebrated fable “The Three Marked Pennies” (Weird Tales, August 1934). Good Southern atmosphere, with a liberal dose of evocative dialect, is found in such tales as “Seventh Sister” (Weird Tales, January 1943) and especially “Parasite Mansion” (Weird Tales, January 1942), which features a rich fusion of psychological torture and quasi-supernaturalism (the power of levitation). But Counselman’s most interesting and thought-provoking story may be “The Unwanted” (Weird Tales, January 1951). On the surface, this tale
seems merely to evoke the ghosts of children who were never wanted by a poor country wife; in fact, they are the ghosts of children who were unwanted by the surrounding townsfolk, but who supernaturally appear to the wife, who tends to them. The term abortion is never used but is clearly implied. Some mention should be made of what might be called notable oneshots—individual stories by authors who are otherwise little-known or who did little other work of note. Lovecraft thought he had found several such specimens in the pages of Weird Tales, but his judgments were perhaps more charitable than sound. He liked a very early specimen, “Ooze” (Weird Tales, March 1923) by Anthony M. Rud (1893–1942), who was an incredibly prolific author of stories in such magazines as Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Short Stories, and who published eight stories in Weird Tales, four under the pseudonym “R. Anthony.” “Ooze” has an ingenious premise—a scientist develops an immensely large amoeba that is “absolved from natural growth inhibitions” (245)—but the narration is clumsy and unfocused. The story was manifestly an influence on Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” but for all the aesthetic flaws of that story he has handled the core subject much better than Rud. Lovecraft was also fond of “The Canal” (Weird Tales, December 1927) by Everil Worrell (1893–1969), but it is a not especially notable vampire tale. Worrell wrote a score of stories in Weird Tales from 1926 to 1954. As for “Bells of Oceana” (Weird Tales, December 1927) by Arthur J. Burks (1898–1974), it is a tolerably effective sea-horror narrative and probably the only notable weird item by this staggeringly prolific pulpsmith. The one genuine “one-shot” that can be discussed here is “Far Below” (Weird Tales, June/July 1939) by Robert Barbour Johnson (1909?–?), an author about whom almost nothing is known and who published six stories in Weird Tales. “Far Below” has been called the finest story published in that magazine—a ludicrous assertion, as at least half a dozen of Lovecraft’s tales, along with many others one could mention, easily surpass it—but it is a highly effective work nonetheless. The Lovecraft influence is manifest in the pregnant phrase “the charnel horrors of this mad Nyarlathotep-world far underneath” (16). Lovecraft himself is explicitly mentioned a bit later. The story is essentially a riff on Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” especially the idea of hideous creatures lurking underground in large cities, although this one takes place in the New York subway system rather than that of Boston.
It is difficult to summarise the extraordinary subtlety of the cumulative horror of “Far Below.” Every word, every sentence, every paragraph contributes to the inexorable but stunning denouement. It emphatically draws upon some central tenets of Lovecraft’s pseudomythology— especially the notion of an entire civilisation (of a sort) dwelling on the underside of human society, awaiting the proper moment to overwhelm our race in an orgy of cataclysmic horror. Noteworthy specimens of this kind were, sadly, quite rare in Weird Tales. For the most part, it catered to the manifestly low aesthetic level of its readership by an endless parade of hackwork by Seabury Quinn, E. Hoffmann Price (1898–1988), Hugh B. Cave (1910–2004), and a host of still lesser lights. Price began his career reasonably auspiciously with a powerful early tale, “The Stranger from Kurdistan” (Weird Tales, July 1925); but with the advent of the depression, he lost his job in a garage and felt that his only means of earning an income was to churn out pulp fiction catered calculatingly to the specific market he was targeting—whether it be weird, weird menace, Oriental, or whatnot. All this activity no doubt alleviated his poverty but spelled his complete aesthetic damnation. Price largely gave up writing in the late 1940s and did not resume until the 1980s, when he began writing a series of Oriental fantasies and science fiction novels; but these are no better than his earlier work. August Derleth charitably published a selection of his weird tales, Strange Gateways (1967), and some of his other pulp tales appeared in Far Lands, Other Days (1975). Even these volumes have a considerable amount of rubbish, and it is probably just as well that the great majority of his writing has apparently been permanently inhumed in the crumbling pages of the pulp magazines. A number of the writers discussed here published in Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), a pulp whose relatively short lifespan (1939–43) belies its significance in the development of supernatural literature. It is noteworthy that Unknown was a sister publication of Street & Smith’s Astounding Science Fiction and that it was edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., whose impact in the science fiction field is, overall, substantially greater than that in the supernatural horror field; but the fusion of horror, fantasy, and science fiction that we will see in the work of the writers discussed in the next section really had its origin—or, at any rate, received a substantial impetus—in Unknown. Campbell in particular was determined to edit an explicitly non- or even anti-Weird Tales periodical. In particular, he
exhibited a certain animus to Lovecraft or to the type of fiction that he believed Lovecraft and his disciples to be offering, as he made clear in a letter to Jack Williamson in early 1939: I do not want old-fashioned, 19th century writing, the kind that has burdened fantasy readers steadily in Weird Tales. I do not want unpleasant gods and godlings with penchants for vivisection, and nude and beauteous maidens to be sacrificed. I do not want reams of phony atmosphere. I do not want the kind of stuff Lovecraft doted on. He was immensely liked—by the small clique that read Weird regularly. It still wasn’t good writing. I want simple, clear and direct writing. You can’t convince a man of normal intelligence of something he knows darn well is cockeyed by any amount of argument. On the other hand, he’ll accept any premise you want to set up for the sake of a story. Therefore, magic is acceptable if you say it’s magic, and simply say that magic works. Period. You can’t convince him it does, but he’ll go along with you for the fun of it. (Quoted in Dziemianowicz 14) There are a number of problems with this formulation. First, it appears to be setting up a straw man—a caricature of Lovecraft’s own writing (although, perhaps, not so much a caricature of some of Lovecraft’s poorer imitators, such as the ubiquitous August Derleth). Secondly, it underestimates the degree to which the standard motifs of supernatural fiction had become played out and all but aesthetically unusable, forcing Lovecraft and others to look to the very fusion of horror and science fiction that Campbell himself apparently sought. (Campbell wrote the novella “Who Goes There?” [Astounding Science Fiction, August 1938] as a purported answer to Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness; but, although it served as the basis of the classic horror film The Thing from Another World [1951], there aren’t many who will think that, on a purely literary scale, Campbell’s story is superior to Lovecraft’s.) The notion that “magic” and other incredible events could be accepted without the proper atmosphere seems to me an aesthetic error; indeed, the kind of writing Campbell is here advocating appears more suitable to a kind of innocuous whimsical fantasy that is very far from the literature of the supernatural.
But Campbell’s editorial skills were superior to his own formulations. The fact is that he published a number of works that are in the central tradition of supernatural horror; the key differences lie in their contemporary settings and their relatively mundane characters, which carried the implication that these horrors could come upon any one of us at any time. Whether the Unknown writers consciously harked back to, say, the work of M. R. James, which also championed this kind of ambiance, is unclear; but even those of Lovecraft’s disciples who published in the magazine eschewed the learned scholars and intellectual loners who came to typify, for Campbell and others, a remoteness and unreality of character portrayal that in their judgment failed to resonate with contemporary readers. It would be cumbrous to provide any detailed examination of the contents of Unknown, which range from L. Ron Hubbard’s novella “Fear” (July 1940), which powerfully suggests the supernatural but cleverly explains it away at the end, to Frank Belknap Long’s grim short-short “Johnny on the Spot” (December 1939), a remarkable melding of supernatural horror and the hard-boiled suspense tale. Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” (August 1940) is worth singling out as one of Unknown’s most noteworthy contributions to supernatural literature. This extraordinarily powerful and (pace Campbell) atmospheric tale of an anomalous creature that rises out of a forest to wreak havoc on man and beast bears some relations to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the monster, becoming aware of his surroundings, slowly learns the difference between living and dead matter, the fact of the sun’s rising and setting, and other phenomena of earthly life. Whether we are truly convinced by the explanation Sturgeon provides—the creature is a man whose corpse was somehow revived by the mould of the forest floor—is a matter of debate; but there is no question of the novelette’s clutching grimness. Sturgeon (1918–1985), who wrote a number of other tales of supernatural horror as well as the classic short vampire novel Some of Your Blood (1961), which shall be discussed later, chiefly devoted himself to science fiction and fantasy. A more orthodox Unknown story is “Shottle Bop” (February 1941), but this tale reflects both the virtues and the drawbacks of Campbell’s stated aims for the magazine. While an amusing and engaging tale of what happens when a man drinks a curious liquid out of a bottle found in a bottle shop—he becomes able to see the ghosts of the
dead—the story’s whimsicality, bordering on flippancy, actually hinders its credibility; and the fact that it is somewhat meandering and directionless doesn’t help matters. Another substantial contribution to Unknown is Darker Than You Think (December 1940), a short novel that science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006) expanded to twice its size for the 1948 book publication. As an explicit science fiction/horror hybrid it packs considerable power, although the full-length version is bogged down by extraneous verbiage and is very slow to get moving. The core of the story was in some senses derived from an earlier novella, “Wolves of Darkness” (Strange Tales, January 1932), a quite dreadful story that purports to account pseudoscientifically for the existence of werewolves by appealing to a machine invented by a scientist that inadvertently lets in entities from another dimension. How such entities, who apparently possess random human beings, turn them into werewolves is anyone’s guess. But Darker Than You Think is a much more plausible and compelling work. It focuses on Will Barbee, a journalist who is troubled by alcoholism and other ailments, who finds himself inexorably attracted to April Bell, whose werewolf tendencies (at the very outset it is shown that she doesn’t like silver) are not slow in appearing. April, however, refers to herself as a “witch” (74), and later it is suggested that she and her kind are vampires of a sort. A pseudo-scientific account of the standard properties of werewolves occupies a lengthy chapter about a third of the way through the novel; how convincing this account is (it relies on the ability of the mind to control “the vibrating atoms and electrons of the body” [118]) is again a matter of debate, but the fact that Williamson takes the trouble to provide such an account is the significant aspect of it. Will himself, at April’s instigation, himself changes into a werewolf, and later into a tiger and a snake. How is this possible? It turns out that he himself is the “Child of Night” that the scattered werewolves of the world are waiting for; and although Will initially refuses to believe that he is a kind of werewolf saviour (“I’ll not be —your Black Messiah!” [308]), he eventually becomes reconciled to his fate. Darker Than You Think develops a cumulative power as it progresses, and its crisply realised characters—especially the tortured and brooding Will Barbee, who cannot resist being attracted to April even though he knows she is hostile to all that he holds good in the world—are a large part
of its success. Williamson went on to work almost exclusively in the realm of science fiction, but this one novel will guarantee him an honoured place in the canon of supernatural literature. A very different type of werewolf story is the novella “The Compleat Werewolf” (Unknown Worlds, April 1942) by Anthony Boucher (pseudonym of William White, 1911–1968). This farce, in which a magician accosts a professor named Wolfe Wolf and both informs him that he is a werewolf and shows him how to turn himself into such, is one of the gems of weird humour, dealing with everything from movie stars to German spies and concluding ludicrously with Wolf becoming a G-man. Boucher, better known as a longtime reviewer in the mystery field and as editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, also wrote the unwontedly grim supernatural tale “They Bite” (Unknown Worlds, June 1942), about malign presences in the California desert.
ii. The Mixing of Genres: Moore, Kuttner, Bloch, Leiber As we have seen, Unknown explicitly advocated the mingling of genres —specifically, the genres of science fiction and horror. It is not always the case that a given writer melded these genres in a single work, although many did so; some chose to target a given pulp market with material it specifically desired, with the result that some adept pulpsmiths published widely in very diverse fields. But even Lovecraft, so devoted as he was to supernatural horror, found himself drifting toward an unclassifiable science fiction/horror amalagam. To a large degree, as we have seen, this shift was dictated by his own philosophical development, but it is hard to deny that repeated rejections by the flagship journal of supernatural fiction, Weird Tales, did not at least subconsciously lead him to gauge the salability of his work elsewhere. Such of his colleagues as Frank Belknap Long and Donald Wandrei also found ready acceptance in Astounding and Wonder Stories. Two late colleagues of Lovecraft, C. L. Moore (1911–1987) and Henry Kuttner (1915–1958), must inevitably be considered together in this context, not only because they married in 1940 and thereafter collaborated on virtually everything they wrote thereafter, but because they both corresponded with Lovecraft—Moore for several years, Kuttner for scarcely more than a year (it was, in fact, Lovecraft who introduced them to each other)—and both benefited from his literary tutelage. Both worked easily in several related genres, whether their work appeared in Weird Tales or elsewhere. Moore made a splash by the publication of “Shambleau” (Weird Tales, November 1933), nominally set on Mars but really set in a never-never-land of Moore’s imagination. It is a highly evocative melding of sex and fantasy —something that had rarely been done before and would not come to the forefront of weird fiction for decades. The strange creature that calls herself Shambleau is one of a race of vampiric creatures who also triggered the origin of the myth of the Medusa. Moore’s human hero, Northwest Smith, finds himself simultaneously repelled and attracted to her. Although the
story is a bit long and repetitious, it creates a powerful atmosphere of weird fantasy. Northwest Smith finds himelf on Venus in “Black Thirst” (Weird Tales, April 1934), where another vampiric entity, called the Alendar, engenders a race of lovely women because he himself lives on beauty. This piquant conception leads to an extraordinarily intense depiction of intolerable beauty. The Alendar tells Smith: “Beauty is as tangible as blood, in a way. It is a separate, distinct force that inhabits the bodies of men and women. You must have noticed the vacuity that accompanies perfect beauty in so many women . . . the force so strong that it drives out all other forces and lives vampirishly at the expense of intelligence and goodness and conscience and all else.” (61) Certainly an innovative explanation of the “dumb blonde”! In spite of its title, “Black God’s Kiss” (Weird Tales, October 1934) does not involve Northwest Smith, but another of Moore’s favourite protagonists, Jirel of Joiry. Joiry is evidently a region in mediaeval France, and Jirel is seeking revenge against one Guillaume, who has conquered her territory. She risks her soul by descending into an underground world and coming upon the statue of a hideous idol, which she then kisses; she subsequently kisses Guillaume, and he turns to stone. This narrative too is effective, although the mediaeval atmosphere is not notably convincing. Subsequent works by Moore veer more and more toward pure science fiction. “No Woman Born” (Astounding Science Fiction, December 1944) may reveal Lovecraft’s influence—particularly “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow out of Time”—in its scenario of a woman whose brain is preserved in a lovely metal body. Somewhat closer to pure supernaturalism is “Daemon” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1946), in which a sailor is able to detect the “daemons” (really their consciences) hovering around the people he encounters. Perhaps Moore’s greatest triumph in the fusion of weirdness and science fiction is “Vintage Season” (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946), a rich novella set more overtly in the mundane world than was customary in her work. Here a trio of strange and perhaps not fully human people rent a
dilapidated house for a month; a married couple, just as strange, want to buy the property. It is gradually determined that all these individuals are from the future: they have come to this period of earth’s history because it is one of the “vintage seasons”: “‘Now this month of May is . . . the loveliest in recorded times. A perfect May in a wonderful period” (347). The atmosphere of exotic strangeness engendered by this novel—perhaps influenced by Sloane’s To Walk the Night—is indescribable. Kuttner’s work is, sadly, rather more uneven than Moore’s. Indeed, although he wrote a great deal of supernatural fiction early in his career, much of it is inferior, and it was wise of him to switch to the genres of science fiction and fantasy later in his career. Kuttner perhaps began writing —or, rather, publishing—a bit too early. His first story in Weird Tales, “The Graveyard Rats” (March 1936), is little more than an exposition of purely physical horror. It is set in Salem, Massachusetts, although it becomes painfully obvious that Kuttner, a native of California, had little knowledge of the history or topography of the New England town. This deficiency was even more evident in the first draft of “The Salem Horror” (Weird Tales, May 1937), which Kuttner showed to Lovecraft, who painstakingly corrected Kuttner’s many historical blunders. The revised story is an explicit contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, introducing us to Nyogtha, “the Thing that should not be” (233), whatever that may mean. Otherwise, the story is merely a feeble variation on Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Kuttner also contributed a new book to the growing library of Lovecraftian occult lore, the Book of Iod. Very few of Kuttner’s explicitly Lovecraftian tales amount to anything; curiously, for one who was so attuned to science fiction and fantasy, he has utilised, in almost every single instance, Lovecraft’s earlier conceptions of the Mythos as an offshoot of black magic, with spells, incantations, and other occultist paraphernalia. Lovecraft’s later conception of the Mythos as an instantiation of “non-supernatural cosmic art” has entirely escaped Kuttner, as it escaped August Derleth. Kuttner also published extensively in “weird menace” magazines like Thrilling Mystery, where seemingly supernatural phenomena are explained away—usually implausibly—as the result of error or, more likely, trickery by some evil genius. Consider “Laughter of the Dead” (Thrilling Mystery, December 1936), a ludicrous, histrionic tale in which the weird incidents (including an animated skeleton) are unconvincingly accounted for as the
product of hypnosis. Even his purely supernatural tales, most of them published in Weird Tales, don’t amount to much. Two, “I, the Vampire” (Weird Tales, February 1937) and “The Shadow on the Screen” (Weird Tales, March 1938), are among the earliest to fuse weirdness with the burgeoning film industry, specifically the horror film industry. In the first, a figure called the Chevalier Futaine—whose identity as a vampire is made clear from the start—interestingly appears on the screen as a “glowing fog” (192). Two stories present clever twists on readers’ expectations. “The Frog” (Strange Stories, February 1939) exhibits a strange batrachian creature that may be some kind of metamorphosed remnant of the witch Persis Winthorp. The protagonist, Norman Hartley, strives to believe that there must be a natural explanation, but the entity is clearly supernatural. This is a reversal of the standard weird menace trope, where supernaturalism is presented at the start only to be discounted at the end. In “Masquerade” (Weird Tales, May 1942) a young couple comes to an old asylum that is now occupied by a dubious and degenerate family named Carta. Are they vampires or merely murderers? They may be the latter—but it is the couple that are the vampires. The tale is narrated in a pungently satirical manner that enhances its weirdness. In a story like “Pegasus” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, May 1940) we see Kuttner already heading toward fantasy. This charming account of a country family’s attempt to domesticate Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek myth, is entirely lacking in horrific atmosphere, and it becomes clear that this kind of tale is where Kuttner’s strengths lie. He had already written a science fiction story as early as “When the Earth Lived” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1937), and his subsequent work would be in these genres. Lovecraft’s influence, both personal and literary, is perhaps best exemplified in what are arguably his two most distinguished disciples: Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) and Robert Bloch (1917–1994). Leiber corresponded with Lovecraft for less than a year prior to the latter’s death, but that brief association left a permanent impress upon his work and temperament, as he himself testified on numerous occasions. His apparently startling remark that H. P. Lovecraft was “the chiefest influence on my literary development after Shakespeare” (cited in Byfield 11) may perhaps be less puzzling if we interpret the statement absolutely literally; for Leiber’s emphasis here may be on the word development, and if this is the case, then it suggests that
Lovecraft’s own work—and, perhaps more relevantly, the advice that he supplied in his relatively few but ample letters—provided Leiber with suggestions as to the improvement of the style, plotting, motivation, and conception of his early tales, and that these suggestions held Leiber in good stead throughout the subsequent course of his long and fruitful career. We must perforce ignore much of Leiber’s work, which falls outside the domain of supernatural horror. He achieved early celebrity with “Adept’s Gambit” (which Lovecraft read and commented on at length), the first of many sword-and-sorcery tales featuring the distinctive figures Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser; these are manifestly in the domain of fantasy. Analogously, much of Leiber’s other fiction, long and short, falls squarely in the realm of science fiction. What is left is a relatively slim but enormously rich and fruitful group of stories, along with one novel, that helped to revolutionise the field in the 1940s and 1950s. August Derleth recognised Leiber’s brilliance and issued his first book, Night’s Black Agents (1950), with Arkham House. Leiber was aware that the horror tale was almost inherently a backwardlooking genre because of its emphasis on, and utilisation of, such ancient elements of myth, superstition, and folklore as the vampire, the ghost, and the werewolf. He appears quite early on to have wrestled with the quandary of how to update these venerable tropes so that they could still have relevance and emotive power in a twentieth century that had come close to relegating them to the dustbin of intellectual and cultural history. In the late essay “My Life and Writings” (1975) Leiber discusses at length his motivations for writing horror fiction: Now, looking back at those days [the early 1940s], it seems to me obvious that I found the supernatural horror story easier to write because its structure and dynamics were simpler and closer to my own experience. The success of such a story depended on creating in the reader a feeling of strange and lonely terror, and that was something I could do. The essential elements were a weird phenomenon, a carefully slow and poetic build-up, and a sensitive protagonist to experience the terror, and then escape to tell the tale. . . . I found artistic capital in my extended childhood fears of the dark and violence, the unexpected and unknown, to which a strong curiosity added the necessary spice of wonder. Such stories didn’t
show up my limited social development, while the memories of a lonely childhood were a storehouse of suitable atmospheric material, in which the early-absorbed language of Macbeth, King Lear and Hamlet was not the least useful treasure. (59–60) This passage, strikingly similar to several in Lovecraft’s essays and letters (and remember that Lovecraft, too, had a “lonely childhood” and “limited social development”), does not directly address the issue of modernising the weird tale, although some hints are there. And in spite of Leiber’s suggestion that his language in these early tales was directly or indirectly derived from Shakespeare, the one thing that strikes us about his works of the 1940s is their aggresively modern language, ranging from a deft imitation of hard-boiled crime fiction in “The Automatic Pistol” to Camuslike existential angst in “Smoke Ghost” and numerous other tales. “The Automatic Pistol” (Weird Tales, May 1940) is a striking tale of a handgun that exacts vengeance for the death of its owner. It shows Leiber’s adeptness in mastering the hard-boiled style pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler during the years of Prohibition and the depression; but more significantly, it likens the pistol itself to a witch’s familiar. When one of the characters, Glasses, makes this allusion, another, No Nose, finds himself puzzled, as he does not know what a familiar is; so Glasses explains: “Well, No Nose, the Devil used to give each witch a pet black cat or dog or maybe a toad to follow it around and protect it and revenge injuries. Those little creatures were called familiars—stooges sent out by the Big Boy to watch over his chosen, you might say. The witches used to talk to them in a language no one else could understand. Now this is what I’m getting at. Times change and styles change—and the style in familiars along with them.” (N 133–34) That final sentence is the key: in updating the myth of the familiar, Leiber has not only spurned the use of a conventional animal (and recall that Lovecraft’s familiar in “The Dreams in the Witch House”—a tale that Leiber greatly admired—is Brown Jenkin, a relatively conventional rat, albeit with tiny humanlike hands), but an animate entity altogether. In our
mechanised age only a thing of steel can achieve the intimacy with its owner that formerly resided in living creatures. Of “Smoke Ghost” (Unknown Worlds, October 1941) it is difficult to speak in small compass. This mesmerising tale is virtually the prototype of the urban horror story, and its influence upon a long line of writers from Bradbury to Ramsey Campbell to Clive Barker is patent. Leiber has testified in “My Life and Writings” that “Smoke Ghost” was a “modernsetting supernatural horror story” (59), while in the autobiographical essay “Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex” he notes that it was his “first strong supernatural story” and that it was inspired by riding the elevated trains in Chicago, which “introduced and wedded me to Chicago’s lonely and dismal world of roofs” (281). In “Smoke Ghost,” the protagonist, Catesby Wran, appears to see a cloudy, smoky figure on the roof of a building as he rides the elevated. He had earlier discussed the matter of ghosts with his secretary, Miss Millick, and when she states that she had once seen “a thing in white” coming out of a closet in the attic bedroom, Wran counters significantly: “‘I don’t mean that kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books’” (N 109). Wran’s first glimpse of the entity emphatically places it within the context of a modern age far different from the aristocratic castles of oldtime Gothic fiction, the never-never-land of Poe’s fictional topography, and even from the witch-haunted Arkhams and Innsmouths of Lovecraft’s invented New England: There was a particular sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. . . . Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeabe aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he
lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars. (N 112) The smoke ghost is the symbol for the industrialised world that, paradoxically, has simultaneously banished conventional spectres from modern consciousness through the advance of science and, by means of the psychological pressures it places upon human life lived in accordance with the unnatural rhythms of machinery, reintroduced them in a different form. In “The Hound” (Weird Tales, November 1942), in which David Lashley, an employee in a clothing store who appears to be plagued by an immense and ferocious-looking dog, Leiber definitively transfers the locus of supernatural terror from the exterior world to the interior—that is, to the world of our inmost fears and neuroses. It is significant that Lashley, in wondering whether the entity haunting him is some kind of werewolf, has to “read up on such things at the library, fingering dusty books in uneasy fascination” (N 187). The stock image of the werewolf is now consigned to out-of-date treatises that contain only the musty products of those long ages of pre-scientific delusion. A friend of Lashley’s, Tom Goodsell, delivers a somewhat pedantic lecture on the difference between ancient and modern ghosts. He notes that it is the very triumph of modern science in banishing fears of conventional supernatural entities that has unleashed modern terrors of a very different sort: “We began by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn’t we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can’t take root in the new environment. Science goes materialistic, proving that there isn’t anything in the universe except tiny bundles of energy. As if, for that matter, a tiny bundle of energy mightn’t mean anything” (N 190). Leiber is careful not to render the existence of the werewolf entirely psychological: other characters see it, or sense it, sometimes even before Lashley himself does. Accordingly, the werewolf becomes not simply a product of Lashley’s own perturbed psychological state—something suggested earlier in the story by reference to his recollection of a cartoon from World War I in which a wolf was portrayed as symbolic of “war, famine, or the ruthlessness of the enemy” (N 188)— but a supernatural symbol of the fears that haunt our war-torn age. “The Dreams of Albert Moreland” (1945) carries forward the connection between war and the supernatural that “The Hound” had only hinted at. This tale, aside from expressing Leiber’s long fascination with
chess, renders the outbreak of World War II a cosmic event that could spell nothing less than the unravelling of the entire fabric of the universe. Beginning pointedly in “the autumn of 1939” (N 169), the tale recounts the recurring dreams of Albert Moreland, who finds himself playing on an immense chessboard and comes to believe that “He had traced a frightening relationship between the progress of the game and of the War” (N 182). Leiber fuses interior and exterior horror by seeing in modern psychological trauma, caused both by the war and by the frenetic and neurosis-producing tempo of industrialised life, a reflection of the dissolution of the cosmos. With “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) Leiber all but completes his transformation of Gothic horror icons into something balefully credible in the modern world. In this well-known tale of a woman who, not in herself but only in her photographed image as seen on billboards and other advertising, exercises a fatal sexual lure upon the men who see it is distinguished by its tight-lipped, Hemingwayesque prose (“But the Girl isn’t like any of the others. She’s unnatural. She’s morbid. She’s unholy” [N 228]) and in its suggestion that the girl is a vampire very different from the conventional sort (“There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren’t the worst” [N 240]). In the end the narrator—the photographer who discovered the girl and, to his abiding regret, caused her image to be broadcast to the world—becomes aware of what she symbolises: I realized that wherever she came from, whatever shaped her, she’s the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything for and never really get. She’s the being that takes everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl. (N 241) There is more to this than just the false promises of advertising: what is involved is a far deeper, broader psychic vampirism as formerly represented by such mythological entities as the Lorelei or the Sirens—the “eternal feminine” whose temptations are ineluctably seductive to males of a certain
temperament, especially those of such “limited social development” as Leiber. The novel Conjure Wife—first published in Unknown Worlds (April 1943) and in book form in 1953—is the acme of Leiber’s updating of Gothic tropes, in this case the tropes of witchcraft, voodoo, and sorcery. Leiber has stated in “Not So Much Disorder” that the novel was loosely based upon his experiences at Occidental College in Los Angeles (348), but that he transferred to setting to a fictitious college in New England, Hempnell College, so that the scenario could be geographically closer to the source of American witchcraft traditions. On the face of it, the central plot of the novel—a group of faculty wives practising witchcraft in order to advance their husbands’ careers—might seem comical, something on the order of Alice Hoffman’s novel Practical Magic (1995), the basis of a popular film. But in Leiber’s hands the plot becomes the vehicle for compellingly dramatic action, complete with a striking twist at the climax, and more significantly a textbook instance of the modernisation of Gothic tropes. Leiber’s chief concern is the matter of convincingness. He is well aware that his readers are likely to be, in the overwhelming main, sceptical of the notion that actual witchcraft has come into play—or, rather, that the witchcraft practised by the quartet of wives has actually been supernaturally efficacious in its stated purpose. Of the hundreds of thousands of witches persecuted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including those in Salem, a certain percentage may well have believed that they were witches and that their magic rituals—ranging from herbal potions to the practice of the Black Mass—did indeed produce the effects they sought; but no one believes that they were gifted with supernatural powers. It is, accordingly, vital to Leiber’s purpose that both the Norman Saylor and his wife, Tansy, are profound sceptics. The most that Norman can admit—after he has inadvertently discovered that Tansy is practising some kind of conjure magic derived from “an old Negro conjure doctor” (7) whom Norman had interviewed years before in the course of some research—is the following: “‘And what is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I’d welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb’” (18). This is the same kind of sociopolitical rationalisation of
the supernatural—superstition as the product of the multifarious terrors and psychological pressures of modern existence—that we have seen in Leiber’s short stories. But Tansy herself, even though she admits that “I’ve always felt that women were more primitive than men, closer to ancient feelings” (17), is said to be a sceptic: “But Tansy was so sane, so healthily contemptuous of palmistry, astrology, numerology and all other superstitious fads. A hardheaded New Englander. So well versed, from her work with him, in the psychological background of superstition and primitive magic” (10). Once the fact of Tansy’s attempts to practise magic is revealed, the question, both for Norman and for the reader, is whether Tansy’s magic has actually worked or whether she is merely a neurotic. In spite of some hints of the former, both Norman and the reader clearly opt for the latter at the start. Tansy confesses that “the things I did . . . well, they seemed to work . . . at least most of the time” (14); this hesitation and equivation seem to clinch the psychological explanation of Tansy’s actions, for if her magic really had supernatural force, why did it not work all the time? (We later realise that the magic of the other wives, often directed against Tansy’s own magic and in support of their own husbands, has on occasion negated Tansy’s efforts.) The rest of the novel is a systematic onslaught on the reader’s scepticism so that the only alternative left is to assume that supernatural magic is actually being practised—but Leiber is compelled to use the most austere elements of logic and reason to effect this contra-rational result. His chief weapon is the law of probability. Given a certain series of actions, what is the most plausible explanation of them? If that explanation is conventionally regarded as supernatural, should it be rejected on that count alone? Would it not be more rational to accept the supernatural in lieu of clutching at such implausible straws as extreme coincidence or widespread psychological trauma? At one point Norman confesses, “Sorcery is. . . . Something has been conjured down from a roof. Women are witches fighting for their men. Tansy was a witch. She was guarding you. But you made her stop” (89). But that is not quite the end of the matter. Later Norman wonders whether even witchcraft might be encompassed within the bounds of a wider conception of science:
. . . was it not likely that all self-destructive impulses were the result of witchcraft? Those universal impulses that were a direct contradiction to the laws of self-preservation and survival. To account for them, Poe had fancifully conceived an “Imp of the Perverse,” and psychoanalysts had laboriously hypothesized a “death wish.” How much simpler to attribute them to malign forces outside the individual, working by means as yet unanalyzed and therefore classified as supernatural. (107) Here again the principle of probability (“was it not likely . . .”; “how much simpler . . .”) is put to use. And yet, Norman cannot quite bring himself to admit the supernatural even in this quasi-scientific manner. Even when he himself begins a succession of magic rituals to counter those of his enemies, he is still maintaining that he only “pretend[s] to believe in black magic in order to overawe three superstitious, psychotic women who had a hold on his wife’s mental life” (173)—in other words, that all this magic was merely of psychological origin and that its efficacy, if indeed it was efficacious, operated purely on a psychological level, just as a man who is told that he is the object of a curse might well fall ill if he believes that curses are real. In this context it is significant that Norman initially uses “the modern science of symbolic logic” (173) to come to Tansy’s aid: symbolic logic, the pinnacle of Western philosophical rationalism, would seem just about as far from witchcraft and sorcery as anything could be, and yet it does prove fruitful (along with certain elements of superstition, such as the use of mirrors, potions, a piece of thread tied into an intricate knot, and the like) in combating the ultimate source of the evil, the aged Mrs. Carr, who had sought to usurp Tansy’s young body while hoping to entice Norman to kill her own body with Tansy’s soul trapped within it. Conjure Wife once again suggests that ancient superstition, far from being banished by scientific rationalism, has only gone underground, remaining as potent as ever and perhaps all the more powerful for its apparent defeat by reason. Norman Saylor is at the outset presented as a “modern husband” (1), and a telling metaphor regarding his house is also made at the beginning: “Today’s washable paint covered last century’s ornate moldings” (2). The modern age may cover over the superstitions of the past, but this superficial coating only conceals and does not eradicate. Ironically, Saylor and his colleagues are themselves referred to as witches, “performing the necessary rituals to keep dead ideas alive, like a college of
witch-doctors in their stern stone tents” (3). In one of his classes Norman states that “we’re modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships” (35)—a brilliant simile that underscores how the retention of primitive superstition has gone hand in hand with spectacular technological progress. Leiber of course went on to write prolifically throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and one later work will be worth considering in a subsequent chapter. Robert Bloch is as different from Leiber as it is possible for two writers in (approximately) the same genre to be. They share a common association with Lovecraft; indeed, Bloch’s four-year correspondence with the Providence writer transformed his life and work to such an extent that he felt perennially indebted to Lovecraft for making him the man and writer he became. Within a week of their getting in touch in April 1933, Bloch sent Lovecraft some of his early tales. Lovecraft’s reponse is illuminating: It was with the keenest interest & pleasure that I read your two brief horror-sketches; whose rhythm & atmospheric colouring convey a very genuine air of unholy immanence & nameless menace, & which strike me as promising in the very highest degree. . . . Of course, these productions are not free from the earmarks of youth. A critic might complain that the colouring is laid on too thickly—too much overt inculcation of horror as opposed to the subtle, gradual suggestion of concealed horror which actually raises fear to its highest pitch. In later work you will probably be less disposed to pile on great numbers of horrific words (an early & scarcelyconquered habit of my own), but will seek rather to select a few words—whose precise position in the text, & whose deep associative power, will make them in effect more terrible than any barrage of monstrous adjectives, malign nouns, & unhallowed verbs. (Letters to Robert Bloch 10) This is a refrain Lovecraft would repeat for several years—although it is arguable that Bloch did not fully learn the virtues of artistic restraint until a decade or more after Lovecraft’s death. In any event, Bloch’s early stories in Weird Tales—“The Feast in the Abbey” (January 1935), “The Secret in
the Tomb” (May 1935), and many others—were exactly of the lurid, overcoloured sort that Lovecraft was warning Bloch against. They are entertaining in their way, but ultimately insubstantial. A number of them develop themes in Lovecraft’s pseudomythology, and Bloch can presumably be proud of devising a popular title in the Cthulhu Mythos library—Mysteries of the Worm by Ludvig Prinn (although Lovecraft had to come to his aid in fashioning the Latin title, De Vermis Mysteriis). The wellknown trilogy—Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” (Weird Tales, September 1935), Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, December 1936), and Bloch’s “The Shadow from the Steeple” (Weird Tales, September 1950)—need not concern us greatly: that each writer took great relish in killing the other off in the first two stories points to the fundamental frivolity of the enterprise. An important transition from Bloch’s Lovecraftian pastiches to his more serious later work is the story “Black Bargain” (Weird Tales, May 1942), in which Bloch abandons the Lovecraftian idiom—although De Vermis Mysteriis is intimately involved—in writing a supernatural tale written in an effective hard-boiled manner. Although the tale is disappointingly conventional in summoning the Devil, it is nonetheless effectively atmospheric. It was around this time that Bloch began to find his own voice in tales that August Derleth decided to collect in Bloch’s first volume, The Opener of the Way (Arkham House, 1945). The book’s title belies the fact that many of the tales expand upon or even repudiate the Lovecraft manner and seek new ground—specifically, the nebulous boundary between horror, fantasy, and crime/suspense fiction. In “The Cloak” (Unknown, May 1939), for example, we are never sure whether the cloak of the title truly endows its wearer with vampiric powers or whether the vampiric tendencies of the wearer are psychological in origin. The celebrated “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (Weird Tales, July 1943) is perhaps not as meritorious a tale as its popularity suggests: the supernaturalisation of the Jack the Ripper murders is fundamentally unconvincing. The collection Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of (1979) encompasses many of the tales that Bloch, in an afterword, refers to as “psychological suspense” (284), although there are a few supernatural specimens. One of the cleverest stories is “I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1955), in which the protagonist claims to be visiting a
psychiatrist for his various psychological ills but has in fact invented the psychiatrist. Although told in the third-person, the tale is as vivid an example of the unreliable narrator as one would wish. Psychological terror reaches its pinnacle in two of Bloch’s novels, The Scarf (1947; revised 1966) and Psycho (1959). The former might even be regarded as superior to its celebrated successor were it not for its contrived and implausible ending. We are here dealing with Dan Morley, who gives a first-person account of an early psychological trauma when, as a schoolboy, he was seduced and almost killed by a female teacher and subsequently developed a hatred of women. But in spite of this, he becomes attached to a succession of women—each of whom he kills with a scarf after he has written stories about her. Dan exhibits a classic dehumanising rationalisation for his acts: “I killed Rena because she was just a story character to me. She wasn’t real. She didn’t exist at all” (17). The novel turns authentically weird when we are presented with extracts from a diary or “Black Notebook” that Dan keeps, in which he records not only his criminal acts but the bizarre nightmares he suffers. These passages are powerful in themselves as instances of psychological terror; and because we are not distracted with the question of whether Dan is or is not guilty of the murders he commits—thereby eliminating the suspense component from the scenario except toward the end, when he is being pursued by those who have come to suspect his complicity in the crimes— we are allowed to perceive his psychological aberration in a relatively undiluted form. Psycho deserves to be read in addition to, or apart from, Hitchcock’s celebrated film, for it reveals subtleties and moments of chilling terror that even the film has not captured. In addition, it is much more authentically a weird tale than the film, which—aside from its iconic portrayal of Norman Bates’s residence as a kind of haunted house from the Gothic tradition—is largely an exercise in psychological suspense. It is worth studying Psycho in relation to a much earlier tale, “Enoch” (Weird Tales, September 1946), as the latter’s premise is strikingly similiar to that of the novel. In this tale, the protagonist believes that a strange entity lives on the top of his head and compels him to commit murder; he goes on to say that “Most people . . . thought I was crazy—because of my mother” (Best of Robert Bloch 26). This utterance is not entirely explained, but it appears that his mother was a witch. The story is in fact supernatural—the entity in question, Enoch,
really does exist, as a district attorney finds to his discomfiture—but on the whole it is an unsuccessful venture: the very use of supernaturalism here undercuts the psychological force of the story by absolving the protagonist of moral guilt in the crimes he commits. Psycho, being a tale of psychological horror, does not make that mistake. But for all that we find a horrible compulsion in the murderous actions and, especially, the rationalisations of Norman Bates—for he has not only denied the fact of his mother’s death, but maintains that it is she who is killing the women who come to his motel—the novel contains some notable instances of what I would call pseudo-supernaturalism in details of landscape, atmosphere, and character description. And let us recall that, to a reader coming upon the work for the first time, Norman Bates’s mother is actually alive at the outset and actually does the killing. The passage where Lila Crane, the sister of the murdered Mary Crane, enters the Bates home to ascertain the truth of the matter is perhaps the most horrific scene in the novel. It is here that pseudo-supernaturalism comes into play, for the narrative tone suggests a kind of haunted-house atmosphere where anything can happen; Lila’s repeated utterance, “There are no ghosts” (144, 145), carry exactly the opposite connotation, and we would not be surprised if the ghost of Mrs. Bates (for by this time we have learned that she is in fact dead and that it is Norman who has been carrying out the crimes in her name) were to emerge suddenly out of her bedroom, which has been kept eerily intact ever since her death. Robert Bloch, as with almost every other writer who has ever lived, wrote too much, and a certain proportion of his work is hasty and uninspired, and even verges on hackwork. He wrote two additional and splendid suspense novels, The Dead Beat (1960) and Night World (1972). Less compelling is the historical serial killer novel American Gothic (1974); and of his two sequels to Psycho, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), the less said the better. His hundreds of short stories feature an array of good work; a judicious selection would be welcome.
XIV. Horror at Midcentury
i. The Group: Bradbury, Matheson, Beaumont, Nolan In the 1940s and 1950s, a remarkable group of writers, mostly based in California, effected a revolution in supernatural and non-supernatural horror literature as dramatic as that engendered by H. P. Lovecraft and his compatriots a generation earlier. This group—called, blandly enough, “The Group,” and consisting chiefly of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and William F. Nolan, with other, lesser figures such as George Clayton Johnson and John Tomerlin, several of whom, to our great good fortune, are still with us—all worked seamlessly in the genres of supernatural horror, crime/suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. In some senses this genre-switching and genre-blending was a result of market forces: the demise of the pulp magazines (Weird Tales finally collapsed in 1954 after thirty-one years of existence) and the emergence of the digestsized science fiction magazines (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, and many others) created a sudden absence of a market for pure supernaturalism and a need to present weird fiction in the guise of science fiction or psychological suspense. The end result was that these writers, all acquainted with one another and often exchanging ideas dynamically, fostered a modernisation of the supernatural by appeal to science as well as by an appeal to the mundanities of contemporary life in America, with the result that much of their work features a social criticism of the increasing blandness and conformism of their time. Chronologically speaking, Ray Bradbury (b. 1920) should probably be regarded as the pioneer in the midcentury shift of supernatural horror from the flamboyant cosmicism of Lovecraft and his colleagues to the mundane social realism that in some ways continues to dominate the field today. Bradbury’s letter to the editor in the November 1939 issue of Weird Tales briefly praises Lovecraft’s “Cool Air,” and he retained a lifelong devotion to the exotic prose-poetry of Clark Ashton Smith’s fantastic tales; but his own work, while being richly prose-poetic in its own way and deftly fusing fantasy, supernatural horror, psychological horror, and a delicate character
portrayal not often found in weird fiction, is as different from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos or Smith’s tales of Zothique and Hyberborea as any literature could well be. And yet, Bradbury’s devotion to the pulps compelled him to publish much of his early weird work in Weird Tales and its rivals, beginning in 1942, and these tales were quickly noticed by August Derleth, who was always on the lookout for promising new work to publish with Arkham House. His identification of Bradbury’s talent is one of his most astute observations, and his publishing of Bradbury’s first volume, Dark Carnival (1947), is a landmark both for its author and for its publisher. That single volume—or, perhaps more accurately, the extensive revision and reordering of that volume in the later collection The October Country (1955)—could be said to have all but single-handedly initiated a new and vibrant trend in weird fiction. What distinguishes Bradbury’s work from that of many of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors—aside from the sheer inventiveness of his imagination and his immense gifts of language and story construction—is his uncanny ability to construct weird scenarios that serve as powerful symbols or metaphors for central human concerns. Perhaps the most obvious—but nonetheless effective—instance of this trait is the somewhat later story “The Dwarf” (Fantastic, January–February 1954), which utilises Bradbury’s patented carnival setting. Here the dwarf of the title is obviously a stand-in for Bradbury himself, as he writes pulp detective stories (Bradbury wrote extensively for the detective pulps as well as for the weird and science fiction pulps). Ralph, the operator of the hall of mirrors at the carnival, switches mirrors so that the dwarf looks, not bigger, but even smaller than his actual dimensions: a more transparent symbol could scarcely be sought for Bradbury’s own insecurity as he was transitioning from a pulpsmith to the greater stature he sought as a mainstream writer. Several other stories deftly probe abnormal psychological states in either a supernatural or non-supernatural manner. Of the former sort is the chilling tale “Skeleton” (Weird Tales, September 1945), in which a man develops a shuddering horror of his own skeleton: “A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long
and scattered like dice!” (OC 68). As a result of this bizarre affliction, he loses weight—whereupon he thinks that his skeleton is trying to starve him. The supernatural element here is a bit adventitious—a strange physician, Dr. Munigaut, removes the man’s skeleton, rendering him a jellyfish-like creature—but the psychological analysis remains acute. A purely psychological horror tale is “The Next in Line” (first published in Dark Carnival), in which a woman visiting a remote Mexican town becomes terrified by thoughts of mortality—especially when she learns that the town digs up graves if the survivors do not continue to pay a fee for their maintenance. This story achieves an acme of physical horror at the thought of death and its aftermath. Other stories continue the exploration of abnormal psychology. “The Wind” (Collier’s, 5 August 1950) tells of a man who thinks the wind is after him: he is under the impression that it absorbs the intelligence of those it kills, thereby growing increasingly more powerful and dangerous. In a clever supernatural twist, the man hears the laughter of a friend outside— but no friend is there. . . . Also effective is “The Night” (Weird Tales, July 1946), in which a boy’s terror of a ravine at night metamorphoses into a general terror of human loneliness. (It becomes evident that August Derleth borrowed heavily from this tale in “The Lonesome Place.”) “Fever Dream” (Weird Tales, September 1948) also seems on the surface a tale of psychological horror—a boy suffering from scarlet fever thinks that his hands have been taken over by the fever, to such a degree that at one point he tries to choke himself—but features a clever supernatural twist at the end. Bradbury quickly developed a remarkable insight into human character and motivation, and also the skill to adopt weird quasi-supernatural scenarios to express it. Consider “The Jar” (Weird Tales, November 1944), an unforgettable etching of the dreary hopelessness of rustic life. A man named Charly buys from a carny a jar containing what appears to be some strange entity preserved in formaldehyde. He becomes the talk of his wretched community with the possession of this grisly object, even though the carny later admits to his wife that the object is a fake. Refusing to believe it, Charly kills his wife and places her head in the jar. There is an unparalleled poignancy in Bradbury’s depiction of a man who has nothing in his life except the attraction of what might or might not be in a jar. “The Lake” (Weird Tales, May 1944) is also extraordinary poignant in depicting a
man’s remembrance of his adolescent relationship with a twelve-year-old girl who had drowned. Does she come back from the dead to finish a sand castle the two of them had begun decades ago? We never learn the answer to that question, but the portrayal of bittersweet young love has never been bettered. Bradbury’s later work has perhaps justly been criticised as at times maudlin and sentimental, but early in his career he could produce tales of remarkable grimness, even of bitter cynicism. Probably the chief among them is “The Small Assassin” (Dime Mystery, November 1946), which was, incredibly, actually submitted to Good Housekeeping but was rejected because the editors rightly maintained that it would prove offensive to young mothers! This immortal tale of a young couple who come to believe that their own new-born baby is trying to murder them is a flawless instance of the kind of “mundane horror”—horror emerging from the seemingly bland events of ordinary life—that Bradbury and other members of The Group championed. As David Leiber, the father of the child, states to a physician: “But suppose one child in a billion is—strange? Born perfectly aware, able to think, instinctively. Wouldn’t it be a perfect setup, a perfect blind for anything the baby might want to do? He could pretend to be ordinary, weak, crying, ignorant. With just a little expenditure of energy he could drawl about a darkened house, listening. And how easy to place obstacles at the top of stairs. How easy to cry all night and tire a mother into pneumonia. How easy, right at birth, to be so close to the mother that a few deft maneuvers might cause peritonitis!” (OC 141) The story progresses with enormous skill from psychological horror—at the outset we are led to believe that the baby’s mother is merely a victim of post-partum depression—to actual supernaturalism. Just as grim in a different way is “The Crowd” (Weird Tales, May 1943), in which a man comes to realise that the crowwd that gathers at car accidents and other disasters consists, in many cases, of the same people— and the crowning horror is his awareness that they are in fact dead. Bradbury is somewhat less successful at humorous treatments of the
supernatural, as in “There Was an Old Woman” (Weird Tales, July 1944), in which a woman refuses to believe that she is a ghost. “The Man Upstairs” (Harper’s, March 1947) is a half-comic vampire tale of no great distinction. Bradbury quickly achieved enormous celebrity as a science fiction writer with the publication, in rapid succession, of The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). A number of the stories of this period powerfully fuse horror and science fiction. Perhaps the best of them is “The Fog Horn” (Saturday Evening Post, 23 June 1951), the basis for the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). This story of a lighthouse keeper who comes upon the last surviving prehistoric creature who thinks that the lighthouse’s foghorn may be the call of its long-lost mate is inexpressibly touching: “All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps it’s a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it’s the last of its kind. I sort of think that’s true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it, out toward the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you’re alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.” (Stories 269) “The Veldt” (Saturday Evening Post, 23 September 1950; in The Illustrated Man) is powerful but somewhat less successful. The story broaches the notion of virtual reality: in the future, homes are now equipped with walls featuring moving images that display landscapes triggered by the thoughts of the children occupying them. In this case, the children repeatedly think of an African veldt with dangerous lions in the background. Later, the children lock their parents into the room, where they are killed—not by the lions coming to life, but by the parents somehow entering the image of the veldt on the wall. Ingenious as this idea is, the plausibility of the conception leaves something to be desired; and the general symbolism of the tale—a satire on permissive parents and unruly
children—seems a trifle mundane. More purely science fictional, but perhaps among the most chilling stories in Bradbury’s entire oeuvre, is the brief and celebrated “There Will Come Soft Rains” (Collier’s, 6 May 1950), an imperishable depiction of a house that continues to operate automatically after what appears to have been a nuclear holocaust. Of Bradbury’s novels, only Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) needs to be considered here. In a sense it is a successor to Dandelion Wine (1958), a fix-up novel that somewhat clumsily stitched together a number of Bradbury’s short stories into an affecting depiction of the nostalgia of summer as seen through the eyes of a small-town boy. Bradbury, whose understanding of the psychology of adolescent boyhood is perhaps unmatched in literature, and whose ability to evoke the aching nostalgia of long-lost childhood is also second to none, brings both qualities to the fore in a novel of genuine terror. Something Wicked takes place in Green Town, a transparent metaphor for the town of Waukegan, Illinois, where Bradbury spent his own boyhood. Somethiung Wicked focuses on two teenage boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, the latter born on Halloween and the former the day before Halloween. In the week before their birthdays, a carnival—Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium shadow Show—comes to town. One senses at once that something is awry: carnivals never come to the town after Labor Day; the carnival arrives on a train at 3 A.M.; as it progresses, a calliope is playing—but no player is visible. Further bizarre manifestations occur, the most notable of which is the remarkable power of the merry-go-round or carousel to increase or decrease one’s age depending on whether it goes forward or backward. (This idea was derived from the earlier short story “The Black Ferris” [Weird Tales, May 1948].) Mr. Cooger rides the carousel eighty or ninety times, with the result that he is hideously aged: The eyes were mummified shut. The nose was collapsed upon gristle. The mouth was a ruined white flower, the petals twisted into a thin wax sheath over the clenched teeth through which faint bubblings sighed. The man was small inside his clothes, small as a child, but tall, strung out, and old, so old, very old, not ninety, not one hundred, no, not one hundred and ten, but one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty impossible years old. (75–76)
But these horrific scenes are only the surface phenomena of the much deeper purpose of the carnival. As Will’s father explains: “All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They’re a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people’s sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn’t care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from ral or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.” (148–49) What Something Wicked This Way Comes is really about is the ability to resist those desires that we know to be impossible (such as the desire of Miss Foley, the teacher, to regain her lost youth) or self-destructive. It is also about boyhood, the bonds of young friendship (“Oh, Jim, Jim . . . we’ll be pals forever” [213], Will says at the end), and the developing relations between father and son. It is at once the culmination of Bradbury’s utilisation of the carnival motif—a motif that fuses light-hearted play, secretive darkness, fantasy and illusion, magic and trickery—and of his evocation of nostalgia and adolescence. It is written in perhaps an excesively self-conscious prose-poetic idiom, but its elements of terror and wistfulness have rendered it immensely influential on subsequent weird writing. Bradbury’s ability to use weird motifs as metaphors for profound human concerns allowed him to shift easily from the pulp market to slicks like Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post, while his hugely popular works of science fiction helped to raise that genre in critical esteem and to elevate his own work to the level of an American classic. It is a bit sad to note that the best of his work had largely been written, with rare exceptions (like Something Wicked), by the late 1950s. Bradbury, more than most authors, has written far too much and has also in some senses believed his own press and become a self-consciously literary author. Little that he has written since the 1960s is of any account, but his early work has made an imperishable impression on the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and
supernatural horror, and his undoubted talents will establish him as a writer close to the stature of a Lovecraft or a Poe. Richard Matheson (b. 1926) is as different a writer as two Californians working in the same genre(s) could possibly be. Deliberately eschewing the prose-poetry of Bradbury, Matheson developed a flat, mundane, Hemingwayesque style that is frequently effective in conveying the subtle incursion of the bizarre into the ordinary lives of ordinary Americans; but on occasion this excessive spareness renders his conceptions difficult to swallow. Although Matheson did publish two stories in Weird Tales, they are not among his most distinguished, and he did his best work in the weird/supernatural vein in stories published chiefly in the burgeoning digest-size science fiction magazines of the period. Matheson also wrote a considerable amount of non-supernatural or psychological suspense work, some of which borders on the weird. Matheson’s work offers definitive proof, as if it were needed by now, that the heritage of both supernatural literature and horror film was casting a pronounced influence upon the literature of this and subsequent periods. Several of his earlier stories are conscious riffs on prior work in the field. “Blood Son” (1951), about a boy who wants to be a vampire, contains patent references to both the novel and the film Dracula. “Lover When You’re Near Me” (1952) is a science fiction story based on the premise of Robert Hichens’s “How Love Came to Professor Guildea.” Even the late story “Button, Button” (1970) is a variant of “The Monkey’s Paw,” and one wonders whether Matheson is even aware of the borrowing. In other stories, Matheson fashions deliberate take-offs of well-known supernatural motifs, as in the well-known “Witch War” (1951), where the poltergeist abilities of young girls are harnessed to fight wars. His two Weird Tales stories may be of this sort: “Slaughter House” (July 1953) is a rather tiresome account of a revenant, written in a poor “Victorian” style (as Matheson himself has labelled it [CS 2.48]) that is ill-suited to his talents; “Wet Straw” (January 1953) is a routine story of supernatural revenge. Several of Matheson’s best stories are interesting fusions of psychological and supernatural horror, at times lapsing into science fiction. One of the most powerful of his early tales is “Mad House” (1953), in which a man, Chris Neal, seems constantly enraged at life and feels that the inanimate objects in his house are conspiring against him. A physician, influenced by Charles Fort, believes that Chris’s anger is itself causing
these bizarre events and that it may kill him without the presence of his wife, Sally, who is “acting as an abortive factor” (CS 1.194). When she leaves, the objects in the house become actually animate and induce Chris to kill himself with a razor. Somewhat similar, but resolving itself nonsupernaturally, is “Legion of Plotters” (1953), in which a man believes there is a conspiracy on the part of the rest of humanity to drive him insane by constantly irritating him, to the point that he finally snaps and stabs a man on a bus who had been sniffing loudly. Matheson is at his most effective in establishing mundane scenarios that veer off into the bizarre. Consider “The Curious Child” (1954), in which a man finds that he does not know where he lives or works, and finally ends by not even remembering his own name. An unconvincing science fiction conclusion dealing with time travel does not mar the nightmarishly unnerving quality of the overall narrative. Similar is “The Edge” (1958), where a man named Arthur Nolan recognises Don Marshall as an old friend, although Don does not know who he is; Arthur then goes home and finds that his own wife fails to recognise him. In stories of this type Matheson is again able to present effective non-supernatural variants: “The Children of Noah” (1957) deals with a traveller stopped for speeding in a small town in Maine and, after repeated humiliations that lead him to be kept in jail overnight, discovers that the townspeople are going to eat him. In “The Distributor” (1958) a man moves into a placid suburban neighbourhood and by simple acts sows discord among his neighbours. Matheson wrote in a note on the story that “that’s what true evil would be like. It’s not monsters and devils and all that. It’s what happens every day in your own neighborhood” (CS 2.444). “Prey” (1969) is another nightmarish story of a Zuni fetish doll that comes to life in a woman’s apartment. Matheson is also clever at incorporating humanity’s inveterate fear and unease at new technologies. In this sense, “Long Distance Call” (1953) is a prototypical story. An elderly woman, Elva Keene, finds that her phone is constantly ringing, but no one responds when she answers. In later calls, a man does respond, but he evidently cannot hear Miss Keene’s increasingly frantic words. The story contains a clever double twist: it is not merely that, as the operator discovers, the phone calls are coming from the cemetery; it is that, in the final call that concludes the story, the man states ominously, “Hello, Miss Elva. I’ll be right over” (CS 1.399). The celebrated “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (1962) should be discussed in this context. This
well-known story of a man on a plane who believes—rightly, as it happens —that a gremlin is seeking to bring the plane down is really a parable about the advance of technology beyond the powers of human beings to absorb it, and the concomitant feelings of helplessness it engenders. Several of Matheson’s stories, however, suffer from his mundane prose and from implausible scenarios. In “Disappearing Act” (1953) the tokens of a man’s identity disappear one by one, but the narrative is unconvincing. “Old Haunts” (1957) could have been a poignant story about a man who revisits his college and comes upon younger versions of himself; but Matheson’s mechanical prose fails to engender the nostalgia inherent in the plot—something that Bradbury or even Rod Serling could and did engender in analogous tales. “Crickets” (1960) tells of a man who thinks that crickets are sending out messages from the dead, but the story is marred by insufficient development. A number of Matheson’s later tales show his increasing interest in the occult. Several deal with second sight or precognition. In “The Holiday Man” (1957) a man is able to predict how many people are going to die on a given holiday. Similarly, “Girl of My Dreams” (1963) tells of a woman who is a “sensitive” and has visions of the future. Her husband uses her skills as blackmail, until she takes pity on a woman whose son is going to die and warns her, whereupon her husband kills her. This story is yet another victim of the determinism paradox, something we shall find in a more celebrated work of weird fiction written several decades later: If the woman had seen the vision of the boy’s dying, no act on her or anyone else’s part could have deflected that result—or, rather, all actions seeking to deflect that result would have led inexorably to it; if, as a result of anyone’s actions, the boy did not in fact die, the woman could not have seen the vision in the first place. In “Mute” (1962), a boy is raised by a family that does not teach him to speak, as the parents are conducting an experiment to see if he develops telepathic powers—which he does. After the parents die, his foster-parents do teach him to speak; he loses his powers but gains the familial love that has been missing from his life. We have seen that Matheson frequently fuses supernatural and science fiction scenarios; in his tales he is not always successful, but in one novel, at least, he has produced a noteworthy contribution: I Am Legend (1954). The plot of this work—about Robert Neville, who fears that he may be the last man on earth who has not turned into a vampire—need not be
rehearsed. The critical issue is the manner in which Matheson renders this conception plausibly. We are evidently to understand that a virus carried by dust storms has rendered everyone but Neville a vampire; he alone is “immune to their infection” (53), because he was once bitten by a vampire bat and derived some kind of immunity in that fashion (132–33). How convincing this is can be a matter of debate; at any rate, in classic science fiction fashion, Neville spends much time at the Los Angeles Public Library looking for a “rational answer to the problem” (66) and even learning enough chemistry to identify the bacterium in a vampire’s blood. A good part of the early sections of the novel, depicting a world that is devastated and all but deserted as a result of the curious virus, reads like M. P. Shiel’s novel The Purple Cloud (1901/1929), and I would not be surprised if Matheson were consciously influenced by it: it had been reprinted in paperback in 1946 and had appeared in an abridged version in the June 1949 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. But the novel develops both originality and poignancy by the appearance, first, of a living dog, whom Neville spends weeks trying to catch and domesticate before it finally dies, and then of a woman named Ruth, who appears to be uninfected, although she reacts poorly to garlic. The complex interplay between the two is the emotional centre of the novel: Neville, by this time so unused to human interaction that he occasionally lapses into boorishness or even cruelty, desperately hopes that Ruth is who she says she is, and even envisions reconstituting the human race in the manner of Adam and Eve. But she is in fact a member of a small band of infected humans who have learned to survive in daylight for short periods of time, and it is this group that will establish a new society. Neville is caught, and Ruth urges him to take pills and commit suicide before he is executed. He does so, and his concluding reflections on being the last true human being on earth reach a level of poignancy and majesty that is rare in Matheson’s work. Matheson’s interest in the occult is exhibited in the later novel A Stir of Echoes (1958), in which a man’s psychic powers reveal the dark secrets lurking behind the lives of his seemingly normal neighbours, and in the very poor Hell House (1971), an unwitting caricature of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). By this time Matheson had virtually abandoned the writing of short stories, and his later work tends to be almost exclusively in the realms of fantasy or science fiction.
Another work that cleverly melds supernatural and science fiction motifs is The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1911–1995), first published serially in Collier’s (26 November–24 December 1954) before appearing in book form in 1955. Set in the imaginary town of Santa Mira, California (the revised version of 1978 is set in the actual town of Mill Valley), the novel revolves around Dr. Miles Bennell, who finds that a number of his patients have come to believe that intimate members of their family are in some vague way impostors. It turns out that these individuals are in fact impostors—aliens who have come through space as pods and are able to replicate both the physical and the mental aspects of the inhabitants of whatever planet they come upon; this happens when the original inhabitants are asleep, whereupon they are reduced to a grey dust. It has often been believed that the novel is an exhibition of Cold War paranoia and the dangers of communist spies lurking in the midst of ordinary American life; but there is very little sociopolitical commentary or implication in the novel that would lend support to such an interpretation, and it is more likely that the work is merely a rumination on the nature of humanity. The aliens lack emotions, and they cannot reproduce, so that they will be dead in five years. It is this that Miles emphasises to one of the aliens, remarking that “There’s no real joy, fear, hope, or excitement in you, not any more. You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you” (183). The popularity of both I Am Legend and The Body Snatchers is indicated by the numerous film adaptations of both: the first has been adapted three times (1964, 1971, 2007), the latter four times (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007). Matheson and Charles Beaumont (1929–1967) were two of the most prolific writers of teleplays for Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” but he also wrote a substantial amount of short fiction as well as the non-weird novel The Intruder (1959), about race relations in Missouri. Beaumont’s work is characterised by highly penetrating analyses of character, a prose style of muted lyricism, and some powerful weird conceptions that simultaneously draw upon the heritage of supernatural literature and shine a pungent light on the social and psychological angst of the period. During his tragically shortened lifetime—he was afflicted, apparently, with a radical form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, the evident result of consuming immense quantities of Bromo-Seltzer to relieve his crippling headaches—
he produced a bountiful array of literary work, including screenplays and teleplays; but his stories were gathered in only three original collections, The Hunger and Other Stories (1958), Yonder (1958), and Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960), of which the second is almost entirely devoted to science fiction. Relatively little of Beaumont’s work is overtly supernatural, but one of these, “The Vanishing American” (1955), may be his most striking and socially relevant narrative. This plangent tale of an average office worker who gradually disappears from view is perfectly emblematic of the intellectually and aesthetically stultifying life engendered by the corporate America of the 1950s. The fact that the protagonist, Mr. Minchell, cannot see himself in a mirror evokes the similar invisibility of vampires in mirrors, but to a very different purpose. The tale ends happily, however, when Minchell throws off his staid conventionality by riding one of the stone lions guarding the New York Public Library—an act of imaginative independence that allows him to be seen by others once again. Beaumont’s other notable supernatural tale is “The Howling Man” (1960), in which a traveller, taking refuge in a German monastery, hears the appalling cries of a howling man in a cell and is soberly informed by the abbot that it is the devil. The traveller refuses to believe the abbot and sets the man free. He of course turns out to be the devil. As a tale contrasting ancient belief and modern scepticism, the tale is moderately successful, but the general implausibility of the overall narrative weakens its effect; and a happy ending—the devil is, in some unexplained fashion, once more caught at the end of the story—doesn’t help. Then there is “Black Country” (1954), an astonishing narrative that, in the manner of a jazz composition, portrays the apparent possession of a white musician’s body by the spirit of his black mentor. Less successful is “Free Dirt” (1955), a predictable tale in which a miser who gets free dirt from a cemetery is later buried in it. Beaumont’s best work is in the realm of psychological suspense, where his skill at character portrayal and his acuity in the analysis of aberrent mentalities is on display. “Miss Gentilbelle” (1958) tells the seemingly simple narrative of a woman who has had an illegitimate child and, out of shame, forces the boy to think of himself as a girl; in vengeance, he later kills her. But this summary cannot begin to convey the grim effectiveness of Beaumont’s depiction of the crippling effect of the mother’s vicious
treatment of her own son. The same could be said for “The Hunger” (1955), in which a woman, out of loneliness, deliberately puts herself in the path of a rapist-murderer. Some of Beaumont’s stories are less than successful, perhaps because the satire that he wishes to direct at some of his figures is not as subtle as it could be. “Open House” (1957) tells of a man who has just murdered his wife in the bathroom but is forced to receive two friends who have arrived at his doorstep; later he feels compelled to kill them also, whereupon more friends arrive. Then there is the long and intricate narrative “The New People” (1958), in which a couple settling in a house whose previous owner had committed suicide find increasing suggestions that their neighbours are all involved in various criminal or antisocial activities culminating in a black mass. The tale proves to be highly contrived, in that Beaumont must convince us (unsuccessfully) that the young wife of the new couple is still a virgin, simply so that she can then be suitably sacrificed in the neighbours’ black mass. Another story, “The Crooked Man” (1955), is disturbing for a different reason: this science fiction tale about a future society in which heterosexuality is now regarded as aberrant suggests a strain of homophobia on Beaumont’s part. “Perchance to Dream” (1958) is a remarkable fusion of psychological and supernatural horror and in some senses could be regarded as the pinnacle of Beaumont’s—and The Group’s—blending of genres. A man sees a psychiatrist because, as he maintains, his dreams are taking on a hideous kind of reality. The story culminates in the man’s jumping out the window—but in fact the entire narrative has been a dream, and the man is found dead of a heart attack. Some note should be taken of the work of William F. Nolan (b. 1928). In some senses his work is less spectacular than that of his friends and colleagues in The Group, and in many ways he is of greatest interest as a critic, biographer, and bibliographer of their work. Nolan compiled the first anthology of essays on Bradbury, the slim Ray Bradbury Review (1952), and he also wrote the later Ray Bradbury Companion (1975); his monograph on Beaumont, The Work of Charles Beaumont (1990), is an important reference work. Although best known for the dystopian science fiction novel Logan’s Run (1967), cowritten with George Clayton Johnson and the basis for a celebrated film, Nolan has himself produced a substantial
body of fiction in a wide array of genres, from supernatural horror to science fiction to crime/suspense to westerns. The supernatural does not bulk large in his work, but some instances of it are of considerable merit. Perhaps the most notable is “The Party” (1967), in which a man who comes to an apartment where a party is going on discovers, perhaps to no one’s surprise, that he has entered hell. But the merit of the story is Nolan’s flawless capturing of the utterly inane and pointless conversation uttered by the various guests (“I knew a policewoman who loved to scrub down whores” [39]). Then there is “Dead Call” (1976), in which a dead man persuades his friend to commit suicide as he himself had done (“Life is ugly, but death is beautiful” [92]); his friend does so and thereby continues the cycle. Even the science fiction tale “The Underdweller” (Fantastic Universe, August 1957) has its soupçon of terror: in the future, the last man in Los Angeles (or perhaps the world) lives in tunnels, continually on the run from what appear to be aliens—but in fact he is on the run from children, since the aliens who had invaded the earth years before had killed all adults above the age of six except himself. There is perhaps an influence of Matheson’s I Am Legend on this tale, but it retains its originality because of its clever surprise ending. The retrospective collection William F. Nolan’s Dark Universe (2001) is a worthy testament to the work of a writer whose talent and longevity deserve our deepest respect.
ii. Some Short Story Writers An array of British short story writers at midcentury probed the weird from a generally mainstream perspective. The result was, in some senses, a diminution of purely weird elements but an enhancement of other elements such as character portrayal, social and political relevance, and even some pungent satire. To some degree their work helped to prepare a mainstream readership for the proliferation of supernatural horror that began gathering steam in the 1960s. John Collier (1901–1980) began writing short stories as early as the late 1920s, continuing to do so almost up to the time of his death. The best of his weird specimens were gathered in The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It (1943), expanded as Fancies and Goodnights (1951). A retrospective collection, The Best of John Collier (1975), contains a large proportion of his short fiction, but a surprising number of tales remain uncollected and unpublished. Collier fits reasonably well into the class of satirical fantaisistes—and, like even the best of his predecessors, including Ambrose Bierce, Saki, and L. P. Hartley, there is a perennial suggestion of authorial trickery in the manner in which clever dénouements and twists are offered. Surprisingly little of Collier’s work is supernatural. I do not refer to whimsical fantasies such as “Bottle Party” (1941), in which a man who buys a bottle with a genie in it ultimately finds himself trapped in the bottle himself. Here there is not the remotest suggestion that we are to take the story literally as an actual occurrence; all the fun in the tale is seeing the working out of the implausible premise. Analogously, “Halfway to Hell” (1934) tells of a man who almost goes to hell, but manages to shunt a rival off into a demon’s hands. Once again the quasi-supernatural is used purely for comic effect. The one genuine tale of the supernatural in Collier’s work, so far as I can ascertain, is the celebrated “Thus I Refute Beelzy” (1940). A young boy apparently invents a playmate named Mr. Beelzy (i.e., Beelzebub), but his father demands that his son acknowledge it as a fantasy; he thinks it is unhealthy to engage in delusions of this kind. Eventually the father is found dead in a hideous manner (“It was on the second-floor landing that they
found the shoe, with the man’s foot still in it” [220]). But the essence of the story is not this supernatural climax but the plain implication that the son has been physically abused by his father, so that Mr. Beelzy becomes, in the most literal sense of the term, a defence mechanism. The bulk of Collier’s most piquant tales are non-supernatural, and a number of them deal with marital troubles of various kinds. This is also the burden of the curious early novel His Monkey Wife (1930), featuring a bizarre triangle between a man, his fiancée, and an ape. In such stories as “De Mortuis” (1942) and “Back for Christmas” (1939), Collier seems to take relish in the grim dispatching of a tiresome spouse. In the first, a physician appears to be burying his murdered wife in the basement. Two friends, who have discovered him in the act, decide to aid him in escaping the law—after all, the wife, Irene, was the “town floozy” (18). It turns out that Irene is not in fact dead—but she will be, as the friends have now provided the physician with an unbreakable alibi. “Back for Christmas” is slightly less effective. Here a man actually does kill his wife and buries her in a hole in the cellar designed for a wine bin; but he is disconcerted when he receives a letter from a building company (hired, clearly, by his late wife) saying that it will be installing the wine bin before Christmas. Some of Collier’s most powerful tales are those in the very borderline of the weird, where nothing supernatural can explicitly be seen to happen. Consider “Evening Primrose” (1940), which engenders a pervasive atmosphere of strangeness in its account of people living in a New York City department store at night. Somewhat similar is “Special Delivery” (1941), a long, seriocomic tale about a man in love with a mannikin. The indescribable “Green Thoughts” (1931) introduces us to man-eating orchids in a manner that combines humour and loathsomeness. Collier’s lapidary prose, full of pungent wit, keen observation of human foibles, and on occasion a surprising modicum of poignancy and tenderness, is melded with a meticulous story construction that renders each of his tales a flawless aesthetic gem. If he had chosen to devote a greater proportion of his output to the explicitly weird, he would occupy a still greater place in the field than he does. H. F. Heard (1889–1971), who sometimes published as Gerald Heard, deserves some consideration on the strength of two volumes, The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (1944) and the Lost Cavern and Other Tales of the Fantastic (1948). In actuality, several of the more noteworthy tales in these
collections straddle the boundary between horror and science fiction, perhaps tending a bit more toward the latter than the former. “The Great Fog” tells rivetingly of a mildew, created by scientists as part of the war effort, that ultimately spreads around the globe. While there is indeed terror in this scenario—and an uncanny anticipation of global warming (“the balance of life has been upset” [GF 38], one scientist laments)—the greater portion of the narrative focuses on the radical changes in life and society engendered by the phenomenon. In “Wingless Victory” an explorer in the Antarctic is captured by immense intelligent birds, the leader of whom learns human speech and conducts a long colloquy with the captive. At this point the focus of the tale shifts from horror to a discussion of comparative physiology, where the bird makes compelling arguments for the superiority of his species over human beings. Not dissimilar is “The Lost Cavern,” where an explorer enters a cave in Mexico and is captured by hideous creatures: “I was in the hands of a huge tribe of man-size, or nearly mansize, bats!” (LC 26). But the initial terror of the situation again dissipates in a long discussion of the comparative merits of the two species; and, as in the earlier tale, the explorer gains a “dawning sense of their uncanny superiority” (LC 42). Two long stories, one in each volume, “Dromenon” and “The Chapel of Ease,” seem to evoke the antiquarian ghost story of M. R. James, but their ultimate focus is elsewhere. The first tells of a scholar on Gothic architecture who goes to a country church and meets the organist, with whom he seems to undergo strange mystical experiences. In the other, a civil servant during wartime takes refuge in an old Norman church and first hears curious groaning and sobbing from no apparent source and then sees a figure—perhaps a symbol for the “sheer misery of existence” (LC 210) during a world war. But both stories are too prolix and, at times, intellectualised to be effective weird narratives. Somewhat more conventional are two tales of metempsychosis, “The Swap” (in which two professors switch bodies, each finding the other’s horribly uncomfortable) and “The Cat, ‘I Am’” (in which a cat appears to exhibit human personality traits). Heard gained more celebrity for his unorthodox mystery novels—such as A Taste for Honey (1941), about killer bees—and his science fiction novels and tales than his weird work, but the latter is an interesting if ultimately insignificant contribution to the literary supernaturalism of the period.
It is difficult to treat the short fiction of Gerald Kersh (1911–1968) in the context of supernatural literature, since—as with his younger contemporary Robert Aickman, to be discussed in the following chapter— so many of his tales are “strange” without being explicitly horrific or supernatural. In his half a dozen or more collections from 1944 to 1964, one or more weird items could reliably be found; most of them were gathered in the compilations On an Odd Note (1958) and Nightshade and Damnations (1968), the latter assembled by Harlan Ellison, who has been a particular champion of Kersh’s work. Consider “The Queen of Pig Island” (1953). Here a motley array of members of a freak show—including a beautiful woman with no arms and legs (the queen of the title)—are stranded on a deserted island. Nothing remotely supernatural occurs, but the tale is nonetheless infused with an appealing sense of strangeness. More closely approaching the supernatural is the eccentric fairy tale “Seed of Destruction” (1947), where a ring that is said to bring bad luck if it is given or stolen (as opposed to being purchased) brings bad luck. The story seems to be a commentary on human credulity, as doubt is cast on the truthfulness of the man telling the tale— until it is seen that he himself has died as a result of being given the ring. As with Heard, several of Kersh’s tales straddle the borderline between supernatural horror and science fiction, including his most noteworthy tale, “Men without Bones” (1954). In this shocking narrative, a professor tracks down legends of “a race of gods that came down from the sky in a great flame when the world was very young” (54). Actual remnants of the ship, apparently from Mars, are found, as also are a race of small boneless men— but how could these creatures have built the metal ship? In one of the most striking climaxes in weird fiction, the professor realises to his horror that we are the Martians and that the boneless men are the “humans”—the original inhabitants of this planet. There is a double emotive impact here: not only is our own species suddenly seen to be a group of alien invaders, but the loathsomeness of the boneless creatures makes us question the very meaning of what it is to be “human.” “Voices in the Dust of Annan” (1947) tells of the ruins of a city named Annan, whose precise location Kersh deliberately obscures. It turns out to be the city of London—for we are in the far future, after a cataclysmic war. Vaguely similar is “The Brighton Monster” (1948), where a monster found off the coast of Brighton in 1745 proves to be a Japanese man thrown back
in time by the atom bomb. More conventionally supernatural is “The Eye” (1957), where the eyes of a criminal, transplanted into the body of a child, compels the child to speak in the patois of the criminal. In “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953) the corporal of the title makes the outrageous claim that he is 438 years old: in the sixteenth century he had been the recipient of a magic potion from an alchemist that allowed even fatal wounds to heal in short order. Once again, the credibility of the taleteller is at issue—but his uncanny knowledge of events of the remote past (he had once met Shakespeare: “puffy-faced man, bald on top; used to wave his hands about when he talked” [185]) seem to ring true. . . . In recent decades the work of L. T. C. Rolt (1910–1974), as contained in the volume Sleep No More (1948), has found a new audience, especially when it was reprinted in anthologies by Hugh Lamb; but his work is in fact disappointingly conventional. While it cannot be said that he is one of M. R. James’s cadre of undistinguished disciples and imitators, he did confess to have been inspired by James’s ghost stories from an early age. The fact becomes plain in the routine supernatural scenarios found in his tales: conventional supernatural revenge in “The Cat Returns” and “Bosworth Summit Pound,” an elemental (“whatever that may mean”! [82]) in “Agony of Flame,” the haunting of a foundry in “Hawley Bank Foundry,” and psychic possession in “Music Hath Charms.” In several tales there is an unconscionable vagueness in the very nature of the weird or supernatural phenomenon, as in “Cwm Garon,” in which a man ultimately sees a black mass being held at a Welsh church and concludes that “there stalked through the valley something intangible, unearthly, monstrous and very terrible” (48–49). All that distinguishes Rolt’s work is a heartfelt love of the English countryside and a technical knowledge of engineering, railways, canals, and even music boxes. “New Corner” is at least notable for its novelty of setting —an apparently haunted section of a racetrack. But again there is no account of why the haunting has occurred, and all we are given is a coy conclusion: “I think there is something on the inside of that fence that is best left alone” (32).
iii. Some Novelists With the demise of such titans as Machen, Dunsany, and Blackwood, and with such of their successors as Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber producing only the occasional novel of note, the supernatural novel fell upon hard times at midcentury, just as the supernatural short story did with the demise of the pulp magazines. But one figure who dominated the period—in terms of sales, at any rate, and in the general absence of much competition—must now be addressed: the prolific British writer Dennis Wheatley (1897–1977). From as early as 1933 up to a few years before his death, Wheatley produced an array of sizeable novels that had the minimal virtue of keeping the supernatural in the purview of the reading public. With the bestseller The Devil Rides Out (1934), Wheatley appeared to find a successful formula in a mix of Satanism, black magic, and derring-do adventure. In the end he published more than fifty novels. But Wheatley is an unspeakably bad writer in every possible understanding of the term. His writing is verbose and slipshod, he succumbs to nearly every sin of popular fiction (stereotyped characters, naive goodvs.-evil moral dichotomy, contrived cliffhanger endings of chapters, an “easy-reading” prose style entirely lacking in distinction or novelty), and he resurrected the stalest of supernatural scenarios—specifically, the incursion of the Devil and his minions into modern life—in a manner that makes clear his personal belief in this baleful Christian hallucination. All Wheatley’s deficiencies as a writer are on embarrassing display in the novel The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948). Here a young crippled airman seems to be beset in his house by “some form of devil,” which he assumes is “one of those forces of evil that are said to have been let loose in the world after Satan and his host were defeated by the Archangel Michael and cast down out of Heaven” (4). Jugg—who tells the story in long, tedious diary entries—manifestly speaks for Wheatley himself in his regret at the increasing scepticism of the age (“Satan has become rather a figure of fun these days” [4]), but he himself has a very different idea: “it seems impossible to doubt the existence of demons” (5). Thereafter, Jugg
elaborates a painfully inept sociology of belief that reads like a tract written by a notably dense fundamentalist Christian. He himself, he makes clear, was once an atheist, but he has changed his mind—and now the octopusshaped creature he sees occasionally outside his window is undoubtedly a demon summoned to plague him . . . for what exact purpose is not entirely clear. Wheatley evidently realises that this supernatural manifestation is not of any particular interest in its own right, so he lards his tale with all manner of inessential data to pad his work out to suitable novel length. This includes the revelation that Jugg saw a ghost as a child and also had an odd experience as a teenager in school—which would lead most people to wonder whether Jugg is not merely hallucinating his present supernatural siege. And there is the question of why he is being so beset. Jugg himself comes to believe that the villain is his former tutor, one Helmuth Lisický, who Jugg is at pains to note is himself a dogmatic atheist, but who is apparently using the supernatural to gain power over Jugg—or, more precisely, the large amount of money that will come to him on his twentyfirst birthday. So the majority of The Haunting of Toby Jugg is spent in Jugg’s repeated attempts to escape from the house—attempts that are continually foiled by Helmuth’s superior ingenuity. It does not help that Jugg, as is frequent in Wheatley’s novels, engages in a jingoistic nationalism—for it turns out that Helmuth the atheist is (naturally) a communist working to undermine the valiant British nation; worse, Helmuth also proves to be a Satanist, and the head of a band of like-minded villains called the Brotherhood that seeks nothing less than to take over the entire British government and other institutions, in part by securing the wealth of people like Toby Jugg. At this point the novel has collapsed of its own absurdity, but Jugg relentlessly pursues his escape from the evil Helmuth, which he finally manages to accomplish by the partial assistance of a nurse, Sally, with whom he has fallen in love. But mere human contrivance isn’t sufficient for the task: God has to be brought in. In a predictable deus ex machina, Jugg finds that at a critical moment his power of locomotion is miraculously restored to him: “God had heard my prayer. I found that I was standing up” (303). More remarkable still, the convenient flooding of an underground chapel from the nearby lake
manages to drown the entire Brotherhood, gathered there in a nefarious Black Mass. It is remarkable that Wheatley can believe that such hackneyed mumbojumbo can pass muster in an age of widening scepticism; but his audience was plainly the great unwashed who either lapped up his feeble defence of Christian orthodoxy or those equally brainless readers who wanted the vicarious titillation of witnessing the nefarious doings of Satanists and their ilk. The mechanical repetition of these trite motifs in novel after novel— Strange Conflict (1941), To the Devil—a Daughter (1953), The Satanist (1960), and on and on and on—provides conclusive evidence that bestselling writers are almost uniformly beneath critical notice. The only mercy is that Wheatley’s unending succession of windy blockbusters have now found the oblivion they eminently deserve. Another bestseller—Uneasy Freehold (1941) by the Irish writer Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958), published in the United States as The Uninvited (1942) and the basis of a stylish 1944 film—is a somewhat different proposition. While a bit long-winded, this novel is at least a literate and moderately compelling read, with lovingly drawn characters and crisp prose. The supernatural phenomenon here—evidently the ghost of a woman who died in a house, Cliff End, on the Devon coast—is also rather venerable, but the overall handling is able. In the end, the novel proves to be a kind of supernatural detective story, in that the new owners of the house, a brother and sister named Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald, must ascertain the exact causes of the death of two women who both seem to haunt the house. Macardle wrote a few other novels involving the supernatural—Fantastic Summer (1946), Dark Enchantment (1953)—but they are less notable than The Uninvited. The first original novel that August Derleth published with Arkham House was Witch House (1945) by American writer Evangeline Walton (1907–1996). It is creditable, though far from remarkable. Drawing upon the New England witchcraft panic of the late seventeenth century, the novel focuses on Betty-Ann Stone, an eight-year-old girl who appears to be the victim of a succession of supernatural phenomena, including the appearances of a black hare and a white kitten. In the end, this novel, like The Uninvited, is a tangled tale of love and betrayal spanning the generations, with the supernatural elements finally dispelled by a physician,
Gaylord Carew. Walton achieved greater celebrity by a series of fantasy novels in the 1970s based on the Welsh Mabinogion.
iv. Domestic Horror: Shirley Jackson Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) is something of a forgotten figure in American literature. Even the year of her birth was, until recently, a matter of doubt, since she herself cut off a few years and claimed to be born in 1919, so as not to appear older than her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919–1970). Because she was not firmly ensconced in either mainstream fiction or weird fiction, critics in both genres have tended to ignore her. Although mainstream critics admire her artistry in the short story, they disdain the oftentimes grim and horrific subject-matter of her tales and novels; while the horror community, noting that she published in the New Yorker and Mademoiselle instead of the horror or science fiction pulps (or, as they were on the point of dying, their successors, the digest magazines), seems to regard her as a dilettante who is merely slumming in their field. It is unclear to me how much orthodox weird fiction Jackson read; there is little evidence, judging solely from the internal evidence of her fiction, of any significant influence—or, indeed, any influence at all—from Lovecraft or other Weird Tales writers or even of older figures such as the Victorian ghost story writers, Bram Stoker, or Arthur Machen. Jackson’s weird writing, intensely character-based and domestic as it is, appears to have been a kind of strange outgrowth of her family life: the mother of four children and the wife of a notorious philanderer, Jackson papered over the traumas of her life in the dozens of sketches that she collected in her two utterly captivating books about her family, Life among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). So many of Jackson’s weird tales involve perversions of domestic or social scenarios that no dominant literary influence can or should be brought forth to account for their subject-matter or execution. One of Jackson’s relatively few comments on weird fiction occurred relatively early in her career, in 1948, when she addressed the issue of using the supernatural as a metaphor for human beings’ relations to each other and to society:
I have had for many years a consuming interest in magic and the supernatural. I think this is because I find there so convenient a shorthand statement of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best an inhuman world. . . . [E]verything I write [involves] the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment. (Oppenheimer 125) The ease with which Jackson can alternate between domestic fiction and weird fiction is illustrated by a single example. An uncollected story, “The House” (Woman’s Day, May 1952), was included in Life among the Savages —but not all of it. What seems, in that book, like an engaging autobiographical account of moving into a new house proves, in the magazine appearance, to be a ghost story about a physician (the original builder of the house, in 1816) whose presence continues to be felt. If it is the case that Jackson’s first weird tale is “The Lottery” (New Yorker, 26 June 1948), then we must ask why she wrote a spate of borderline horror stories at this precise juncture. I’m not sure of the answer, and I’m not sure an answer can be given. Even “The Lottery,” manifestly non-supernatural as it is, fits only uneasily into the rubric of weird fiction, unless we assume that the overall scenario—the very existence of a lottery of the sort depicted in the story—throws the tale into the realm of alternateworld science fiction. What “The Lottery” is about is, of course, scapegoating—but, more specifically, it is an instantiation of a comment Jackson made in her novel Hangsaman (1951): “Another instance . . . of ritual gone to seed” (62). The lottery is based on the continuing belief that a human sacrifice must be made to ensure good crops, and it is precisely the townspeople’s resolute determination to preserve this outmoded and irrational rite that generates horror. Another story from this period, “The Summer People” (1949), is a potent tale of psychological horror. When a couple decide to remain in their summer cottage past Labor Day—something that has never done before— they quickly find themselves the recipients of increasingly vicious vengeance on the part of the locals, who resent this violation of long-held custom.
Some of Jackson’s most effective tales are those that tread the borderline between psychological and supernatural horror, resulting in an unidentifiable atmosphere that Robert Aickman would simply label “strange.” The celebrated tale “The Daemon Lover” (1949) tells of a lonely young woman, Margaret, who seeks to lend meaning to her existence by apparently fabricating the existence of a lover, James Harris, to whom she believes herself to be engaged. When he fails to show up at her apartment, she ventures out to look for him. Various individuals seem to point her in the direction where they think Harris has gone—but the perennially unanswered question is: Does James Harris have any existence outside Margaret’s imagination? But if he does not, why are these other people apparently fostering her delusion? Then there is “The Lovely House” (1952), perhaps Jackson’s most subtle weird tale. Here a college girl, again named Margaret, comes to the home of her friend Carla Rhodes for a visit. The tale develops a powerful atmosphere of weirdness through the deliberately artificial dialogue—it is as if all the characters know they are in a work of fiction. Carla’s mother has, throughout the story, been weaving a tapestry of the house. At the conclusion we read the following: “You will not leave us before my brother comes again?” Carla asked Margaret. “I have only to put the figures into the foreground,” Mrs. Rhodes said, hesitating on her way to the drawing room. “I shall have you exactly if you sit on the lawn near the river.” “We shall be models of stillness,” said Carla, laughing. “Margaret, will you come and sit beside me on the lawn?” (Come Along with Me 120) What has apparently happened is that Margaret is being woven into the fabric of the house by way of the tapestry. Other tales by Jackson are perhaps too tenuous—or too much on the borderline of the weird—for detailed analysis. There is “The Renegade” (1948), in which a family newly moved into a country town find the neighbours recommending increasingly hideous and cruel punishments for
their purportedly misbehaving dog. There is “Pillar of Salt” (1948), about a woman from the country so terrified of being in New York City that she is unable to cross a street. And there is “The Intoxicated” (1949). A man at a rather boring party encounters a girl of seventeen who is harrowingly certain that the world is going to come to an end soon. Is she right?—in which case she is (supernaturally) clairvoyant. Is she insane?—in which case the tale is one of psychological suspense. Or is she merely a kind of tease?—in which case she is a little sadist, making the tale a different kind of psychological suspense. That Jackson refrains from answering these questions attests to the artistic restraint of her work. Jackson published six novels in her lifetime, from 1948 to 1962. Of these, at least four are of interest from a weird context. The Bird’s Nest (1954) is perhaps the most disappointing of them: an account of a woman with multiple personalities, the novel could have been an effective tale of psychological horror were it not for its clumsy execution and the unsuccessful portrayal of the excessively rational psychologist who is treating the woman. The Sundial (1958) is an utterly unclassifiable tale of the Halloran family, which is convinced that the rest of the world is soon going to end. The entire novel takes place within the house where a motley array of family members are gathered, each with their own idiosyncrasies and all of them tyrannised by the domineering Mrs. Halloran. The atmosphere of claustrophic bizarrerie is unmatched, for all that nothing overtly supernatural occurs. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) are Jackson’s most exhaustive contributions to weirdness, the one from a supernatural, the other from a non-supernatural perspective. I am far from endorsing the common view that The Haunting of Hill House is the best haunted-house novel ever written; for my money, the palm ought now to be awarded to Ramsey Campbell’s The House on Nazareth Hill (1996). Hill House—whose premise is the attempt by Dr. John Montague to enlist three other individuals (all with purported psychic abilities) to investigate the nature of the “haunting” of Hill House—is, in fact, a bit diffuse and unfocused, and its plethora of supernatural phenomena seem to be paraded somewhat unsystematically merely to create a shudder. Where the novel triumphs is in its exquisitely delicate but cumulatively powerful portrayal of its central figure, the lonely spinster (the sexist word precisely suits this context) Eleanor Vance, perhaps Jackson’s most skilfully etched
portrait of the weak-willed, love-starved woman. Some of the details in this novel are uncommonly fine. At one point, the guests find some crude writing on the wall—“HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (103). The wording is significant: it is not “Help Eleanor go home,” which would seem to be the more natural expression if the sense is that Eleanor should leave Hill House; rather, the sentence suggests that Eleanor must be made to feel at home, that Hill House is where she belongs—or, as she herself says toward the end, “Hill House belongs to me” (173). It is in this context that we are to understand the constant repetition of the plangent Shakespearean line “Journeys end in lovers meeting”—for Eleanor has made a long journey to be at Hill House, the only entity that has truly loved her and where she has become the person she wants to be. It is inevitable, therefore, that she kills herself in a car accident when she is forced by the others to leave the edifice, echoing the fate of the last occupant of Hill House two decades before. We Have Always Lived in the Castle brings Jackson’s satirical skills to the forefront in its searing display of the hatred and occasional violence directed at the Blackwood family for past derelictions that are only revealed at the conclusion. The town’s shunning of the family, especially the sisters Mary Katherine (called Merricat) and Constance, escalates to the point where the house is finally burned down. Ostensibly, this ostracism is incited by the deaths of several family members by poisoning six years earlier, a crime for which Constance was tried and found innocent; it is perhaps no surprise that, in the end, we learn that Merricat is the true culprit. The vicious mutual hatred exhibited by the townspeople and by the Blackwood sisters, especially Merricat, raises this novel to a Biercian level of misanthropic horror. Although the number of actual supernatural specimens in Jackson’s work is quite small, her work as a whole is pervaded with an abiding sense of the weirdness that can emerge from the commonest elements of ordinary life. Her penetrating understanding of human character, and especially of human loneliness even in the midst of crowds, and the rapierlike satire that she frequently directed at the bountiful instances of greed, stupidity, smallmindedness, hypocrisy, and other lamentably common human foibles render much of her work chillingly terrifying even when nothing overtly bizarre occurs. Jackson now seems, belatedly, to be garnering the attention in the mainstream community that she deserves, as the recent (2010)
Library of America volume of her work attests; it would be welcome if the weird community similarly embraced a consummate literary artist who was able to span what can occasionally seem like a yawning gulf between the mainstream and the weird.
XV. Anticipations of the Boom The 1950s and 1960s, while constituting somewhat of a dearth in the actual production of supernatural or horror literature—several of the most significant writers of the time, among them Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont, chose to dabble in the genre by way of suspense or science fiction, while such a superlative writer as Robert Aickman received little attention—the era set the stage for the horror “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s in a number of ways. Chief among them was the gradual emergence of horror in the media, specifically film and television. Of course, horror films had been prevalent since the silent era, including such classics as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1926); but most of these films, as well as such of their successors as Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and The Wolfman (1941), were regarded as somewhat sub rosa, the appreciation of which was considered something of a guilty pleasure. That began to change gradually in the 1940s, with the issuance of somewhat more stylish films such as The Uninvited (1944) and even whimsies such as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and Harvey (1950), which slowly acclimated viewers—and, by extension, readers—to the incursion of supernatural elements. The central figure in this transition may have been Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), whose films not only embodied an immeasurably superior technical skill than the B movies of the period but whose ventures into psychological suspense often came close to actual horror. Such films as Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) featured terror and psychological aberration in no small measure, while Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) —the pinnacles of his excursions into, respectively, non-supernatural and supernatural horror—were adapted from celebrated literary works.
Hitchcock capitalised on his personal celebrity as an icon of horror and suspense by launching such television shows as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (1955–61) and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” (1962), the former containing many adaptations of horror tales, as well as original teleplays, by Robert Bloch among others. Other television shows followed in their wake: “One Step Beyond” (1959–61), “Thriller” (1960–62), “The Outer Limits” (1963–65), and, most celebrated of all, “The Twilight Zone” (1959–64), hosted by Rod Serling. Both Hitchcock and Serling published horror anthologies over their names—Hitchcock’s many anthologies, beginning with Suspense Stories (1945) and including the significantly titled Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV (1957), were largely compiled by Robert Arthur and included a fair proportion of crime and suspense stories taken from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (1956f.); some of these, especially those by the prolific Henry Slesar (1927–2002), featured a fair modicum of psychological and physical horror. Serling added his bit with such volumes as Rod Serling’s Triple W (1963), ghost-edited by Gordon R. Dickson. At the same time, several long-running series of horror tales, from The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959f.), edited by Herbert Van Thal, to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964f.), the first eight volumes of which were edited by Robert Aickman, presented a wide array of both “classic” and contemporary horror fiction, even though the Pan series rapidly degenerated into forays of gruesome bloodletting. The effect of this multimedia blitz in nurturing the public’s taste for horror cannot be overestimated. “The Twilight Zone,” bringing the work of an array of contemporary writers such as Matheson, Beaumont, and Bradbury into American living rooms, was vital in creating a potential audience for literary (or, shall we say, popular) ventures into psychological and supernatural horror, while such directors as Roger Corman continued to fill movie theatres with adaptations from Poe, Lovecraft, and other classic writers. It was only a matter of time before enterprising writers would capitalise on this fertile field and catapult themselves on to the bestseller lists.
i. Throwbacks: Russell, Kirk, Brennan, Walter, Du Maurier The increasing advance of weird fiction into the literary mainstream engendered a curious backlash among certain writers who sought to return the genre to its roots—in some cases all the way back to the Gothic novel, in other cases to the pulp era that had ended in the mid-1950s. Accordingly, we are faced with a succession of writers who consciously associated themselves with an older tradition; but in many cases this nostalgia failed to result in work of any great note. American writer Ray Russell (1924–1999) made no secret of his thirst for the past. In the curiously defensive introduction to Unholy Trinity (1967), he expressed a yearning for older means of expression that go far beyond mere nostalgia to a kind of reactionary aestheticism. Speaking of a bygone day “in which romance and gallantry still lived, when candlelight or the soft glow of the gas lamp diffused and blurred the hard times of reality, when the night was still a silence broken only occasionally by the whipping of capes or the clip-clop of hooves upon cobblestones,” Rusell concluded that he was “thoroughly weary of the twentieth century” (ix–x). The result was the three Gothic novellas that form the volume. Chronologically, the first of these is “Sardonicus” (1960), in which a British physician of the later nineteenth century, Sir Robert Cargrave, receives an invitation from an old lover, Maude Randall (now the wife of Mr. Sardonicus), to visit them in their castle in Bohemia. Sardonicus tells Cargrave that he must remedy a deformity that has plagued him ever since he dug up his father’s grave to secure a winning lottery ticket: he is plagued with in inflexible grin (the risus sardonicus) that seems impervious to medical treatment. If Cargrave does not succeed in his task, Sardonicus will subject his wife to various unspeakable punishments. The tale actually proves to be one of psychological, not supernatural, horror: from the beginning it is plain that psychological trauma has caused the risus, and Cargrave’s apparently successful remedy—a muscle-relaxing potion supposedly concocted from plants—is in fact, as he admits at the end,
nothing but distilled water. And in a final twist, Sardonicus suffers from an opposite condition: his muscles are now (in his own mind) so loose that he cannot open his mouth to feed himself, and so he dies. “Sagittarius” (1962) is set in the Paris of 1909 and involves an actor at the Grand Guignol who may or may not be the mediaeval mass murderer Gilles de Rais and may also may or may not be the son of the person on whom Robert Louis Stevenson based The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and who, finally, may in fact be Jack the Ripper! This tale suffers from having too many purportedly clever twists and too many allusions to prior legend and literature, so that it collapses of its own pretentious absurdity. The final story, “Sanguinarius” (1967), is a tale of the “vampire countess” Elisabeth Bathory, who narrates in the first person how she was unwittingly led by a gypsy to committing various acts of sadomasochism. The novelty of approach—the assumption that Bathory was fundamentally guiltless in the commission of the crimes attributed to her—and the effective archaism of the prose are what distinguish this tale. Russell’s other work in the short story is uninspired, marred by facile jack-in-the-box twists and a general lack of substance and depth. “Comet Wine” (1967) is a pseudo-sequel to “Sardonicus” in resurrecting Cargrave, who encounters a Russian composer who has sold his soul to the Devil for musical genius. “The Runaway Lovers” (1967) is a conte cruel—about the wife of a duke and her lover who are allowed to escape from a dungeon only to be caught again—that is too similar to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s much superior tale on the same subject, “The Torture by Hope.” Curiously, in light of Russell’s manifest aesthetic antiquarianism, he wrote a number of (uninteresting and undistinguished) tales of science fiction over the course of his career. Russell’s novel The Case against Satan (1962) is worth treating not because it is in any way a successful horror novel but because it set the stage for a much more celebrated successor. This superficial, clumsy, and stilted novel of a sixteen-year-old girl who is apparently the victim of authentic demonic possession, who is saved in the end by a priest and a bishop who conduct an exorcism to evict the annoying devil, is only a few notches above hackwork. The pathetic earnestness of Russell’s belief in the fundamental reality of what he has narrated—emphasised in a brief afterword to the novel—makes one regret the degree to which religious
orthodoxy can so disfigure a work of supernatural fiction as to render it laughable and preposterous. Russell’s best work in the field came not as an author but as an editor. As an editor at Playboy from 1954 to 1960, and a consulting editor for years thereafter, he defied his own devotion to traditional supernaturalism by publishing the innovative work of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and others. He was also the unacknowledged editor of several anthology of weird tales from Playboy, including the notable Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural (1967). Conservatism of a very different kind is evident in the ghost stories of Russell Kirk (1918–1994), best known to the general public as the author of an unrelenting mass of politically conservative propaganda, beginning with The Conservative Mind (1953) and continuing on through many windy treatises, oceans of editorial columns, and other work. Along the way he managed to write several collections of weird tales, including The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), The Princess of All Lands (1979), and Watchers at the Strait Gate (1984), as well as several novels. But Kirk’s work is crippled not only by the many crotchets that he addressed in his political writing—dislike of liberals and communists (much the same thing in his mind), scorn of the welfare state, disdain of gays and lesbians, and a fervent and aggressive Roman Catholicism—but, more seriously from our point of view, by a clumsiness in the manipulation of supernatural phenomena. Consider an early story, “Ex Tenebris” (1962). Here the ghost of a dead vicar protects an old woman from eviction from her cottage by throttling the “planning officer” who seeks to level the area for new development. Not only is the caricature of the planning officer ineffably crude, but his murder is an obvious deus ex machina that is aesthetically ludicrous. “The Surly Sullen Bell” (1950) is similarly flawed. What appears to be an effective supernatural conception—a man is slowly absorbing the life-force of his wife by dominating her physically (he had spoken mystically of a “spiritual triumph” [64])—proves to be nothing more than a sordid tale of poisoning. Another early story, “Behind the Stumps” (1950), features—as a number of other Kirk tales do—an effective portrayal of the topography of rural Michigan, but is merely the tale of a ghost of an old witch. Other stories by Kirk prove to be equally inept as far as the supernatural is concerned. In “Uncle Isaiah” (1951) the title character, apparently a
reanimated corpse, manages to spirit away an extortioner. “Sorworth Place” (1952) initially creates an effective atmosphere of a haunted house, but it resolves absurdly. A woman, Ann Lurlin, is afraid that her dead husband will fulfil his promise to return a year after his death to kill her, and she somehow manages to persuade an acquaintance, Ralph Bain, to be with her as the fateful day approaches. He confronts the dead husband and apparently tackles him on the roof, whereupon both fall down and apparently die (the one for the first time, the other for the second). “Saviourgate” (1979?) is a follow-up to the story, where Bain finds his way into the bar of a hotel that proves to be some kind of antechamber to Heaven; but the whole story is nothing more than a pedantic discuission of the afterlife. Kirk reaches the nadir of supernatural absurdity in “The Princess of All Lands” (1979?), where a woman named Yolande (part Native American and apparently possessed of unspecified magical powers) picks up a young female hitchhiker who forces her to drive to her house, where she, her father, and her brother plan to brutalise her in the customary manner; but of course Yolande manages to summon her powers in the nick of time and set the loathsome trio aflame. Not much better is “Lex Talionis” (1979), where an ex-con, Eddie Mahaffy, who got religion in jail dispatches another criminal who had sought to pressure him to commit robbery. This kind of treacly moralism is regrettably prevalent in Kirk’s work, where we know all too clearly who are, in his view, the good guys and who are the bad. Later stories reveal a surprisingly effective portrayal of lower-class life in the urban slums, such as “The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost” (1983), although in this long and complex narrative the supernatural element seems adventitious, and the morality of the tale is as naive as other of Kirk’s. Several of his tales involve a character named Manfred Arcane, who in “The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion” (1980) manages to ward off an evil individual who seeks to evict his soul from his body by clinging to a crucifix. “The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Castle” (1983) effectively employs archaic language in presenting an old document that tells a longwinded and anticlimactic tale of ghosts, revenants, and romance, where again the supernatural does not seem central to the overall narrative. For some inexplicable reason Kirk won the World Fantasy Award for the prolix tale “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” (1976), in which, so far
as any sense can be made of it, an ex-con has been reincarnated in the present day because he saved the lives of a family back in 1915. Kirk’s two early novels, Old House of Fear (1961) and A Creature of the Twilight (1966), suggest the supernatural without actually invoking it; and both are windy and verbose exercises in “Gothicism,” adventure, and the usual display of Kirk’s bêtes noires. Although gifted with a prose style of elegance and verve, Kirk was far too addicted to the sound of his own voice, with the result that most of his tales are far longer than they need be; and the naive moralism that renders so many of them the equivalent of political tracts consigns the great majority of them to aesthetic oblivion. Joseph Payne Brennan (1918–1990) might be regarded as a kind of throwback to the pulp era—in fact, one of his earliest published stories, the elegantly titled “Slime,” actually appeared in Weird Tales (March 1953), so he could be considered one of the last relics of the pulp era. But the sad fact is that Brennan, genial and engaging as he was as a person, was plagued by a phenomenon we shall see increasingly in the later stages of this study— the occasional ability to devise a clever supernatural idea but an utter deficiency of literary talent to execute it competently. The hallmark of Brennan’s work is an almost childishly simple, unadorned prose that might be thought to facilitate the subtle incursion of the weird; but in reality this flatness of style renders his conceptions preposterous and absurd because of an insufficiency of atmospheric preparation. “Slime” itself—dealing with an amorphous entity emerging from the depths of the ocean, and almost certainly inspired jointly by Lovecraft’s shoggoth (from At the Mountains of Madness) and a similar entity in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Vaults of YohVombis”—is entirely lacking in imaginative scope, for the entity is actuated merely by insatiable hunger and, once having emerged on to the land as a result of a volcanic upheaval, merely consumes a certain number of hapless human beings and animals before being routed by a flamethrower. Other stories are similarly lacklustre. “The Corpse of Charlie Rull” (1959) fuses horror and science fiction in its depiction of a corpse that is reanimated by radioactive waste. “Canavan’s Back Yard” (1958) has gained a celebrity for no reason that I can fathom, although its portrayal of a man’s back yard that, because of a witch’s curse, appears at times to be of infinite extension is minimally more imaginative than other of Brennan’s tales. “The Willow Platform” (1973) is one of several tales that feature the one notable element of Brennan’s work—an effectiveness in the portrayal of the
ignorant and stunted lives of rustic folk. But this story about a farmer who summons a wendigo or elemental is no more interesting, from a supernatural perspective, than other of his works. Brennan occasionally dabbled in non-supernatural horror, but to no great purpose. “Disappearance” (1959) is the longwinded story of a man who murders his brother and sets him up as a scarecrow on his farm, while “The Impulse to Kill” (1959) could have been an interesting tale—a man lures hoodlums to rob him so that he can kill them—if there were any penetrating psychological analysis of the murderer; but there isn’t. The one story where Brennan’s elementary prose may actually enhance the effect of the scenario is “Levitation” (1958), even though its premise is a bit artificial. A hypnotist at a carnival puts a man to sleep and makes him levitate—at which point the hypnotist dies of a heart attack. The body continues to levitate, foiling attempts by others to catch it; and the final line —“Then it disappeared altogether” (36)—expresses in potent simplicity the terror of the inexplicable scene. Brennan was the author of one of the only fourteen volumes that Arkham House published in the 1950s, Nine Horrors and a Dream (1958). He published other collections of his tales through his own press, Macabre House, including The Dark Returners (1959) and Scream at Midnight (1963). Later volumes include Stories of Darkness and Dread (1973) and several collections of light-hearted tales of the psychic detective Lucius Leffing, but these are scarcely to be taken seriously. Brennan is probably a better poet than a fiction writer, and his simplicity of utterance can be highly effective in short, pungent poems of fantasy and terror. Arkham House’s Nightmare Need (1964) is well worth seeking out, as is the later Sixty Selected Poems (1985). The Anglo-Welsh writer Elizabeth Walter (1930?–2006) can be treated here. Although substantially superior to Brennan in matters of prose, character portrayal, and story construction, her work too suffers from the conventionality of its supernatural manifestations. Walter published a number of weird collections in the 1960s and 1970s, including Snowfall and Other Chilling Events (1965) and The Sin-Eater and Other Scientific Impossibilities (1967); the Arkham House volume In the Mist and Other Uncanny Encounters (1979) was her own selection of her best tales. What we find in these stories are relatively routine ghosts, revenants, and so forth, enlivened—when enlivened at all—by crispness of characterisation and a
fine ability at landscape description, particularly of the Cornwall and the Welsh Border country, where she dwelt for many years. Walter worked best in the long short story or novella, which allowed her to expand on her literary strengths. “The Sin-Eater” (1967) may not be quite as gripping as the 1895 tale by Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), but it is an effective rendering of that old myth. Several of her tales involve the sea or seafaring, but the best of these may be “The Island of Regrets” (1965), where a supernatural curse is ingeniously interwoven with a man’s reluctance to marry the domineering woman to whom he has become engaged. Somewhat along the same lines is perhaps Walter’s single most effective tale, “The Spider” (1967), which similarly links a man’s fear of spiders with his growing fear of a lonely woman who, spiderlike, clearly wishes to possess both his body and his soul. But overall, Walter’s work lacks distinctiveness and novelty. Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) might be discussed here if only because, like the great majority of popular writers, her work embodies an aesthetic conservatism that was in large part the secret of her success—if, of course, the writing of an endless array of best-selling novels counts as “success.” Rebecca (1940) is, in fact, a modest success in the literary as well as the popular sense; and this throwback to the Gothic novels of a century and a half earlier could in a sense be considered a kind of nonsupernatural variant of Poe’s “Ligeia,” where a dead first wife comes to dominate her living successor. Although the true villain of the piece proves to be the first wife’s maid, the novel—and, more so, the Hitchcock film— creates a powerful sense of the lingering presence of the first Mrs. De Winter. None of du Maurier’s many novels are supernatural in any meaningful sense, but several of her shot stories—or, rather, novelettes and novellas— are. Regrettably, a number of these are marred by flaws of one kind or another, chiefly prolixity. “The Apple Tree” (1952) is too transparent in its identification of an old apple tree with a man’s deceased wife and a young tree with a young “helper” during the war whom the man (never named, oddly enough) groped on one occasion. As for the celebrated tale “The Birds” (1952), it is a textbook instance of a poor story that can be saved by imaginative treatment in film. Hitchcock’s 1963 movie bears almost no relation to the story except in the basic premise of birds attacking human beings—a premise no doubt lifted from Machen’s The Terror (1917), and
one that du Maurier handles even more clumsily than Machen himself did. Aside from offering not the slightest account or explanation of why birds of all kinds have suddenly teamed up to challenge humanity’s supremacy of the earth, the tale ends in a curiously inconclusive fashion—a British farmer and his family are barricaded in their house, waiting for the next attack—as if du Maurier, for once in her lifetime, became tired of spinning out her prose and simply decided to stop. “The Blue Lenses” (1959) is no more effective, its ridiculous premise—a blind woman fitted with blue lenses during an operation sees human beings endowed with the heads of animals —making it impossible to swallow. Two other stories are somewhat more effective tales of psychological and supernatural horror. “The Alibi” (1959) keenly portrays an ordinary officer worker who takes a flat in a run-down London neighbourhood and develops an anomalous relation with the young single mother from whom he rents a room. “Don’t Look Now” (1970) is unquestionably du Maurier’s best supernatural tale. When a man named John sees his wife, Laura, with a sad expression and in the company of a pair of elderly twin sisters, returning to their hotel in Venice when he believes she is on a plane back to England, we wonder whether he is simply mistaken or whether the twins are somehow kidnapping Laura. We are not inclined to believe one of the twins—a student of the occult—who maintains that what John saw was a vision of the future; but this hypothesis proves harrowingly true when John himself is killed, thereby accounting for the sadness of his wife. Du Maurier’s work is not, on the whole, notably distinguished for its supernatural imaginativeness, and her general lack of skill in the portrayal of character, for all her valiant attempts, renders her tales only slightly above the usual crop of best-selling writers; but now and again she is capable of vivid horrific effects, and her work is not to be entirely despised.
ii. Looking Ahead: Dahl, Grubb, Serling, Case More representative than the nostalgic writers who sought to take weird fiction back to its centuries-old roots is a group of writers, having little or no connexion with one another, who adopted to the full the modes and mannerisms of the literary mainstream and applied them to the weird. These writers succeeded in placing their work—short stories for the most part—in prestigious mainstream venues that helped to bring greater attention to the weird and thereby laid the foundations for the popular explosion of weird fiction in the early 1970s. Roald Dahl (1916–1990), a British writer of Norwegian parentage, burst on the scene in 1946 with a stirring collection of stories, Over to You (1946), based on his experiences as an RAF pilot during World War II. Working slowly and meticulously, Dahl began publishing short stories in major periodicals such as the New Yorker and Harper’s, publishing two celebrated collections, Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1960), which shall be our chief interest here. Dahl has customarily been seen as working in the tradition of satirical fantasy or horror, in the manner of Ambrose Bierce, Saki, L. P. Hartley, John Collier, and his contemporary Shirley Jackson. But there is such little overt supernaturalism or even anything remotely resembling horror in many of his tales that his inclusion within the rubric of the weird becomes highly problematical. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, there is—even more than in his presumed predecessors, just named—an element of authorial trickery in his work that makes it superficially clever but entirely insubstantial. Dahl, so far as I can tell, has no message to convey aside from a predictably cynical view of human nature and human relationships, especially the institution of marriage. (His own marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, although marred by painful misfortunes to some of their children, appears to have been a model of harmony, and he nursed her back from a serious illness in the 1960s; they divorced after thirty years of marriage.)
The one story in the entire corpus of Dahl’s early work that could be said to be supernatural is “The Wish” (1948), in which a child imagines that something dire will occur to him if he steps on either the black or the red portions of a carpet in his house; what seems a harmless game proves grimly real (“and at the last moment, instinctively he put out a hand to break the fall and the next thing he saw as this bare hand of his going right into the middle of a great glistening mass of black and he gave one piercing cry of terror as it touched” [116]). “The Sound Machine” (1949) is a science fiction/horror hybrid about a man who devises a machine that can hear vibrations above those detectable by the human ear—and learns that plants cry out in pain and horror when they are torn up. Fusing supernatural horror and tart satire is “William and Mary” (1959), in which a man with pancreatic cancer agrees to have a neurosurgeon friend of his extract his brain and preserve it, apparently indefinitely. The tale is really one of marital discord, as his wife then claims the brain and deliberately smokes in its presence, knowing that her late husband disapproved of the practice. Somewhat similar is “Royal Jelly” (1959), in which a beekeeper begins feeding his malnourished baby with milk laced with royal jelly (a secretion of bees used to feed queens, with the result that they become enormous). The formula seems at first to work wonders, but the suggestion is that the baby will similarly become incalculably huge. “Edward the Conqueror” (1953) is an ambiguous supernatural tale in which a woman begins to suspect that a stray cat that responds strongly to music is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt; this preposterous hypothesis seems to gain uncanny corroboration from the cat’s behaviour, which in many ways mimics Liszt’s known predilections. Her husband ostensibly thinks his wife is crazy and eventually throws the cat in the bonfire—or is he in fact unnerved that his wife may have been correct? The great majority of Dahl’s stories are of course non-supernatural, but the flippancy and mockery of the narrative voice have the unfortunate result of rendering them aesthetically innocuous, as readers merely wait for the surprise ending that they know will inevitably come. In only a few tales is there any searching analysis of aberrant personality. Perhaps the most accomplished is “Georgy Porgy” (1959), in which a curate who had had a traumatic experience as a child—he had been terrified by the sight of a mother rabbit eating one of her newborn babies, an incident that led him unwittingly to cause his own mother’s death—becomes alarmed by a
woman’s flirting with him: he develops the fantasy that he himself has been swallowed by her. The tone of this story is also light-hearted, but a grim substratum of psychological horror emerges. Less successful but still powerful is “Neck” (1953), in which a woman’s neck becomes stuck in a wooden sculpture by Henry Moore, causing her discontented husband nearly to cut it off with an axe. Here there is keen psychological analysis of all the relevant characters involved. Otherwise, we have merely a succession of crime stories—the most famous of which is, perhaps, “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1953), in which a woman murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then cooks the lamb and feeds it to the policemen investigating the case—or caper stories, such as “The Champion of the World” (1959), in which poachers attempt to steal pheasants from a wealthy landowner’s estate. As I have stated, it is difficult to find an overarching message or philosophy in Dahl’s stories, and many of them are far more susceptible than Bierce’s or Collier’s to the accusation of clever trickery. But Dahl’s influence in the field of weird fiction was perhaps greater than his own literary contributions reveal. Firstly, his writing, always skilful and elegant, was of the sort that appealed to the editors and readers of mainstream magazines, although in this regard Shirley Jackson preceded him by a few years. As such, his substantial fame and reputation—as a writer for both adults and children—elevated the tale of psychological horror out of the pulp ghetto. Much later, Dahl’s work extended into the media: while some of his tales were adapted for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in the 1950s, he adapted his own stories for the sporadic but longrunning series “Tales of the Unexpected” (1979–88), leading to reissues of his tales under the titles Tales of the Unexpected (1979) and More Tales of the Unexpected (1980). Dahl’s original writing, however, became increasingly less weird with the passage of time, and such a volume as Switch Bitch (1974) merely contains four long stories chiefly focused on sexual situations or aberrations. The American writer Davis Grubb (1919–1980) contributed to both supernatural and psychological horror with Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural (1964). Grubb had previously gained celebrity with the crime thriller Night of the Hunter (1953), adapted into a celebrated film two years later. The stories in his first collection are perhaps a bit lacking in emotive impact, but they gain cumulative strength from their meticulous
character portrayal and landscape description, especially of the author’s native West Virginia. One of Grubb’s earliest stories, “One Foot in the Grave,” actually appeared in Weird Tales (May 1948), but he subsequently published in more mainstream venues such as Collier’s and Woman’s Home Companion. “One Foot in the Grave” is an effective tale of a man’s detached foot that appears to gain a life of its own—but this is the least interesting facet of the story, which focuses instead on the unspoken love for the man that is felt by his secretary. Several of Grubb’s tales are tantalisingly ambiguous in their supernatural manifestations. In “Busby’s Rat” (1953), are we to believe that a man has developed an anomalous relationship with an immense river rat? In “The Rabbit Prince” (1949), does an itinerant magician turn a schoolteacher into a rabbit then back again? More conventionally supernatural are such tales as “The Horsehair Trunk” (1946), in which a man trains his soul to leave his body, with dire results; and “Where the Woodbine Twineth” (1964), which uses animate dolls effectively. Perhaps Grubb’s most powerful tale is “Radio” (1964), in which a radio that can’t be turned off becomes a symbol for the ubiquitous presence of intrusive technology into modern life. Of a quasi-science fiction sort is “Nobody’s Watching!” (1964), in which a television engineer has apparently discovered the means of transporting matter through space, doing so by means of a television. Has he actually sent an annoying television actor, Toby Burns (who, incidentally, was having an affair with the engineer’s wife), through the television set at three in the morning, when nobody is watching? And perhaps parts of Burns will come back at some point. . . . Grubb later wrote more weird tales in the volumes The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Tales (1978) and You Never Believe Me and Other Stories (1989). Although a few of his stories were adapted for television in shows by Hitchcock and Serling, his work generally fell uneasily between the weird and the mainstream, and he never received substantial recognition in either field. Another American writer, David Case (b. 1937), has also failed to receive his due as a weird writer. Case published a collection of novellas, The Cell: Three Tales of Horror (1969), with little fanfare, followed quickly by the short novel Fengriffen (1970), later packaged with two long stories as Fengriffen and Other Stories (1971). Evidently failing to receive
encouragement for this work, Case turned to other writing—including Westerns and hundreds of pornographic novels—before briefly returning to the horror field with a pair of novels, The Third Grave (1980) and Wolf Tracks (1981). In recent years he has resumed horror writing in such collections as Brotherly Love and Other Tales of Faith and Knowledge (1999) and Pelican Cay and Other Disquieting Tales (2010). Case’s early horror work is unusually thought-provoking, going well beyond mere shudder-coining. All three of the tales in The Cell deal with metempsychosis, but in radically differing manners. “The Cell” is the grim first-person account of a man who turns into a werewolf at every full moon. This seemingly conventional scenario is enlivened by the narrator’s unwitting revelations about his own disturbed mentality. Although denying that he is a “sex pervert” (53), he later reveals that his brutal killing and sexual mutilation of a young woman in the woods was impelled by his witnessing her having sex with two men in turn—with the result that, in his view, “that girl needed to be punished” (58). He later elaborates on his twisted justification of murder: And when one considers how many young men that woman would have debased, how many she would have led into sin and degradation and ruin . . . well, perhaps I have saved a good many. And surely the girl herself is better off dead. She had nothing whatsoever to live for. Young as she was, she was already old with win, and she could never have been happy in her depravity . . . (60– 61) More than the lycanthrope’s vicious killings, his sanctimonious rationalisations for his brutality engender the true horror in the narrative. “The Hunter” is a bit less successful. Focusing on a police investigation of a succession of murders in England, the tale makes little secret of the fact that the culprit is one Byron, a hunter who has evolved a brutal philosophy of violence—a kind of dumbing-down of Nietzsche’s vigorous “saying yes to life.” In the end, although lycanthropy is hinted at—a trail leading to a murder victim appears to show the perpetrator sometimes walking on two legs, sometimes on four—an unconvincing non-supernatural explanation (Byron has trained a wolverine to do his killing) is offered. The tale has
some relation to another unsuccessful venture, “Among the Wolves” (in Fengriffen and Other Stories), where an ecologist offers similarly crude Social Darwinist views as his justification for killing elderly people he regards as “useless.” The final tale in The Cell, “The Dead End,” may be the most impressive. A virtual short novel dealing with the expedition of Arthur Brookes, an employee of a London museum who travels to Tierra del Fuego to examine rumours of a “strange creature . . . that appeared vaguely manlike, but behaved like an animal” (92), the narrative comes to focus on a reclusive scientist, Hubert Hodson, who has been studying genetic mutation—and makes the remarkable claim that he knows what causes it. In the end, the creature, seen fleetingly throughout the tale, proves to be the result of Hodson’s manipulation of the genes of the creature’s parents. This skeletonic outline cannot begin to convey the textural richness of the story, with its vivid evocation of its desolate landscape and its impressive portrayal of a genuinely Nietzschean scientist seeking to engender the next stage of human evolution. The short novel Fengriffen might, again, seem a reversion to conventionality as a routine modern Gothic, set in an imposing mansion in England, but Case introduces novelty by deft characterisation and an unusually forthright sexual scenario. A psychologist named Pope is brought in to examine Charles Fengriffen’s wife Catherine, who appears vaguely disturbed and perhaps even insane. In the course of his examination he learns the hideous tale of Fengriffen’s grandfather, Henry, who had raped a woman who had just married one of his tenants, a woodsman named Silas, in a hideous resurrection of the practice of droit de seigneur. Silas curses Henry: “he made his vow: swore that the monstrous spirit evoked in the blood of this night would know no rest until it had known vengeance, and that the next virgin bride of Fengriffen House would taste the horror of violation” (68). Can Catherine be the virgin bride in question? When Charles hears his wife in the throes of sexual ecstasy and bursts into her bedroom, he finds no one—but the window is open. She is discovered to be pregnant soon thereafter. Throughout the text, the tale dances between a supernatural explanation (has a demon actually impregnated Catherine?) and a non-supernatural one (is the son of Silas the violator of his master’s wife?), until, at almost the very last line, the former appears to be confirmed.
Case’s work is rich in philosophical substance, and his prose is nuanced and deft. His novels, Wolf Tracks (a werewolf tale) and The Third Grave (a variation of the mummy theme), are less distinguished than his novellas, but the latter constitute a substantial contribution to the weird tale, for all their failure to receive attention when they were first published. Fame and notoriety were certainly not in short supply in the relatively brief but crowded career of Rod Serling (1924–1975), who burst on the scene with the scintillating mainstream teleplays Patterns (1955) and Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) before he initiated “The Twilight Zone” in 1959. Serling’s literary talents tend to be denigrated by those writers and critics who are perhaps resentful of his celebrity as a television personality, but they were not inconsiderable. He is properly to be regarded as a late member of The Group, although he was in fact older than both Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (both of whom he enlisted to write teleplays for “The Twilight Zone”). Serling’s three slim collections of “Twilight Zone” stories (1960–62), his collection of novellas The Season to Be Wary (1967), and his two volumes of “Night Gallery” stories (1971–72) comprise a far from insignificant addition to the weird literature of the period, if for no other reason than because their author’s fame allowed them to reach a far wider audience than might otherwise be the case. Serling’s early teleplays make clear his sympathy for down-and-outers and others who have have been on the short end of the socioeconomic spectrum. His weird work—ranging from grim tales of psychological horror and interpersonal conflict to innovative tales of science fiction—is no different; and his gift for pungent and cynical satire enliven narratives that might otherwise seem drearily mundane. Serling wrote up only a tiny fraction of his “Twilight Zone” teleplays into short stories—he found the task of writing short fiction inordinately difficult and painful—but they cover a wide thematic range, from chilling tales of obsession (“The Fever”—about a man who succumbs to gambling mania and accordingly endows a slot machine with quasi-human and malicious emotions) to nonsupernatural tales on contemporary themes (“The Shelter”—perhaps Serling’s finest tale, about the vicious in-fighting in a placid suburban community over who will occupy a fallout shelter when a nuclear attack appears imminent) to mordant science fiction stories (“The Rip Van Winkle Caper”—about thieves who bury a large quantity of gold and then seal
themselves away in suspended animation for a century, only to find upon awakening that gold is valueless). The misanthropy latent in several of these narratives reaches its pinnacle in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” where all it takes to turn people against one another is to “stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers” (TZ 134). And yet, Serling also succumbs perhaps a bit too frequently to sentimentality, although some of these ventures are undeniably effective. “The Big, Tall Wish” poignantly depicts a boy’s fervent wish that an ageing boxer win a fight—and the wish appears to accomplish the desired result. Nostalgia of the Bradbury sort is evoked in “Walking Distance” and “A Stop at Willoughby,” where harried businessmen appear to return, at least fleetingly, to the scenes of their cherished boyhood. Much less successful, in my estimation, are those tales by Serling that are overtly comic (“The Mighty Casey,” “The Whole Truth,” “Mr. Dingle, the Strong”), although “Showdown with Rance McGrew,” in which a cowboy actor appears to encounter the ghost of Jesse James, is effective as a self-parody. The three novelettes comprising The Season to Be Wary were later adapted as the two-hour pilot of “Night Gallery,” and they are among Serling’s most effective tales. His pungent cynicism is at its height here, with some imperishable metaphors: the Nazi pursued by Jews in “Escape Route” is “some stale breath left over from a death rattle” (60); and the hapless ex-fighter Charlie Hatcher, who in “Eyes” has agreed to give up his eyes so that they can be transplanted into the head of a wealthy socialite, is etched as follows: “What a Goddamned and miserable shame it was that God said to some men the moment they were born—‘You lose’” (145). The two volumes of “Night Gallery” stories are also powerful, although Serling expressed dissatisfaction with the television series as a whole, since editorial control rested with his producer, Jack Laird, who seemed to want pure horror without the heavy moral overlay that Serling was inclined to add. He commented on one occasion: “I wanted a series with distinction, with episodes that said something; I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but totally uncommentative on anything” (Engel 328). Not surprisingly, the stories that Serling wrote up from his teleplays are cleary commentative on something: “The Messiah on Mott Street,” in which a young Jewish boy apparently comes upon the Messiah— in the form of a black man—who cures his father; “They’re Tearing Down
Tim Riley’s Bar,” another excursion into nostalgia whose effectiveness is marred by an adventitious happy ending; and “Make Me Laugh,” an extraordinarily grim account of a failed comic. In the end, however, for all Serling’s literary gifts, his importance in the history of weird fiction will reside in his television work. In both “The Twilight Zone” and “Night Gallery,” he presented either original teleplays or adaptations of work by Matheson, Beaumont, Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Conrad Aiken, Harlan Ellison, and a host of other classic and contemporary weird and science fiction writers, and accordingly helped to lay the foundations for the horror “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s.
iii. Robert Aickman’s “Strange Stories” The work of British writer Robert Aickman (1914–1981) is more than a little odd, and his own ascent from relative obscurity to (deserved) celebrity as perhaps the leading writer of weird fiction in his time is odder still. Aickman introduced himself in a curious manner with the volume We Are for the Dark (1951), which contained three stories by him and three by Elizabeth Jane Howard, none of which were signed, so that for years it was uncertain who wrote what. It was more than a decade before Aickman published his next volume of tales, Dark Entries (1964), and it was only with the publication of Cold Hand in Mine (1975) that he began acquiring an audience in the United States. Along the way he also published a poignant autobiography, The Attempted Rescue (1966), as well as a sensitive novel about lesbianism, The Late Breakfasters (1964); but he will be remembered for the fifty or so weird tales, many of them novelettes, that he wrote during the last three decades of his life. Aickman himself referred to his tales as “strange stories,” and that is perhaps the best description that can be made of them. Surprisingly few involve the supernatural in any concrete or clear-cut manner, and many appear to focus merely on the progressively odd behaviour of the characters he puts on stage; but this is sufficient to create a pervasive and at times highly disturbing sense of the weird. Aickman, however, is frequently guilty of excessive obscurity, even in regard to the bare events of his tales, let alone their broader philosophical or aesthetic foci; and this obscurity— which in some cases might more charitably be referred to as engaging ambiguity—is a direct result of his pronounced views on the purpose of “ghost stories.” These views are enunciated in the various introductions to the first eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964–72), which he edited. The central statement occurs in the second volume: In my Introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, I tried to define what seem to me the basic facts about the genre. I pointed out that the ghost story must be distinguished both
from the mere horror story and from the scientific extravaganza. I suggested that the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry; that it need offer neither logic nor moral; that it is an art form of altogether exceptional delicacy and subtlety; and that, not surprisingly, there are only about thirty or forty first-class specimens in the whole of western literature. [F2, 7] The rationale for these utterances is purportedly found in the first volume, but in many ways his reasoning there is flawed or insufficient. His distinction between what he calls the “mere horror story” (which he refers to as “purely sadistic; it depends entirely upon power to shock” [F1, 7]) and science fiction is valid enough; but the emphasis on the unconscious, and on the lack of “logic” and “moral,” are more problematic. I have frequently quoted the comment by L. P. Hartley from the introduction to The Third Ghost Book (1955) that, for the weird writer, “Chaos is not enough. Even ghosts must have rules and obey them” (viii). Aickman’s emphasis on Freudian notions of the unconscious led him to this extreme view that a story need not make sense even on the level of plot to be effective. What I believe has happened is that Aickman used the weird tale to tap into his own unconscious, in such a way that the characters and events became symbols that carried much meaning for him, but that are not always capable of conveying that same meaning—or any meaning—for his readers. Many of the central issues that Aickman addressed in his work can be found in a careful reading of The Attempted Rescue, where he details both the events and the emotions that dominated the first forty years of his life. He wrote relatively little during this period, but these events and emotions clearly became the focus of the weird tales he eventually did write. (Aickman wrote a second autobiography, The River Runs Uphill [1986], covering the later stages of his life, but it deals almost entirely with his valuable work to save Britain’s inland waterways.) One of the central issues in his life was travel. As he writes in The Attempted Rescue: “Travel, the art of travel, is the great impersonal passion of my life, though personal also, because I need a perfect companion, and cannot make art without” (89). It quickly becomes apparent that many of Aickman’s tales rely on a character’s travel from the familiar to the unusual to trigger the weird. “The Trains” is representative: two young women are hiking in the north of England, and when their map proves to be inaccurate
and is finally destroyed in the rain, the event symbolically portrays their entry into the bizarre. Even a tale like “No Stronger Than a Flower,” although it begins with a married couple in their apartment, veers into the strange when the wife seeks out a beauty shop whose “address was in a street, and indeed a part of the town, which were outside her restricted topography” (Unsettled Dust 98). The celebrated tale “The Wine-Dark Sea” evokes Greece with remarkable immediacy, while “The Houses of the Russians” is set in a remote area of Finland. Perhaps Aickman’s most successful and powerful weird tale, “Ringing the Changes,” can be considered here. This tale also features another of Aickman’s most powerful autobiographical elements—sex. With notable candour he admitted in his autobiography that “For years I suffered unspeakable agonies from sex frustration” (156), and many of his best tales rely on sexual tension for their effectiveness. In “Ringing the Changes” a newly married couple comes to an obscure coastal town in England for their honeymoon, where the husband, Gerald, feels increasingly disturbed by the odd milieu. When, one night, all the churches appear to be ringing their bells at the same time, Gerald asks an old pensioner what is the significance of the act; he is told: “They’re ringing to wake the dead” (Painted Devils 102). There follows a simple but harrowing discussion: “I don’t believe in the resurrection of the body,” said Gerald. As the hour grew later, the bells grew louder. “Not of the body.” “What other kind of resurrection is possible? Everything else is only theory. You can’t even imagine it. No one can.” (Painted Devils 102) The entire tale—especially its conclusion, where the dead are only heard in the dark, never seen—achieves a remarkable sense of cumulative suspense and intensity. The sexual frustration that Aickman spoke of is conveyed powerfully in a number of tales, not the least curious of which is “Letters to the Postman.” Here a young postman, Robin Breeze, hears that a woman, Rosetta Fearon, is living alone in a house that never receives any mail. One day he receives a note from her: “Something strange has happened to me. I find that I am married to someone I do not know. A man, I mean. His name is Paul. He is
kind to me, and in a way I am happy, but I feel I should keep in touch. Just occasional little messages. Do you mind? Nothing more, for God’s sake. That you must promise me. Write to me that you promise” (Intrusions 188– 89). As the tale advances—and, indeed, concludes—we scarcely know whether to believe any part of this bizarre missive: Is Rosetta merely teasing the postman, or is she insane, or has she in fact married a stranger? It need hardly be emphasised that nothing even remotely supernatural occurs in this narrative—and yet it is the epitome of Aickman’s “strange stories.” Other stories of sexual tension are equally odd. “Ravissante” deals with the peculiar encounter of a man and the widow of a painter whom he admires; at one point, his fondling of her clothes manifestly symbolises his sexual desire for her. Then there is “The Swords,” perhaps a trifle more straightforward than many of Aickman’s other tales. In a curious exhibit at a fair, a woman lies on a chair while the master of ceremonies invites members of the audience—all male—to take a sword and plunge it into her body. They do so, first reluctantly, then more eagerly, as they see that the swords seem to have no appreciable effect aside from making a horrible hissing sound as they enter her flesh. The symbolism of the act, I trust, need not be belaboured. In the story “Marriage” a man appears to be attracted to two women who are roommates, Helen Black and Ellen Brown; their similarity of names ultimately suggests that they are merely alternate facets of a single personality. Another key element in Aickman’s temperament is his distaste for modernity—an element that also fuses with his nostalgia for aristocracy or, at least, for old-world courtesy. Throughout his life Aickman expressed disdain for the era in which he lived, with its increasing scientific rationalism (Aickman himself was, mortifyingly, on occasion inclined toward belief in occultism, although this mercifully makes little appearance in his fiction) and, more pertinently, its abandonment of the belief and practice of life as a fine art. “I believe that magnificence, elegance, and charm are the things that matter most in daily life” (15), he wrote in The Attempted Rescue, adding that he developed a nostalgia for pre-1914 England: “Of course it was a world for the few, but almost all good things are for the few, and almost everything is depreciated when too many people have it” (26). Let it pass that Aickman himself never experienced that
world, since he was born in 1914; his nostalgia is no less real and plangent for all that. Two stories highlight this phase of Aickman’s thinking. “Growing Boys” begins as a half-comical treatment of two rambunctious fifteen-yearold sons (presumably twins) who do little but eat and storm in and out of the house; but the tale takes a grimmer turn when a policeman informs the boys’ mother that they have committed serious crimes such as assault and rape. It becomes evident that the boys are symbols for the increasing violence and chaos of contemporary society, a view emphasised by the later remark: “Those two are like children of the future” (TLD 37–38); and still later, “they were passing unnoticed amidst the freaks and zanies that people urban and suburban areas in the later part of the twentieth century” (TLD 45). Then there is the almost indescribable “Meeting Mr Millar.” When an impoverished writer is forced to move into a cheap flat and take up work for a pornography publisher, he comes upon a large apartment below him that is apparently occupied by a company that does not seem to do much actual business. The writer hears “endless giggling, shouting, and banging of doors” (CHM 196); the employees’ conversation, which he occasionally overhears, “was always of unbelievable commonplaceness or banality” (CHM 198). Finally the writer has a peculiar encounter with Mr Millar, evidently the head of the company: rarely has such a colourless character inspired such vague terror. Later another tenant makes the following suggestion: “It just struck me for one moment that you might have seen into the future. All these people slavishly doing nothing. It’ll be exactly like that one day, you know, if we go on as we are. For a moment it all sounded to me like a vision of 40 years on—if as much” (CHM 225). But whatever the value or relevance of this sociological analysis, the tale itself engenders such a sense of bizarrerie that it must rank among Aickman’s finest. One cannot leave Aickman’s work without taking note of the oddly disturbing story “The Hospice.” A man named Maybury is compelled to stop at a roadside inn where, among other bizarre details, all the other diners, seated at a long table, are elderly individuals who are eating “as if their lives depended on it” (CHM 132). Later Maybury notices that one of the old men has his leg chained to a rail beneath the table. The succession of individually peculiar incidents somehow becomes cumulatively horrible,
culminating in Maybury’s being forced to leave the establishment in a hearse. For all the occasionally frustrating obscurity of some of Aickman’s tales, his work overall is one of the most accomplished in the history of weird fiction: with a prose style of impeccable grace and fluency, an ability to engender the weird through incidents of seeming innocuousness and even banality, and—in his best work—a skill at creating an inexorable and increasingly potent atmosphere of strangeness, Aickman stands head and shoulders above most of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors in the sheer artistry of his work. His actual place in the history of weird fiction is difficult to specify, largely because his work was for all practical purposes ignored and overlooked until just prior to and after his death; but his influence on Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, and a few other literary artists is undeniable. His work may perhaps be caviare for the general, but he is worth seeking out for the subtly distinctive chills he offers.
iv. Some Novelists: Sturgeon, Wilson, Davies, Levin, Stewart Some highly interesting individual specimens of supernatural fiction— or a fusion of supernaturalism and science fiction—can be cited, among them “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” (1950) by Margaret St. Clair (1911–1995), in which a boy with precognitive powers reluctantly declares that the sun will explode on the following day; “It’s a Good Life” (1953) by Jerome Bixby (1923–1998), where an entire community is held in terror by a boy who has incredible psychic powers and is not afraid to use them; and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967) by Harlan Ellison (b. 1934), a grim and intense post-apocalyptic tale of a computer that inflicts hideous tortures on hapless human beings. Ellison wrote a number of horror/science fiction hybrids, and the same could be said of Philip K. Dick (1928–1982). Perhaps his closest approach to pure supernaturalism was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), in which a businessman becomes a kind of sorcerer by means of a powerful drug that subdues his competitors. But a number of other writers probed the weird in a widely diverse array of novels. Theodore Sturgeon produced a striking contribution to weird fiction in the short novel Some of Your Blood (1961). Telling the dreary tale of a young soldier who is identified only as George Smith (not his real name, evidently), the novel recounts his harsh upbringing in rural Kentucky at the hands of a drunken father who brutalises both him and his mother. George is arrested for robbery and sent to a prison/orphanage, which he actually likes because of the regular meals and the education it provides. After the death of his parents, he goes to live with his aunt in Virginia, where he develops a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman named Anne. He later joins the army, and at some point he is sent to a psychiatric ward as a result of various odd behaviours. Some of Your Blood is presented as a psychiatric case study, with correspondence between the psychiatrist, Philip Outerbridge, and his superior; but the bulk of the text is an autobiography that George is
encouraged to write, in which he discusses his life and sentiments in the third person. After reading the document, Outerbridge makes a breakthrough by realising that George has a need to drink blood—the blood of animals that he killed on a regular basis in Kentucky and, more loathsomely, perhaps even the blood of his own mother during infancy, that of a small child he had killed, and, finally, that of Anne herself. But what kind of blood did he drink from Anne? The appalling revelation that he drank her menstrual blood is made only at the end and is encapsulated by the chilling brief letter that he had written her: “Dear Anna: I miss you very much. I wish I had some of your blood” (142). Some of Your Blood is a tour de force in that it is the first novel of which I am aware that provides a convincing account of a purely non-supernatural method of vampirism. The gradual manner in which the increasingly vile actions of George Smith are revealed, chiefly in his own words (and, more particularly, by what he fails to write about), is masterful. At one point, Outerbridge’s superior actually states, “He [George] is one of the few human beings I’ve ever heard of who seems to have placed sex in a genuinely wholesome perspective” (72)—an analysis that Outerbridge subsequently shows to be tragically false. And yet, the true horror of the novel is not George’s disgusting actions but the sordid upbringing that impelled him to perform them. The British writer Colin Wilson (b. 1932) unexpectedly contributed to weird fiction with a loose trilogy of novels beginning with The Mind Parasites (1967). This novel, using several conceptions from H. P. Lovecraft’s tales as a springboard, was engendered in an unusual manner. Wilson had, in the treatise The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1961), written very harshly of Lovecraft, referring to him as someone who was “sick” and “rejected ‘reality’” (whatever that may mean). This discussion so angered August Derleth, then Lovecraft’s chief advocate and defender, that he dared Wilson to write a Lovecraftian novel of his own. Wilson took up the challenge, writing The Mind Parasites. The novel is surprisingly compelling, in spite of the fact that a large proportion of the “action” takes place quite literally within the minds of its protagonists. Set in the near future, it relates the discovery by some scientists of the existence of a race of creatures they name mind paraasites, who attack the creative and intelligent person and “cause him to become the enemy of life and of the human race” (58). Ultimately, the Lovecraftian
content proves relatively tenuous, and Wilson has written a scintillating novel of ideas, midway between horror and science fiction, that ultimately emphasises his own relatively optimistic view of the future development of the human race as opposed to what he believed (and unjustly criticised) to be Lovecraft’s pessimism on the subject. Wilson followed up this novel with The Philosopher’s Stone (1971), a pompous and windy philosophical novel that actually utilises Lovecraftian conceptions more centrally than its predecessor. Here the premise is the quest for eternal life by means of the expansion of consciousness, although the scientists undertaking this quest are menaced by Lovecraftian “Ancient Old Ones” (219) that oppose them. For all its extraneous verbiage, this novel too becomes compelling toward the end in its long, elaborate account of the million-year history of the Old Ones and their possible resurgence in the future. Wilson then wrote The Space Vampires (1976)—filmed as Lifeforce—but this work is chiefly an action-adventure science fiction tale about “energy vampires” that suck the life out of their prey, chiefly by the use of sex. The Anglo-Welsh writer L. P. Davies (1914–1988), author of more than twenty novels from 1964 to 1983, has generally failed to receive his due as a contributor to the weird, chiefly because his works were marketed as either mystery fiction or science fiction, and because of a somewhat mundane prose style that relies largely on the compelling nature of his ideas to carry the narrative forward. Those ideas are, however, quite compelling indeed, chiefly focusing on the baffling themes of amnesia, displaced personality, telekinesis, and so forth. His first novel, The Paper Dolls (1964), is a noteworthy attempt to depict, not a single individual with multiple personalities, but a set of quadruplets with a single mind or soul. Psychogeist (1966) fascinatingly exhibits a schizophrenic who is able to revive the dead body of a transient and compel it to act out a comic-book fantasy. The amnesia theme is perhaps the dominant one in Davies’s work and is present in his accomplished second novel, Who Is Lewis Pinder? (1965), and in what is by all odds his best work, The Shadow Before (1970). In this novel, Lester Dunn, recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumour, has an elaborate dream about finding a way to tunnel from his own pharmacy into the vault of a neighbouring jeweller’s shop, so that he and his friends can make off with a fortune undetected. This dream is not in fact
presented as a dream until midway through the novel, and Dunn is relieved to find that it is only a dream; but, as he and his friends discuss it, the events recounted in the dream begin harrowingly to come true, with a kind of inexorability that produces chilling terror. A sort of mirror-image to the amnesia theme is the theme of an individual’s past being apparently wiped away. Here a character knows who he is and has suffered no lapse of memory, but finds that the physical relics of his past have been absolutely annihilated. The White Room (1969) is a splendid instantiation of this conception, and Give Me Back Myself (1971) elaborates upon the theme. All Davies’s novels make for entertaining reading, and his work deserves far greater attention than it received during his lifetime. (For years, indeed, Davies’s death date was unknown, and it required the work of a private detective to ascertain the date of his demise in the Canary Islands.) But his intricate fusion of mystery, science fiction, and the quasisupernatural (the actual supernatural rarely enters his work except for the inferior late novel The Land of Leys [1979]) produces an unclassifiable amalgam that is strangely appealing. If L. P. Davies failed to receive the attention he was due, it is arguable that Ira Levin (1929–2007) received far more than he deserved, and that Rosemary’s Baby (1967) is of much greater historical importance than it is from a purely aesthetic perspective. Levin, who had already attained celebrity for comic teleplays (No Time for Sergeants, 1955, based on the novel by Mac Hyman) and suspense novels (A Kiss Before Dying, 1953), was apparently inspired to write his horror novel when he learned of Anton LaVey’s establishment of the Church of Satan in 1966. The well-known plot recounts the renting of an apartment in an old building in New York, the Bramford, by Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, where they encounter other tenants who “seemed entirely commonplace” (27) but who prove to be a coven of witches. The novelty of Rosemary’s Baby—or, perhaps more accurately, the reason for its popular success—rests on the utter mundanity and contemporaneousness of its setting and characters, matched by the mindnumbing flaccidity of Levin’s prose. The novel is so preoccupied with the commonplace matters of moving into a new apartment, furnishing it, and establishing the interplay with the various boring and stereotyped characters that it is difficult, at this late date, to discern how it could have become a
bestseller (it ranked No. 7 in that year’s hardcover novels [Hackett & Burke 201]); even more surprising is how Roman Polanski’s slavishly faithful film adaptation of the following year could have been the sensation that it was. In this novel, Levin found a formula—“ordinary” characters moving about in an ordinary modern setting, fused with highly conventional supernaturalism—that proved successful in capturing the interest of readers who were not hardcore devotess of weird fiction; in so doing, he paved the way for the adaptation of this formula by his successors, notably William Peter Blatty and Stephen King, whose work similarly appealed to the general public. If there is any “surprise” or ingenious twist in Rosemary’s Baby, it is that the Satanism works on two levels. Even after it is revealed (or the reader has guessed) that a coven of witches is living in the Bramford, it is possible to believe in a non-supernatural explanation— although this becomes implausible when we discover that actions by the witches (who quickly win over Guy Woodhouse to their plans) have resulted in injury or death to those who oppose them (a rival actor suddenly goes blind, allowing Guy to gain an important acting role; a friend of the Woodhouses, sensing the presence of the witches, lapses into a coma and later dies). But this Satanism rises to a new level at the end, when we discover that the baby that Rosemary has spawned is not merely one intended—as she believes—as a sacrifice during a black mass, but is in fact the son of Satan. But the novel is beset with difficulties of conception and motivation. If it is hardly credible that Guy could be so easily swayed by the witches merely to advance his career, it is even more incredible—indeed, preposterous—to believe that Rosemary, after learning that the baby is in fact the son of Satan (he has yellow eyes—and, apparently, also a tail and claws, although these are never shown), would so rapidly come to cherish it and become its nurturing mother. It is difficult to credit that even a lapsed Catholic like Rosemary would become so easily reconciled to her giving birth to the Antichrist. But whatever flaws exist in Rosemary’s Baby, the novel and the film laid the groundwork for the horror “boom” of the subsequent two decades —although this “boom” was itself largely a marketing or publishing phenomenon, with inevitable pop culture overtones, rather than a literary phenomenon of any interest or merit. What is most surprising of all, perhaps, is that Levin, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to devise
ingenious plots without the slightest ability to execute them compellingly (The Stepford Wives, 1972; The Boys from Brazil, 1976), waited a full three decades before writing a truly horrendous sequel, Son of Rosemary (1997). One writer who wasted no time capitalising on the popularity of Rosemary’s Baby was Fred Mustard Stewart (1932–2007), whose first novel, The Mephisto Waltz (1969), is suspiciously similar in many features to Levin’s novel. Here too we have a New York City setting, a focus on a young married woman (Paula Clarkson, wife of a former pianist and struggling writer, Myles Clarkson), and relatively routine supernaturalism of a manifestly Christian sort. In this case, it transpires that a celebrated pianist, Duncan Ely, somehow uses a formula found in a book of witches’ spells to switch bodies with Myles so that he can both gain a younger body and continue his musical career. Paula immediately senses the difference in her husband and also has suspicions about Duncan’s daughter, Roxanne de Lancre, who in fact proves to be the incestuous lover of her own father. The Mephisto Waltz is of interest only in proving that an even worse horror novel than Rosemary’s Baby could achieve bestseller status and be the venue for a popular film. The conclusion of this work is even more ludicrous than Levin’s: we are asked to believe that Paula, although up to this point quite devout, suddenly delves into Satanism herself in order to switch bodies with Roxanne because she desires Myles’s body—in spite of the fact that Myles’s soul or personality is no longer in it, and in spite of the fact that Duncan/Myles and Roxanne had caused the death of her own daughter. It is typical that Stewart, although venturing into the realm of the medical thriller (The Methuselah Enzyme, 1970), and producing a wretched horror/science fiction hybrid (Star Child, 1974), generally abandoned horror fiction after his first novel. He was the first, but by no means the last, of the opportunists who sought to cash in on the sudden popularity of supernaturalism, and the result is an endless array of mediocrity or worse that polluted the literature of the next two decades.
XVI. The Boom: The Blockbusters
i. A Disquisition on Bestsellerdom The simultaneous emergence of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Thomas Tryon’s The Other on the bestseller lists in 1971 necessitates a further discussion of the phenomenon of the bestseller, as it is something we shall have to face throughout the rest of this book. Bestsellers have been curiously understudied in academic literary criticism, perhaps because highbrow critics disdain them out of hand while the advocates of “popular” fiction are reluctant to face the obvious but uncomfortable conclusion that such writing has little if no correlation to aesthetic merit. Popular fiction can only be said to have emerged in the later nineteenth century, and was the result of a fortuitous concatenation of factors—chiefly, the increasing literacy and increased income of the working classes, causing them to be purchasers of books and other “entertainment” products (as they were conceived) for the first time. Popular writing prior to this period really did not exist. The standard counter-examples—Shakespeare and Dickens— prove to be nothing of the kind. Shakespeare’s plays were popular not because of his actual literary merits—his remarkable insight into character and his ability to express that insight in language of high poeticism—but because his plays were entertaining spectacles for the peasants who flocked to the Globe Theatre. Dickens did appeal to a slightly wider audience than the tiny proportion of the educated public of the period, but it is a plain falsehood to say he appealed to a “mass” audience. Book sales of David Copperfield during the years 1851–53 averaged only 1500 copies a year; even the initial issuance of this book in “parts” averaged only about 20,000 copies—a far cry from the two million copies that Lew Wallace sold of his bestseller Ben-Hur (1880). It is telling that Alice Payne Hackett’s book on bestsellers begins with the year 1895. As I have stated, the pulp magazines fostered the development of what came to be called genre fiction—mystery, horror, science fiction, romance, the western—but books of such writing did not generally appear on the bestseller lists until well after the demise of the pulps in the 1950s. Even Rosemary’s Baby was only no. 7 on the cumulative 1967 bestseller list, while The Exorcist and The Other were no. 2 and no. 9, respectively. In all,
The Exorcist remained on the New York Times bestseller for a total of 55 weeks in 1971–72, while The Other appeared there for 24 weeks in 1971. The simple fact is that these books, along with the later books by Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and others, were in many instances calculated to appeal to a mass audience that generally did not read horror fiction—and the appeal was based on those qualities that either constitute the lower ranges of literary skill or are altogether subliterary: fast-paced narrative to keep the pages turning; contemporary settings (replete, in King’s case, with familiar brand-name articles) to engender readers’ associations; relatively bland, ordinary human characters to whom the average reader can relate; an equally bland, easy-to-read style that doesn’t tax the reader’s intelligence in regard to diction or syntax; happy endings that neatly resolve the myriad crises elaborated upon in the text; and, perhaps most significant of all, a relatively conventional supernatural scenario, frequently drawing upon the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that does not strain average readers’ credulity or expand their imagination in the manner of Lovecraft’s extraterrestrials or Blackwood’s occult mysticism. For the plain and brutal fact is that the average reader is intellectually and aesthetically incapable of distinguishing popular rubbish from literary merit. Of the eighty-one books that were No. 1 bestsellers in the years 1895–1975, no more than six can be said to have entered the American literary canon. Virtually all the others have been deservedly forgotten; and they have been forgotten not because of some conspiracy on the part of highbrow critics to suppress “popular” writing but because these works are in fact inferior products that have no lasting appeal or resonance. Accordingly, the suspicion that bestsellerdom largely equates to aesthetic ineptitude is not an unreasoned prejudice but a conclusion impelled by the facts of the case. The emergence of horror as a bestselling phenomenon was, as we have seen, not a sudden or unexpected event, but one that the preceding decades had nurtured; it only took the right circumstances—chiefly, the increasing intersection of popular writing and blockbuster film—to bring it about; and it was, in some senses, an accident that The Exorcist and, to a lesser degree, The Other were the triggers. It could well have been other books. The fact that horror was a bestselling phenomenon only for a period of roughly two decades—the “boom” being largely over by 1990, the result of an appalling tidal wave of rubbish that seemed finally to exhaust even the most devoted
horror maven—suggests that truly meritorious writing in this field has always, and should always, appeal to the few.
ii. The Breakthrough: Blatty and Tryon William Peter Blatty (b. 1928) would hardly seem to be a likely candidate to effect the breakthrough of horror onto the bestseller lists, and indeed there is every reason to think that his role as a pioneer in this field was accidental and, in several senses, unwelcome to himself. Blatty began his career with a succession of comic novels that attracted little attention; one of these, Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane!” (1966), is of interest in providing certain foreshadowings of The Exorcist (1971). In that novel, Hudson L. Kane, a psychiatrist in an institution catering to soldiers and astronauts, is a self-confessed “confused” Catholic (66) who is seeking to answer the myriad questions and paradoxes involved in assuming an allpowerful and benevolent God, chief of which is: “How can there be evil coexistent with a good God?” (67); one patient even wants Kane to conduct an exorcism. A final comment in the novel is of interest: “He said that evil doesn’t spring out of madness—that it’s the other way around” (183). This comment seems to be in many ways the foundation for The Exorcist, and the very existence of Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane! may be a counterweight to the otherwise embarrassing similarity of Blatty’s blockbuster on Ray Russell’s The Case againt Satan (1962), where a pair of anguished priests perform an exorcism on a young girl—unless, of course, we assume (implausibly) that Kane itself was inspired by the Russell novel. For in The Exorcist we have a Kane-like figure in the angst-ridden Father Damien Karras, the focal point of the novel; and the work as a whole rests on Blatty’s assumption that the troubles faced by little Regan MacNeil must be the result, not of psychiatric disorder, but of demonic possession—not by Satan himself, but by the demon Pazuzu. Blatty, indeed, claimed that his novel was based on an actual case of exorcism performed in 1949, which he became convinced was an actual case of demonic possession, thereby validating long-held Catholic teaching. It becomes obvious that The Exorcist is not in fact a horror novel as such but a religious tract with horrific elements serving as an enticement to the reader to swallow the message.
This point is emphasised by the fact that the actual nature of the demon Pazuzu is very ill-defined—it hardly matters what he is; his role is merely to exist, and therefore to confirm that demonic possession exists. It is also critical that Regan’s mother, the actress Chris MacNeil, is at first portrayed as an atheist (43) and one who doubts the existence of the afterlife (22): if she can be convinced that demonic possession exists, then anyone can! Similarly, when the prospect of possession is first raised, it is done so in a psychological manner (“Quite frankly, we don’t know much about it except that it starts with some conflict or guilt that eventually leads to the patient’s delusion that his body’s been invaded by an alien intelligence; a spirit, if you will. In times gone by, when belief in the devil was fairly strong, the possessing entity was usually a demon” [166]); but this explanation fails, and is designed to fail, to account for all the features of the case. The conclusion of the tale—where Karras and another priest, Father Merrin, finally succeed in hurling the demon out of Regan’s body and into Karras’s own—seems ambiguous, but a careful reading underscores the religious optimism with which Blatty wishes to leave the reader. For Karras, once the demon has entered him, promptly leaps out of the bedroom window and down to his death on the stairs below, thereby apparently killing the demon also. This is Karras’s final triumph. There is, however, an overriding problem with the whole religious thrust of The Exorcist: Why has this apparently powerful demon chosen to afflict Regan? Surely he has bigger fish to fry than to cause a young girl a certain amount of discomfort. Merrin actually discusses the matter at one point (“I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity . . . to see ourselves as ultimately bestial” [311]), but the answer is both lame and insulting: Are we required to believe in God so as not to feel “bestial”? But there are more problems with The Exorcist, at least from the author’s own point of view. He is on record as complaining that the immensely popular film version of 1973 was not true to his vision, especially in its emphasis on the horrific elements of the novel but not the philosophical or religious message; but Blatty himself is guilty of the same error (if error it is), for the most vivid features of the novel are exactly those (relatively fleeting) moments of physical horror rather than the ponderous preaching that peppers the novel from beginning to end. In particular, one gripping scene where Regan violently masturbates with a crucifix (“You bitch! Let Jesus fuck you, fuck you!” [190]) is pretty hard to take even for
an old atheist like myself; to believers it must have been the acme of sacrilegious horror. So Blatty bears some responsibility for The Exorcist becoming an icon of contemporary horror fiction. Blatty’s subsequent career is sad to behold. He rewrote “Killer” Kane into The Ninth Configuration (1978), not necessarily for the better; then he published Legion (1983), a very loose sequel to The Exorcist, with one Lieutenant William F. Kinderman (who has a bit part in The Exorcist) taking the place of Father Karras as the anguished theologian discussing the nature of God with a Father Dyer. The novel is ostensibly based on the socalled Gemini murders in Washington, D.C., but it is so weighted down with pompous philosophising that the narrative never has a chance to develop. In the end, Kinderman determines that all the victims were somehow related to the exorcism of 1971. The demon in Karras’s body did not die; and, in a pungent irony, Pazuzu actually revives the priest’s body and causes it to escape from its coffin just prior to burial. Legion could have been a compelling novel if Blatty had stuck to the core plot; indeed, his own film version of it, The Exorcist III (1990), is far more riveting that the novel itself. Blatty claimed in the mid-1980s that he had long been working on “a suspense thriller with a theological theme,” a work that would be “much bigger in scope and size than either [The Exorcist or Legion]” (Winter 46– 47), but such a work is apparently not likely to appear soon, if at all. He did publish Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing (1996), but this is merely a satire on Hollywood, while the novella “Elsewhere” (1999) is indeed a tale of spiritual horror, but it can hardly be said to equal The Exorcist in scope or power. In the end, Blatty will probably be remembered only for The Exorcist, a novel that is certainly powerful in spots and filled with a greater modicum of philosophical or religious speculation—whether convincing or not—than your usual bestseller; but more people will probably remember William Friedkin’s film than the novel on which it was based. Thomas Tryon (1926–1991) is an altogether different proposition. He was an even more unlikely bestseller, having started as a Hollywood actor who took to writing and quickly produced The Other (1971) and Harvest Home (1973), which not only became bestsellers but also two of the most distinguished horror novels of the past fifty years. Tryon was that rarest of commodities—an author who both had literary substance and popular appeal. Both his novels are tales of psychological, not supernatural, horror;
but their ability to simulate the supernatural make them highly engaging reading and in part account for their popularity. The novel of psychological horror had notable contributions in Robert Bloch’s The Scarf (1947) and Psycho (1959) and other works, but Tryon’s novels are of a substantially different sort. Rather than merely focus on a disturbed protagonist, they suggest the supernatural throughout the narrative, and the “climax” is often the revelation that what was thought to be supernatural is in fact natural—but this resolution is in strict accordance with the psychological analysis that Tryon has been conducting all along. As such, the novels avoid the disappointment to which the works of “explained supernaturalism” going all the way back to Ann Radcliffe are subject. The Other is, frankly, based on a trick—and the trick is the extraordinarily adept concealment of the fact that, of the twin brothers Niles and Holland Perry, Holland is in fact dead. In this poignant tale of rural Connecticut, written in a prose of exquisite luminosity and poignancy, we gradually learn that Niles is frantically pretending to himself that Holland is still alive and that it is Holland, rather than Niles himself, who is responsible for the horror and tragedy that sprinkle the novel. The revelation of Holland’s death occurs about two-thirds through the novel and constitutes one of the most powerful climaxes in recent horror literature; but even this is not the end, for we later learn that Niles has told his entire narrative from an insane asylum. Niles’s ability to fuse his personality with that of Holland, and in some senses to pretend to be Holland, is portrayed as a result not merely of his status as a twin, but of a “game” that his grandmother, Ada, encouraged both of them to play—a game that seems to have allowed them to meld their minds with that of some other entity, such as a bird. (This game— which indeed is a supernatural phenomenon—is given far more prominence in the 1972 film than in the book.) But there is more to it than this. It becomes clear that Niles, on those occasions when he pretends to be Holland, is psychologically transferring to his dead brother his “evil” side, so that he can maintain that the killings and other crimes he himself commits were in fact committed by Holland. Niles can do this the more efficaciously because Holland’s own death was caused by his attempt to kill a cat, resulting in his falling down a well and dying.
Once the revelation of Holland’s death is known, the entire novel takes on a different cast, and words, phrases, and whole passages that seemed to have an altogether different or ambiguous meaning suddenly make sense, both in terms of plot and in terms of Niles’s psychological state. Tryon’s writing is so tight and meticulous that every word not only contributes to the final outcome, but frequently carries a double meaning that is not elucidated until all the facts are known. In this sense, it adheres strictly to Poe’s strictures on the “unity of effect”—a remarkable achievement in a novel. The Other, in its exquisite lyricism, its clutching horror, and its skilful analysis of all the central characters, is a triumph in every way. Harvest Home is one some senses an even greater triumph, for in spite of its substantially greater length it too is written with remarkable compression and concision. Here the setting is again rural Connecticut, and the focus is on Ned Constantine, who with his wife, Beth, have left the turmoil of New York to move into the small village of Cornwall Coombe. Tryon emphasises the respect for tradition that the village embodies (“Tradition . . . was the important thing here; tradition and custom, customs that had been preserved through the villagers’ lineage since olden times” [32]), where the age-old patterns of planting, nurturing, and harvesting the crops are the central focus of the community. Although the inhabitants of Cornwall Coombe appear to be devout, there is some question as to exactly what god they worship. One resident states: “See this little valley of ours, see the bountiful harvest we’re to have. God’s fine, but it’s old Mother Earth that’s the friend to man” (60). Another resident almost gives the game away: “You’re bound to think us positively heathenish hereabouts” (86). Amidst the seeming tranquillity of the village, where Beth finds pleasure participating in a sewing circle and other local activities, Ned seems to be something of an outsider. He has heard of a revenue agent who has come to a bad end, and whose ghost seems to haunt the nearby woods; and on one occasion he actually hears bansheelike howls in the woods, then sees a hideous sight: Ghastly, eerie, the figure was a gray ashen hue, the white garments flapping like cerements, a specter returned from the grave. I have never seen a ghost, nor do I believe that ghosts exist, but at that moment I was absolutely certain I was looking at one. It seemed to
glow against the lurid sky, hovering some twelve feet above me, the body cut off by the edge of the embankment, head upraised, arms outstretched. I tried to tell myself I was imagining all this, but there it stood, a haggard, silvery shape, like some ghoul risen from the dead. (148) Only much later does Ned learn that this grotesque figure was a man who had been a former handyman in the village whose tongue had been cut out —but for what reason? Ned’s fortunes take a dramatic turn when he befriends Worthy Pettinger, a young man who has been selected as the next Harvest Lord, a high honour in the eyes of the villagers, but who spurns the office and attempts to flee; but when he is dragged back to the village, Ned’s own role in Worthy’s flight is looked upon with disfavour—by his own wife, among others. Then there is the matter of Grace Everdeen, a young girl who was chosen as the Corn Maiden some years before, but who had died under mysterious circumstances. Eventually Ned learns that she had been afflicted with acromegaly, which made her physically grotesque and therefore unsuitable as the Corn Maiden; she had been killed by the villagers, and it was her skeleton, not that of the revenue agent, that Ned had once come upon. The climax of Harvest Home is of almost unbearable potency; for it is here that the secret ceremony of Harvest Home—in which the women of the village, along with the Harvest Lord, participate—comes to the fore. Ned, who against all the rules of the village peeks in on the ceremony, finds to his horror that it will result in the death of the Harvest Lord, but just as horrifying is his witnessing of his own wife coupling with the Harvest Lord, a scene whose fusion of primitive archaism and perverse sexuality is imperishably gripping. But again, as with The Other, the real climax of the novel is of a quieter if even more insidious sort. For in the end we learn that, because of his various derelictions, Ned has been blinded and his tongue cut out; his entire narrative is a monumental flashback, and once again a number of passages that had seemed either innocuous or ambiguous take on a loathsome signification. Harvest Home, with its rich characterisation, deft construction, fluid prose, and cumulative power, is one of the great weird novels of our time and a virtual textbook on how to update the form while simultaneously drawing on history to lend texture and substance. In some
senses it is a kind of novel-length version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” where the emphasis is similarly on an age-old ritual that results in death for the sake of a bountiful harvest. Subsequent to Harvest Home, Tryon took to other forms of writing. Lady (1974) is a winsome novel that proves to be simultaneously a murder mystery and an interracial love story. The Night of the Moonbow (1989) was marketed as a horror novel, but in fact is a delicate story of a young boy’s maturation. A work that appeared years after his death, Night Magic (1995), was apparently completed by Valerie Martin (author of Mary Reilly) and John Cullen, whoever he might be. Although it deals with the possibly supernatural ramifications of prestidigitation, it is not a compelling work— and since one hardly knows how much of it Tryon himself wrote, it would be unwise to regard it as part of his fictional corpus. In any event, Tryon has already made two substantial contributions to the literature of horror, which is more than can be said of most other writers.
iii. The Bestseller Factory: Stephen King And now we come to the 800-pound gorilla of contemporary horror fiction, Stephen King (b. 1947). There was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when King was held in such awe and reverence as a blockbuster—one whose mere citation on the cover of a book was sufficient to move it in large numbers—that few readers or critics paused to wonder whether his ability to sell books was in any way equivalent, or had any relevance, to enduring literary substance; but now that King is not quite the publishing titan he used to be—now regularly outsold, even within the horror realm, by Anne Rice and Dean R. Koontz, to say nothing of such bestsellers as James Patterson and John Grisham—there is perhaps room to wonder whether King is any different from Charlotte Mary Yonge, Robert W. Chambers, and other popular but largely forgotten writers of a prior day. What is particularly remarkable about King is (a) his unrelenting prolificity (he has published one or more books nearly every year from 1974 to the present day), and (b) the extent to which nearly all of his novels, and many of his short stories and novellas, have been adapted to film, making him far more of a pop culture commodity than those writers who have to rely on the written word alone to convey their message. King has, in effect, become a brand name—the deliverer of a reliable product that, for the most part, remains within fairly fixed parameters and therefore delivers a predictable effect on his readers, in the same manner as McDonald’s or Budweiser. King began his career in a relatively orthodox manner, publishing short stories largely in men’s magazines such as Cavalier, Penthouse, and Gallery; these stories were collected in Night Shift (1978). King has made no secret of the literary influences operating on his writing, and he has testified to his fondness for horror fiction in the informal treatise Danse Macabre (1981). It becomes evident that such writers of a prior generation as Lovecraft, Bradbury, and Matheson have exercised an enormous influence on him; but that influence is augmented and tempered by the perhaps greater influence of somewhat less exalted sources such as comic books, television, and B movies. We will find that there is very little
originality in King’s supernatural conceptions, nearly all of which can be traced in one fashion or other to something he has read or seen in his youth. Given that King’s earliest tales date to the late 1960s, it cannot be said that he was directly influenced by The Exorcist or The Other to try his hand at horror fiction; but his casual comment to Blatty—“You know, in a way, you’re my father” (Winter 39)—signals the degree to which the bestsellers of 1971 inspired him to seek a wider audience for his own horror writing. King has made it abundantly obvious that he is attemping to reach as broad a reading public as possible; indeed, one of the secrets of his “success” (if selling a lot of books is considered a success) is his ability to appeal to those readers who do not, as a rule, read horror fiction. It is, however, of interest—and indicative of the degree to which fiction and media have become intertwined—that King’s first novel, Carrie (1974), did not achieve bestseller status until the film version appeared the following year. One of the obvious ways in which King has achieved his widespread appeal is by contemporaneity of setting and character; as he has remarked, “my idea of what a horror story should be [is that] the monster shouldn’t be in a graveyard in decadent old Europe, but in the house down the street” (Underwood-Miller 94). This methodology was, of course, already championed by Matheson, Bradbury, and other of King’s predecessors, but he has taken it to an embarrassing extreme, as in his much-ridiculed brandname-dropping. King also developed a particularly simple, elementary, easy-to-read prose style that posed no difficulties to the impatient reader; and—at least in those works where he was able to restrain his inveterate penchant for logorrhea—he was able to generate a certain narrative drive that kept the reader turning those pages. But King’s works of the 1970s and 1980s, which will be the focus here, are peculiarly beset with conceptual problems, especially in the critical issue of the function of the supernatural. Many of his early short stories use supernatural motifs of the utmost commonplaceness and lack of distinction: a haunted ironer in an industrial laundry (“The Mangler”); a giant Lovecraftian worm in a church (“Jerusalem’s Lot”); toy soldiers coming to life (“Battleground”). King is particularly weak on why the supernatural manifestations in his tales occur at all; he has absorbed so many comic books and B movies that he no longer feels the need to supply even a token rationale for the incursion of the bizarre.
This problem plagues his early novels. ’Salem’s Lot (1975)—no relation to the story “Jerusalem’s Lot”—asks us to believe that an entire town of vampires exists in a small Maine town. How do they all survive? What do they feed on? How does the outside world not know of their existence? And King’s resolution of the matter—the two chief vampires are dispatched by a stalwart band of citizens led by one Ben Mears, who along the way manages to have a love affair when time permits—is equally inept. In The Shining (1977), which some have regarded as the best of his early novels, King elaborates his widely used theme of the anomalous powers of the mind, first cited in Carrie: a boy, Danny Torrance, seems to be gifted with precognitive powers, but there are numerous paradoxes in King’s treatment of the theme. And the multifarious weird phenomena in the novel—an elevator that moves of its own accord; the ghost of an old woman that appears in the bathtub where she died; a bar whose patrons seem to materialise at random moments—are never harmonised into a unity. Perhaps King’s most serious conceptual difficulty is found in The Dead Zone (1979), and it essentially cripples that novel. Here we are to believe that John Smith, as a result of a boyhood accident, has had a part of his brain damaged, with the result that whenever he touches a given individual, he can see that person’s future life. When he shakes the hand of a radical right-wing politician, Greg Stillson, Smith sees visions of Stillson becoming president and initiating a nuclear holocaust. With great effort, he undertakes to kill Stillson; but, while failing in this attempt, he manages to discredit Stillson so that he will never become president. But the book is one more victim of the determinism paradox. If Smith touched Stillson and saw him becoming president, no conceivable actions on his part would have prevented that result; or, rather, any actions that Smith (or anyone else) took would lead inevitably to that result. If Stillson (whether through Smith’s actions or not) was not going to become president, then Smith would never have had his vision in the first place. King is, in effect, trying to have his cake and eat it too: he wants to present readers with a terrifying prospect (a nuclear holocaust) but also to show his valiant characters performing heroic acts to negate the prospect. Other novels are not much better. Firestarter (1980) is a mere replay of Carrie, but this time a little girl is endowed with what King calls “pyrokinesis” (a singularly unfortunate coinage, since what he means to convey—the ability to start fire from a distance, with her mind—would
have to be expressed by the neologism “telepyrosis”), and much of the novel is merely an action-adventure story in which the girl and her father seek to escape the clutches of the government. Cujo (1982) is perhaps the nadir of King’s work: this mercifully short novel about a mad St. Bernard is nothing more than a melodrama about the townspeople whom the dog victimises. Christine (1983) begins promisingly as a touching paean to (male) adolescence and to a boy’s fascination with his first car; but the idea that a machine that was obviously manufactured in Detroit could somehow gain supernatural powers is more than a little ridiculous. As for Pet Sematary (1983), where the pets buried in a pet cemetery come to life because they were interred on ground sacred to Native Americans, it too is a failure—largely because of a maudlin sentimentality in the handling of personal relationships that besets much of King’s work. And then there is It (1986), whose almost inconceivable length renders it the perfect soporific. Here the idea is that seven children who grew up in a small town in Maine come back as adults to battle a manitou or shapeshifter (a point we learn around page 700), which has the distinctive capacity of presenting itself in the form most terrifying to its observer. But the problem with a manitou—as Peter Straub discovered in Ghost Story (1979)—is that, by tradition, it is virtually eternal; but somehow our trusty band manage to dispatch it. This novel is so crippled by massive verbosity and inessential character description that it collapses of its own weight. The same could be said of The Stand (1977), which King, at the height of his popularity, published in an unabridged edition (1990) that restored the 400 pages that were originally cut. King dryly remarks in the preface to the later edition that “After all, many critics . . . regarded it bloated and overlong to begin with” (x). Quite so. This book presents a naive good-vs.evil struggle between another stalwart band of Americans, who gather in the middle of the nation after a “superflu” has killed off most of the populace, and another group of bad people led by one Randall Flagg (“the purest evil left in the world” [514]); but even this struggle fizzles out at the end, and Flagg is destroyed by the apparently accidental detonation of a nuclear warhead. Or was it accidental? King actually suggests that the hand of God (1084) was responsible for Flagg’s death. That’s all very nice—but where was God when the superflu was ravaging the country? King had actually treated this kind of apocalyptic theme in the early story “Night
Surf” (1974), a compact and pungent narrative that is infinitely superior to its flabby successor. I do not wish to suggest that King is a total failure on purely aesthetic grounds. He has had some modest successes both in the short story and in the novel. As a mainstream writer—or, at any rate, as a non-horror writer— King has proven on occasion to be surprisingly effective. The best story in Night Shift is “The Woman in the Room” (1978), a lightly fictionalised account of the death of King’s mother from cancer. And the early novels that King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman are also competent. Rage (1977), about a boy who holds his high school class hostage, and The Long Walk (1979), a science fiction tale where teenage boys are forced to undertake a 100-mile walk without stopping, are highly effective in short compass; but they are surpassed by The Running Man (1982), a gripping short novel about a television show in which a man must survive undetected for a month to claim an enormous reward. It is true that the novel bears striking similarities to Robert Sheckley’s story “The Prize of Peril” (1958), but the vivid evocation of a futuristic world where the gap between rich and poor has become cavernous appears to be King’s own. It may well be King’s best novel. Other mainstream works by King—especially some of the novellas in Different Seasons (1982)—deserve some attention. One that doesn’t is the long-winded “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” about a man who, having been falsely convicted for murder, spends decades digging a tunnel out of his cell. The lame “moral” we are to take from this story —“Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies” (100)—does not justify a tale as long as Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. But “Apt Pupil” and “The Body” (the basis of the film Stand by Me) are more creditable, although both are severely flawed. The former tells of the bizarre symbiotic relationship between a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, and a former Nazi concentration camp commandant, Kurt Dussander. The perverse relationship—where Todd solicits increasingly horrifying details of the events at the camp from Dussander, making the former just as loathsome as the former—is effectively portrayed, but the tale is spoiled when both individuals begin killing derelicts in the town: Todd’s motivations are clear (he now wishes to kill Dussander but is afraid to do so, so he turns his aggressions elsewhere), but Dussander’s are entirely inexplicable. “The Body,” although containing
some of King’s freshest and most vibrant writing and imagery, is marred by a serious error in overall conception. What could have been a delicate and moving tale of teenage boys undergoing a rite of passage when they find the body of a boy who died mysteriously becomes instead a pretentious account of the evolution of one of the boys, Gordon Lachance, into a writer—and Lachance, it becomes obvious, is another in a long line of stand-ins for King himself, so that the tale really becomes a story about its author. Still more respectable are three later novels of this period, Misery (1987), Gerald’s Game (1992), and Dolores Claiborne (1993). The first tells the well-known story of a romance writer, Paul Sheldon, who is kidnapped by a crazed fan, Annie Wilkes, who then forces Sheldon to write another novel in a romance series that he wishes to end. While an effective conte cruel, the novel suffers from the obvious self-pity in which King indulges: Sheldon is also a King stand-in—or, perhaps more accurately, a wish-fulfilment fantasy. For Sheldon “wrote novels of two kinds, good ones and best-sellers” (6), and he is distressed that Wilkes (a stand-in for King’s own many readers) insists that he continue his “whoredom” (66) to write romance blockbusters instead of books that, in his opinion, have a chance to win the National Book Award! Gerald’s Game is another conte cruel, but it is handled in a much superior fashion. This gripping account of a woman whose husband suffers a heart attack during a sex game—she is handcuffed to the bed in a remote cabin in Maine—and her attempts to extricate herself out of her situation becomes both a chilling suspense tale (in one impressive set-piece, King spends ten pages in an agonising portrayal of the woman’s attempts to reach a glass of water) and a moving analysis of her guilt at partly causing her husband’s death and of her reflections on the course of her entire life. Dolores Claiborne is somewhat less notable: the entire novel is a long monologue by the protagonist, Dolores Claiborne St. George, who seeks to clear herself from accusations that she murdered a wealthy woman who had left her a large sum of money, but who confesses to the decades-old murder of her husband, who had begun to molest their daughter. The novel is a convincing portrayal of lower-class life, perfectly mirrored in the ignorant, coarse, and filthy monologue of Dolores; and yet, King extends sympathy to her, and only a contrived happy ending spoils the overall effect. Two later supernatural novels are worth some attention. The Dark Half (1989) is, in effect, a fictionalised account of the manner in which the
Richard Bachman pseudonym was revealed. Here a pseudonym, George Stark, of the author Thad Beaumont actually comes to life: this premise, while entirely preposterous and never adequately explained, still leads to interesting effects, since Stark viciously kills everyone involved with the revelation of the pseudonym, but then finds that he is “losing cohesion” (266) because Beaumont is no longer using the pseudonym. Finally, there is Needful Things (1991), in which King seeks to put an end to his fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. A man named Leland Gaunt opens a shop called Needful Things, in which he sells various rare commodities to the townspeople and asks in return only that they play increasingly nasty tricks on one another. The premise is probably adapted from Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, but King’s treatment, if inevitably prolix, is deft. Gaunt is ultimately revealed to be a demon, but his role is merely to incite the townspeople to commit acts that they might have been inclined to commit in any case; as such, the novel is a clever fusion of supernatural and psychological horror. King, of course, resolutely continued writing even when the horror “boom” was over in the early 1990s; but, as I have stated, his subsequent work did not quite captivate readers as his earlier work did. My analysis has also passed over in merciful silence some truly dreadful works—the last Bachman book, Thinner (1985); the ludicrous science fiction/horror hybrid The Tommyknockers (1987); the novellas in Four Past Midnight (1990), the last two of which are so crippled by prolixity as to be virtually unreadable. As for the multivolume series The Dark Tower (1982f.), some readers and critics profess to find deep meaning in this bizarre fantasy/horror/western hybrid; but if so, I shall leave it to them. There are, indeed, serious doubts as to the overall aesthetic or philosophical thrust of King’s work. What he is trying to say? Is he, in fact, trying to say anything? For a time some of his enthusiastic defenders maintained that his work was full of profound statements about life and society, but the evidence for such claims seems to me slim to non-existent. The best that can be said about him is that on a few occasions he exhibits a notable sensitivity to the mentality and emotions of (male) adolescence and on even rarer occasions is able to convey it effectively; and some of the later novels of this period that I have discussed—novels that, tellingly, were largely scorned by his own devotees—do at times reveal a more serious attitude toward human relationships. But overall, King is just a
schlockmeister—the literary equivalent of all the B movies and comic books he digested in his youth and continues to regurgitate to this day. For all the awards he has received over the years (including, grotesquely, a National Book Award for “distinguished contribution to American letters”), there is every reason to believe that the great proportion of his work will, as with so many of the bestsellers of prior ages, lapse into oblivion with the passage of time.
iv. Successors to the King In the wake of the popular success of Blatty, Tryon, and especially King, a host of other writers—wannabes, opportunists, and a few of some actual (if minimal) literary talent—joined the ranks of the bestsellers, although none of them achieved anything approaching King’s commercial success or Tryon’s aesthetic triumphs. First on the agenda is American writer Jeffrey Konvitz (b. 1944), whose potboiler The Sentinel (1974) was turned into a 1977 film, which the author resourcefully produced and wrote the screenplay for. The Sentinel harks back to Rosemary’s Baby in its New York City setting (an old apartment building on the Upper West Side), its contemporary setting and characters (the chief focus is on Allison Parker, a model, who moves into the building), and its highly conventional supernatural manifestation. We are asked to believe that this building is in fact the gateway to Hell, and that the Catholic church has for decades or centuries been stationing a “sentinel” there (currently a blind priest) to guard against the emergence of devils from this baleful terrain. The curious thing about this premise is that it is obviously undermined by the very events of the novel; for Allison sees all manner of curious tenants in the building, and we later learn that these are the very imps of Hell whom the priest is presumably seeking to keep in their infernal domain. Possibly the idea is that these imps can never stray beyond the precincts of the building, but Konvitz never spells out this idea. The whole novel is crippled by its own absurdity and confusion; predictably, Konvitz produced an even worse sequel, The Guardian (1979), in which Allison has now become a blind nun and taken the place of the blind priest. Konvitz mercifully decided at this point to abandon writing for the most part (aside from one further lacklustre horror novel, Monster [1982], about the Loch Ness monster) and stuck to being a film producer. John Farris (b. 1936) joined the ranks of horror bestsellers with The Fury (1976), although he had been publishing books since 1956. Farris is one of those rare popular writers who can actually write a coherent sentence —indeed, at times his prose ascends to modest heights of lyricism, and his ability at character portrayal is not entirely to be despised—but who have
been so seduced by bestsellerism that they have corrupted whatever literary merits they possess. The Fury is prototypical. A “horror-thriller” whose convoluted plot needs no recycling here—suffice it to say that it deals with the efforts of Peter Sandza to rescue his psychically gifted son, Robin, from the clutches of a shadowy government agency called MORG (Multipsychic Operations and Research Group), in which task he teams up with teenager Gillian Bellaver, who is Robin’s “psychic twin”—The Fury fails as a supernatural novel precisely because Farris is so keen on shoot-’em-up action that he neglects to specify exactly what powers Robin and Gillian have and, even more pertinently, why the government is seeking to harness these powers. Gillian appears to be able to make certain susceptible people bleed to death, and she is also clairvoyant; Robin seems to have some of these qualities and perhaps others, but their nature is never clarified, and the whole novel is merely a long-drawn-out adventure story. Decades later Farris produced three interminable sequels to The Fury, while writing bushels of other novels dealing with vampires, Mayan deities, and similarly hackneyed subjects. It may be worth noting that Stephen King appears to have pilfered elements of The Fury for not one but two of his novels—The Dead Zone and Firestarter. Such novels as Audrey Rose (1975) by Frank De Felitta (b. 1921) and The Omen (1976) by David Seltzer (b. 1940) are scarcely worth discussing aside from noting their mere existence and the film adaptations of them (in 1977 and 1976, respectively) and, again, their conventional supernaturalism (the latter postulates the birth of the Antichrist)—the only novelty in these cases, if indeed it is a novelty, is that children are the focus of the terror, in one case as a victim (Audrey Rose is possessed by the soul of a girl previously killed) and in the other as villain. The drearily prolific V. C. Andrews (1923–1986) also milked this vein in Flowers in the Attic (1979) and many other works that fuse Gothic horror and family saga; but as her work is non-supernatural, it can mercifully be bypassed here. It is this schtick that John Saul (b. 1942) has made the focus of an appalling array of shoddily written and manipulative novels. Saul has discovered the obvious fact that average readers have a built-in sympathy with and concern for children, since they usually have children of their own, and so he strives to maximise the horrors—supernatural and natural— to which children can be exposed in order to engender reader empathy. All these qualities are on display in his first novel, the bestseller Suffer the
Children (1977). After a brief but striking “prologue,” set a hundred years ago, in which a man rapes and kills a little girl (who, it is later ascertained, is his own daughter), we move up to a period fifteen years ago, where the focus is on Jack and Rose Conger, a troubled married couple whose two daughters are the focus of the tale. The younger, Sarah, was brutally beaten by her father, for no reason that he can determine, and is now unable to speak; her older sister, Elizabeth, seems a model girl in tending to Sarah and dealing with her affliction with understanding and concern. But Elizabeth turns out to be the villain, because she ultimately kidnaps several children and leads them down into a pit near where the hundred-year-old killing occurred, ultimately killing her captives and managing to cast the blame on to her sister, who is unable to refute the charge. As the novel at last moves into the present day, the bodies of the murdered children are found on the very day that Sarah, now roughly rehabilitated, is released from an institution. She suddenly remembers that her sister is in reality a murderer and thereby lapses into speechlessness once more. The novel dodges more questions than it answers. Was Jack Conger himself possessed by some spirit or other when he initially brutalised Sarah? Was Elizabeth possessed by the spirit of the dead girl (named Beth) to undertake her own killings? But overriding these ambiguities is the fact that the novel is largely a melodrama, with much space devoted to the Congers’ marital troubles, and with the supernatural almost entirely absent except, perhaps, at the very end. In any event, Saul used this formula in a dreary plethora of novels that numbers thirty-six down to 2009. I am not entirely sure that a single one of them is worth reading, for their supernatural manifestations are all routine and mundane—psychic possession, ghosts, Native American myth, and so forth—and all are crafted with the calculated purpose of eliciting transparent reader response by their focus on children or teenagers. But Saul comes off as a veritable Melville when compared to Richard Laymon (1947–2001), an American writer who somehow managed to establish a greater reputation in England than in the United States—which will no doubt destroy forever the myth that English readers are more literate and sophisticated than American ones. Laymon’s first novel, The Cellar (1980), pretty much tells the whole story. We are here concerned with a house in a small town in California where several murders have been committed over a period of seventy or more years, and which has therefore
gained the soubriquet of The Beast House. Is some actual supernatural creature lurking there, or are these killings merely the work of a succession of crazed human beings? The focus of the novel is on Donna Hayes, a beautiful woman who flees Los Angeles with her teenage daughter, Sandy, when she learns that her husband, Roy, has been let out of jail. Roy is a singularly unpleasant fellow who at once kills several individuals upon his release, including Donna’s own sister, Karen, in an effort to locate her. It transpires that Roy was put in prison for raping his own daughter. Implausibly, Donna strikes up an acquaintance with one Judgment [sic] Rucker, who for some reason is seeking to probe the mystery of Beast House. It rapidly becomes clear that Jud will end up with Donna and Roy will be dispatched. In the end, the “beast” dispatches Roy bloodily; but it turns out that there is not one beast but several, and they appear to be the mutant offspring of some of the inhabitants of Beast House. In a preposterous ending, both Donna and Sandy are captured by the current owners of the house and are impregnated by the beasts. What distinguishes Laymon is a prose style of almost moronic inanity. Consider the following luminous passage: He washed up. After he dressed in clean clothes, his suitcase was nearly empty. He tossed the few remaining contents into the bed, and took the suitcase into the bathroom. There, he piled his torn, bloody clothes into it. He dropped the old bandage in and latched the suitcase. Then he carried it outside. (167) This is, quite literally, a passage that anyone could have written. (Dean Koontz, incredibly, has stated: “No one writes like Laymon, and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes”—but Koontz’s credentials as a literary critic are in some doubt.) The truth is that Laymon was only marginally more intelligent and aesthetically attuned than the majority of his brainless audience, and it is this simple fact that allowed him to publish more than thirty novels in a twenty-year span. Laymon also wrote his share of short stories, but the title of one of his collections— Dreadful Tales (2000)—unwittingly sums up their overall quality. Laymon’s simple-minded prose and tendency toward blood and gore may
make him some kind of antecedent of the splatterpunks, assuming there is anything impressive in that fact. At the very opposite pole from Laymon is Charles L. Grant (1942– 2006), who gained some kind of distinction as a proponent of “quiet” horror —horror that purportedly implied more than it stated. In principle, this methodology is unexceptionable, but Grant himself was sadly incapable of executing it effectively; for his besetting sin was both a frustrating vagueness and an excessive restraint in the depiction of supernatural phenomena, with the result that much of his work is vitiated by diffuseness and tameness. Grant achieved celebrity with his second novel, The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1977), set in an imaginary Connecticut town called Oxrun Station. His idea was evidently to fashion a kind of updated and upscale version of Lovecraft’s Arkham; but he handicaps himself at the start by noting the town’s “gentle isolation, insulation and nearly intangible aura of unassuming wealth” (13)—meaning that this is a relatively ordinary town where an unusual number of odd things happen. There is very little that is distinctive about Oxrun Station or its inhabitants, and this novel itself is merely a melodramatic tale of a woman, Natalie Windsor, whose husband was brutally murdered and who finds herself being pursued by the same forces—human and otherwise—that apparently dispatched her husband. In the end, the villain is one of the town’s leading citizens, who hopes to gain immortality. Much of the tale inevitably focuses on a romance between Natalie and a newspaper reporter—an issue that leads her to remark all too truly, “She wondered if perhaps she wasn’t reading too many of the library’s romances lately” (23). The weird phenomena in this novel, and in most of other of Grant’s works, are simply too imprecisely conceived and described to be effective. Grant rarely extended his imagination beyond the usual array of hackneyed monsters: Indian myth in The Nestling (1982), zombies in Night Songs (1984), a ghostly horse in The Pet (1986), and so on throughout his more than two dozen novels. Grant also worked extensively in the short story, but equally ineffectively. The Arkham House volume Tales from the Nightside (1981) contains almost nothing of note. “Home” is prototypical: here a man is found feeding both animals and human beings to some sort of creatures in a sandbox, but we are never given even the remotest hint as to what these creatures are or how they got there. Nightmare Seasons (1982) seems
suspiciously similar to King’s Different Seasons, but it appears that Grant’s book came out just before King’s. Here we have four tales, each taking place in Oxrun Station about ten years apart, beginning in 1940, and in different seasons; but this schema is uninspiring, as Grant is unable to summon up the literary skill to depict these different eras with any perspicacity. The four novellas are all boring and prolix, and the supernatural phenomena as unadventurous as in the rest of his work (a young man who can turn into a snake; a femme fatale; supernatural bikers; and so forth). Grant in fact wrote a number of women’s Gothics under pseudonyms, and his penchant for cloying melodrama and romance is all too evident throughout his work. Grant was a considerably better editor than a writer, and his elevenvolume Shadows series (1978–91) did in fact exemplify his ideal of “quiet horror” far better than he could do himself—chiefly on the basis of contributions by such genuine artists as Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Dennis Etchison, and Steve Rasnic Tem. A writer of occasional merit is F. Paul Wilson (b. 1946). He began publishing science fiction novels in the 1970s but switched to horror in the 1980s; such novels as The Keep (1981) and The Tomb (1984) made the bestseller lists. The former, filmed in 1983, takes place in an obscure region of Romania in 1941, where some mysterious entity is killing the Nazis stationed at a small castle or keep that guards a critical pass to the mountains. It turns out that the entity in question, one Viscount Radu Molasar, is apparently a vampire; but a shadowy figure who calls himself Glenn, who has providentially arrived on the scene, informs us that he is of much older ancestry: he is actually a creature called Rasalom (Molasar backwards) deriving from a prehuman era called the “First Age,” and he wants more than just blood: “He draws strength from human pain, misery, and madness” (359). Glenn is himself a member of an ancient species called the Glaeken, who has vowed to stop Rasalom’s depredations. At the end he predictably does so, getting the girl in true bestseller fashion. The Keep is nothing more than a popular potboiler, with stereotypical characters, liberal doses of grisly murder and sex, and all the other elements that caused the horror “boom” to die of inanition and mediocrity. It is the first of a succession of novels in the so-called Adversary Cycle, in which the noble Repairman Jack (introduced in The Tomb) and the evil Rasalom wage cosmic battle in various corners of the world. This tiresome good-vs.-
evil scenario is unenlivened by anything approaching subtlety of character portrayal, and Wilson seems to think that an excess of bloodletting and an emphasis on political libertarianism will paper over his deficiency in moral adventurousness. And now we come to Dean R. Koontz (b. 1945). As I have mentioned earlier, Koontz has been outselling Stephen King of late, although that may have more to do with King’s own paucity of fresh ideas and his irredeemable logorrhea than to any merits Koontz may possess; indeed, the only genuine virtue to Koontz’s existence is to prove that an even worse writer than Stephen King can become popular. Like Wilson, Koontz began his career writing science fiction (generally under pseudonyms), but evidently switched to horror when he saw what a profitable commodity it was. Many of his novels are accordingly uneasy fusions of supernatural and science fiction motifs. The hallmark of Koontz’s work is an even more elementary good-vs.evil dichotomy than is usually found in popular writers, along with a heavy dose of religious moralising (he converted to Catholicism in college) and a “love-conquers-all” optimism straight out of the women’s romance school of writing. Combine this with incredibly stereotyped characters, inevitable prolixity and verbosity, and a prose that borders on the illiterate, and you have the makings of a writer destined for popularity among the herd. Consider Phantoms (1983), a bestseller that was not, oddly enough, filmed until 1998, even though earlier novels such as Demon Seed (1973) had been filmed as early as 1977. Here we find that a nameless entity has killed nearly all the inhabitants of a small town in Colorado by some mysterious means. The focus of the novel is Jennifer Page and her much younger sister Lisa, who return from a vacation to find all the townspeople of Snowfield, Colorado, either dead or missing. Eventually, one Timothy Flyte, author of a book called The Ancient Enemy, is brought in, because he has studied mass disappearances throughout history; various other policemen and government officials are also summoned, although a regrettable number of them perish in their seemingly futile attempts to track down the entity. The villain reveals himself—by somehow managing to commandeer a computer and writing cryptic messages on it—as Satan, but it turns out that it is not Satan himself but a creature millions of years old who gave rise to the myth of Satan and other such entities in the religions of the world.
Conveniently enough, the creature has a clever skill at shape-changing, thereby allowing him to appear in all manner of guises, from human to animal, in the course of the novel. Flyte states at one point, “I’m not arguing that this thing is a supernatural being. It isn’t. It’s real, a creature of flesh—although not flesh like ours” (345), and so it is easily dispatched by a bacterium devised by one of the scientists on the scene. The religious moralising in the novel is so inept as to seem a parody of itself, were it not that Koontz is so earnest about it. First he makes the extraordinary assertion that “There’s evil in nature,” referring to “the blind maliciousness of earthquakes” and “the uncaring evil of cancer” (271)—as if “evil” could somehow be manifested by entities other than human beings, who are the only creatures within our purview who have a (socially constructed) sense of right and wrong. Then, after various maunderings about whether the creature is actually the Devil or merely the source of the legend of the Devil, a character learnedly opines: “If the shape-changer was the Satan of mythology, perhaps the evil in human beings isn’t a reflection of the Devil; perhaps the Devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind. Maybe what we’ve done is . . . create the Devil in our own image” (413). If Koontz expects this epitome of the obvious to pass as profound philosophical disquisition, then perhaps he is underestimating even the admittedly low intelligence of his chosen audience.
v. Vampires and More Vampires One of the most curious phenomena of the horror “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s is the recrudescence of fiction about vampires—a trend that, inexplicably, continues to this day. One would have thought that the vampire trope had been pretty well played out by midcentury; Richard Matheson in I Am Legend (1954) and Theodore Sturgeon in Some of Your Blood (1961) had been compelled to resort to science fiction and psychological horror to lend a semblance of new life into the motif. But with the publication of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), vampirism of a surprisingly conventional sort returned to the bestseller lists. The very next year saw the publication of Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. Rice (b. 1941) was perhaps not the most likely person to have written a vampire novel. She had hitherto only published only a few mainstream short stories, so it is not surprising that the hardcover edition of Interview with the Vampire sold only modestly; it became a bestseller only when Ballantine, the paperback publisher, marketed it extensively. Only nine years later did Rice publish a second vampire novel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), but by the 1990s these and other novels had established her as the most popular author of vampire novels of her time, and perhaps of all time. Perhaps because Rice did not emerge out of the horror community, her initial view of the phenomenon of (literary) vampirism is refreshingly iconoclastic. Indeed, it is not at all clear how much previous vampire literature aside from Stoker’s Dracula Rice had even read when she wrote her early novels. But in Interview with the Vampire she seems keen on establishing the precise nature and function of her vampires. The process by which one becomes a vampire—as Louis, a Frenchman who moved to Louisiana and, in 1791 at the age of twenty-five, became a vampire at the hands of one Lestat, tells a modern-day reporter in San Francisco—is that one’s blood is drained almost entirely out of the body, whereupon the victim is forced to drink the vampire’s blood from his wrist. Beyond this, the “rules” governing the life (if one can call it that) of the vampire are surprisingly scant: they cannot move about in daylight, but they are not affected by the cross, cannot change shape into smoke, and cannot be killed
by having a stake driven through their hearts. They are also able to sustain themselves on animal blood just as well as human. What is striking about Interview with the Vampire—and it is indeed a striking novel—is that it brings to the surface the sexual symbolism of the vampire that had been latent since Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” and which had been scarcely beneath the surface in Dracula. In this instance, the vampirisation of Louis by Lestat is a transparent metaphor for homosexual sex. And yet, one of the most striking tableaux in the novel is the scene where a little girl, Claudia, is turned into a vampire—a scene whose fusion of pathos and eroticism is nearly unrivalled in modern horror literature. Throughout Interview Rice engages in interesting reflections on the relationship of vampires to conventional religion. The dispensing of the cross as a weapon against the creatures is only one phase of the matter; it becomes increasingly obvious that Lestat is close to being an atheist. In this sense, the novel is a kind of template for the relevance of vampirism in the contemporary age of scepticism. Rice herself renounced her Catholic upbringing in 1972, after the death of her daughter, although in recent years she has to some degree gone back to the faith. But the true virtue of Interview with the Vampire is not so much its philosophical disquisitions as its richly sensual and evocative prose and its probing of the complex metaphysical and emotional issues dealing with the vampiric state. Where it fails is in its portrayal of the historic backdrop against which the action is set—a failing even more pronounced in The Vampire Lestat, an overblown and verbose novel that only redeems itself at the end, where we are given a kind of origin of species of vampires. We come upon the mother and father of all vampires in Egypt, Akasha and Enkil; their continued existence is intimately tied to the fate of all the vampires on earth. Rice took a further step backward with The Queen of the Damned (1988), a painfully verbose and unfocused novel in which various vampires spin angst-ridden maunderings about their fate. She recovered to some extent with The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), a reasonably compact novel that focuses on body-swapping: Lestat yearns to become human again and persuades a colleague to switch bodies with him, but then remembers that the human body comes with numerous attendant inconveniences, such as eating, sleeping, and eliminating waste. Rice wrote other novels in the first two decades of her literary career—including three perfectly unreadable
novels in the 1990s about the Mayfair Witches—but they have not had the influence of her vampire tales. The exact degree of Rice’s influence on the popular vampire novels of the 1980s is unclear; at any rate, any number of other writers sought to leap onto the bestseller lists with tales about the undead. Whether by accident or design, these writers chose to focus on one or the other of the two chief foci of Rice’s own work—the historical vampire and the vampire as sexual predator. In the first category are such works as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Hôtel Transylvania (1978), George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982), and, to a lesser extent, Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980). There is some merit in all these authors and works, but in general they occupy a lesser rank to the literati whom I will treat in the next chapter. Yarbro (b. 1942) focuses on the real-life figure of the Comte de SaintGermain (1712?–1784?), an aristocrat and alchemist who in his time was believed by some to be immortal. In Hôtel Transylvania Yarbro begins the long process of laying out his history: he was born in Transylvania (18) and states at one point: “I was old when Caesar ruled in Rome” (64). But this novel is merely a windy costume drama that features almost nothing of the supernatural; ultimately it descends into a conventional chase scenario where Saint-Germain predictably rescues a woman from the clutches of an evil aristocrat who wishes to make her a virgin sacrifice. But Yarbro became fascinated by the figure of Saint-Germain and included him in a score of other novels, placing him in such variegated historical epochs as ancient Egypt, Renaissance Italy, and even the China of Genghis Khan. Yarbro’s historical research is impeccable, but it is frequently overdone, seeming at times merely a disgorging of historical information out of an encyclopaedia. And she does not appear to have made any particularly novel use of the vampire trope itself. Martin (b. 1948) sets Fevre Dream in the antebellum South— specifically, the year 1857. The root of the conflict in the novel is the battle between a “good” vampire, Joshua Yorke, and an “evil” one, Damon Julian. Joshua has discovered a formula that allows vampires to refrain from killing human beings, but Damon seems to enjoy the power that he and his cohorts have over humans, whom he deems “cattle.” Damon often sounds like a dumbed-down Nietzsche (“there is no good or evil, only strength and weakness, masters and slaves” [206]), and of course, as could have been
predicted, Joshua—in conjunction with a human, the riverboat captain Abner Marsh—dispatches Damon in the end. The problem with Fevre Dream, aside from its intolerable length and its fatuous Huck-Finn-meets-vampires atmosphere, is Martin’s serious confusion over the origin of vampires. Joshua declares that “We are . . . another race” (154). Whether or not Martin derived this element from Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (for which see below), the matter is as confused here as there. How is it possible for two such similar species to have evolved independently? Martin descends further into fatuity by having Joshua revise Genesis by stating that Cain’s wife (otherwise unaccounted for in the Bible) was a vampire (173), thereby initiating the race. But since he later remarks that vampires and humans cannot interbreed (176), the matter of the vampires’ origins becomes a trifle confused. Mercifully, Martin has rarely returned to the vampire theme in subsequent works. Charnas (b. 1939) is a somewhat more capable writer than others we have so far treated, but there is similar difficulty in accounting for the origin of her vampire, Dr. Edward Weyland, who as The Vampire Tapestry opens is a cultural anthropologist in a small college. The historical element is not at the forefront of this novel, but when Weyland begins consulting a psychiatrist about his condition (it is not that he is in any way regretful that he is a vampire; he merely wishes to secure a clean bill of mental health so that he can return to the college after some untoward incidents had caused him to flee it), he states that he does not know of any other vampires in existence. Later he slightly qualifies the comment, but his very existence as a vampire is still never accounted for. Still later Weyland vaguely conjectures whether he might be an extraterrestrial, but we are apparently not meant to take this seriously. Charnas is a gifted writer, with a fine lilt to her prose and an impressive ability at drawing character; but The Vampire Tapestry remains a deliberately fragmented novel where the whole does not add up to more than the sum of its various parts. The focus on the sexual aspects of the vampire comes to the fore in several novels of this period, notably Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981), Ray Garton’s Live Girls (1987), and Nancy A. Collins’s Sunglasses After Dark (1987). The Hunger—not in any sense to be judged by the very loose and pretentious film of 1983—seems to have attracted some kind of cult following, although on what basis is not clear. Strieber (b. 1945) focuses on
a vampire named only Miriam (later she pretends to be the husband of a man, John Blaylock, whom she turned into a vampire and thereafter takes his last name), who has been in existence since at least Roman times and probably much earlier. Various flashbacks take us to ancient Rome, the mediaeval era, and the early nineteenth century as Miriam adopts certain human lovers—male and female alternately—and grants them a lengthy, but not eternal, term of life by turning them into vampires; but they become unusually bloodthirsty as their bodies begin, after centuries, to deteriorate. Thrown into this mix is a gerontologist, Sarah Roberts, who is working on pioneering research on the connexion between ageing and the composition of blood. But Strieber never accounts for the origin of his vampires, although he engages in a fearsome amount of technical jargon about how variations in their blood have caused their condition. They are, it would seem, a separate species; but, as in Fevre Dream, how such a species could have evolved independently of human beings is never satisfactorily answered. But these questions are relegated to the background amidst the focus on the heterosexual and lesbian affairs of Miriam, where little is left to the imagination. At times Strieber’s prose descends to the sentimentality of women’s romance novels: “Their love had never seemed so frail, or so terribly important” (78). Sarah is converted against her will into vampirism by Miriam, but rebels at her loss of humanity and seeks to kill Miriam; she fails, and Miriam discards her and, at the end of the novel, looks forward to her next lover, whoever that might be. The Hunger never comes to life, if you will pardon the pun; Strieber’s flaccid prose fails to invigorate any of the characters, and the development of the plot is similarly ponderous. Strieber’s subsequent career has been most unfortunate. In 1987 he published Communion, the first of four books in which he related, evidently with a straight face, his adventures as an alien abductee. These works destroyed whatever minimal reputation as a horror writer Strieber had, and although he published two lacklustre sequels to The Hunger in 2001 and 2002, his career has never recovered. The loss to literature is perhaps not extensive. We descend even lower on the literary scale with Live Girls. Garton (b. 1962) has struck upon the ingenious idea of setting his vampires in the red light district of New York’s Times Square—and to the extent that the efforts of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have banished the porn shops from that district
and scattered them far and wide, Live Girls becomes something of a period piece. But the premise that seductive vampire prostitutes perform oral sex on men and suck their blood in the process is as ludicrous as it is clumsily handled. While not descending to Laymonian (Laymonesque?) levels of illiteracy, Garton is heading rapidly in that direction. His various stickfigure characters all behave predictably and absurdly, and in the end the shop called Live Girls is blown to smithereens. Garton has returned to vampires in a few of his dreary plethora of novels, but neither they nor any of his other works, short or long, are worth a moment’s attention. Sunglass After Dark is a somewhat more creditable work. Collins (b. 1959) presents us with the figure of Sonja Blue, a young vampire snatched as a teenager by an aristocrat named only Sir Morgan and turned into a vampire; but, in some senses like Sarah Roberts in The Hunger, she turns against her own kind and becomes a vampire killer. Sunglasses After Dark has no shortage of blood and grue, but Collins’s vivid prose enlivens both these scenes and the variegated characters in the book. Sonja has the convenient ability to heal from injuries in short order, so that she can absorb all manner of pummelings from hit men and others with insouciance. Collins also seeks to lend a sociological significance to her work by maintaining that many of the people on the fringes of human society—the whores, the bums, the drug pushers—are in reality not human at all but “Pretenders”: ogres, succubi, seraphim, and so on. But little is done to render this conception either plausible or philosophically profound, and the novel ultimately becomes little more than an extended chase sequence where Sonja seeks to kill as many vampires as possible in her hunt for Sir Morgan. That hunt continues in several later novels until she finally dispatches him in Paint It Black (1995). A few popular vampire writers do not fit neatly into either of the two categories outlined above. Robert R. McCammon (b. 1952) chose to imitate the bloated blockbusters of Stephen King in They Thirst (1981) and other ponderous works. They Thirst presents the spectacle of an ancient vampire, Count Conrad Vulkan, leading an invasion of vampires in Los Angeles— which, conveniently, is suffering a sandstorm at the time, so that the deathly rays of the sun are unable to stop the vampires’ advances. McCammon has merely set up a tiresome action-adventure scenario where a valiant police officer, a female reporter, and other stereotypical characters battle the undead—to a predictable victory. McCammon has done almost nothing to
distinguish his vampires from those of his predecessors, and his writing is simply not good enough to carry a novel longer than Dracula. But McCammon did not learn his lesson, for he went on to write other prolix novels that are similarly indebted to the work of his predecessors. Then there is the sad case of Brian Lumley (b. 1937). This Englishman began his career writing unwittingly comical pastiches of H. P. Lovecraft— although, in the end, these works proved to be equally unwitting imitations of the perversion of Lovecraft’s myth-cycle engendered by August Derleth. Then he took it into his mind to write Necroscope (1986), the first of more than a dozen fat novels that present a ridiculous farrago of supernatural horror, espionage, fantasy, and science fiction, the basic premise of which is the attempts by one Harry Keogh, a necroscope (one who can communicate with the dead) who has become a British intelligence agent, to battle some Soviet agents who seek to bring in the “Wamphyri” into our world. Never has such a bad writer written so much that has been read by so many. But the inherent absurdity of this entire series, as with Lumley’s work as a whole, will cause posterity to deal with it in its usual fashion, and it will all end up in the maw of oblivion where it belongs.
vi. Horrors from the Mainstream Several mainstream writers—or, at any rate, writers who approached horror from mainstream or other genre perspectives—produced some notable (or at least popular) works during this period. American writer William Hjortsberg (b. 1941) wrote several novels (including a science fiction/crime hybrid, Gray Matters [1971]) before publishing Falling Angel (1978), powerfully filmed as Angel Heart (1987). A complex supernatural novel masquerading as a detective story, the tale focuses on a private detective, Harry Angel, who becomes involved with a shadowy figure named Louis Cyphre—who, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be Lucifer. Although the novel proves to be one more reprise of the selling-one’s-soulto-the-Devil motif (in this case the seller is a 1940s crooner, Johnny Favorite), the structural complexity of the tale, its stylish prose, and its vivid realisation of setting (both New York City and New Orleans) render it far superior to the average run of bestseller fare. Hjortsberg’s next supernatural novel, Nevermore (1994), is a considerable step downward, treating of the relationship between spiritualist convert Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and debunker Harry Houdini. The case of Thomas Harris (b. 1940) is a perplexing one. After writing a dreadful potboiler, Black Sunday (1975), about terrorists wishing to blow up the Super Bowl from a blimp, he produced—at surprisingly long intervals, for a bestselling writer—two notable novels, Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988). The celebrity of these works—as well as of their film versions (the first, filmed as Manhunter, appeared in 1986, the second in 1990)—has caused Harris to be a figure of much renown and his works to be hailed as significant contributions to weird literature. But, while there is no question that nothing supernatural occurs in these works, there is a vexing question as to whether they fall even into the category of psychological horror. In my opinion they do not, although that judgment has no relevance to my relatively high regard for the novels as literary works. Both are presented as mystery or detective stories. In Red Dragon, Will Graham, a semi-retired FBI agent, seeks to hunt down a serial killer by adopting the mindset of the criminal. Harris makes elaborate claims that he
has devised a new method of detection, but in fact the novel proceeds using fairly orthodox forensic techniques. That, however, is beside the point; the question is whether this tale can be classified as a psychological horror tale. To be sure, the killer—Francis Dolarhyde, an orphan raised by a hideous and tyrannical granadmother—is a loathsome figure, although he engenders some minimal sympathy on the basis of his unfortunate upbringing; but the novel is a work of detection, and there is to my mind an unsufficiency of terror engendered by Harris’s occasional attempts to probe his killer’s diseased mentality. In The Silence of the Lambs the focus is on Clarice Starling, a trainee in the FBI Academy who has been chosen to interrogate Dr. Hannibal Lecter —a cannibalistic murderer captured by Graham, and who played a bit part in Red Dragon—to gain insights into another serial killer, labelled Buffalo Bill, ultimately identified as one Jame Gumb. Gumb is also a diseased mentality—he kills in order to make an entire suit out of women’s skin, as this will be, in his mind, the closest he will ever come to being a woman— but the gripping mental battle between Starling and Lecter ends up relegating the Gumb case to the background, so that once again no sense of terror is engendered by a portrayal of his psychological aberrations. Lecter escaped at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, and he becomes the focal point of Harris’s two subsequent novels, Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006); but these works had best be forgotten. Hannibal was apparently written in some haste in order to forestall an independent film sequel to The Silence of the Lambs; the film version of Hannibal duly appeared in 2001. To say that the novel is a disappointment is a monumental understatement; the second half in particular plummets into realms of dreadfulness not seen since the heyday of Harold Robbins and Richard Bach. It concludes preposterously with Lecter hypnotising Starling so that she becomes his companion and presumable lover. This contrived and implausible ending is a fitting capstone to a novel that descends into cheap bloodletting but has none of the elegance and restraint of its predecessors. Hannibal Rising is not quite as offensively bad, dealing not incompetently with Hannibal’s upbringing in Lithuania, but it too is generally unsuccessful. A brief note should be given to American Psycho (1991) by American novelist Bret Easton Ellis (b. 1964), who had previously gained notoriety with the mainstream novels Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of
Attraction (1987). American Psycho, by its very title, suggests a link with Robert Bloch’s Psycho, as does the name of its protagonist, the yuppie Patrick Bateman. This novel is probably not to be classified as psychological horror either, but it is actually rather closer to it than Harris’s are. If American Psycho provided any penetrating examination of the psyche of Bateman—who progresses from hanging out with his yuppie friends and lovers to cold-blooded murder, twisted sex, and cannibalism—it could perhaps be considered a work of psychological horror; but it is exactly to Ellis’s purpose not to engage in such a thing. Bateman and all his cronies are psychologically empty: there simply are no depths of character to fathom. He himself states at the end, “Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in” (375). The real horror of the novel is the utter vacancy of Bateman’s personality.
vii. The British Invasion British writers were not slow to jump on the bestseller bandwagon, once they observed the popularity of Blatty, King, and others. Some writers, of course, are beneath discussion, among them Shaun Hutson (b. 1958), who since 1982 has written a dismal array of novels whose chief foci are gruesome bloodletting, raunchy sex, and a prose style of nearly perfect illiteracy; and Guy N. Smith (b. 1939), a neo-pulp writer whose dozens of novels are all destined for oblivion, if they have not already achieved it. But some British popular writers are minimally above this low standard and worthy of some analysis. Basil Copper (b. 1924) is a puzzling case. Capable on rare occasions of striking ideas and powerful emotive effects, he spoils much of his work by conventional supernaturalism, stiff and wooden characters, and in general a lack of concision and dramatic tensity. His supporters point to the old-time leisureliness of his writing, hearking back to the nineteenth-century ghost story; but this feature detracts from rather than adding to the merits of his work. Copper’s first story collection, Not After Nightfall, dates to 1967, but he began writing in earnest in 1970 and most of the work for which he is best known dates to the following two decades. But there is very little of merit in either his novels or his tales. The early “Camera Obscura” (1965) is competent enough, although its moral is very elementary (the greedy will get their comeuppance); it is probably better absorbed through the effective “Night Gallery” episode than in print. “Amber Print” (in From Evil’s Pillow, 1973) puts forth the ingenious idea that a rare print of a film (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) changes upon each viewing, and at one point a character finds himself in the film; but the execution is clumsy. “The Great Vore” (in Here Be Daemons, 1978) begins promisingly but lapses into a verbose tale about a sex cult. As for Copper’s novels, the less said the better. The Great White Space (1974) is one of the worst Lovecraftian pastiches on record—a cheap ripoff of one of Lovecraft’s poorest tales (“The Nameless City”), with a protagonist absurdly named Clark Ashton Scarsdale. Other of his novels,
such as The House of the Wolf (1983) and The Black Death (1991), are similarly unimaginative and prolix. Another writer who appears to have earned the respect of his countrymen, if only for his longevity and prolificity, is R. Chetwynd-Hayes (1919–2001), who wrote a dozen or so novels and more than twenty-five collections of stories from 1959 to his death; but little of this mass of work is worth reading. The collection Terror by Night (1974) is representative. Here we are met with a routine and predictable tale of a female werewolf (“The Throwback”); a painfully laboured attempt at a humorous ghost story (“The Ghostly Earl”); an unconvincing tale about the Devil in a Scottish village (“Lileas and the Water-Horse”); a passable tale about an actor who has played a monster in so many films that he thinks he has become one (“Under the Skin”); a story about the “hounds of hell” featuring a certain stateliness of diction that is not entirely ineffective (“Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwn Annwn”); an utterly confused story of a man who, out of unrequited love, engenders a kind of evil automaton (“The Echo”); a transparent and superficial account of religious fanaticism (“The Monster”); a ludicrous story about a wife who teams up with a ghost to kill her husband (“Housebound”); and so on and so forth. It can be seen from these summaries that Chetwynd-Hayes trods very well-worn ground, alternating from supernaturalism to non-supernaturalism as the case may be. But his prose lacks distinction and his conceptions are trite and hackneyed. The fact that he began writing his horror tales at a time when the field was at a low ebb should not entice us to elevate his work beyond the level of resolute mediocrity. Mediocrity of an altogether offensive sort is exhibited by the dreary plethora of novels emitted by Graham Masterton (b. 1946). His first novel, The Manitou (1976), was a bestseller and filmed two years later. A kind of informal sequel to The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), the short novel that August Derleth wrote up from scanty notes by Lovecraft, The Manitou concerns the efforts of a Native American sorcerer, Misquamacus, to summon a “Star Beast” (163) who—as a contemporary Indian shaman, Singing Rock, informs us—is a “Great Old One” (176). But never fear: Singing Rock is here. He lets us know that every object in the world, including manmade ones, have a “manitou” (spirit) that can be summoned. Misquamacus and his creature are eventually dispatched by summoning up the spirit of a computer, which is “Christian [!!!] and God-fearing and
dedicated to the cause of law and order” (189)—in spite of the fact that, much earlier, Singing Rock had declared, “These demons have nothing to do with Christianity at all. You can fight Christian demons with crucifixes and holy water, but these demons will just laugh at you” (118). Whatever the case, The Manitou is a wretched piece of hash that was clearly meant to capitalise on the popularity of The Exorcist and other blockbusters. In the short run it succeeded in its goal, as it was made into a big-budget film in 1978 and spawned two sequels by Masterton, The Revenge of the Manitou (1979) and Burial (1992), which I have not had the masochism to read. Other of Masterton’s novels employ such routine villains as evil spirits, Nazis using black magic, and so on. There are liberal doses of sex (as is fitting for one who edited Mayfair Magazine for years and has written a dozen or more sex manuals) and grue, but of literary quality there is not the faintest scintilla. Much the same can be said of James Herbert (b. 1943), who, like Copper and Chetwynd-Hayes, appears in recent years to have gained the respect of his compatriots. This is apparently a reversal from a previous era when Herbert was held in low esteem. Even Ramsey Campbell, who ordinarily is acute in distinguishing the meritorious from the trashy, remarks that his previous poor opinion of Herbert was “wrong” and that “I’ve begun to wonder if Herbert is disliked by some writers because he challenges the class bias of English horror fiction” (Ramsey Campbell, Probably 256). This is a very odd comment, suggesting that Herbert is a kind of British Theodore Dreiser, when in fact he is merely the producer of a succession of unimaginative and shoddily written potboilers. Herbert’s first two novels, The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975), pretty much tell the whole story. In the first, enormous rats appear to have overwhelmed a lower-class section of London, killing and eating many of the downtrodden inhabitants. If this is supposed to symbolise some kind of class conflict (the rich victimising the poor?), I fail to see it. Instead, what James attempts is capsule biographies of his various victims, as if his superficial and uninteresting portraiture of these hapless individuals somehow humanises them and makes the horror that much more poignant; it is transparently obvious that these passages are merely filler, designed to flesh out a work whose substance would not otherwise justify the length of a novel. For much of the work there is a question whether these are merely
overgrown rats or somehow supernatural; in the end we learn that a zoologist had engendered these creatures as mutations from radiation. But the most preposterous phase of the novel is Herbert’s suggestion that the entire population of the London metropolitan area is at one point evacuated so that the authorities can destroy the rats. Where do these tens of millions of people go? How will services be provided for them? Herbert blandly ignores the absurdity of the proposition merely to further the plot. As if the put-upon denizens of London hadn’t been through enough, in The Fog they are now faced with a fog or mist that first causes odd behaviour, such as random killing, and then horrible death. Even animals are afflicted, committing mass suicide by drowning themselves in the sea. In another whopper, the entire population of the city of Bournemouth is killed. Once again a pseudo-science-fictional premise is unearthed: the fog was caused by a virus that was released by an underground bomb blast. It can be seen from these synopses that Herbert’s early novels fall into a kind of “supernatural disaster” scenario, possibly influenced by the related bestsellers by such writers as Michael Crichton and Robin Cook. Disasters they are, but not of the sort that Herbert imagines. The thinking apparently is that by creating a worldwide (or at least nationwide) menace, the reader will be far more riveted than if the horror affects only a small group of people; but the end result is that the focus of the novels becomes one of mystery or suspense or adventure rather than the supernatural, which is given short shrift both in terms of plausibility and of coherent rationale. The Dark (1980), as well as two sequels to The Rats, fall into this pattern. Much more orthodox is Haunted (1988), a not ineffective ghost story. But overall, no one need waste much time sorting the few gems from the depressing mass of Herbert’s rubbishy work. Where Britain excelled, during this period, was in the anthology. The immensely prolific Peter Haining (1940–2007), amidst a welter of mediocre volumes, did assemble several noteworthy titles such as Gothic Tales of Terror (1972) and The Lucifer Society (1972), the latter including mainstream writers who wrote the occasional weird tale. Hugh Lamb (b. 1946) did sound work in resurrecting unjustly neglected writers of the supernatural, while Michel Parry (b. 1947) also has some notable volumes to his credit.
viii. Splatterpunk and Its Antecedents We have seen that Ray Garton and others introduced an element of extreme horror that ultimately led to the founding of the splatterpunk school in the late 1980s. Another important precursor was British writer Clive Barker (b. 1952), who burst on the scene in 1984–85 with the unprecedented publication of a six-volume paperback series, the Books of Blood. Previously, Barker was only known as the author of several produced but unpublished plays. After the Books of Blood he largely abandoned the short form and generated a succession of novels ranging from the superlative to the dreadful. The tragedy of Barker is that he is possessed of substantial literary gifts but is one of the most undisciplined writers on record. He has already written far too much, and after the initial acclaim his work received he expanded into films (the Hellraiser series), comic books (or “graphic novels”), and other media, spreading himself too thin and dissipating his energies. The convenient blurb that a critically challenged Stephen King bestowed upon him—“I have seen the future of horror, and it is named Clive Barker”—has become, in some ways, an albatross. What Barker sought to do in the Books of Blood is to overwhelm his readers with a furious mix of gruesome horror and sex that masked what proved to be rather conventional supernaturalism—and, to boot, supernaturalism that was either poorly thought out or not thought out at all. Consider “Sex, Death and Starshine.” Here we are to imagine that ghosts of old actors are presiding over the final performance of a Shakespeare play at an old theatre about to be demolished. But how do these ghosts come to be, and why do the living actors these ghosts kill become ghosts themselves? Not the slightest rationale is offered for these events. “The Midnight Meat Train” takes place in the New York subways and veers from physical horror (a man going home late is trying to escape a serial killer in the next car) to absurd supernaturalism: the serial killer is in fact feeding the bodies he kills to “City fathers” living in the bowels of the subway! If there is some nebulous political message in all this, I am too dense to perceive it.
“Rawhead Rex” is intended merely to inspire disgust at the sight of some immense non-human creature who eats children in the British countryside. Even some of Barker’s better tales suffer from problems of conception and execution. “Son of Celluloid” begins powerfully in depicting a criminal who dies behind the screen of an old movie theatre and somehow causes the revival of the famous actors and actresses who enlivened that screen—but the supernatural means by which this was accomplished is said to be the criminal’s cancer, at which point the tale’s plausibility collapses. “In the Hills, the Cities” has been lauded for the ingenuity of its monster—a huge figure made up of thousands of human beings who practice for years to perfect the motions suitable for their respective places in the entity’s anatomy—but the tale is marred by facile satire against communism (it takes place behind the Iron Curtain, and the monster is a kind of symbol of mindless collectivism). Just as fatuous in its political message is “Babel’s Children,” where a group of aged individuals on an island off the Greek coast purportedly run the world’s affairs. A few tales, however, can be singled out for commendation. “The Forbidden” grippingly depicts the cultural transformation of a middle-class woman who is studying graffiti in a ghetto, in the course of which she meets the Candyman, a sort of embodiment of the rumours that come out of the ghetto. “Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud” is also effective in its dissection of class distinctions. Perhaps Barker’s most powerful tale is “The Age of Desire,” the one story where he actually fuses sex and horror successfully. Here a man is given a drug that so stimulates his sexual desire that everything becomes seductive. As one character states: “All our socalled higher concerns become secondary to the pursuit [of sex]. For a short time sex makes us obsessive; we can perform, or at least we think we can perform, what with hindsight may seem extraordinary feats” (BB 5.136). As an exposition of the sexualisation of our age, this story is notable. Barker somehow managed to put aside all his literary deficiencies and write The Damnation Game (1985), which stands as one of the finest horror novels of the past fifty years. Not only is this work impeccably written, eschewing the slovenliness that so frequently dogs Barker’s prose, but its supernatural framework is rich and complex. The novel revolves around Mamoulian, a mysterious figure who has never lost at cards. A petty thief and gambler, Joseph Whitehead, actually beats Mamoulian (or is allowed to win), and as an apparent result he becomes fabulously wealthy. But what
exactly has he won at Mamoulian’s hands? It appears to be nothing less than the control of chance. As Mamoulian once told Whitehead, “All life is chance. . . . The trick is learning how to use it” (230). But how did Mamoulian himself gain this power over chance? He did so by learning the secrets of chance from a monk, whom he then killed. But, in a reprise of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, it is Mamoulian who now wishes to die at Whitehead’s hands. It is difficult to find a flaw in The Damnation Game: it is structurally perfect, rich in characterisation, and simultaneously evocative of horror, awe, and pathos. Regrettably, the rest of Barker’s novelistic output over the next decade or more has been increasingly disappointing. Weaveworld (1987) is a lame fantasy about a magic carpet (meant to stand for art and imagination); The Great and Secret Show (1989) is an interminable and incoherent novel that also purports to be about art and imagination; Barker continues the account in the unreadable Everville (1994). Imajica (1991) is another ludicrous and intolerably verbose fantasy about the Five Dominions (whatever they may be). One wonders if Barker abandoned supernatural horror for this kind of pretentious metaphysical fantasy because he did not wish to be typecast as a horror writer; but if so, the end result is even poorer than the average run of his earlier work. Joe R. Lansdale (b. 1951) is not a splatterpunk author tout court, but he contributed to the tendency toward extreme horror with The Nightrunners (1987). This unpleasant novel focuses on a married couple, Montgomery and Becky Jones; Becky is attempting to recover from the trauma of being raped, while Montgomery feels self-contempt because, as his own father said to him repeatedly, he has “no balls.” It turns out that the rapist, a teenage hoodlum named Clyde Edson, was interrupted before he could carry out the task of slitting Becky’s throat after he raped her (he had committed several rape/murders in the preceding months), and then, after a short time in prison, he killed himself. But his spirit somehow manages to infiltrate the mind of a fellow hoodlum, Brian Blackwood, whom Clyde is now urging to complete his unfulfilled mission of killing Becky. But Becky and Montgomery, with the aid of two policemen (both of whom die in the final conflict), manage to kill Brian and his cohorts and save themselves. From this scenario it can be seen that the supernatural component of the story is almost entirely adventitious: it serves no vital function in the overall scenario, most of which is concerned with the exposition of the crimes—
rapes, murders, animal cruelty, and so forth—of Clyde, Brian, and others. At one point Brian, under Clyde’s influence, reflects that he may be some kind of Nietzschean Superman—the vanguard of a new brand of humanity to replace a species that has been weakened by excessive pity and civilisation. But these reflections are so foolish that they can hardly be said to lend any depth to the work. There is also some vague mention of a God of the Razor, a kind of eternal force of evil; but not much is made of this either. With the passing of years, however, Lansdale finally learned how to write, and later novels and tales show a certain gift for prose—even if the down-home Texas style that he has made his signature can seem at times a tad studied and artificial—and an engaging ability to meld humour and horror. This latter trait comes out in two supernatural tales, “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks” (1989) and “Bubba Ho-tep” (1994). The former takes the flimsy premise of a chemical accident that brings the dead back to life as the springboard for a gonzo extravaganza involving bounty hunters, religious fanaticism, sex with the living and the dead, and so forth; it manages to render the zombie concept—an even more imaginatively unfruitful trope than the vampire, and one that regrettably entered modern pop culture through George Romero’s cult film The Night of the Living Dead (1968)—moderately original and engaging. As for the latter, with its protagonist who is either an Elvis Presley impersonator or Elvis himself in his doddering old age, it similarly revivifies the mummy concept in a particularly ingenious manner. Many of Lansdale’s novels and tales are either of the crime/suspense or non-supernatural horror variety, such as the grim “Mad Dog Summer” (1999), and much of his work features a forthright, if not particularly subtle or nuanced, confrontation of the crude racism of his native region. David J. Schow (b. 1955) coined the term splatterpunk in 1986, so one would suppose he is some kind of father to the movement; but, oddly enough, he refused to participate in the anthology Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror (1990), edited by Paul Sammon. Nevertheless, he appears to have established some of the foci and parameters of the school, which explicitly rejects the artistic restraint found in such writers as M. R. James, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell (a particular target appears to have been the Shadows anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant, with their advocacy of “quiet horror”) and a strong emphasis on physical gruesomeness, frequently
mingled with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Sammon states in his introduction that “Incest, racism, rape, animal cruelty, serial murders, exploitation of the dead” are the subject-matter of the splatterpunks (a list notable for its exclusion of supernaturalism, although in fact many splatterpunk writers employ the supernatural), but adds loftily: “But please, not only for the shock value. For these stories carry profound subtexts, harrowing insights into our own sick and shining twentieth century” (xv). Whether the splatterpunk writers do or do not live up to these high expectations is the issue we must address. But it is reassuring that this short-lived movement has produced at least one writer of substance, and that is Schow. Curiously, he published four books in 1990—the collections Seeing Red and Lost Angels and the novels The Kill Riff and The Shaft—although he had been writing professionally for at least a decade before that. All these books have points of merit. Schow is the one splatterpunk writer who, in short, can write; his prose is vibrant, scintillating, and laced with pungent similes and metaphors. And yet, he is far from being a Johnny-one-note; he wields a surprising variety of tone and mood. While his work is unified by a generally grim, dark worldview that sees little hope either for the social or economic underclass (what in The Shaft is called “anything that survives the outskirts of polite civilization” [5]) or for the middle class whose sole object is to avoid contact with the underclass and its zones of violence and despair, his tales themselves range from the brooding to the comical to the poignant. “Red Light” (included in both his story collections) may be Schow’s finest weird tale, telling of a model who gains spectacular success only to suffer a hideous fate—a victim of “psychic vampirism.” In a sense the tale is an updating of Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” but it is told with power and panache. “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You” is the horrifying tale of a dubious movie theatre teeming with vermin. This story may be nothing more than an evocation of the normal human disgust at cockroaches, but the handling is deft. Later tales, such as those found in Black Leather Required (1994), are also engaging. Here we are presented with tales that tread the borderline between humour and horror, such as the indescribable “Last Call for the Sons of Shock,” which puts Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, and the Wolfman on stage. Of Schow’s two early novels, The Kill Riff is non-supernatural, while The Shaft is emphatically supernatural. This fact alone is part of the reason
why the latter is far more successful than the former. The Kill Riff focuses on a man, Lucas Ellington, who seeks to exact vengeance on a rock band that he blames for his daughter’s death. Although the evolution of Lucas’s character is well handled, the novel devolves into merely a series of tableaux where he systematically kills off the various members of the band. The Shaft is an entirely different proposition. This novel, about the drug culture that festers on the underside of Chicago’s tenements, is perhaps the only genuine contribution that splatterpunk made to weird literature. It embodies many of the central concerns in Schow’s fiction—the pervasiveness of drugs and their corrosive effects upon society and human lives; the insidious melding of the normally separate worlds of grinding poverty and middle-class yuppiedom; and the emergence of the weird and the horrific from the mundanities of daily life. The crux of the supernaturalism in the novel is a ventilation shaft down which two of the characters drop two kilos of cocaine during a police raid; as a result, a huge tapeworm emerges and then, in some fashion or other, causes the entire building to become weirdly animate. The plausibility of this whole scenario leaves something to be desired, but some pungent supernatural effects are engendered—the walls bleed when they are damaged, and the rooms are able to enlarge and contract to trap some hapless tenant. In any event, the mingling of a clearly supernatural horror with the very real dangers involved in drug-running creates a uniquely compelling atmosphere. Schow has still not received the attention he deserves, and he is anything but a bestselling author (to date, The Shaft has still not been published in the United States). Very different are the collaborators John Skipp (b. 1957) and Craig Spector (b. 1958), who wrote a succession of blockbusters that defined the splatterpunk movement for its short duration. But the curious thing is that these novels, for all their purportedly bold and radical approach and method—chiefly the inclusion of liberal doses of teenage sex and gruesome bloodletting—are curiously, even absurdly, conventional in terms of their supernatural manifestations. The Light at the End (1986) mingles vampirism with the punk lifestyle; The Scream (1988) implausibly and interminably tells of a rock band that is in some fashion the embodiment of ultimate evil; Animals (1993) is little more than a standard werewolf tale. In all these works, grim violence and an affectation of existentialist despair are made to serve in place of good writing and deft
character portrayal. Skipp and Spector split up after the publication of Animals, but no one need mourn the surcease of their collaboration.
ix. The Bridge: Peter Straub Peter Straub (b. 1943) provides a convenient bridge from the schlockmeisters of the bestseller club and the more refined literary artists to be treated in the next chapter. For a time he and Stephen King were bookends among horror bestsellers, and he was fond of saying that, whereas King is a kind of Charles Dickens among weird writers, he is a Henry James. This kind of self-flattery is regrettably common in Straub’s various comments about himself, suggesting that he has a pretty high regard for his own talents. Whether that regard is justified is the question. Straub only took to horror writing after the publication of his first, mainstream novel, Marriages (1973), a book heavily influenced by D. H. Lawrence and Henry James. His agent then suggested that he write a “gothic”—no doubt because it was proving to be popular. He produced the able novels Julia (1975) and If You Could See Me Now (1977) before reaching the bestseller lists with Ghost Story (1979), which was lavishly filmed in 1981. Since Ghost Story, however, Straub has fumbled to some degree, and his work ranges widely from fantasy to the conte cruel to the mystery or detective story. Whether he has produced a single book that is entirely satisfactory, from an aesthetic perspective, is in considerable doubt. Julia is a capable little novel, fusing psychological and supernatural horror deftly in its account of a neurotic young woman who believes that her house is haunted by a ghost. If You Could See Me Now also has merits, focusing on the possibility that a girl who died as a teenager is coming back from the dead to keep an appointment with her young lover, Miles Teagarden, who as a man has come back to see if the appointment is in fact going to be kept. She does so—but only after a deliberate anticlimax in which Miles believes she is not coming; the novel is unable to recover its momentum after this letdown, and there is also a curious problem of how to put down the spirit after it has revived. Miles and a new lover manage to do so relatively easily by fire. A problematical ending is the besetting flaw in Ghost Story, which otherwise remains Straub’s finest weird novel. This well-known tale of four elderly members of the Chowder Society, who find themselves victimised
by the spirit of a woman who, as it turns out, they themselves killed as young men, also features a not-so-subtle misogyny, one that perhaps Straub did not intend: as the novel proceeds, all the sympathy is given to the men as they seek to escape the clutches of the actress Eva Galli, who has come back as a manitou to wreak her vengeance; but since the men caused her death to begin with, how are they not culpable? But the problem of the ending is even more serious. A manitou is, apparently, immortal or nearly so; so how is it to be dispatched? The manitou itself declares: “I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers” (469). At the end of the novel we are treated to the ludicrous spectacle of one of the men pursuing the spirit as it changes forms over and over again, until finally it enters the body of a wasp. The man captures the wasp and chops it up with a knife, causing a certain amount of unfortunate injury to his hand but evidently killing the entity for good. But one shouldn’t be too hard on Ghost Story. It is written with a luminous prose that instantly vivifies both the characters and the varied settings of the novel, and it does manage to create a sense of cumulative power and suspense. The plot seems fairly clearly to have been taken from Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” as Straub himself admitted in an interview; but it is nonetheless a deft treatment of its subject. Shadowland (1980), the much-awaited successor to Ghost Story, is a disappointing novel that unsuccessfully attempts to inject a sense of weirdness into the subject of magic or prestidigitation. Floating Dragon (1982) is a nearly total failure in that it features too much supernaturalism. There is a fundamental confusion in the very premise of the work. We are to believe that the various supernatural phenomena that descend upon a small town in Connecticut is caused either by the release of a poison gas from a nearby chemical plant or by a centuries-old spirit dwelling in the town . . . or perhaps both. But the logic of supernaturalism requires that only a single cause must be put forth for a given effect, and Straub does not seem to have made up his mind whether to use the one or the other. Straub seemed to grow disenchanted with supernatural horror after Floating Dragon. After writing a dreadful collaboration with Stephen King, the fantasy The Talisman (1984), he generated a trilogy of loosely connected novels in which the supernatural is reduced to a minimum or eliminated altogether. Koko (1988) is a drearily prolix novel about a
Vietnam veteran, Tim Underhill, suspected of being a serial killer. After this, Straub published Mystery (1989), a fairly able detective novel that for once eschews the literary pretentiousness that had increasingly dogged his work. But even this work did not prepare one for The Throat (1993), an extraordinarily long and complex mystery/suspense novel that is far and away Straub’s best book overall and, in my judgment, one of the finest stories of its kind ever written. Here, Straub has seamlessly fused the Vietnam theme from Koko and the murder mystery theme in Mystery into a compelling and vital novel. There is no supernaturalism here, and no particular message except the platitude that child abuse and war trauma can cause psychological problems and lead to hideous violence. Straub did return to supernaturalism with the story collection Houses without Doors (1990), whose chief features are two long novellas, “The Buffalo Hunter” (a creditable venture into psychological terror) and “Mrs. God” (a clever pastiche of the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman). Other stories in the book are mortifyingly pretentious. Straub has continued doggedly to write novels of various themes and genres, but Ghost Story and The Throat remain his two most satisfactory books. He did succeed in showing that literary elegance, even if it borders on highbrow snobbishness, can be commercially successful; but his work by and large must recede into the background in comparison to the genuine masters of modern weird fiction to be discussed in the next chapter.
XVII. The Boom: The Literati There were, during this period (the 1970s and 1980s), any number of weird writers who didn’t make the bestsellers lists but who nonetheless contributed to the ever-increasing corpus of weird writing; indeed, a number of them produced work that revolutionised the field in a variety of ways and thereby engendered the fields of supernatural and nonsupernatural horror as we now know them. Many of these writers (and the blockbusters of the previous chapter as well) took advantage of several new publishing venues to market their wares. From the demise of Weird Tales in 1954 to the 1970s, relatively few magazines of wide distribution welcomed supernatural short fiction; but that changed with the founding of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine (1981–89), edited successively by T. E. D. Klein and Tappan King, which featured the leading writers of the field and achieved impressive newsstand distribution. This magazine was far more visible than Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers (1973f.), which had evolved from a smallpress journal devoted to Lovecraft to one that published some of the bestselling writers of the day. Weird Tales itself was sporadically revived— first by Sam Moskowitz (1973–74), then as a series of four paperback volumes edited by Lin Carter (1981–83), and then finally as a quarterly in 1988; it is still publishing. But this latest incarnation, long edited by Darrell Schweitzer, appeared to focus more on whimsical fantasy than supernatural horror, although it did feature the work of Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, and many other luminaries. But increasingly the preferred venue for short fiction was the original anthology. Perhaps inspired by the landmark volume Dark Forces (1980), edited by Kirby McCauley, which assembled an impressive cast of both popular and literary horror writers, many other editors began publishing anthologies containing original contributions by leading writers. We have
already taken note of Charles L. Grant’s Shadows series (1978–91), while Stuart Schiff edited six volumes of Whispers anthologies (1977–87). Several competing anthologies of “year’s best” horror tales emerged, including The Year’s Best Horror Stories (1973–94), many volumes of which were edited by Karl Edward Wagner; The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (1987f.), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; and Best New Horror (1990f.), the first five volumes of which were coedited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, the remaining by Jones alone. Each of these volumes had a slightly different focus (Wagner devoted himself to the thankless task of canvassing the small press for meritorious work), but each displayed a wealth of substantial short fiction that presented a kind of snapshot of the state of the field.
i. Ramsey Campbell: Horrors of the City British author Ramsey Campbell (b. 1946) is the leading weird writer since Lovecraft and can rank with Poe, Lovecraft, Blackwood, and Dunsany as among the greatest weird writers in all literary history. This high acclaim is, at the moment, perhaps not widely shared in the horror community, much less the literary culture at large, but both the breadth of Campbell’s achievement—more than twenty novels and hundreds of short stories written over the past five decades—and the remarkably high and consistent level of quality that his work displays have given him an unassailable position in the field, and it is only a matter of time before recognition of that fact becomes universal. Campbell began writing at an extraordinarily early age, and by the age of fifteen he was submitting stories to August Derleth of Arkham House. Derleth, initially unaware of Campbell’s youth, accepted a collection of Lovecraftian stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), while lending significant assistance to Campbell in the basic craft of writing. In particular, he suggested that Campbell devise his own British variant of Lovecraft’s “Arkham country,” and Campbell promptly did so, establishing the cities of Severnford, Brichester, and others in the Severn Valley. These early stories exhibit few of the qualities of Campbell’s later work, but they are at least written with a verve and enthusiasm lacking in most “Cthulhu Mythos” pastiches written up to that time, including those by Derleth himself. Very shortly after completing these tales, Campbell initiated a much more serious and original phase of fiction writing, and over the next several years his unceasing toil culminated in the assemblage of another collection, Demons by Daylight (1973). The volume was essentially completed as early as 1968, but Derleth’s poor health, leading to his death in 1971, delayed the volume’s appearance from Arkham House for several years. It is no exaggeration to say that this volume almost singlehandedly ushered in the contemporary mode of serious weird writing—a mode that fused fluid, evocative prose, provocative sexual situations (contrasting with the amusingly chaste writing that had dominated weird fiction since Poe’s day),
innovative weird conceptions, depiction of complex interpersonal relationships, and bold modernity of setting and cultural reference. With this one volume, weird fiction became a serious competitor with mainstream fiction for the depths of human emotion it explored. But Campbell was not content with this book; he continued to produce collection after collection—The Height of the Scream (1976), Dark Companions (1982), Cold Print (1985), Scared Stiff (1986), Waking Nightmares (1991), and several others, culminating in the remarkable Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961–1991 (1991), fittingly issued by Arkham House. In the mid-1970s, he began writing novels. While these are on the whole somewhat uneven—and Campbell has admitted that he is compelled to write them in order to continue making a living as a professional writer—several of them are ones we would not wish to be without, including The Face That Must Die (1979/1983), The Hungry Moon (1986), Midnight Sun (1990), and The Count of Eleven (1991). Campbell’s apprenticeship in the Lovecraft idiom yielded surprisingly rich results only a few years after the appearance of his first book. Such a story as “Cold Print” [1966–67; dates placed in brackets in this section indicate date of composition, not date of publication], although set in Brichester, was manifestly based on Campbell’s native Liverpool. He had earlier devised his own addition to the groaning bookshelf of Lovecraftian “forbidden books,” The Revelations of Glaaki, but in this story he transforms the hackneyed idea by tying it to the world of violent pornography. Here, the seediness, grime, and slums of Liverpool—with their potential for explosive violence at every turn—are vividly etched as examples of urban decay very different from what Lovecraft did in, say, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Even more powerfully, “The Franklyn Paragraphs” [1967], using Lovecraft’s “documentary style,” terrifyingly depicts a man, Roland Franklyn, whose soul is trapped within the pages of his own book of occult lore, with the result that his pleas for help appear on blank pages of the book. Other stories in Demons by Daylight broach daring weird conceptions with a subtlety and indirection that render them, in the words of a later collection, waking nightmares. Here we have stories ranging from the nonsupernatural “The Stocking”—where a man becomes sexually obsessed with a co-worker—to “The Second Staircase,” where the ambiguously
named Carol (a man), beset with misogyny, finds to his horror that he has turned into a woman and is forced to undergo sex with the lascivious manager of a hotel. Perhaps the greatest tale of the collection is “Concussion” [1967], whose extraordinarily oblique narration has raised considerable controversy over what actually happens in it. In my estimation, the most plausible reconstruction is that a woman, Anne, has hit her head during an accident on a bus; in the week that she is in hospital recovering from a concussion, she goes back in time fifty years and has a bittersweet romance with a young man, Kirk. In the present day (which is actually fifty years in the future), the now aged Kirk meets the still-young Anne on the bus. This crude synopsis cannot begin to convey the exquisite delicacy of treatment that renders this tale both terrifying and poignant. Campbell is the poet of urban squalor and despair. From as early as “The Scar” [1967], a grimly atmospheric tale in which a middle-class man is insidiously replaced by a lower-class double who bears a scar on his face, to “Litter” [1972], where garbage blown about by the wind in an outdoor market is the focus of terror, Campbell is capable of infusing the commonest elements of urban life with clutching fear. In the short story, the capstone of his achievement is “Mackintosh Willy” [1977], one of the most frightening tales in contemporary fiction, telling of a derelict who terrorises a group of boys both in life and in death. Intermingled with the purely supernatural component of the story is the sensitive account of the teenage narrator’s slow maturation as he relates to his friends and parents, has his first girlfriend, and goes through the other customary stages leading from adolescence to adulthood. “The Depths” [1978] provides a kind of philosophical justification for Campbell’s tales of urban horror. Here a writer finds that if he does not write about the horrific nightmares that plague him, the events of those nightmares begin playing themselves out in real life. The writer serves as a kind of focus for the collective repression of a society that would prefer to ignore the very existence of crime and its sources. In the novel, Campbell’s supreme epitome of urban horror is the nonsupernatural novel The Face That Must Die, which was published in a truncated edition in 1979 and then in a complete edition in 1983. That latter edition also contained an illuminating introduction in which Campbell made the disturbing confession that the central figure of the novel, John Horridge, was based on his own mother, who, following her separation from her
husband, became increasingly paranoid and was finally institutionalised. Horridge is a classic paranoiac, full of hatred toward homosexuals and women, ashamed of the childhood injury that causes him to walk with a limp and places him on the dole, and perennially blaming others for his own failings and misfortunes. He would be a harmless enough individual if he did not become convinced that a man he sees on a bus is a murderer whose sketch he has seen in the newspaper. He tracks down the man (who is gay) and brutally kills him. This is only the beginning of Horridge’s crimes, and they culminate with his kidnapping of a young married couple; they manage to escape him and apparently send him tumbling down a quarry, but an epilogue informs us that he is still very much alive. The Face That Must Die is an almost unbearably dismal and cheerless novel, but its psychological account of its central figure is razor-sharp and the suspense and terror it generates from Horridge’s increasing insanity make it one of the most powerful works of non-supernatural horror ever written. Campbell wrote a bizarre pendant to this novel more than a decade later in The Count of Eleven, which is nothing less than a comic serial killer novel. Here a man named Jack Orchard, trying to help his family survive in the face of various economic and other setbacks, becomes obsessed by a complex number-mysticism, focusing either on the number eleven or on the number thirteen, with the result that he gradually begins killing people who seem to get in his way. The gradual manner in which the novel metamorphoses from a kind of Three Stooges buffoonery to grim murder is remarkable; even more remarkable is that readers remain grudgingly sympathetic to Jack even as he descends to killing, because of his manifest love for his family and his increasingly frantic attempts to aid them. Throughout his career, Campbell has revivified many of the seemingly stale tropes of supernatural fiction, lending them new vigour by distinctive treatment. Whether it be werewolves in “Night Beat” [1971] or “The Change” [1976], the Frankenstein monster in “A New Life” [1076], the zombie in “Rising Generation” [1974], or voodoo in “Missing” [1973] or “Dolls” [1974], standard motifs gain new life in Campbell’s work. The motif of psychic possession is the subject of Campbell’s weak first novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1975), but is treated in a much more provocative manner in other novels. The Parasite (1980; To Wake the Dead in the UK) is, by Campbell’s own admission, a novel written in an attempt to capitalise on the burgeoning popular interest in the horror novel, and as
such it features readily identifiable characters, a fast-moving plot, and a spectacular dénouement—elements that detract from its aesthetic status, but make it an enjoyable read. The crux of the novel is the discovery that Rose Tierney—who suffered a traumatic incident, told in a harrowing prologue, in which as a little girl she was attacked by some nameless entity—is possessed by the spirit of Peter Grace, an occultist who believed he could attain immortality by transferring his spirit into another body, perhaps that of a baby. Implausible as some elements of the plot may be, The Parasite is far more than a shilling shocker in its vivid characterisation and smoothflowing prose. Still more effective is The Influence (1988), in which an elderly woman named Queenie is so fiercely tenacious of life that her soul, prior to her death, enters the body of her grand-niece, Rowan, after initially occupying the body of a little girl named Vicky (i.e., Victoria). In one of the most hallucinatory passages in all Campbell’s work, Rowan’s soul must trudge from a cemetery back to her home many miles away—a task that seems to take hours or days or months. In essence, The Influence uses the psychic possession trope to convey Rowan’s pitiable helplessness as she is exiled from her body and must wander about as a disembodied spirit. The dream theme is also extensively used by Campbell in both the Demons by Daylight stories and in later works. His distinctively allusive style renders the distinction between reality on the one hand and dream, nightmare, hallucination, or madness on the other hand tenuous at best. His most exhaustive treatment of the theme is the long novel Incarnate, which can stand as one of the imaginative pinnacles of contemporary supernatural literature. This immensely complex novel focuses on an experiment on dreams conducted in Oxford in which five individuals, all of whom have confessed to having dim precognitive faculties, once participated. Years later, each of these characters still seems to be suffering from the traumatic effects of the experiment; and the result is an extraordinary tapestry of narration in which the lives of the five individuals become insidiously intermingled. The novel ultimately centres on Molly Wolfe, an employee of a television station who is astounded to discover that, after she is apparently beaten up by a policeman and his assistant, the whole incident was a dream. Whereas in other works Campbell narrates actual incidents with the cloudy delicacy of a dream, this dream-incident is told with the pitiless clarity of a documentary.
Molly ultimately realises what is happening: “The dreams are getting stronger. My dreams and everyone else’s. We’ve allowed them to grow stronger by trying to explain them away, don’t you understand?” (424). Ultimately re-establishing contact with the other dreamers, Molly discovers that each of them has been plagued in some mysterious fashion by various incarnations of a figure named Sage, who appears to wish to control their dream-life. In a conclusion unlike anything in supernatural fiction, the five dreamers find that London is being replaced by a dream of their own making, and the reality of the world is saved only by Molly’s realisation that she must simply renounce the dream so that the real world can return. In Incarnate, the complexity of the plot, the intricate interweaving of narratives and narrative voices, the suppleness and richness of the prose, and the harrowing nature of the central horror all fuse into one of the finest weird novels of its period. Perhaps our only reservation concerns the figure of Sage, since it is never entirely clarified why he is seeking to gain possession of dreams or what he hopes to accomplish if and when he does so. The bizarre novella Needing Ghosts (1990) can be studied here. The plot of this tale is almost impossible to describe, since we can never be certain whether any of the incidents related in it are actually occurring or are merely the hallucinatory fantasies of its protagonist, a man named Simon Mottershead. Simon appears to awaken in a strange house suffering from amnesia, and in the course of his peregrinations around an unnamed city he discovers that he is a writer. Along the way he encounters a bald man with whom he has some bizarre encounters, as well as a wife, son, and daughter who, he suddenly remembers, live in a house nearby and whom he finds killed in a strange manner: books are lying across their throats with knives impaling them. If any sense can be made of this surreal novella, it may be that Mottershead has fallen into his own fictional universe. This is only one of several possible reconstructions of the tale, but however one elucidates it, it is a masterwork that sits nebulously on the borderline of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural. Campbell, in his intense focus on human relationships, rarely writes the cosmic horror of a Lovecraft, but in two novels he has made interesting contributions to the mode. The Hungry Moon takes us to the small town of Moonwell, evidently in the north of England, near Manchester, which is visited by Godwin Mann, an American evangelist who unwittingly releases
an age-old entity in the course of his attempt to convert the locals to his brand of fundamentalist Christianity. This entity, living in a cave near the town, apparently comes from the moon, and it takes possession of Mann; more disturbing still, the entire town is swathed in darkness, and no one appears to be able to enter or leave the vicinity. This detail may perhaps have been derived from Hodgson’s The Night Land, but Campbell appears to be using the element as symbolic of the intellectual darkness of fundamentalism. Midnight Sun is an avowed tribute to the “visionary” horror of Machen and Blackwood, and is one of Campbell’s great achievements—or would be if it were not for its problematical ending. In prose of the utmost fluidity and evocativeness, Campbell etches the increasing alienation from his family of Ben Sterling, a writer of children’s books who senses some great mystery in the immense forest surrounding his house. It appears that Ben is hearing the call of some mysterious ice-entity that inhabits the region, and gradually he makes efforts to loose the entity upon the world. In a scene that is quite literally chilling, Ben’s family finds the nearby town swathed in ice and all its inhabitants frozen to death. But suddenly Ben has a change of heart as he contemplates the icy death of his own family: “The only light he wanted to see now, too late, was the light in Ellen’s and the children’s eyes” (319). Shortly thereafter, however, he perceives the awesomeness of the force he is up against: The world and the stars had been less than a dream, nothing more than a momentary lapse in its consciousness, and the metamorphosis which was reaching for the world was infinitesimal by its standards, simply a stirring in its sleep, a transient dream of the awful perfection which would overtake infinity when the presence beyond the darkness was fully awake. (323) Nevertheless, Ben somehow manages to defeat or suppress the ice-entity by setting himself on fire. This conclusion does not, quite frankly, seem warranted by the overall thrust of the narrative, and in general it appears to be a concession to those of his readers (presumably the majority) who do not wish the human world to end. But in so doing, Campbell has seriously compromised the impressive cosmic scenario he has established.
At the opposite end of Campbell’s cosmic tales are those narratives that focus on children, emphasising their peculiar helplessness in an adult world they scarcely understand. The theme found powerful expression in so early a tale as “The Interloper” [1968], a gripping tale of school life in which two teenage boys are menaced by a teacher who manifests himself as a hideous, cobweb-covered monster. Perhaps also to be noticed here is “The Guy” [1968], a tale that fuses horror and pathos in its depiction of a Guy Fawkes’ Day celebration that goes awry. The focus of the story is the insurmountable class distinctions between two boys of different families. Another masterwork in Campbell’s early work is “The Chimney” [1975], which proves to be nothing less than a horrific elaboration of Campbell’s own family situation. Upon the estrangement of Campbell’s parents, his father lived upstairs while Campbell and his mother lived downstairs; Campbell never saw his father except during Christmas, only hearing his father’s footsteps as he padded across the floor above. Campbell brilliantly encapsulates this emotionally painful scenario by portraying the terror of a small boy who has a vision of a charred Father Christmas coming down the chimney and is thereafter terrified of what might emerge from that orifice. The novel The Claw (1983), initially published under the transparent pseudonym “Jay Ramsay,” focuses on Anna, the daughter of the writer Alan Knight and his wife, Liz. Alan has been persuaded by anthropologist David Marlowe to take an artifact—a ferocious-looking but beautifully crafted metal claw—back from Africa to England. It transpires that the claw has supernatural properties related to the African cult that fashioned it. The overall plot is a trifle pulpish, but the increasing brutalisation of Anna by her parents is powerfully handled. Not to be overlooked is the novel Ancient Imges (1989), whose engaging premise—a “lost” film, Tower of Fear, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, during the making of which an unusual number of the film crew suffered accidents or death—is a red herring for a plot that eventually focuses on an age-old curse on a region in rural England controlled by the aristocratic Redfield family. But it features one of the most piquant monsters in all Campbell’s work: Its mottled limbs looked both lithe and horribly thin. Its torso had shrunk around its ribs, its greenish penis had withered like a dead
root. Almost worse than all this, she recognized the face. Perhaps she was recognizing that the eyes, when it had had eyes, had been set so wide as to make the forehead seem lower than it was, but the vegetation that patched the skull had grown into a misshapen parody of the fact that had been there—the Redfield face. (288) It is possible to speak at unending length about the short stories and novels of Ramsey Campbell, as they are inexhaustibly rich and rewarding. Every one of his tales, long or short, is moulded with impeccable craftsmanship, and every one of them suggests more than it states. Campbell never uses horror or the supernatural merely to shock or terrify; there is always an underlying symbolic or metaphorical message that speaks of his deep concern for the fragility of human beings in their complex relationships with one another, with their society, and with a universe they can scarcely comprehend. In the last twenty years Campbell has continued to write stellar work in the short story and the novel, and these works will be discussed in a subsequent chapter.
ii. Other Short Story Masters It would be inaccurate to state that any of the four Ameican writers discussed in this section are direct disciples of Campbell, but they have all learned from his example and duplicated, in part, the skill and power he has displayed, especially in the short story. One of them, T. E. D. Klein, did in fact write a significant essay/review of Demons by Daylight, “Ramsey Campbell: An Appreciation” (Nyctalops, May 1977), which Campbell himself found highly encouraging. But all have apparently found in Campbell a model of how serious, socially and philosophically relevant weird fiction should be written. Klein (b. 1947) is one of the most well-read writers in the field: while at Brown University, he wrote an honours thesis on Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, and he has exhibited a deep appreciation of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and other leading figures. While editing Twilight Zone, he produced a substantial, four-part series, “Dr. Van Helsing’s Handy Guide to Ghost Stories” (1981), an exhaustive treatment of the history of supernatural fiction not at all dissimilar in scope and content to Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Klein has established an enviable reputation on a remarkably small body of work. In essence, his fictional output is restricted to a long novel, The Ceremonies (1984), and a collection of four novellas, Dark Gods (1985); his remaining short fiction was gathered much later in the sardonically titled Reassuring Tales (2007). But since the mid-1980s, when he began work on a second novel, tentatively titled Nighttown, a severe case of writer’s block and other personal difficulties have dried up his fictional pen so that he has written only a handful of stories in the past two decades. Nevertheless, his corpus is so aesthetically rich and meticulously crafted that he retains a high standing in supernatural literature. Klein has made New York City—his home since graduating from college—the source of much of his fiction, and he has probed its wonders and terrors in a similar fashion to Campbell’s decades-long treatment of Liverpool. “Children of the Kingdom” (1980) is perhaps his most concentrated exercise in urban horror—a novella that plays upon and
inverts the racial tensions that were tearing the city apart at that period. The locus of horror is a dreary tenement on the Upper West Side that now serves as a nursing home, whose basement provides a hideous glimpse of loathsome white monsters—the descendants, apparently, of an ancient race of creatures who had preyed upon the Native Americans long before the advent of Europeans to the continent. The culminating scene of the tale, taking place during the New York City blackout of 1977, is one of the towering moments in modern horror fiction: The door exploded in my face. I went down beneath a mob of twisting bodies pouring through the doorway, tumbling out upon me like a wave. I was kicked, tripped over, stepped on; I struggled to rise, and felt, in the darkness, the touch of naked limbs, smooth, rubbery flesh, hands that scuttled over me like starfish. In seconds the mob had swept past me and was gone; I heard them padding lightly up the hall, heading toward the stairs. (DG 59–60) These creatures are metaphors for the horrors of robbery, rape, murder, and other terrors that have made city life a sort of ongoing pitched battle in many of the metropolises of the world. “Petey” (1979) takes us to a seemingly safe rural locale in Connecticut well beyond the penumbra of New York City, but Klein’s deft unraveling of the plot renders this realm potently horrific as well. The entire story is nothing but a series of vignettes about a housewarming party held by the new owners of a house for their city friends; and what seems on the surface to be relatively innocuous satire directed at the various foibles of the guests is in fact a vehicle for conveying with consummate subtlety hints of the menace lurking nearby. The title ends up being a pun; for the hideous creature that the original owner of the house had evidently raised as a pet is not in fact named Petey, but P.D., or petit diable (little devil). “Petey” is one of several tales where Klein broods on the complex interplay of words and things. “Black Man with a Horn” (1980) is somewhat along the same lines, although its thrust is ultimately quite different. This explicitly Lovecraftian tale, with a protagonist that is clearly based on Lovecraft’s friend Frank Belknap Long (whom Klein also knew well), makes gradually clear the fact that Lovecraft’s fiction may in fact
have concealed a loathsome reality: when the narrator sees in a museum catalogue an artifact that is said to have come from the “Tcho-tcho” tribe, he is startled—for he had previously known of that term only from one of Lovecraft’s stories. As he remarks piquantly, “I’d been put in the uncomfortable position of living out another man’s horror stories” (DG 151). “Nadelman’s God,” first published in Dark Gods, is a rich exploration of the interplay of words and things, as well as the role of religion in human affairs. In college, Nadelman had written a sophomoric epic poem in which he proposed, given the extent of human suffering on the earth, the idea that God is “deranged and malign, delighting in cruelty and mischief” (DG 198). An apparent lunatic, learning of Nadelman’s poem, becomes obsessed with it, fashioning (according to the poem’s dictates) a “servant” made of garbage. Is this all merely an exercise in insanity, or has the garbage creature actually come to life? This richly evocative novella probes a number of philosophical questions while retaining its ability to terrify. Words and things are also at the heart of Klein’s earliest success, the novella “The Events at Poroth Farm” (1972). Set in rural New Jersey, the tale outlines the increasing paranoia of its protagonist, Jeremy Freirs, as he seeks to bone up on the literature of the supernatural for a course he will be teaching in the fall. The journal that Jeremy keeps during his stay at Poroth Farm not only recounts his readings but the gradual accumulation of hints that strange entities are lurking in the vicinity. On one level, the tale is suggesting that Jeremy, the cloistered scholar, is simply unable to deal with the horrors he is encountering in real life: habituated to horrors that remain on the printed page, he becomes paralysed with fear when actual terrors emerge. Consider this passage from his diary: “Lord, this heat is sweltering. My shirt is sticking to my skin, and droplets of sweat are rolling down my face dripping onto this page, making the ink run. My hand is tired from writing . . .” (RT 167). The symbolism is very telling: the ink runs because what Jeremy has experienced is literally “ineffable”—it cannot be told. He is tired of writing because the vicarious emotions inspired by literature are pathetically inadequate in the face of real horror. But an entirely different interpretation of the tale can be offered. There is a dim suggestion that the books that Jeremy is reading actually cause the events at Poroth Farm; or, perhaps more accurately, that his readings are a kind of symbolic echo—or, in some cases, anticipation—of the increasingly
disturbing manifestations that take place around him. To choose only one example, Jeremy at one point reads Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceres,” which he describes as a “witch/cat story” (RT 132). The significance of this detail is obvious, as the Poroths’ cat Bwada plays a central role in the unfolding of the horrific scenario. Once again, words are intimately interrelated with things. The Ceremonies is a complex fusion of many of the themes underlying Klein’s work. This novel, a remarkable expansion of “The Events at Poroth Farm,” did in fact appear fleetingly on the bestseller lists, but it contains far more substance and textural richness than most such works. Both Lovecraft and Arthur Machen (especially “The White People”) are the dominant influences on the novel, but Klein’s adaptation of motifs from these writers is very much his own. The focus of the novel is a Mr. Rosebottom, who proves to harbour in his person an age-old entity, the Old One, from the depths of space; Rosebottom arranges for Jeremy Freirs to reside for the summer at Poroth Farm, and also for a young woman, Carol Conklin, to take a job at a library nearby. All these manipulations are necessary in order for Rosebottom to engender the Ceremonies that will result in the destruction of the world. It is difficult to convey the subtlety and gradualness with which this seemingly outlandish plot is convincingly unfolded; the result is a novel of cumulative horror perhaps rivalled only by Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home or Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game. Far more than mere pastiche, The Ceremonies is a vital and independent work that nonetheless draws strength and texture from previous work in the field. Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994) was a well-respected and well-liked figure in the field whose early death inspired widespread lamentation, but his actual literary work is more than a little uneven. Much of it falls outside the strict domain of the supernatural, as in his numerous sword-and-sorcery tales and novels, modelled upon the work of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. His own weird short fiction was collected in In a Lonely Place (1983) and other collections, but it is a decidedly mixed bag. Although Wagner is deft at evoking the topography, human and natural, of those regions of the South (chiefly Tennessee and North Carolina) in which he spent much of his life, the stories themselves are often weak in motivation and disappointing in their dénouements.
Easily the best of Wagner’s tales is “Sticks” (1974), which is simultaneously a tribute to H. P. Lovecraft and to the artist Lee Brown Coye, whose cover illustrations to the Arkham House Lovecraft editions of the 1960s won him widespread recognition. Set in 1942, “Sticks” tells the story of the artist Colin Leverett, whose artwork became excessively gruesome after he encountered an apparently animated corpse in a farmhouse. Twenty-five years later he is asked by Gothic House (an obvious stand-in for Arkham House) to illustrate the work of horror writer H. Kenneth Allard. The publisher is later killed. A nephew of Allard, Dana Allard, comes to Leverett with a stack of Allard’s unpublished stories that he wishes Leverett to illustrate. The artist, who had been fascinated by the stick-lattice work that he saw at the old farmhouse, undertakes the task, only to learn that these lattices are glyphs designed to aid in the summoning of the Great Old Ones. Dana Allard is, in fact, H. Kenneth Allard himself. This recounting of the plot of “Sticks” cannot begin to convey the extraordinary skill in its execution. After a time the omnipresence of the stick-lattice figures (something Lee Brown Coye actually used in his Lovecraft illustrations) becomes oppressive and hideous, and the tale is a masterwork of slowly cumulative horror. In the end, the story perhaps has no broader message to convey, and to that extent it can be considered nothing but a clever horror tale; but as such it ranks high, both in the canon of modern supernatural fiction and in the very slim canon of competent Lovecraft pastiches. Other stories are less successful. “In the Pines” (1973) captures the atmosphere of rural Tennessee ably, but its account of a seductive female ghost from the 1920s who tempts a married man from the present day and ultimately kills his wife—a clear symbol for the couple’s marital troubles— is not as subtle as one would wish. “.220 Swift” (1980) is a quasiLovecraftian tale of archaeological horror—chiefly dealing with the supposed existence of “mines of the ancients” in the South, which one archaeologist believes were merely made by early Spanish settlers but which another believes to be not only of far older construction but built by a hideous pygmy race—but the narrative is fundamentally unconvincing. “The River of Night’s Dreaming” (1981) has become celebrated as a tribute to Robert W. Chambers: this account of a woman who, after a bus wreck, comes to a strange city and comes to the home of a Mrs. Castaigne, names herself Cassilda Archer, and engages in sadomasochistic encounters
with her hostess as well as a maid, Camilla (all names mentioned in The King in Yellow, which is cited in the story) requires a bit more poeticism than Wagner is apparently capable of engendering. “Beyond Any Measure” (1982) is one of several stories that draw upon Wagner’s own profession of psychiatry. A woman, afflicted with bizarre dreams, consults with a psychiatrist who believes that the dreams are indicative of a past life. In the end the tale is one of vampirism and psychic possession, but it too lacks conviction. Later stories reveal occasional merits mingled with flaws of conception and execution. “More Sinned Against” (1984) powerfully evokes the successive degradation of a woman from minor film actress to porn star to prostitute, but Wagner may have erred in adopting a supernatural conclusion, whereby the woman uses voodoo to gain revenge against a man whose acting career she had nurtured but who then deserted her. The tale would have been more effective if it had remained purely non-supernatural. This is exactly why “But You’ll Never Follow Me” (1990) is successful: its unflinching account of a man who kills his ailing parents in a nursing home out of mercy, just as he had done with a fellow soldier in Vietnam, requires no supernaturalism for its emotive power. Another poignant story is “Did They Get You to Trade” (1992), in which an American artist in London, Ryan Chase, encounters a derelict who proves to be Nemo Skagg, a oncepopular punk rocker who lost his money for a highly peculiar reason: he felt the need to pay for the cremation of all the fans who took their own lives at his concerts. Wagner will remain best known for his editing of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, as discussed earlier. He also was the key figure in the establishment of a short-lived small press, Carcosa; but its resurrection of the mediocre pulp work of E. Hoffmann Price, Hugh B. Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman did no one any favours. A much superior literary artist is Dennis Etchison (b. 1943), who has raised the mingling of genres—supernatural horror, psychological suspense, and science fiction—to an art form. Etchison produced three early collections of weird tales—The Dark Country (1982), Red Dreams (1984), and The Blood Kiss (1988), as well as several novels; but his best work is unquestionably in the short form. He himself has articulated the rationale under which he writes as follows:
I have never thought of myself as a horror writer. Someone said that there are two kinds of writers, those who find out what the market is and write to fill it, and those who write and then find a marekt that will take their work. And I think I’m the latter kind of writer. I’ve always tried to write whatever I wanted most to write and then send it out, usually starting with the top-paying markets and working my way down. And if the story ended up in a girlie magazine or a science-fiction magazine, that was essentially accidental. (Winter 52) Just as Campbell has made himself the poet of the British urban landscape, Klein has vivified the teeming megalopolis of New York, and Wagner has evoked the remote backwoods of the American South, so has Etchison become a kind of brooding, cynical prose-poet of his native Southern California. At the same time, he has evolved a clipped, sardonic prose reminiscent of the one genre—hard-boiled crime writing—that can be said to have been the wholesale creation of California writers. These qualities—along with some highly distinctive supernatural conceptions— render his work unique in the realm of contemporary weird fiction. Consider “On the Pike” (1977). This account of a woman, Sherron, who persuades her fiancé to visit a carnival featuring a succession of freak shows proves to be an unsparing psychological portrait of Sherron and her perversity in the witnessing of pain and humiliation. Apparently conventional supernaturalism enters in “The Late Shift” (1980), one of Etchison’s signature stories, dealing with reanimated corpses employed to work the night shft in 7-Eleven stores. This potentially ludicrous premise proves to be the springboard, as Etchison has stated, for probing “questions of exploitation under capitalism” (Winter 62). Three stories in The Dark Country—“The Machine Demands a Sacrifice” (1972), “Calling All Monsters” (1973), and “The Dead Line” (1979)—are thematically linked in their recounting of the potential physical and ethical horrors of a medical profession in which technological skill has outpaced moral restraints. The stories are all nominally science fiction in that they appear to take place in the future and are extrapolations upon contemporary societal issues; but their horrific underpinnings are evident. The first tale grimly speaks of unscrupulous private ambulance outfits that
attempt to be the first on the scene of fatal accidents in order to obtain bodies so that parts of them can be sold later. The second is a magnificently hypnotic tale in which medical technology performs the surgical removal of bodily organs while the brain is still alive. The third tells of “Neomorts,” brain-dead patients who are kept alive after a fashion so that their ogans can be used when needed. Even those tales that appear to be wholly non-supernatural can occasionally be stirring solely on account of deft technique and execution. “Drop City” (1974) is the convoluted story of a man who has suffered amnesia and becomes framed for a murder; but this relatively mundane plot is enlivened by some of the most powerful and affecting dreamlike prose outside the pages of Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti. “Call 666” (1987) also appears to be a tale of psychological horror—although I am not entirely clear what exactly happens in the story—but the fragmented style again creates eerily hallucinatory effects. “Talking in the Dark” (1984) is a more orthodox conte cruel about a celebrated writer who turns out to be a psychopath, but its wry exposition and stunning climax redeem it. Etchison has been less than successful in the novel; like Campbell, he appears to have taken to novel-writing chiefly to support himself so that he can craft his short stories. His first novel, Darkside (1986), is by no means without merit. Although it at times suggests the supernatural, the novel is really about a group of teenagers who seek near-death experiences as a means of escaping from the jaded ennui of their lives. To the extent that Darkside captures the seeming listlessness and disregard for life and death that typify the youth movement of the mid-1980s, it can be considered a modest success. The same cannot be said for Shadowman (1993) or California Gothic (1995), both of which are highly disappointing coming from an otherwise immensely talented writer. The former, about a series of child-murders in a small suburban California community, is dragged down by diffuseness, prolixity, and a failure to come to terms with the social and personal issues raised by the scenario. The latter is still worse, recounting a woman’s pursuit of her former lover (although in the end she reveals herself to be the woman’s daughter). All the characters are drawn unconvincingly, their actions seem wooden and unmotivated, and the prose is uncharacteristically lifeless.
A fair number of Etchison’s short stories also fall flat, either because of their excessive obscurity or their less than inspired conceptions, but he has nonetheless produced a substantial body of short fiction that simultaneously probes key social issues by means of supernatural horror, psychological suspense, or science fiction, or some ineffable combination of all three. His best tales exhibit a bleak an unflinching vision, a vision that is bitterly antipodal to the cheerful optimism so uniformly if implausibly evident in even the most physically extreme modern weird fiction. If Etchison’s subtlety and restraint link him with an older weird tradition, his aggressively contemporary themes and his occasional innovations in style and execution place his work emphatically in a vibrant and modern mode that contrasts sharply with the flabby sentimentalism of Stephen King or the hypertrophic pyrotechnics of Clive Barker. And now we come to Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953). Ligotti is certainly the most distinctive, if not unusual, figure in contemporary supernatural fiction, if only because of the almost surreptitious way in which he has emerged as a leading figure in the field. His first volume, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), was published by a small press with almost no fanfare, and I daresay that many readers and critics (I was among them) dismissed the poorly printed book as a tedious instance of “fan fiction.” But Ligotti, who had been publishing in magazines since the early 1980s, was the real article. Songs of a Dead Dreamer was reissued in 1989 by a mainstream British publisher and was quickly followed by the collections Grimscribe (1991) and Noctuary (1994); an omnibus, The Nightmare Factory, appeared in 1996. But after the appearance of My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002), Ligotti appears to have suffered some health problems that have virtually curtailed his fiction writing, and he has done very little original work in the past decade or more. The publication of Ligotti’s impressive treatise The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010) emphasises what has really been evident in much of his work: it is fueled by a deep pessimism regarding human life and action. Drawing upon the philosophical work of Peter Wessel Zapffe and others, Ligotti concludes that consciousness renders human existence so painful that it becomes folly to remain alive. There is some suggestion that Ligotti is merely attempting to create a philosophical patina to cover his own pessimism, but the cogency of Conspiracy is nonetheless a challenge to both religious and secular conceptions of the “gift” of life.
What is refreshing about Ligotti, from a purely literary perspective, is his frank disinclination to market himself. Even when his books were being issued by mainstream publishers, he was content to publish his fiction and other writing in non-paying small-press magazines; and he has frankly declared not only his inability to write a horror novel but the dubious aesthetic status of any horror novel. In some ways this stance is connected with Ligotti’s devaluation of human character in his own fiction, a direct product of his pessimism. The focus of all Ligotti’s work is a systematic assault on the real world and the replacement of it with the unreal, the dreamlike, and the hallucinatory. Reality is, for him, a “grossly overrated affair” (“Alice’s Last Adventure” [SDD 38–39]). It is simply too prosy and dull, lacking in intrinsic value or dramatic interest. Accordingly, Ligotti’s literary goal is to suggest that other realm which we glimpse either through dreams or, worse, stumble upon by accident in obscure corners of the world. As a result, his tales refuse to conform to the standard distinctions in weird fiction—say, between supernatural horror and psychological suspense. In “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror” Ligotti speaks of the “logic of supernatural horror” as “a logic that is founded on fear; it is a logic whose sole purpose states: ‘Existence equals Nightmare.’ Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure” (SDD 206). Ligotti’s literary quest, therefore, is not so much a replacement of the real world by the unreal as a sort of turning the real world inside out to show that it has been unreal all along. The vehicle for this transformation is language. Ligotti has evolved a highly distinctive and idiosyncratic style that, with seeming effortlessness, metamorphoses existence into nightmare. Its closest analogue, on purely stylistic grounds, is the eccentric idiom of M. P. Shiel, although he is not a writer whom Ligotti acknowledges as an influence or model. Ligotti’s tales stylistically echo Shiel’s tortuous, metaphor-laden idiom while at the same time seeking to capture the atmosphere of nightmarish or hallucinatory strangeness that typifies Shiel’s best short work. Plot is everywhere negligible, and everything is subordinate to mood. Ligotti’s attitude toward Lovecraft highlights the ways in which he both resembles and differs from his great predecessor. He has frequently expressed dissatisfaction with Lovecraft’s later, more scientific narratives, maintaining that Lovecraft thereby lost the sense of dreamlike unreality that
typified his early work. Even so straightforward a pastiche as “The Last Feast of Harlequin” (published in 1990 but written early in Ligotti’s career) makes this point clear, as it owes much more to the early “The Festival” than to its more scientifically detailed successor, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” In this tale, an anthropologist interested in exploring the “significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts” (G 3) goes to the Midwestern town of Mirocaw, where a festival is held every December. The tale must be read to appreciate its richness of texture, density of atmosphere, psychological and topographical realism, and the notion of ancient and loathsome rituals surviving to the present day. But the realism of this story is an anomaly in Ligotti’s work. A later tale, “Nethescurial,” is more representative. There may be a subtle Lovecraftian undercurrent in this tale also, as it seems a highly oblique adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu.” Like Lovecraft’s tale, “Nethescurial” is in three parts, and it follows the basic thrust of “The Call of Cthulhu” in effecting the gradual transformation of words into reality. At the outset, we learn of a manuscript that describes a man who comes to a mysterious island named Nethescurial, which appears connected to an “omnipresent evil in the living world” (G 71), “an absolute evil whose reality is mitigated only by our blindness to it” (G 75). This realm finally engulfs the narrator, who writes plangently at the end: “I am not dying in a nightmare” (G 84), a pathetic attempt to evade the fact that he is dying in a nightmare. Ligotti has also brilliantly adapted the trope of the “forbidden book” in such a tale as “Vastarien” (1987). The plot of this richly atmospheric story is deceptively simple: a man finds a book and it drives him mad. But what a wealth of dense imagery is created by means of this seemingly hackneyed device! Victor Keirion searches for a book to transport him out of this world, but most of the “forbidden” books he finds are insufficient for the task. But the book called Vastarien is different: it is “not about something, but actually is that something” (SDD 267). But what sort of book is Vastarien? “To all appearances it seemed he had discovered the summit or abyss of the unreal, that paradise of exhaustion, confusion, and debris where reality ends and where one may dwell among its ruins” (SDD 271). “The Tsalal,” first published in Noctuary, draws not upon Lovecraft but Poe for its focus. It concerns an individual, Andrew Maness, who is the incarnation of the Tsalal (a term taken consciously from Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), or “a perfect blackness” (Noctuary 86). Maness’s
father, a reverend, has written a book called Tsalal, and Andrew ponders its significance: “‘There is no nature to things,’ you wrote in the book. ‘There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.’ You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, nothing exists to be saved— everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives if we simply gaze through the eyes of the Tsalal.” (Noctuary 80) Somehow Andrew Maness is the embodiment of this nihilistic existentialism, and only Ligotti could have written so compellingly hypnotic a tale around such a dryly philosophical conception. Some of Ligotti’s tales allow a little more of the observably real world than others, and a few of these are among his great successes. “The Frolic,” an early and relatively conventional story, is still powerful for the visions of a lunatic that so hideously defy the inept rationalisations of a psychiatrist to account for them naturalistically. “Alice’s Last Adventure” recounts a rather old idea—fictional characters coming to life—but does so with great adeptness and cumulative power. The plot of “Les Fleurs” is deceptively simple—a man evidently lures and kills a series of women—but a profound unease is engendered in the reader because of the many features of the story that are left tantalisingly unexplained. For all his professed inability to write a novel, Ligotti did produce a short-novel-length work in the title story of My Work Is Not Yet Done. The tale introduces us to Frank Dominio, a longtime worker at a company that is never named and whose actual business is never specified. Through a series of accidents Frank is forced to resign; blaming his coworkers, he undertakes to murder them one after the other. But the tale is far from being a mere serial killer story; in some wisely unexplained fashion, Frank himself lapses into a bizarre half-dead, half-alive state, with the power of leaving his body
and also, apparently, with the power to transform the very atoms of his victims into something very much worse than their already grotesque human forms. There are, of course, any number of aesthetic pitfalls in the highly selfconscious, intellectualised approach to horror fiction that Ligotti has taken, but he at any rate has managed to pull it off and left a legacy of bizarrerie that is perhaps only matched by Ramsey Campbell at his hallucinatory best (say, in the Demons by Daylight stories or the novella Needing Ghosts). Ligotti’s effective fiction-writing career lasted scarcely more than two decades, but in that short interval—which, let us recall, was just as long as the careers of Poe and Lovecraft—Ligotti has bequeathed a rich storehouse of literary terror that is unlike that of any writer who preceded him.
iii. Mainstream Horror The 1970s and 1980s saw an increasing number of mainstream writers dabbling in the weird for the space of a novel or even a single short story. Some of these can be dispensed with quickly—not because they are not meritorious works of literature in their own right, but because the element of weirdness is so fleeting that it constitutes an insignificant feature of the overall narrative. Consider The Black House (1974) by American writer Paul Theroux (b. 1941). In this tale of a cantankerous anthropologist, Alfred Munday, who returns with his wife, Emma, from Africa to a small town in England, there is a single supernatural incident—a woman who appears to Emma in her house (which the neighbours call the Black House) not long after they move in. It transpires that the woman is one Caroline Summers, a local denizen who ends up having an affair with Alfred. When this is revealed, it becomes problematical whether the vision seen by Emma was that of a “ghost” in the traditional understanding of the term—for how can there be a ghost of a living person? The novel is a delicate treatment of a troubled marriage, but its supernatural element is so insignificant to the plot, and the sensation of terror so entirely absent, that it cannot be considered a genuine contribution to our field. Somewhat more central is The House Next Door (1978) by American novelist Anne Rivers Siddons (b. 1936). Here we are concerned with a newly constructed house that appears to cause tragedies for a succession of inhabitants, from a woman having a miscarriage when she falls down the stairs to adultery and actual murder. The question is how such a new house, with no history of strangeness, could have caused these events. In the end it is revealed that psychological maladies on the part of the architect were responsible. Siddons is at best a popular writer a few notches above the level of Danielle Steel, and her novel—in spite of Stephen King’s endorsement of it in Danse Macabre as one of the finest horror novels of the twentieth century—is only intermittently compelling. A far superior writer is British novelist and short story writer Angela Carter (1940–1992), but her array of distinguished volumes are only on the
borderline of the weird. The keynote of Carter’s work is a kind of modern revision of the fairy tale—a device she used most notably in the short story “The Company of Wolves,” in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). To say that this is merely a rewriting of the Little Red Riding Hood story would be ineffably crude; and yet, because the story, like all fairy tales, takes place in a never-never land of the imagination, the element of the supernatural never, in the strictest sense, enters into the narrative. It is not a paradox to say that the 1984 film version, which Carter cowrote, is more a work of supernatural terror than the story, simply because the necessary realism of the film medium renders the contrast between the natural and the supernatural more evident. Carter’s subsequent volume, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993), is similarly more fantastic than supernatural, and much the same can be said of her eccentric novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). American writer Fred Chappell (b. 1936) has, in the course of a distinguished career as novelist and poet, written several works of weird fiction. The novel Dagon (1968) passed almost unnoticed by the mainstream and horror communities, but it is a grimly powerful nonsupernatural tale, based on several Lovecraftian conceptions, specifically the lonely scholar researching arcane subjects, the social isolation of backwoods denizens (here, a North Carolina farming family), and allusions to ancient gods. In the end, however, the novel is a chilling account of sexual obsession. Decades later, Chappell began producing weird short stories, many of them also founded on Lovecraftian conceptions, collected in More Shapes Than One (1991). Here the chief item of interest is “The Adder” (1989), in which a copy of the Necronomicon (under its Arabic title, Al Azif) wipes out the text of any book into which it comes into contact. This brilliant tale restores to the hackneyed idea of the “forbidden book” its original notions of apocalyptic danger and evil, for its corrupting influence has the potential to destroy our most cherished cultural artifacts. Distinguished American writer Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) has been dabbling in the weird since at least the 1970s. Among her prolific output are at least five volumes of weird tales, from The Hungry Ghosts (1975) to Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001); Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) probably constitutes her most concentrated collection of horror tales. But the contents are highly uneven. Oates is manifestly more interested in human relationships than in supernatural phenomena, and oftentimes the
latter serve merely as symbols or reflections of the former. “The White Cat” (1987) is a transparent echo of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” where a man’s obsessive hatred of his wife’s white Persian cat is a metaphor for his increasing estrangement from her. “Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” (1992) is a lacklustre takeoff of The Turn of the Screw. “Martyrdom” gained some notoriety when it appeared in Dennis Etchison’s MetaHorror (1992): its alternating accounts of the growth of a rat and the growth of a young woman sold into sex slavery, with their eventual meeting, certainly constitute an acme of physical horror. But, in all humility, a number of the tales in Haunted and other Oates collections would never have been published were it not for their author’s celebrity. Oates also wrote a series of four “Gothic” novels—Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), and My Heart Laid Bare (1998)—that fuse crime, psychological horror, and spiritualism, but are predominantly non-supernatural. As for British writer Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949), he ventured into the weird in Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), but neither work is entirely satisfactory. The first concerns the lingering supernatural effects on present-day London of the eighteenth-century architect (and Satanist) Nicholas Dyer (based on the actual architect Nicholas Hawksmoor), and the latter deals with the possession of a contemporary academician by John Dee, the Elizabethan physician and alchemist. But both novels are excessively weighed down by a heavy pedantry in the delineation of their respective historical periods, making the reading of them a chore and causing the supernatural manifestations to be submerged under an array of documentation. Then there is Beloved (1987) by distinguished American novelist Toni Morrison (b. 1931). There seems no question that the supernatural comes into play here. In this novel, a black woman, Sethe, has fled slavery in Kentucky and come to Ohio; but along the way she killed her own eldest daughter, Beloved, so that she would not have to return to slavery. Later a young woman named Beloved appears, and Sethe’s other daughter, Denver, is convinced that she is the reincarnation of her murdered sister. Some critics have maintained that the novel is ambiguously supernatural, in that the events can be accounted for naturalistically (the girl in question is later thought to be a young woman who escaped the clutches of a white man living nearby), but, as Sethe herself reflects at one point, the girl seems to
know things that only the murdered Beloved could know. But the supernatural element in Beloved is the least interesting thing about it: this exquisite prose-poem of a novel focuses so intensely on the horror and tragedy of slavery that all other features in it dwindle to insignificance; in any event, the appearance of the girl Beloved excites little terror in either the characters or the reader, who is much more horrified at the grisly murder that Sethe felt she was compelled to carry out as a fugitive slave. British writer Patrick McGrath (b. 1950) suddenly emerged in the late 1980s with a striking volume of stories, Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988), and several novels soon thereafter. In 1991 he and Bradford Morrow edited an anthology titled The New Gothic, suggesting that his work and those of others of like mind were creating something novel out of old-time Gothicism reaching back to the eighteenth century. In their very brief introduction to that volume, the authors suggest that the New Gothic is a fusion of the physical props of the original Gothic movement with the psychological acuity found in Poe’s best work, with the result that “the new gothicist would take as a starting place the concern with interior entropy— spiritual and emotional breakdown—and address the exterior furniture of the genre from a contemporary vantage” (xii). I am not entirely sure what this means, but a study of McGrath’s own work may provide some illumination. McGrath certainly uses Gothic machinery in his work, whether physical or psychological. In “The Angel” we find an angel in Manhattan whose body is decaying hideously because people no longer believe in angels. “The Black Hand of the Raj” tells of an Englishman who, after being touched by an Indian guru, finds a hand growing out of his head. In “Blood Disease” we come upon the inhabitants of a small community in England who, afflicted with pernicious anemia, have developed a taste for human blood. “Marmilion” evokes Southern Gothic in its account of a sordid tragedy in a Louisiana family during and after the Civil War. It can be seen from these descriptions that the supernatural does not figure extensively in McGrath’s work. But the true focus of the New Gothic, if his own work is any guide, is a kind of knowing wink that renders all these conceptions half-parodic. In “The Black Hand of the Raj,” this parody becomes explicit: the tale may have been inspired by Edward Lucas White’s “Lukundoo,” but it veers off into comedy when the hand ends up masturbating the man’s fiancée. Similarly, “Hand of a Wanker” takes the
half-comic premise of W. F. Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers” to obscene levels by telling of the detached hand of a chronic masturbator that retains life (and desire) until it is finally destroyed by a meat cleaver. McGrath’s first novel, The Grotesque (1989), retains this unnerving mix of black comedy and horror. An entirely non-supernatural tale of the events at an aristocratic estate named Crook, the novel is told from the point of view of Sir Hugo Coal, who has suffered a “cerebral accident” (9) that has paralysed him and rendered him hideous: “to be a grotesque is my destiny” (10). Sir Hugo believes that his own butler, Fledge, has conspired to oust him from his position as master of Crook, including the seduction of his wife, Harriet; along the way, one Sidney Giblet, engaged to Sir Hugo’s daughter, Cleo, is murdered and fed to pigs. This is all certainly very grotesque and Gothic, but in the end the novel is a prototypical instance of the unreliable narrator: when we read the final page we realise that we have no idea what has really happened—or, rather, whether it is Fledge, or Sir Hugo himself, or some other party who has murdered Sidney, whether Fledge has or has not seduced Harriet, and whether Fledge caused Sir Hugo’s “accident” (a burst blood vessel). Not entirely dissimilar in overall setting are McGrath’s next two novels, Spider (1990), another account by an unreliable narrator evidently shattered by his tragic upbringing, and Asylum (1993), an historical novel of adultery and obsession. The weird content of McGrath’s works has declined with each of his novels, although in some senses they retain a “Gothic” sensibility, at least as he understands that term.
iv. More Vampires The popularity of the vampire novels by Anne Rice, Whitley Strieber, and others impelled several writers of more substantial literary heft to undertake their own explorations of the undead, with fair to middling results. What their efforts show, perhaps, is that the vampire trope is so limited in its aesthetic range that even talented writers are unable to bring any new or fresh ideas to it. But the demands of the reading public are inexorable, and so, right down to the present day, writers of all stripes continue to trudge their legions of vampires into the light of day. One writer who did not receive as much credit as he deserved for his vampire writing is the American Les Daniels (1943–2011). In a span of just over a decade, he published five substantial novels—The Black Castle (1978), The Silver Skull (1979), Citizen Vampire (1981), Yellow Fog (1986; expanded 1988), and No Blood Spilled (1991)—featuring the redoubtable vampire Don Sebastian de Villenueva. These novels’ chief virtue is exactly in the area of Anne Rice’s chief aesthetic failing—the vivid evocation of diverse historical periods. They are a fascinating mix of the supernatural novel, the historical novel, the mainstream novel, and the detective story. Daniels came well prepared for the task of, as it were, infusing fresh blood into the vampire trope. His critical study, Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975), is an exhaustive study of the field from the Gothic novel up to its time, covering films, comic books, and other media. Daniels has made it clear that he has read and absorbed all the leading vampire works of the past, from Varney the Vampire to “Carmilla” to Dracula to films from the 1920s to the 1970s. The end result is that Daniels’s vampire, Don Sebastian, conforms to the strictest canons of what he himself called “the care and feeding of vampires” (Living in Fear 63); but this is the least interesting thing about him. He is, in fact, a ruthless and pitiless vampire who nevertheless elicits the reader’s sympthy (or, at any rate, respect) by the cynical dignity of his bearing and his quest for knowledge. Where Daniels diverges from traditional vampirism is in his attitude toward religion. In a sceptical age, he realises that the efficacy of standard
Christian symbols to combat the vampire is increasingly implausible; accordingly, in Citizen Vampire a woman is horrified to find that a cross she holds up to ward off Sebastian crumbles in her hand. (The scene is, however, suspiciously similar to one in Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot.) The transition is never complete, as in The Black Castle Sebastian finds himself unable to enter a church—not because he is afraid of it, but because “its presence saddened him” (230). It is not entirely clear what is meant by this, but in other novels Daniels, through Sebastian, makes clear his Nietzschean perspective on religion. In a sense, Daniels also seeks to play down the supernatural element in his novels—not by minimising Sebastian’s vampiric powers but by emphasising the greater (human) horrors of the historical periods in which he finds himself. Accordingly, in The Black Castle, set in 1496 against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, the “backdrop” ultimately comes to dominate the work, and the real horror becomes the Inquisition and not Sebastian. Similarly, in The Silver Skull, perhaps the most accomplished of Daniels’s novels, the horror and barbarism of the Aztec rites, and the savage fighting between Aztecs and Spaniards, leave a far greater impression than Sebastian’s intermittent feasting. Citizen Vampire is set in the midst of the appalling bloodletting of the French Revolution. No Blood Spilled takes us to India in the mid-nineteenth century, featuring the mysteries of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. Daniels abruptly gave up fiction writing after No Blood Spilled in order to devote himself to other literary interests. The loss to supernatural literature was not inconsiderable, for Don Sebastian had emerged as a rather more interesting and substantial character than Lestat or other vampires of the period. But the five novels he generated will remain, in their relatively humble way, weightier contributions to horror fiction than many of the more pretentious novels that followed in their wake. One of these was Vampire Junction (1984) by the Thai writer S. P. Somtow (b. 1952). The title refers to an immensely popular album issued by one Timmy Valentine, a teenage rock star who proves to be a vampire who has survived since at least Roman times under a succession of names and disguises. He is pursued by a variety of human beings, for varying motives, including members of a cult, the Order of the Gods of Chaos, who were involved in a ritual involving human sacrifice at Cambridge University when Valentine disrupted the proceedings. There are some
splendid set-pieces in the novel—at one point Timmy recalls being eviscerated by Gilles de Rais in 1440, but he manages to recover—and the wild antics during one of Timmy’s concerts in the present day, when he turns into a succession of animals and kills several people in the audience, are impressively depicted; but the overall thrust of Vampire Junction is confused. Some have seen it as reflecting a kind of economic vampirism, whereby Timmy’s ethereal singing voice is exploited by ruthless recording executives and marketers; but relatively little is made of this throughout the novel, which is more focused on Timmy’s various enemies, who prove to be just as vicious and bloodthirsty as he himself is. Somtow hurt his own cause by writing two lacklustre sequels to the book, Valentine (1992) and Vanitas (1995). Still more pretentious is Carrion Comfort (1989) by American novelist Dan Simmons (b. 1948). This monumental novel—by my count, about 350,000 words—was predictably referred to as an “epic” work, as if anything of vast length is an epic; but in fact it is a windy, laborious, and ultimately contentless action-adventure novel whose basic thrust could, and should, have been expressed in less than a third of its length. The premise of the novel is psychic vampirism—the ability to enter into human beings’ minds and compel them to perform actions they would not generally perform. Inevitably, the various vampires—ranging from a seemingly normal elderly woman, Melanie Fuller (who occasionally interrupts the narrative with first-person maunderings), to a former Nazi, Willi Borden— are engaged in a battle against both a different and even more ruthless set of vampires who apparently wish to rule the world and a valiant band of human beings who ultimately prevail over them, although somehow Melanie manages to survive. And yet, in spite of all its verbiage, Simmons never once confronts the critical matter of exactly how his vampires gained their superhuman powers. All we get is an inconclusive passage toward the end, when Willi confronts his chief enemy, the elderly Jew Saul Laski: “People born with my ability are rare, perhaps no more than one in sevreal hundred million, a few dozen each human generation. Throughout history my race has been feared and hunted” (838). This passage raises more questions than it answers: by citing his “race,” is Willi suggesting that vampires are merely a subset of the human race or are somehow a different species altogether? These and other questions remain unanswered while Simmons engages in a
maddeningly tedious vampire hunt that culminates in Saul somehow managing to throttle Willi to death. At half the length of Carrion Comfort, The Empire of Fear (1988) by British writer Brian Stableford (b. 1948) has considerably more substance, but it still beset with dragging monotony. What Stableford has written is an alternate history of the Renaissance and early modern periods, where vampires—including Attila the Hun and Charlemagne on the Continent, and Richard I (Lionheart) on the British throne—control many of the nations of Europe and, perhaps, much of the rest of the world. Set largely in the early to mid-seventeenth century, The Empire of Fear depicts a courageous band of humans, led by Edmund Cordery and his son Noell, who seek to penetrate the mysteries of the origin of vampirism and to overthrow the vampires from their positions of power. Noell ultimately finds the secret of vampirism in Africa and thereby devises an elixir of life that allows for the production of “new” vampires who ultimately defeat the older vampiric rulers. What Stableford is attempting here is nothing less audacious than an intellectual history of the overthrow of aristocracy, superstition, and religion by the forces of science and rationalism—but his account is so mired in historical minutiae, and his novel so bloated with drawn-out debates on the nature of vampirism and with battles between the old and new vampires, that the intellectual thrust of the novel is seriously obscured. Nevertheless, Stableford has written a work that is, perhaps, more an impressive achievement than an enjoyable read. Stableford, an enormously prolific novelist, short story writer, translator, and critic, has spanned the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in his various works, and his treatise Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 (1985) is a model treatment of its subject. At the opposite pole in many regards from the work of Simmons and Stableford is the slim novel The Last Vampire (1991) by American writer T. M. Wright (b. 1947). Wright, best known for the novel A Manhattan Ghost Story (1984), has written a mercifully slim account of a young man, Elmo Land, who in 1927 was turned into a vampire by a neighbour, Regina Watson. The narrative alternates between desultory reports of his ongoing vampirism from that date forward and hints of some kind of nuclear holocaust around 2007 that has almost entirely depopulated the earth. The bland, affectless tone that Elmo adopts in his first-person account can be
occasionally effective, but overall it tends to deaden the reader’s emotions at exactly those points where it needs to be heightened.
v. Some Other Tale-Spinners The veteran Fritz Leiber made a triumphant return to the supernatural with Our Lady of Darkness (1977), a novel that simultaneously captured the topography of San Francisco, where Leiber had long resided, and is a grand summation of many of the elements of urban horror that he had introduced in his pioneering short stories of the preceding decades. Here Leiber introduces us to the notion of “paramentals” (paranormal elementals), the souls of the metropolises that, according to a tract discovered by the novel’s protagonist, are the death-traps of the hapless human beings who dwell in them. The smooth-flowing prose and compelling action of this novel is a fitting capstone to Leiber’s distinguished career. Dan Simmons first came to the world’s attention with short stories in the 1980s; these were collected in Prayers to Broken Stones (1990). Perhaps his most satisfactory work to date is “The River Styx Runs Uphill” (1982), which appears to deal with the hideous and poignant results that ensue when a mother dies but is resurrected. As a symbol for the natural human inability to accept the finality of death, this scenario is not likely to be surpassed. Another poignant tale is “Metastasis” (1988), which postulates the notion of “cancer vampires” (125). A man radiates himself with immense quantities of X-rays, then lays hands on cancer patients; the cancer molecules appear to migrate into the man’s body, whereupon they are consumed by the cancer vampires. Once again, the supernaturalisation of one of the most terrifying natural forces in human society lends a distinctive atmosphere to the tale. Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali (1985), has been highly praised, but it is not clear that this praise is warranted. We are here taken to Calcutta, which is described with the kind of ingenuous horror that a Westerner might feel toward this chaotic and kaleidoscopic megalopolis. Once Simmons gets down to a plot, we find that we are concerned with an Indian poet, M. Das, who claims that he committed suicide but was resurrected by the goddess Kali. An American, Robert C. Luczak, working on a magazine article about Das, finds him after a long search: “I was looking at a thing from the grave” (199). Soon thereafter, Luczak is captured and thrown into an underground
chamber, where he appears to encounter the goddess herself. But all the events of the novel can be explained naturalistically: the “resurrected” Das may simply be suffering from leprosy, and Luczak’s vision of Kali may well be a hallucination. It is not entirely clear what message Simmons is trying to convey with this meandering novel; a vague concluding discussion about “black holes in the human spirit” (308) doesn’t help much. Simmons has written several other weird novels, but their increasing length, as in Carrion Comfort, blunts their impact. Scottish writer Iain Banks (b. 1954) wrote one of the most striking nonsupernatural horror novels in literary history with his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984). It is the bleak story of Frank Cauldhame, a seventeen-yearold who lives on an island off the coast of Scotland and tells the story of his life in an affectless but curiously chilling first-person narrative. Along the way we learn that Frank not only killed his younger brother and two cousins before the age of ten, perhaps out of rage over the horrible mutilation of his genitals by a dog when he was three years old. But for all the crimes that Frank has committed, his older brother Eric appears to be an even worse specimen of flawed humanity; and nearly at the end of this compact novel we learn why: he was traumatised by something he witnessed while serving in a hospital and attending to a seriously handicapped infant: Then he saw something, something like a movement, just a tiny little movement, barely visible on the shaved head of the slightly smiling child. Whatever it was was small and slow. Eric blinked, shook his head to try to dislodge the quivering lights of the migraine building inside. He stood up, still holding the spoon with the mushy food on it. He bent closer to the skull of the child, looking closer. He couldn’t see anything, but he looked round the edge of the metal skull-cap the child wore, thought he saw something under it, and lifted it easily from the head of the infant to see if there was anything wrong. . . . Flies had got into the ward, presumably when the airconditioning had been faulty earlier. They had got underneath the stainless steel of the child’s skull-cap and deposited their eggs there. What Eric saw when he lifted that plate up, what he saw with all that weight of human suffering above, with all that mighty spread of
closed-in, heat-struck darkened city all around, what he saw with his own skull splitting, was a slowly writhing nest of fat maggots, swimming in their combined digestive juices as they consumed the brain of the child. (141–42) Lest one think this is a mere excursion into physical grisliness, it should be noted that this revelation has been prepared for by a meticulous and detailed portrayal of the severe psychological aberrations of both Frank and Eric. And there is a still more appalling revelation to come: Frank is not a boy, but a girl, Frances; his father had been surreptitiously feeding him male hormones since infancy. This turn of events casts a pungently ironic shadow over the frequently expressed misogyny in Frank’s own temperament. Banks has never returned to the overt horror of The Wasp Factory in subsequent novels. Under the name Iain M. Banks, he has written a succession of exotic science fiction novels, while also writing mainstream novels that certainly contain their modicum of gruesomeness—such as Complicity (1993), a politically charged serial killer novel, and A Song of Stone (1997), a grim novel of torture that also features political overtones— but must be regarded largely as outside the weird tradition. Another writer residing in Scotland, the American-born Lisa Tuttle (b. 1952), did some interesting work in the 1970s and 1980s, although it is perhaps not quite as distinguished as her devotees seem to believe. The short story collections A Nest of Nightmares (1986) and Memories of the Body (1992) contain a wealth of stories that purport to study human relationships by means of supernatural and psychological horror, but the results are often disappointingly flat and superficial. Perhaps the only noteworthy tale in the former collection is “Bug House” (1980), a chilling tale about a man who proves to be a kind of huge insect who rapes women so that eggs can be planted in them. This supernaturalisation of sexual violence is effective because of the gradual manner in which the weird element is revealed. Other tales are less successful. “The Other Mother” (1980) is the story of the Welsh legend of a “white goddess of creation and death” (103) who appears to gain possession of the two children of a young mother, whose actions in saving them end up killing them; but the story lacks dramatic tensity. Somewhat better is “A Friend in Need” (1981), which deals with the encounter of two young women, each of whom had imagined the other as playmates when children. A tone of wistful
melancholy suffuses the narrative, which is manifestly an expression of loneliness and family trauma. Memories of the Body contains several tales that almost work. “The Wound” (1987) is about a formerly married man who seems to be attracted to another man: is he thereby becoming a woman? The interesting premise of the story is insufficiently worked out in a tale far inferior to Ramsey Campbell’s similar story “The Second Staircase.” “Lizard Lust” (1990) is the story of a librarian in London who becomes fascinated by a lizard owned by a man (or perhaps a woman) named Gert, who leads the librarian to some kind of alternate world. But—and this is a problem with many of Tuttle’s stories—the tale is told with too much clarity and rationality for the fantastic premise to be convincing. “Riding the Nightmare” (1986) is a complex story about the nightmares that a woman is having while she conducts an extramarital affair with a man whose wife initially condones the relationship. But the whole account is too rushed to be effective; it would have benefited from novel-length treatment. It can be seen from the above that Tuttle’s chief focus is on human relationships, especially the infinitely complex relations between the sexes. This focus is the thrust of her several novels, including The Familiar Spirit (1983), Gabriel (1987), and The Pillow Friend (1996), the last of which is probably the best. American writer Chet Williamson (b. 1948) emerged out of the fan world of the 1970s to publish weird tales in Playboy, the New Yorker, and other distinguished venues. After writing an able haunted house novel, Soulstorm (1986), Williamson wrote the substantial Ash Wednesday (1987), a novel that well displays many of his literary talents. The premise of the novel is simple: ghosts of the dead begin appearing in all corners of a small town in Pennsylvania, apparently where they had met their deaths, whether natural or otherwise. In one particularly vivid scene, the ghost of a woman shows up on the bed of a man who had had an affair with her while his wife was away and who, by accident, killed her there. The ghosts remain for months, becoming a media phenomenon. At the end of the novel, we learn that they are now appearing in a neighbouring town. What distinguishes Ash Wednesday is the depth of character portrayal that enlivens many of the central figures in the story. Unlike the superficial portrayals we find, say, in the novels of James Herbert, Williamson’s characters are vivid and vital, and he has displayed remarkable skill in
showing how the living figures gradually become reconciled to the presence of their ghostly companions. The narrative ultimately focuses on two individuals: Jim Callendar, traumatised because he believes he has caused the death of his own son and of some other children when his school bus was hit by a truck and burst into flames; and Brad Meyers, an unsympathetic character who brutalises his wife and blames Jim for the death of his own son, Frank, who was on the bus that crashed. Other characters—including a corrupt federal official, Clyde Thornton, who has been assigned to investigate the matter—are also crisply realised. Whether Williamson’s refusal to account for the origin of the supernatural phenomenon is to be regarded as a failing is a delicate question. There is some suggestion toward the end of the novel that the ghosts’ appearance was somehow triggered by the psychic trauma experienced by Jim and Brad, but it is not clear that we are to take this suggestion seriously. Perhaps no explanation is necessary. (The fact that the ghosts, while tinted a weird blue colour, are naked is perhaps a nod to Ambrose Bierce’s whimsical essay “The Clothing of Ghosts” [1902], which poked fun at accounts of “true” ghostly sightings by wondering why such ghosts always wore clothes: Do clothes also have souls and return from the dead?) Williamson has gone on to write many more novels and tales, but none have been quite as commercially or critically successful as Ash Wednesday. Dreamthorp (1999) mingles supernatural and non-supernatural horror in an ingenious fashion in suggesting that a serial killer’s depredations trigger the resurgence of a Native American curse. In the short fiction collected in Figures in Rain (2002) there is much of merit. Thomas Tessier (b. 1947) has done some sound work, especially in the novel, but his writing is plagued by unevenness of conception and execution. An early novel, The Nightwalker (1979), was highly regarded, but it is not in the end a sound work. It is the tale of an American Vietnam veteran, Robert Ives, who lives in London and finds himself committing acts of violence—including pushing his girlfriend in front of a bus, killing her—for no apparent reason. He becomes convinced that he has lived before, having been a zombie in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. After another incident in which Robert assaults a woman in a park, slashes her belly, and drinks her blood, he is informed by a psychic that he is a werewolf. Other violent actions follow until the psychic kills Robert
with a silver knife. The problem with The Nightwalker is that it is narrated in such a bland and textureless fashion that no genuine psychological analysis of the protagonist is possible, and the matter of whether he really is a supernatural entity or merely a psychotic fails to be of any great moment. Phantom (1982) is marginally better, if only for some spectacular individual scenes of terror. These scenes involve a ten-year-old boy, Ned Covington, who explores the ruins of a spa near his home in Lynnhaven, Maryland. But the novel overall seems not to have a clear focus, and the climactic scene—in which Ned, while afflicted with a high fever, has a vision of being led by a woman first into a strange city, then to an immense mountain made of bones, the woman later identifying herself as Death—is not entirely convincing. Finishing Touches (1986) is probably Tessier’s best novel, although it is non-supernatural. Returning to a London setting, it tells of a young physician, Tom Sutherland, who falls under the sway of an elderly cosmetic surgeon, Roger Nordhagen, and becomes a member of an exclusive club where all manner of sexual and other irregularities are practiced. Tom also has a torrid affair with Nordhagen’s secretary, Lina Ravachol. Later there is an appalling revelation: in a secret basement laboratory, Nordhagen is keeping twelve human beings, partially dismembered, imprisoned for a variety of physiological and psychological experiments, and Tom realises that he is being groomed to take over the work after Nordhagen dies. Although Tom, in revulsion, kills both the twelve patients and Nordhagen himself, he later resumes his affair with Lina and, out of boredom, takes to killing people at random. Although a generally effective novel of psychological obsession, Finishing Touches fails to probe Nordhagen’s motives sufficiently, and its conclusion is predictable. Tessier’s Rapture (1987) was also highly acclaimed, but it too is not wholly successful. This is another novel of obsession—in this case, the obsession of a middle-aged man, Jeff Lisker, for a high school sweetheart, Georgianne Corcoran, to the extent that Jeff kills Georgianne’s husband and insinuates himself into the life of Georgianne and also into the life (and, implausibly, the bed) of her college-age daughter, Bonnie—but, aside from an irritating habit of shifting the narrative perspective from one character to the other in a rapid and bewildering fashion, Tessier again fails to make Jeff’s obsession entirely plausible. On the whole, however, it does seem as
if Tessier is somewhat more successful in the non-supernatural as opposed to the supernatural vein.
XVIII. The Contemporary Era The collapse of the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s did not mean an abrupt end to horror publications in the mass market, but it did see a decline in the popularity of horror writing, as even the big-name writers of the past struggled to maintain their readership. It is noteworthy that, in the past two decades, certain writers who fall into the broad category of fantasy— notably J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman—have gained a substantially greater readership than most of the bestselling horror writers of the period; only the young-adult writer Stephenie Meyer can come close to matching these titans in popularity. The demise of best-selling horrordom resulted in the return of weird literature to where it probably belongs—the small press. Over the past twenty years, three small presses have risen head and shoulders above the others—Subterranean Press, PS Publishing, and Night Shade Books. But many others (some of them now defunct) have contributed to a thriving weird community where literary artistry can flourish because it does not require the artistic concessions that best-selling writers are compelled to make. Such presses as Fedogan & Bremer, Centipede Press, Delirium Books, Necronomicon Press, Earthling, Dark Regions Press, Hippocampus Press, Bloodletting Press (and its sub-imprint, Arcane Wisdom), Chaosium, and many others have published, on occasion, outstanding material, while such largely reprint houses as Ash-Tree Press and Tartarus Press have now ventured into the publication of new weird fiction. One notably silent firm is Arkham House, which, since the departure of James Turner as editorial director around 1997 (he later formed a notable small press, Golden Gryphon Press, before dying in 1999), has appeared to have lost its focus; it has not published a book since 2006. But so many others have taken up the slack that Arkham House’s silence has gone largely unnoticed.
The drawbacks of the small press—its limited and at times very expensive print runs, its inability to undertake widespread advertising, and the quick departure of some publishers because of financial or other difficulties—have made it difficult for some authors to gain a reputation except by a slow and laborious process of word-of-mouth, and the sheer number of such publications creates challenges to those readers and critics who seek to sort the wheat from the chaff and establish anything approaching a canon of contemporary weird literature. The bewildering diversity of approach adopted by contemporary authors makes it nearly impossible to establish any dominant trends in the field, and all one can do is to focus on certain figures who have gained reputations and to probe whether such reputations are or are not justified.
i. The Blockbusters Resume In general, the fate of the four blockbusters of the 1970s and 1980s— Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice—has not, in the past twenty years, been happy. King, although slowed by a serious accident in 1999 in which he was struck by a truck while walking along a road, has continued to produce novels and story collections in quantity—a total of twenty-one novels (not including the final five instalments of The Dark Tower) and seven story collections, along with sundry novellas, nonfiction volumes, and miscellany, since 1991. Some of the earlier of these works are of considerable merit, among them The Green Mile (1996), a poignant account of a black man on death row with magical curative powers. But others of his works come close to the nadir of his output—and that is saying something: Insomnia (1994), which will certainly cure the malady indicated by its title; The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), a fatuous tale of a little girl lost in the woods; and the incredibly bloated Under the Dome (2009), in which an invisible barrier somehow descends on a small town in Maine, setting the stage for an appalling series of ludicrous social and political machinations. A single novel, Bag of Bones (1998), highlights both the many failings and the few virtues of King’s later output. The work is narrated by Michael Noonan, a bestselling author who is suffering from writer’s block. (No doubt for the prolific King, who recognises that one can’t scare others without scaring oneself, such a thing must be about the most frightening thing it is possible to contemplate.) After his wife’s sudden death, he becomes involved with Mattie Devore, a young mother who is the daughterin-law of a wealthy computer pioneer, Max Devore. Much of the novel becomes bogged down in the tedious recounting of court proceedings whereby Max is attempting to wrest his granddaughter away from Mattie. This whole subplot is only minimally related to the actual supernatural element of the novel—the apparent revival from the dead of one Sara Tidwell, a black blues singer who was raped and killed by a gang of white
boys decades ago, and whose “bag of bones” Michael finds toward the end of the tale. Bag of Bones is itself a kind of shambling bag of bones, with too many elements in it that do not fit well together. It can be seen from this summary that the whole business about the custody battle over Kyra between Devore and Mattie/Michael is simply a time-wasting and space-consuming red herring: it serves no integral purpose in the novel, whose central supernatural premise is the ghostly revenge of Sara Tidwell. This latter feature is presented so sketchily and fragmentarily throughout the novel— chiefly in the form of those preternatural dreams to which Michael is subject—that its final revelation toward the end carries little impact: the reader has not been sufficiently prepared for this turn of events because King, like a too-clever detective writer, has dropped too few hints along the way that might lead convincingly to this denouement. Dean Koontz has been even more prolific than Stephen King: since 1991, he has published at least forty novels (excluding collaborations), a short story collection, sundry children’s books and works of nonfiction, and even—if it can be imagined—a poetry collection; and I do not even count the endless reprinting of his earlier, pseudonymous volumes in the wake of his bestsellerdom. Of this dreary tsunami of words I have had the stomach to read only one: The Taking (2004). It pretty much sums up the author’s severe deficiencies as a supernatural writer. The novel purports to be an apocalyptic thriller in which nearly the entire world is overwhelmed by a variety of bizarre phenomena ranging from cataclysmic floods, dead people reviving in various degrees and fashions, and much else besides—all the result, it would seem, of an invasion of alien entities from outer space. Some remnants of humanity in southern California gather at a tavern, where they quickly divide into various factions: one group merely wishes to drink themselves to oblivion, thinking there is no hope for humanity; a second group embraces dogmatic pacifism; a third are fence-sitters who say they need more information before taking any action; and the fourth are the fighters. It is pretty obvious whose side Koontz is on (for those of you who are a bit dense, it is the last). This last group ultimately takes refuge in a Catholic church (naturally), which unfortunately harbours a hideous spiderlike entity in the basement. The entity is dispatched (although with some regrettable loss of human life), but the church burns down in the process. The main protagonist, one
Molly Sloan, takes a group of children (one must always think of the children) back to the tavern. But let us not pursue the meandering plot of this silly novel any further. The upshot is that the aliens—who finally are seen, after a fashion, when their immense mother ship hovers over the humans for a brief time—simply leave without further ado; the loathsome fungi that had sprouted over everything—apparently their food—also vanishes. Can this be the end of the horror? It certainly appears so. Let us ignore the fact that this resolution is staggeringly anticlimactic: even in the absence of some titanic battle with the disgusting aliens, the reader is surely owed something a bit more exciting and interesting than the mere cessation of weird phenomena. So the critical question becomes: How does Koontz explain all the odd things that have happened in his book? The supernatural incidents have been of such a bewilderingly diverse sort that it would seem difficult to encompass them in any kind of convincing account. What is Koontz’s solution? Well, in effect, there is no solution. First of all, he asserts that all the adults who survived the alien armageddon “had been chosen not just to save the children but for the talents he or she could bring to this larger purpose” (329). The religious undercurrent of this utterance is elaborated upon—after a fashion—in the few chapters that remain, for it appears that the aliens were really conducting a kind of purging because humanity had become so corrupted by violence, lack of faith, and other evils that the only solution was to get rid of them all. The irony of this “explanation,” if it is even credible, is that, in spite of its underlying (Christian) religiosity, is that it unwittingly endorses a kind of Social Darwinism that he would presumably be the first to hold in abhorrence. If the people who are left on earth were “chosen” because of their various “talents,” it means that the ones who were “taken” had no particular talents to offer to the newly cleansed planet—they are simply “unfit” to live and must be whisked off to other realms, whether it be above or below. I am certain that the pious author would be horrified at this conclusion, but his own “explanation” leads inevitably to it. Clive Barker, mercifully, has not been nearly as prolific as King or Koontz: a mere twelve novels since 1991, with various story collections and miscellany. This includes one more instalment of “The Book of The Art” (which had begun with the bloated Great and Secret Show), three volumes of something called the Abarat Quintet, and so on. A good many of these
books appear designed for young adults, and are also generally more inclined toward fantasy than supernatural horror. Where the latter enters is in the intolerably prolix Coldheart Canyon (2001), a hackneyed ghost story set alternately in Eastern Europe and Hollywood, and the cryingly stupid Mister B. Gone (2007), about a demon in Hell. But Barker doesn’t command either the popular or the critical acclaim he once did, and much of his work already seems to have descended into the maw of oblivion. The literary and personal evolution of Anne Rice is perhaps the strangest of any of the writers considered here. While she has maintained both her productivity—twenty novels since 1991—and her popularity, she has fluctuated wildly in her religious views; a matter she recounts, in part, in her autobiography Called out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (2008). We learn that, in 1998, she returned to the Roman Catholic Church after declaring herself an atheist (in part because of the death of her daughter in 1972). The result, as far as her work was concerned, was that, although continuing to write the Vampire Chronicles (ten volumes to 2003), the Mayfair Witches chronicles, and several novels that fused these two series, she also turned to writing ponderous pseudo-philosophical tomes as well as several novels specifically dealing with the life of Jesus. This tendency had been evident even before her conversion—Memnoch the Devil (1995) is burdened with tedious theological and cosmological maunderings by the protagonist—but was markedly enhanced after 1998. Then, in 2010, because of the Catholic Church’s continued opposition to homosexuality, feminism, birth control, and other causes that Rice espouses, she claimed to have given up being a Christian in the orthodox sense of the term, although she remains committed to Jesus. What effect this newest turn in her spiritual development will have on her work remains to be seen. The author whom I deemed the “bridge” between the blockbusters and the literati, Peter Straub, continues to struggle to produce a wholly satisfactory weird volume. What we have among his recent output are an intermittently compelling serial killer novel, The Hellfire Club (1996); a lacklustre Lovecraftian pastiche, Mr. X (1999); a disappointing story collection, Magic Terror (2000); and so on. The novel lost boy lost girl (2003) perhaps encapsulates Straub’s difficulties. This tale once again resurrects both Tim Underhill and Tom Pasmore from previous novels, but its focus is on Tim’s nephew Mark, who becomes fascinated with an
abandoned house behind his own in the town of Millhaven. Ultimately we learn that a serial killer related to Mark’s mother has supernaturally inspired a contemporary serial killer. But the novel is routine and uncompelling—a novelette idea stretched out to novel length.
ii. The Literati Continue The nearly total silence of T. E. D. Klein (since the mid-1980s) and Thomas Ligotti (since the early 2000s) has been an immense loss to literate weird fiction; but the continued productivity of Ramsey Campbell has not only elevated him to the pinnacle of the field, but has enriched the genre with a substantial body of both novels and short stories. Campbell’s novelistic output over the past twenty years divides fairly evenly into supernatural and non-supernatural horror, and in both modes he has engendered some highly memorable products. In the former realm, we should pause over the rich and vibrant novel The Long Lost (1993), which manipulates the Celtic notion of the sin-eater to great effect. The sin-eater in question is an elderly woman named Gwendolen Owain, a figure both horrifying and pitiable as she seeks to shed herself of the sins she has accumulated from a lifetime (or more than a lifetime) of her unenviable occupation—the eating of the sins of the dead. When a group of individuals eats the cookies she has made, endowed with these sins, the result is both appalling and tragic. Campbell has secularised the notion of the sin-eater; for the “sins” these individuals have absorbed is, in effect, merely an augmentation of the character flaws with which they were already endowed. Hence, one character is unhealthily attracted to the teenage daughter of a friend; another kidnaps a friend’s infant son, since she believes the child is being ill-treated; and so on. The worst fate is reserved for Richard Vale, his wife, and their adolescent children: increasingly depressed by his inability to support his family, Richard resolves to kill them all. In one of the most harrowing tableaux in the whole of Campbell’s work, the Vales spend what seems to be a perfect day by the river while Richard secretly ponders, and then executes, his plan. In The Long Lost the supernatural has been reduced almost to the vanishing point; but it surfaces subtly in the unnatural longevity of Gwendolen and in the seemingly irrational actions taken by the characters who have absorbed her sins. Every one of the characters in the novel is vividly and vitally realised, most notably Gwendolen herself: she is a
tenuous, inscrutable, almost intangible presence, as ghostly in her psychology as her pale white skin makes her look in appearance. Her utterances are, in almost every single instance, double entendres, seeming to answer some innocent question but in reality reinforcing the heavy burden of her ancient occupation. An even greater triumph is The House on Nazareth Hill (1996), which in my estimation ranks as the finest haunted house story ever written, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House not excluded. Here we are introduced to Oswald Priestley and his teenage daughter Amy, who move into a new apartment building named Nazarill (short for Nazareth Hill). The structure has been refurbished after it served as a series of offices in the nineteenth century. A variety of odd events occur, chiefly focusing on the increasingly tortured relationship of Amy and her father, who appears to be behaving almost like a jailor. The difficulties of raising a teenage daughter alone (Amy’s mother had died years before in an auto accident) are keenly etched by Campbell. The novel takes a definite turn into the supernatural when Amy discovers that Nazarill had in fact served, in the eighteenth century, as an asylum where numerous women branded as witches were interred. Can this explain the hideous spectre that Amy sees? The grey wispy coating of the skull was certainly not hair. The figure still had some of a face, or had somehow reconstructed parts of one, which looked in danger of coming away from the bones, as the scraps of the chest were peeling away from the ribs to expose the withered heart and lungs, which jerked as though in a final spasm as Amy’s gaze lit on them. (287) The relation between Oswald and Amy deteriorates to the point where Oswald locks Amy into her room. Even this is not the worst; for, in one of the most vicious scenes in Campbell’s work, Oswald at one point rushes in and cuts off Amy’s tongue. In an almost dreamlike conclusion, we learn that both father and daughter have perished in a fire that overwhelms the structure. Oswald has manifestly become possessed by the spirit of the jailors of the old asylum, while Amy has seen the ghosts of several of the “witches”
confined there. What is remarkable about The House on Nazareth Hill is that, although a sizeable work, it features only two main characters— Oswald and Amy. Their tormented relationship is nearly the entire focus of the novel, and the supernatural component only augments the searing agony of their ultimate demise. The Darkest Part of the Woods (2002) finds Campbell returning, after a fashion, to his Lovecraftian roots; for the novel is a subtle elaboration on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. But it is far more than an exercise in pastiche, or even an exercise in shudder-coining. Campbell, at the height of his form in fluidity of prose, sensitivity in character depiction, and mastery of narrative pacing, has produced a novel that continuously and lovingly shapes his characters as on a potter’s wheel; every statement, every gesture, even every moment of silence contributes to the etching of each distinctive personality. At the same time, the evocation of the terrors of the natural landscape, and the horrors that can emerge from the centuried past, supply a backdrop of cosmic fear against which the characters appear to struggle in vain. The Overnight (2004) is engaging as it reflects Campbell’s brief employment at a Borders bookstore in Cheshire Oaks. There is perhaps no profound message in this tale of bizarre happenings in a bookstore, Texts, in a shopping plaza in the Manchester/Liverpool area, but some of the effects are striking: A constant and ever-thickening fog seems to hover around the retail park; computers develop minds of their own, failing to correct typographical errors even after repeated proofreading; elevators malfunction; books continually seem to get misshelved; and, most disturbing of all, small grey animate objects are half glimpsed skulking around shelves, in the stockroom, or in the workers’ staffroom. What could be the cause of these manifestations? It is here that The Overnight might perhaps be criticised for excessive reticence. Campbell does not wish to spell out the matter in an obvious way, but the hints that are sprinkled throughout the narrative—hints based upon the sinister history of the region as a focal point of violence and death for centuries or millennia—seem just a trifle too vague and imprecise to account for the horrors on display. It also takes a pretty large leap of faith to assume that such age-old horrors could have the wherewithal to affect the most sophisticated paraphernalia of modern life, from computers to electronic elevators to the very essence of contemporary published books,
whose text and illustrations hideously melt into an amorphous mass before one horrified worker’s eyes. Campbell’s non-supernatural novels of this period are no less impressive; indeed, the grimness of some of them evokes The Face That Must Die, which many readers continue to find almost too depressing to read. The One Safe Place (1995) is a magnificent etching of the troubled relationship between the middle and lower classes in England, with its potential for hideous violence. The Last Voice They Hear (1998) and Silent Children (1999) brutally but elegantly relate the horrific effects of child abuse. Perhaps the most notable novel of this type is Secret Stories (2005), a cheerless portrayal of a young man, Dudley Smith, who hopes to be a crime writer—but can only do so by actually committing the crimes that he subsequently writes about. The manner in which he kidnaps and brutalises Patricia Martingale, who works on a magazine that was to have published some of Smith’s work, makes for painful reading; but Campbell’s skill and sensitivity raise this whole subject to a level far beyond cheap titillation. Campbell’s recent work in the short story and novelette should not be passed over in silence. In such collections as Ghosts and Grisly Things (1998), Told by the Dead (2002), and Inconsequential Tales (2007), he shows how he continues his mastery of the short story while at the same time expanding his own aesthetic horizons by incorporating new subject matter and new manners in which to tell his always compelling narratives. One of his greatest successes is the novelette “The Word” (1993). Aside from being a devastating send-up of the dreariness of science fiction and fantasy conventions, this tale grimly depicts the gradual psychological decline of an embittered critic, Jeremy Bates, who can scarcely conceal either his scorn or his envy of the sudden popularity of a hack science fiction writer, Jess Kray, who achieves immense notoriety with a possibly blasphemous book called The Word. It is no accident that Kray’s name brings Jesus Christ to mind, nor that Bates writes a letter signed Jude Carrot (Judas Iscariot). Bates’s murder of Kray on a television talk show seems all but inevitable. Several recent stories show that Campbell can absorb new developments in technology to augment the horror of his scenarios. “Going Under” (1995) focuses on a man’s desperate effort to secure a working cellphone to contact his estranged lover while running in a charity race through a dark tunnel. “The Alternative” (1994), in which a prosperous man
is haunted by a recurring dream that he and his family are living in a slum, not only hints at the shuddering guilt felt by many of the middle class at the existence of grinding poverty, especially in cities where the propinquity of rich and poor makes it all too evident, but reveals how sterile life can be to many modern-day denizens without such seeming necessities as a television or a computer. I have left myself little room to discuss the current work of other of the literati. Dan Simmons wrote a very long novel, The Terror (2007), that suggests the weird, but it is largely a painstakingly realistic novel about the Antarctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, which ended in tragedy and death in the 1840s. At random moments the members of the expedition are pursued by an apparently supernatural monster—ultimately revealed as an Eskimo demon—but it does not figure greatly in the narrative. Thomas Tessier’s Fogheart (1997) is a compelling novel in which séances reveal dark secrets both of the past and the future. Wicked Things (2007) is less successful—a clumsy attempt to combine hard-boiled detection with small-town horror. Tessier did, however, publish a notable short story collection, Ghost Music and Other Tales (2000), as did Dennis Etchison in the piquantly titled Got to Kill Them All (2007).
iii. Caitlín R. Kiernan: Prose-Poet of the Lost In my estimation, the one writer who has, over the past twenty years, risen to canonical status in weird fiction is Caitlín R. Kiernan (b. 1964). Born in Ireland, she came to the United States as a child, settling in Alabama. She studied palaeontology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and at the University of Colorado, and she has written a number of scientific papers on the subject. After working with Neil Gaiman on the comic book series The Dreaming (1996–2001), she began writing novels and tales in earnest. She dislikes being labelled a “horror writer,” and her work is weird in the fullest and richest sense of the term, fusing the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and supernatural horror and also drawing upon the heritage of cosmic weird fiction, notably Lovecraft, Machen, and Blackwood. In many ways her best work remains in the short story, even though (like Ramsey Campbell) she is obliged to write novels to bring in revenue. It is telling that her short story collections—from Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000; rev. ed. 2008) to The Ammonite Violin (2010)—are published by small presses (chiefly Subterranean Press), while her nine novels are published by Penguin (under the Roc imprint). It is one more indication of the pervasive and ingrained prejudice of commercial publishers against short story collections. There are two distinguishing features of Kiernan’s work. The first is a prose style of wondrous luminosity. When you come upon the prose of Caitlín R. Kiernan, all you can do is gasp in amazement. I pick a passage almost at random from The Ammonite Violin: “And then,” she says, as though she still imagines that I’ve somehow never heard this story before, “the demons tried to carry the looking glass all the way up to Heaven, that they might even mock the angels.” But it shattered, I cut in, trying to sound sober, and she smiles a vitreous sort of smile for me. I catch a glimpse of
her uneven bluish teeth, set like mismatched pegs of lazulite into gums the colour of a stormy autumn sky. (63) Purely on the level of prose, Kiernan already ranks with the most distinctive stylists of our field—Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Thomas Ligotti. With Ligotti’s regrettable retreat into fictional silence, hers is now the most recognisable voice in weird fiction. No one is ever likely to mistake a sentence by Kiernan for a sentence by any other writer. The other distinguishing feature of Kiernan’s work, both on the level of technique and on the levels of theme, imagery, and motif, is its inextricable fusion of science and artistry. She has mastered what might be called geological horror. Consider “To This Water” (1996). This story tells the tale of the Johnstown flood of 1889, suggesting that it may have been supernaturally caused by the rape of a young girl. This fusion of the cosmic and the personal is also a keynote of Kiernan’s work. It features an intense focus on the shifting and at times contradictory emotions of her characters, and their ability or inability to deal with domestic, social, and sexual— particularly sexual—traumas. Her stories are littered with the refuse of our society—the aimless teenagers, the abused whores, the vicious but vulnerable drug dealers whose fliftings at the fringes of middle-class life we so fervently strive to ignore. Kiernan’s tales do, however, at times fail to cohere as narratives and can descend into mere vignettes or prose-poems that appear to have little focus or direction. There is never a wasted word; the prose is always throbbing with vitality and pathos; but too often the stories don’t seem to go anywhere, and end arbitrarily and inconclusively. Among the full-fledged narratives, “To This Water” and, preeminently, “In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)” (2000) stand head and shoulders above the rest. The latter is a masterwork of subtle cosmicism, telling of what my lie in a water-filled pit as the water lines of Birmingham are being built. There are the dimmest echoes of Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space,” but the loving character descriptions—both of the grizzled workmen and of the young professor, Henry S. Matthews, investigating the site—as well as the gradual accretion of horrific details are pure Kiernan. Kiernan’s gift for language can gloss over a number of elements that, in a weaker writer, might be seen as flaws. It is, for example, surprising how many of the stories in The Ammonite Violin deal with venerable tropes that
have dominated weird fiction for centuries. “In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection” is, as its title suggests, about the resurrection of the dead— but it is told in the first person, by a woman so resurrected, and so Kiernan is able to portray with heart-rending pathos the shifting emotions of the woman as she undergoes the experience. Perhaps, indeed, she did not wish to be resurrected at all? The line “I cross one way for you, and I return as another’s experiment, the vessel of another’s inquisition” (194) would certainly indicate so. A number of stories rather quaintly treat the mermaid theme, but even this hoary topos is rendered distinctive by novelty of approach. How does a mermaid, having been skinned and therefore become approximately human, seek to buy back her own skin from a curio dealer? You can find out in “For One Who Has Lost Herself.” “Metamorphosis B” is told from the point of view of a woman who professes to be the daughter of a mermaid and the sea captain who raped her. “Madonna Littoralis,” insofar as I can make sense of the plot, is about lesbian sex with a mermaid. Sexual desire, indeed, looms large in this book, and its performance and ramifications— chiefly lesbian or gay, but occasionally heterosexual, as a kind of novel diversion—are rendered as achingly beautiful by the alchemy of Kiernan’s prose. This fusion of sex and the supernatural can also revivify otherwise stale themes, as in “Orpheus at Mount Pangaeum” and “Ode to Edvard Munch,” both of which feature heterosexual sex with a female vampire. Kiernan’s acclaimed first novel, Silk (1998), features her customary cast of twentysomethings—drifters, struggling rock musicians, and so forth. The focus of the narrative is Spyder Baxter, who runs a shop, Weird Trappings. After some of her friends conduct a ritual involving peyote in the basement of her house, the legs of some immense spider appear to poke out of the trapdoor leading to the basement. One by one, these friends die hideously— one of them has his throat slit by spiderwebs. Eventually we learn that, when she was a child, Spyder was locked in the basement with her crazed father, who had collected hundreds of black widow spiders; they bit him and he died, but they did not bite Spyder. Are they in fact protecting her by killing her friends? Perhaps not: at the end of the novel she is found wrapped in an immense cocoon. Several characters from Silk return in Threshold (2001), but the focus here is on Chance Matthews, who has moved back into her family home in Birmingham, Alabama, after the death of her grandparents. In a sense the
novel is an expansion of “In the Water Works,” for we are here dealing with the possibility that an immense monster is dwelling under a mountain near the city—one that, apparently, her grandfather had found when the water works tunnel was dug in 1888. Still more of these characters appear in Low Red Moon (2003) and Murder of Angels (2004). One of Kiernan’s most challenging novels is Daughter of Hounds (2007), which appear to use Lovecraft’s concept of ghouls—cited in “Pickman’s Model” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath—as a springboard. Around this time Kiernan moved to Providence, R.I., so her absorption of the Lovecraft influence was perhaps natural. But Daughter of Hounds is a curiously mixed bag: in tone it wavers from dreamlike fantasy to hard-boiled crime, and its overall thrust—in which a young woman named Soldier discovers that she is a changeling raised by ghouls—remains unclear. Far and away the most impressive of Kiernan’s novels is The Red Tree (2009). It concerns a writer named Sarah Crowe (already dead by suicide as the novel opens) who has written a book (really a series of diary entries written over a roughly two-month period) entitled The Red Tree. Within this text, Sarah transcribes portions of a fragmentary treatise written by a professor named Charles L. Harvey entitled . . . The Red Tree. Clearly, this is a novel about layers. Harvey’s incomplete typescript reveals his obsession with the red oak (Quercus rubra) at the farmhouse where Sarah herself is now staying as a renter. Harvey committed suicide by hanging himself from the red tree. What kind of sinister power does that tree have? In the course of the narrative we learn that its evil effects stretch back centuries, perhaps millennia. This part of the narrative, evoking a centuries-old evil lurking in the wilderness, is a plot that Lovecraft could, and should, have written. Those seeking a neat resolution to the overall scenario—either to the supernatural manifestation that is the red tree or to the lives and fates of the protagonists—are likely to be disappointed. The Red Tree is supremely rewarding not merely for its moments of terror, but for its ineffably sensitive display of the complexity of human emotions. It is a kind of “Heart of Darkness” for our time—an exploration of both the sinister darkness of the foreboding rural landscape and of the inscrutable darkness of the human heart.
Caitlín R. Kiernan is in the prime of her career, and it will be fascinating to see what new directions she leads herself and her readers. She has already produced a corpus of work as impressive as that of any weird writer now writing, and she is one of the very few writers in this field who one can confidently say will be read by future generations.
iv. Still More Vampires The continuing popularity of Anne Rice’s vampire writings (even though, in the past twenty years, she has expanded her scope well beyond the Vampire Chronicles and returned only intermittently to that series) has caused the vampire motif to become a virtual subgenre of its own within the realm of supernatural fiction—and it itself has fragmented into numerous sub-subgenres, most notably vampire romance. Relatively few writers have made any noteworthy changes or advances in the vampire topos, and the continuing popularity of this manifestly stale and impoverished theme speaks volumes for the fundamental lack of originality demanded of writers by a popular readership. People read vampire novels in the same way they go to McDonald’s or watch a well-loved sitcom: the product may be mediocre, but it is a known quantity and therefore provides the comfort of familiarity. One writer who consciously worked in Anne Rice’s footsteps is Poppy Z. Brite (b. 1967), who wrote several popular novels in the 1990s. But there are major structural and conceptual flaws in her work. Her first novel, Lost Souls (1992), is beset by confusion, verbosity, and lack of focus. We are here concerned with two intersecting tales. One involves the efforts of a trio of vampires, Zillah, Molochai, and Twig, to carry out their bloodthirsty activities as they drive somewhat aimlessly in a van across the southern United States. The other is the story of Steve and Ghost, two-bit rock stars who lead equally aimless lives until they finally become enmeshed with the vampires. The connecting link is a boy named Nothing, who turns out to be the son of Zillah and a sixteen-year-old New Orleans girl and who is fascinated with the music of Steve and Ghost’s band, called Lost Souls. Aside from the fact that Lost Souls relies upon numerous implausible coincidences to keep its plot moving, there is a problem with Brite’s entire conception of vampires. She has dispensed with numerous facets of the vampire myth and declares that her vampires are, although of a different species from humans, begotten by the union of a male vampire with a human woman, and each vampire kills its mother by eating its way out of the womb. This is a picturesque conception, but it creates more questions
than answers: If vampires are a different race, how did they become so uncannily similar to human beings? Where did they come from? Brite presents no “origin of species” for vampires here, as Anne Rice does in The Vampire Lestat. Also, Brite’s vampires can live for hundreds of years unless they die by violence; but when do they stop “growing” outwardly? Brite’s second novel, Drawing Blood (1993), is not quite as bad as Lost Souls, but it is no great improvement. We here return to Missing Mile, where in 1972 a troubled comic-book artist, Robert McGee, kills his wife, one infant son, and himself one night; his five-year-old son Trevor survives, and twenty years later returns to his hometown to see if by some means he can ascertain why his father left him alive when by all rights he should be dead. Trevor has himself evolved into an accomplished comic artist, and he seems to use his art both as self-expression and as a means for investigating his own psyche. Aside from the fact that this promising premise is confounded by the introduction of another character, Zachary Bosch, a young computer hacker who falls in love with Trevor, a supernatural element is suddenly and clumsily introduced. The house in which Trevor and Zachary are staying suddenly gains the power to induce hallucinations, possibly thrusting the two characters into some nebulous fantasy realm that may or may not be a creation of Robert McGee. Why or how the house should gain this miraculous property is never accounted for. Drawing Blood is, in spite of its title, not a vampire novel, nor is its successor, Exquisite Corpse (1996), about a dead serial killer brought back to life. Shortly thereafter Brite gave up horror writing, and has now apparently retired from writing altogether. A very different writer is British novelist Kim Newman (b. 1959), whose multifaceted work is noteworthy for spanning the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Although he has written novels and tales of many different kinds, he has gained the greatest celebrity for a series of vampire novels beginning with Anno Dracula (1992). Here we have entered an alternate world where, in the late nineteenth century, vampires have largely gained control of the English throne: Vlad Tepes has become Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, Lord Ruthven (from Polidori’s “The Vampyre”) is prime minister, and vampires are in control of many phases of the government and the police force. The work focuses alternately on Jack Seward (from Stoker’s Dracula) and one Charles Beauregard, who teams
up with a sympathetic vampire, the 500-year-old Geneviève Dieudonné, to overthrow the vampires. It appears, however, that Newman is more intent on name-dropping, including as many references to real and fictional characters from late Victorian England as he can cram in, than on developing a plausible or aesthetically significant plot. It is not at all clear what the overall message of the book is, aside from the platitude that ruthless people in power should be overthrown. At one point Vlad’s Carpathian Guards wage a campaign against “inverts” (homosexuals) and other perceived degenerates. But even this trite political message is not systematically worked out in the novel, even though it is stated at the end that “The Empire Dracula had usurped would rise against him” (396). This appears to have taken place in The Bloody Red Baron (1995), where Vlad has gone over to the German side and become chief adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I. More real and fictional characters get dragged in, including the German ace Baron von Richthofen (now a vampire) and even Edgar Allan Poe. In Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959 (1998; titled Dracula Cha Cha Cha in the UK) Newman, surprisingly skipping over any extensive discussion of Nazism and World War II, takes us to postwar Rome, where a serial killer called the Crimson Executioner is on the loose, killing vampires and humans alike. Amidst the inevitable references to literature and film (the work is largely structured on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita), some more serious issues at last emerge. It becomes plain that vampires, for all their power and immortality, are both more and less than humans: their self-absorption and inability to love ultimately dooms them to a meagre, unsatisfying existence; and those creative artists who have become vampires find that their loss of humanity also results in a loss of the creative spark that produces viable art. A very different type of alternate world is found in the popular novels of American writers Laurell K. Hamilton and P. N. Elrod. Hamilton (b. 1963) has written nearly a score of novels in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Anita, who has the power to raise the dead, has already, as announced in the first novel in which she appears, Guilty Pleasures (1993), killed fourteen vampires. It appears, however, that “Vampirism was legal in the good ol’ U. S. of A.” (3), although it is not entirely clear what that means. It is later stated that “It’s illegal to kill a vampire without a court order of execution” (122). Blake is pressured to investigate a series of
vampire killings, but ultimately her focus becomes the killing of a “master vampire,” Nikolaos, a female in the form of a teenage girl. In a shoot-’emup scene at the end of the book, she succeeds in the task. It would be fruitless to pursue Anita’s adventures in subsequent novels, which involve everything from a werewolf lover, Richard Zeeman, for Anita (he makes his debut in The Lunatic Café, 1996) to weretigers and wereleopards to a fearsome entity, the Harlequin, that even vampires are afraid of. The problem with all this is multifold: Exactly what is the message, if any, that Hamilton is telling? Is she merely writing supernatural action-adventure novels that are the literary equivalent of popcorn and candy? Her melding of supernaturalism with the hard-boiled detective novel is occasionally effective, but grows wearisome through overuse. Blake, who narrates all the novels in the first person, is a lively and engaging character known for her tight-lipped toughness, and Hamilton’s prose is similarly brisk and at times pungent, but there is an overriding dilemma in her work: too much supernaturalism. The presence of vampires, werewolves, and other mythical entities becomes so ubiquitous as to appear commonplace; they just become another in the varying cast of characters Hamilton puts on stage. Most of her vampires are cardboard villains that are meant to do little but excite the reader’s hatred and loathing, and Hamilton never clarifies the legal status of her vampires in the nation they inhabit. P. N. Elrod (b. 1954) also fuses hard-boiled detection with vampirism, but adds an historical element. Many of her twenty-odd novels divide into three separate series, the first of which was The Vampire Files (ten books, 1990–2003), focusing around the detective Jack Fleming, beginning in the year 1936. In the first novel, Bloodlist (1990), Fleming wakes up in Chicago with partial amnesia. He realises he has become a vampire, but does not know when or by whom. Eventually he remembers that he had fallen in love with a female vampire in New York who had then disappeared. In the course of the novel, Fleming learns that it was a gangster, Frank Paco, who had killed him, and the novel deals with other unsavoury crime figures who end up slaughtering one another. The Gentleman Vampire series (four novels, 1993–96) revolves around Jonathan Barrett, a colonial landowner’s son in the late eighteenth century who becomes a vampire and takes part in the American Revolution, among other historical events. More historical fiction than hard-boiled crime stories, these novels nonetheless portray Barrett as a darker figure than Jack
Fleming. The Richard Dun series, cowritten with Nigel Bennett (three novels, 1997–2004), revolve around Richard d’Orleans and are set in the contemporary world and deal with such issues as the IRA, drug smuggling, and so forth. Elrod’s work avoids the central failing of Hamilton’s—too much supernaturalism—by limiting the number of supernatural entities involved. In the Vampire Chronicles, it is stated that most human beings are immune to becoming vampires, so that only a few unfortunate individuals will be “turned.” Elrod’s prose is not quite as crisp or vivid as Hamilton’s, but it gets the job done. But it suffers from the same aesthetic emptiness as Hamilton’s, and she fundamentally has nothing to say as a novelist. Nancy Kilpatrick (b. 1946) has also made a cottage industry of literary vampirism. The four-volume Power of the Blood series (1994–2000) is not actually united by recurring characters, scenes, or motifs, but they are all lively fusions of vampirism, sex, romance, adventure, and even comedy. In Near Death (1994), the focus is on a tormented love affair between a human woman, Kathleen Stevens (nicknamed Zero), and a British vampire born in 1863, David Lyle Hardwick, whom Zero was instructed to kill. The convoluted storyline has the two fall in love and then battle another group of vampires, led by Ariel, who had been David’s previous lover. Kilpatrick has also written much more explicit sex-vampire novels under the pseudonym Amarantha Knight. Her writing is vibrant, edgy, and compelling, but one would like to see her expand her supernatural range beyond the bloodsuckers she writes so compulsively about. And now we come to Stephenie Meyer (b. 1973). The immense popularity of her four Twilight novels (2005–08), along with the blockbuster films made of them, make it difficult to discuss her work from a purely aesthetic perspective; but the effort should be made, for these novels, although intended for young adults, are surprisingly able pieces of work. They are not high literature by any stretch of the imagination, but the writing is surprisingly competent. Her prose is fluent and refined, largely lacking the solecisms that cripple the prose of most best-selling writers. Ironically, these very qualities create a bit of a conceptual difficulty; for the novels purport to be the first-person accounts of Bella Swan, a seventeenyear-old girl who has come to live with her father in the town of Forks, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State; and, in all honesty, Meyer’s
prose is far too elevated to be credible as the product of a not notably bright teenager. The Twilight novels focus on a clan of vampires, led by an older man, Dr. Carlisle Cullen, and including his attractive son Edward, with whom Bella promptly falls in love. The vampires have come to Forks because, of all the towns in the United States, this one has the smallest amount of sunlight, being under a nearly perpetual cloud cover. Over the four books, the romance proceeds until it culminates in the long-delayed transformation of Bella herself into a vampire. There is, however, an immense plot flaw that cripples the entire framework of these novels. Given that Edward and his “siblings” (they are in fact not related to Dr. Cullen at all, having merely been turned by him into vampires at various times) look like teenagers of various ages, how will their obvious absence of ageing over the decades not have been noticed? In one of the books Meyer states that the clan moves about every five years or so, but this does not obviate the problem: Edward, who looks seventeen, is not likely to look like a twelve- or thirteen-year-old in some other locale. But if this whopper can be swallowed, the novels are engaging enough. They are manifestly told from the perspective, and for the delectation, of teenage girls, and the overriding emphasis is the appealing notion of a girl engaging in a “dangerous” relationship with a boy who has his dubious elements but is fundamentally a good person at heart. Edward even laments at one point: “I don’t want to be a monster” (187). Meyer casually dispenses with several elements of the vampire myth. Even the issue of being able to move about in daylight—presumably the reason the clan came to Forks—is said to be misconstrued: it is not that vampires will die or suffer when going about in daylight; rather, they will “sparkle,” creating a disturbance that might threaten their status as (approximately) normal members of the community. The various obstacles that are put in the path of Edward’s and Bella’s true love are a trifle artificial. In Twilight (2005) a sinister vampire named James captures Bella, but he is defeated far too easily. In other novels, Edward and Bella are parted for a time but always manage to reunite; at times a Native American named Jacob Black, who has fallen in love with Bella (and who proves to be a werewolf), emerges as a major character. But the end that we were all expecting—Bella turned into a vampire by Edward —is the culmination of the saga in Breaking Dawn (2008). Much has been
made of the fact that Meyer, a Mormon, does not allow her chief characters to engage in drinking or premarital sex. Indeed, even when they finally marry and come to the marriage bed, things do not turn out well for Bella: Edward, unable to control his immense strength, ends up bruising Bella; what is worse, she becomes pregnant with a half-human, half-vampire baby that bites its way out of her womb (a detail that Meyer appears to have borrowed from Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls); it is at this point that Edward is compelled to turn Bella into a vampire, to save her life. The Twilight saga is the pinnacle of the growing subgenre of vampire romance, promoted by such writers as Lori Herter, Amanda Ashley, L. J. Smith, and many others. Its popularity, especially among teenagers, is patent, but its aesthetic value is far more doubtful.
v. The British School Any number of writers from both sides of the Atlantic have emerged in the past two decades to establish themselves as either popular or critically acclaimed figures. It would be misleading to claim that they form a “school” in any meaningful fashion or that they have much in common with one another aside from their nationality, but a number of them have produced substantial weird works that deserve to survive. Jonathan Aycliffe (b. 1949), the pseudonym of Irish writer Denis MacEoin, who also writes thrillers under the name Daniel Easterman, achieved a notable success with Naomi’s Room (1991). Aycliffe etches with extraordinary poignancy the bereavement suffered by Charles Hillenbrand, a young Cambridge professor, and his wife, Laura, when their young daughter Naomi is apparently kidnapped and killed just before Christmas. Soon thereafter, strange events occur at their home; in particular, a woman and two children are seen in the attic window—and are even photographed by a reporter. This photographer also snaps a picture of Naomi standing between Charles and Laura in their garden. The atmosphere of weirdness builds as Charles investigates the history of the house, finding that it had once been owned by a physician, John Liddley, whose wife and children mysteriously disappeared in the 1840s. The convenient discovery of Liddley’s diary tells the whole story of his locking his family in the attic and killing them there. But further horrors are in store: Charles, the firstperson narrator, is himself possessed by the spirit of John Liddley and repeats his crimes. Naomi’s Room is a slim but intense novel of domestic tragedy and psychic possession. Unfortunately, Aycliffe attempted to duplicate its success with a relatively similar work, The Vanishment (1993), a stilted and predictable novel about another haunted house, this time in Cornwall, that exercises a baneful influence on a young couple vacationing there. Aycliffe has continued working in the tradition of M. R. James in the ghost novels Whispers in the Dark (1992) and Shadow on the Wall (2000). An explicit M. R. James pastiche is Rune (1990) by Christopher Fowler (b. 1953), a novel-length rewriting and updating of “Casting the Runes.” In
a contemporary London setting, we are introduced to Harry Buckingham, an advertising executive whose father was apparently killed by a rune. Suspicion focuses on Daniel Carmody, head of a communications company, ODEL, that apparently has grandiose plans to take over the control of all British communications. It is not clear that the James tale has been enhanced by this revision of time and setting. In any case, the exact message of Fowler’s novel remains unclear: Is he criticising the megalomania of corporations? government corruption? One needs something a little more innovative to justify a novel as long and tedious as this one. Fowler has written any number of other novels, chiefly focusing on the underside of London life. Simon Clark (b. 1958) seems to be another writer attempting to cash in on the residual popularity of the blockbuster horror novel. Nailed by the Heart (1995) focuses on an old sea-fort that appears to be a kind of guardian against the incursion of the ghosts of terrorists who were killed decades earlier when the boat they hijacked sank to the bottom of the sea. But the development is hackneyed and the characterisation—especially the focus on a child, David Stainforth, whose parents are attempting to renovate the sea-fort—is intended to evoke the maximum amount of sympathy from impressionable readers. Clark has also written the Vampyrrhic Trilogy (1998–2010), drawing on Norse and African mythology. A far more substantial writer is Graham Joyce (b. 1954), who infuses his work with a diversity of elements ranging from his working-class upbringing, his wide travels throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and influences ranging from Arthur Machen to Thomas Pynchon (about whom he wrote a master’s thesis). While it would be unjust to classify his work strictly within the realm of weird fiction, such novels as Dark Sister (1992), a tale of modern witchcraft, and The Tooth Fairy (1996), about a baleful entity far different from the innocuous childhood fantasy of the title, are clearly within the weird tradition. Some British short story writers have emerged in the past two decades. Anglo-Welsh writer Tim Lebbon (b. 1969) has written plenty of novels, but his best work seems to be found in his short stories and novellas. Many of these tales fuse domestic conflicts with the supernatural in an effective manner, such as “The Repulsion” (2000), a subtle and ambiguous story about a troubled marriage. Dean and Maria have gone to Amalfi in an attempt to regain their love; but does Maria’s frequent and inexplicable
disappearances symbolise how Dean has emotionally lost her? There is a distinctly Campbellian atmosphere to this tale. In “Life Within” (2000), a small boy is traumatised when his father kills some newborn puppies, and he is afflicted with hideous dreams of being a foetus in an amniotic sac; in the end he suffocates himself to death by putting a bag over his head. “The Last Good Times” (2000) is a pensive, melancholy tale of revenants. Terry Lamsley (b. 1941) has also developed a high reputation, although it is not entirely clear that it is justified. Conference with the Dead (1996), for example, contains only one genuinely meritorious tale—and this one, “Blade and Bone” (1994), is nothing more than a skilful pastiche of M. R. James, featuring a revenant in the shape of a doglike skeleton. Otherwise, we find such an implausible tale as “Walking the Dog” (1996), in which a man, tasked with walking a nameless grey-green doglike creature for an hour every night, wonders whether the creature is from another planet or dimension. There are several other confused or routine ghost stories —“Screens” (1995), “The Toddler” (1995), and “Inheritance” (1996)— along with a long-winded tale of modern witchcraft, “The Extension” (1996). “The Break” (1996) is occasionally effective—a long, nightmarish novelette told from the point of view of a small boy who finds himself on holiday in a hotel filled with old people. Is it possible that the staff is draining them of their blood? Joel Lane (b. 1963) began publishing in the late 1980s and has written novels, stories, and poems. He has often been referred to as one of the “Miserabilists”—a writer whose unrelenting focus on death, poverty, and hopelessness renders his work the fictional equivalent of the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. But his tales are undeniably effective and often constitute significant social commentary on the social and economic inequalities of contemporary England. Some of his best work is in The Earth Wire and Other Stories (1994). Another “Miserabilist” is Nicholas Royle (b. 1963), who is often confused with a writer of the same name who has written on weird fiction in the treatise The Uncanny (2003). Royle’s novels and tales are richly complex, reflecting a sophisticated understanding of the intricacies of human character and also of the literary devices that can be used to explore them. His accomplished first novel, Counterparts (1993), interweaves several overlapping narratives while conveying a sense of both existential
anomie and weirdness by its mingling of dream and reality and other elements that take the novel in the direction of surrealism. Reggie Oliver (b. 1952) is the author of many plays that were written as early as the 1970s, but he took to writing horror tales in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Some of these stories are pastiches of M. R. James and Arthur Machen, but Oliver is far more than an imitator, and his skill at character portrayal and utilisation of a wide array of historical settings are impressive. The omnibus Dramas from the Depths (2010) contains his best work.
vi. The American School John Shirley (b. 1953) has been publishing horror novels since 1979, but he attained widespread notice only with Wetbones (1991). And yet, it is not clear that this gruesome work—which might well be considered a contribution to the short-lived splatterpunk movement—represents him to best advantage. We are here concerned with a serial killer, Ephram Pixie, who appears to be able to control his victims with his mind. A teenager, Constance Garner, falls under his spell and kills strangers while having sex with them. Eventually we learn that a group of entities called the Akishra, who have the unique ability of using other people’s brains for their own pleasure; they are, it would seem, responsible for all addictions: “The addict, see, is losing life-force. He’s basically using up his life energy on his addiction—little bit by little bit. The Akishra suck off that run-off” (273). And yet, these seemingly powerful creatures are, in an action-packed ending right out of bestsellerdom, banished to the astral realm by an electrical fire. Wetbones is by no means the pinnacle of Shirley’s output. Far superior are such items as the novella Demons (2000; expanded into a novel in 2002), about demons taking over the Earth, and Crawlers (2003), a searing portrayal of decadent youth culture. And yet, Shirley’s best work—work that exhibits his vibrant prose, his daring themes, and his challenge to conventional morality—may be found in his short stories, collected in The Exploded Heart (1996), Darkness Divided (2001), and several other volumes. Kathe Koja (b. 1960) made a remarkable debut with The Cipher (1991). The premise of this novel seems absurd—in the basement of a run-down apartment building is a seemingly limitless black hole, nicknamed the Funhole by the tenants, that produces bizarre effects on those who come close to it—but Koja’s exquisitely modulated, prose-poetic prose makes the conception terrifyingly real. The weirdness quotient increases in excruciatingly subtle increments: a mouse lowered over the hole is shot back up, strangely distorted; a severed hand that is thrown into the hole crawls out of it. The driving force behind the exploration of the Funhole is a
young woman, Nakota, whose compulsion is initially abetted by the firstperson narrator, her sometime lover Nicholas Reid. On one occasion, Nicholas inadvertently inserts his arm into the Funhole, after which his entire body begins mutating hideously. Nicholas realises that the Funhole, whatever it may be, is monstrous and dangerous, and strives to keep others away from it; Nakota (who “had always considered herself the uncrowned queen of the bizarre” [318]), infuriated by Nicholas’s actions, forces her away into the basement room, with loathsome consequences. The Cipher is a gripping novel of obsession—in particular, the obsession for weirdness as exhibited by Nakota, perhaps as an antidote to the emptiness of her life—and is written with an intoxicating mix of metaphor-laden prose-poetry and contemporary slang. It remains one of the finest weird novels of the past twenty years. Koja has not been able to duplicate the success of The Cipher in subsequent novels, many of which are written for young adults. Bentley Little (b. 1960) attained celebrity with The Ignored (1997). This novel focuses on one Bob Jones, whose plain name signals the underlying thrust of the novel: he comes to realise that “I am completely and totally ordinary” (70), with the result that he is not only estranged from his lover, Jane, but, when he takes to performing small acts of sabotage at his “mindnumbingly boring” (39) job, finds that no one notices them—or him. It turns out that he is one of a growing cadre of the Ignored: “I was a product of the mass media standardization of culture, my thoughts and tastes and feelings shaped and determined by the same influeces that were acting upon everyone else of my generation” (138). He, along with others, becomes a “Terrorist for the Common Man” (164). It is not clear that this idea, elementary and even superficial as it is, is a sound basis for a very long novel, especially as it veers increasingly into the implausible, as when a band of the Ignored attack the White House with tanks and weapons. Charles Beaumont wisely restricted the idea to a short story, “The Vanishing American,” whose sociological import is undiminished by the implausibilities of Little’s novel. But Little has gone on to do better work, such as Houses (1997), a clever riff on the haunted house motif. Brian Hodge (b. 1960) established his reputation in the 1990s with a succession of short stories—collected in The Convulsion Factory (1996), Falling Idols (1998), and Lies & Ugliness (2002)—that fused raw sexuality,
urban horror, and supernaturalism into a distinctive mix. Many of these stories are, however, a trifle obscure, including his most celebrated tale, “Cancer Causes Rats” (1991). Here a serial rapist/murderer approaches an attractive female television reporter to tell his side of the story. He had come up with the view that, just as the widespread prevalence of cancer causes more and more scientists to experiment with rats, thereby increasing the rat population, so do reporters need murderers like him to maintain their careers. In the end, the murderer escapes from jail and inspires a copycat killer; thereby—in his mind—he has mutated from being a rat to being a cancer. Other tales—many of them written for the Hot Blood series of sex/horror anthologies edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett—are still less comprehensible than this specimen. Hodge actually began publishing novels in the late 1980s, but they failed to attract much notice. The Darker Saints (1993) seems representative of his early novelistic work in its chaotic fusion of voodoo, zombies, and modern advertising, with a New Orleans setting. The novel—similar, but inferior, to William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (1978)—was clearly written with the hope of bestsellerdom, but, alas, the horror boom was over, so it sold only moderately. But Hodge has continued doggedly to write horror novels and short stories, although several of his novels are non-supernatural tales of crime and suspense. Douglas Clegg (b. 1958) is one of the few writers to have established himself in the 1990s, with a succession of novels that use relatively conventional supernatural motifs but are highlighted by deft construction and an ability to draw character and portray human relationships effectively. The Halloween Man (1998) is one of his more successful novels. The convoluted plot ultimately resolves into the conundrum of what kind of creature may be harboured in the chapel of a wealthy family’s home in Connecticut; but along the way, we are treated to plangent depictions of young love and the tragedy of early death. His short fiction has been collected in The Nightmare Chronicles (1999) and other volumes. It is difficult to difficult to discuss the work of Steve Rasnic Tem (b. 1950) and his wife, Melanie Tem (b. 1949) in short compass—not because they are, individually and collectively, notably prolific, but because the depth and richness of their work defies concise exposition. Melanie Tem has made her reputation largely on such novels as Prodigal (1991), Wilding (1992), and Revenant (1994), which are distinguished not so much for their
supernatural scenarios (they involve the usual array of ghosts, vampires, revenants, and human beings with extraordinary powers), but for the delicacy and keenness of the character portrayal. Steve Rasnic Tem has largely become known for his meticulously crafted short stories, although Melanie Tem’s short stories are also a notable part of their work. Unlike C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, it appears that there is a reasonably clear distinction between works by the Tems published under own names and works that bear both their bylines. The latter were collected in In Concert (2010), and it contains such jewels as “Resettling” (1989), an atmospheric haunted house tale that is simultaneously a poignant tale of marital discord; “This Icy Region My Heart Encircles” (1991), a moving tale of the aged Mary Shelley and all the ghosts of the people who have died around her; “Safe at Home” (1993), a searing tale of the psychological devastation of a woman who was sexually abused by her uncle; “The Marriage” (1994), about a vampire who thrives on human emotion; and “Mama” (1995), a haunting account of a teenage girl whose mother dies but returns from the dead. Then there is the utterly unclassifiable The Man on the Ceiling (2008), a book-length work expanded from a novelette of the same title. Featuring the recurring refrain “Everything we’re about to tell you here is true,” this meandering but exquisitely written work—alternating between first-person and third-person narrative, with each author’s identity detectable (if at all) only by context—is something of an imaginative autobiography, as the authors admit: “This memoir . . . is as much a biography of one family’s imagination as a chronicle of real life events” (10). The courage of the Tems’ revelations of their personal life—they have adopted five children, one of whom, nine-year-old Anthony, hangaed himself, whether by accident or design—is matched by the sensitivity of their revelations of their own goals and motives for writing: “We tell each other fearful stories. Not to banish or deny or even calm the fear, but to give it form, to call it out and make its acquaintance” (248). The distinguished work of Norman Partridge (b. 1958) also deserves far more space than I can devote to it here. His first novel, Slippin’ into Darkness (1993), ranks high among weird novels of the past twenty years, even though it entirely eschews the supernatural. But it creates an illusion of the supernatural by the ghostly hovering of April Destino—a young woman who, gang-raped in high school, descends into prostitution and
ultimately kills herself—over the entire scenario. She is already dead when the novel opens, but she is nevertheless the central character in the book, the character against whom each of the vividly realised figures—the four high-school jocks who raped her, the black man who filmed the rape and who becomes a shabby producer of child pornography films, the woman who was April’s best friend in school but who betrayed her through jealousy—must define themselves. This tour de force of a novel, whose entire surface action occupies exactly one day but whose flashbacks skilfully paint an affecting picture of high school life, is a relentless psychological portrait of people who showed youthful promise but have lapsed into mediocrity, amoral criminality, and humiliating failure. As horrible as the rape of April Destino and her subsequent suicide are, the true horror of Slippin’ into Darkness is the horror of wasted lives and futile violence. The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists (2001) is a substantial collection of Partridge’s short stories and supplies a good an introduction to the many virtues and few deficiencies of his work. In his engaging and illuminating introduction, Partridge—a Northern Californian by lifelong residence— makes an unashamed confession of the significant influence of horror films (many of which he initially saw at a drive-in theatre near his home) upon his work. It is quickly evident that these films have left a decided impress upon Partridge’s work. The tales in this volume are replete with these standard creatures: vampires in “Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu,” werewolves in “The Pack,” and zombies in “In Beauty, Like the Night,” a tale that (aside from the fact that these zombies are otherwise lovely supermodels) manifestly betrays the influence of The Night of the Living Dead, the film that had the greatest impact on the young Partridge’s imagination. Nor is Partridge particularly concerned with providing a plausible rationale—or, indeed, any rationale at all—for the existence of these redoubtable entities. This is because the true merit of his work lies not in its conception but in its execution and style. His prose does not quite reach the gonzo pyrotechnics of a David J. Schow, although it is heading in that direction; but its hard, chiselled tensity and its rugged, slashing beauty are what carries the reader along in spite of the occasional mundanity of the root idea. But Partridge does occasionally expend his imagination into his monsters as well as his prose. “The Bars on Satan’s Jailhouse” features
(aside from a coyote-lycanthrope that seems thrown in rather haphazardly into an otherwise predominantly crime/suspense narrative) a character who wears boots made of live bats. “The Hollow Man,” if I understand it correctly, is an atmospheric tale narrated in the first person by a Wendigo. The tales alternate between supernaturalism and non-supernaturalism, the latter perhaps slightly in the majority. In my opinion Partridge works best in the non-supernatural vein (as he did in Slippin’ into Darkness), although one clever story, “Coyotes,” begins as an apparently routine tale of sadism and verges suddenly off into the supernatural at the end. “Minutes,” “Last Kiss,” and “Red Right Hand” are only a few of Partridge’s triumphs of suspense and psychological terror. It is here that his noir prose finds its perfect match in the scenario he has orchestrated. His story construction frequently features a fragmented narration that can be highly effective, but on occasion produces obscurity and confusion. I am not ashamed to confess that in several stories I am quite unable to ascertain what has actually happened. Every sentence is jewelled, but the overall effect is opaque even on the level of the surface plot. A later collection, Lesser Demons (2010), displays Partridge’s skill both at supernatural horror (the werewolf story “Road Dogs”; the stylish Lovecraftian tale “Lesser Demons”) and non-supernatural horror (the poignant “And What Did You See in the World?”). Norman Partridge has such a wealth of talent—a prose style of wondrous luminosity and grace; a narrative drive that carries the reader inexorably to the spectacular climax; an ability to convey violence and gruesomeness without the least suggestion of crudity or exploitation; and an imagination that opens new worlds to all who venture within his realm—that it will be engaging to chart his course in the future. The one writer of genuine merit who has emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century is Laird Barron (b. 1970). On the basis of only three published books, Barron has established an enviable reputation as one of the cutting-edge writers in our field. He has some similarities with Caitlín R. Kiernan, notably in the verve and panache of his prose, in the firm backbone of science that underpins much of his work, and in an engaging melding of genres (chiefly those of science fiction, hard-boiled crime fiction, and espionage with supernatural horror) that produces atmospheric effects that he already seems to have patented.
There is some difficulty in discussing Barron, because he is a writer of such immense talent that criticising him seems almost an impertinence; but, although the overall distinction of his first story collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), is not in doubt, there are more than a few drawbacks to the nine long stories in the volume. His first published work, “Shiva, Open Your Eyes” (2001), is a meandering, confusing story full of “fine writing” but little coherence of thought. In many of his early tales one gets the sense of an accomplished virtuoso indulging in stylish improvisations that fail to cohere; Poe’s “unity of effect” seems woefully lacking in many of these narratives. Consider “Hallucigenia” (2006). What we have at the outset is the tale of Wallace Smith and his wife, Helen, both of whom are apparently kicked by a horse under strange circumstances, with Helen suffering brain damage and Wallace hallucinations. But then the tale veers off into the account of the original owners of the property, especially one Kaleb Choate, who wanted to “accelerate his own genetic evolution” (163) and had also somehow “bored a hole through space and crawled through” (163). But the overall development of the scenario is far from clear. Barron’s besetting sin of throwing out too many plot threads is evident even in the most accomplished story in his first collection, “The Imago Sequence” (2005). The tale begins compellingly with the idea that a triptych of photographs taken by one Maurice Ammon, and which he calls The Imago Sequence, depicts a hominid unknown to evolution. But this promising beginning is overlayered with so many other ideas, interesting as they are, that the overall focus of the narrative becomes obscured. Barron remedied many of these flaws in his second collection, Occutation and Other Stories (2010). There are, to be sure, tales here that fail to cohere, such as “The Forest” (2007), apparently about insects taking over the earth after the human race dies out; and the oddly titled “—30—” (2010), which, insofar as any sense can be made of the plot, deals with a series of killings in the Southwest that may or may not have a supernatural cause. But on the other hand we have such gems as “Occultation” (2008), a hypnotic story in which the various phenomena that frighten a young couple heavily engaged in drinking and drug-taking may be real or may be imaginary; “The Lagerstätte” (2008), a plangent tale of loss that poses the provocative theory that “there exists a certain quality of grief, so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that it resounds and resonates above and
below” (58); and “Six Six Six” (2010), an effective tale of a Satanist family, told almost entirely in dialogue. Not quite as successful is “Mysterium Tremendum” (2010), in which a quartet of gay men find a mysterious guidebook to weird places in Washington State (Barron regrettably comes up with a hideously bad Latin title, Moderor de Caliginis, which he purports to translate as Black Guide) that leads them to a dolmen that shouldn’t exist. This dolmen is the gateway to a realm of unthinkable mystery and terror. The best story in Occultation would appear to be “The Broadsword” (2010), which is noteworthy not only for its setting—a dubious hotel in Olympia, Washington—but for its keen portrayal of a man, Pershing Dennard, who is haunted by the loss and apparent death of a coworker, Terry Walker, in a forest in the Olympic Peninsula. Increasingly bizarre incidents occur in the hotel, leading to the staggering idea that Walker is part of a vanguard of a race of creatures that feed, literally and spiritually, on the human race. The depiction of a torture session undergone by Dennard exhibits the rich texture of Barron’s prose: An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy coomb of an alien realm. Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered chuckling and sighing, in appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball. He couldn’t discern their forms, only the luminescent faces, their plastic, drooling joy. (186–87) Barron’s separately published novella The Light Is the Darkness (2011) is a gonzo extravaganza that exhibits to the full his mingling of genres. Beginning as a tale of a modern-day gladiator, Conrad Navarro, who is searching for his sister, Imogene (an FBI special agent), who may have been captured or killed by a Dr. Ambrose Drake, an old Nazi, the narrative metamorphoses into the supernatural by its suggestion that Drake and others are on a quest for eternal life. Conrad himself appears to metamorphose into a kind of superman figure.
Barron’s long-awaited first novel, The Croning (2012), fully justifies his high standing in the realm of supernatural fiction. A complex tale of the long life of a scientific couple, Donald (a geologist) and Michelle (an anthropologist) Miller, the novel ranges over several continents and decades in depicting Michelle’s search for the “little people.” These hints of Arthur Machen (and, later, of H. P. Lovecraft) lead to a grippingly apocalyptic climactic scene that involves the revelation of the existence of an extraterrestrial race of creatures called the Dark Ones whose ultimate designs for the human race are too appalling to contemplate. Another writer who has made some noise in the present century is Joe Hill (b. 1972). It was a poorly kept secret that Hill is the son of Stephen King (he was born Joseph Hillstrom King), although Hill himself appears to have played no role in the “outing” of his identity. But the acclaim he has received on the basis of a very slim body of work is more than puzzling. There is no question that he has some talent as a writer, but he is not nearly as good as his supporters seem to fancy. His prose, although far from distinguished, is substantially superior to that of his father; but whereas Stephen King glories in the sermo vulgaris, Joe Hill’s style occasionally tends dangerously toward that of the Iowa Writers Workshop school of fussy, self-conscious prose. There are, however, serious questions as to his skill in the manipulation of horrific or supernatural tropes. In my mind there is not a single wholly satisfactory story in his first collection, 20th Century Ghosts (2005), and many of its difficulties rest upon Hill’s clumsiness in the use of the supernatural. Consider two stories, “You Will Hear the Locust Sing” (2004), a lame updating of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in which a teenage boy named Francis Kay (get it?) turns into a giant cockroach; and “The Cape” (2005), in which a young boy finds that he can fly (or, more properly, float) when wearing a much-beloved cape. Stories of this type, where the supernatural manifestation is so obviously preposterous, can only work if some symbolic or metaphorical element is superimposed on the narrative. But instead, the former tale merely revels in a certain amount of repulsive physical horror, and in the second the protagonist takes his ex-girlfriend on a flight through the air, only to drop her, presumably out of vengeance for dumping him. What symbolism are we to read here?—a regression to childhood?
Other stories are beset with other difficulties. “20th Century Ghost” (2002), about the ghost of a young woman and her decades-long effect on the owner of the movie theatre she haunts, is full of exactly the sort of smarmy sentimentality that condemns so much of Stephen King’s work. “Abraham’s Boys” (2004) could have been an effective story of how Abraham Van Helsing has become a paranoid psychotic in his fears of vampires if it were not spoiled by a corny suggestion that he himself is a vampire. “The Black Phone” (2004) grimly depicts a teenage boy kidnapped by a serial killer—but, in another descent into contrived sentimentality, the boy is saved when the ghost of a previous victim calls him on a non-working phone and advises him how to escape the killer’s clutches. “Voluntary Committal” (2005) is a novella in which a mentally disturbed boy constructs a complicated structure out of boxes that somehow swallows up a friend of his brother and then, years later, himself. Hill’s tales of non-supernatural horror are somewhat better but also flawed. “Best New Horror” (2005) tells of an anthologist seeking to track down the author of a gruesome serial-killer tale, but lapses into predictability when it is revealed that the author and his family are themselves deranged. “In the Rundown” (2005) is a straight crime story in which a young man tries to help a woman who may or may not have injured her infant son; but Hill does not provide sufficient clues as to whether the man himself may be blamed for the incident, and the tale ends inconclusively and anticlimatically. Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (2007), has an intriguing premise but is poorly executed. A woman, Jessica Price, tricks the ageing rock star Judas Coyne into purchasing a ghost—by means of a suit worn by her dead stepfather, Craddock McDermott. She does so because she blames Judas for causing her sister Anna’s death, apparently by suicide. Sure enough, almost immediately upon Judas’s receipt of the suit the ghost of Craddock appears. He is an unusually limber ghost, for at one point he gets into a pickup truck and chases Judas and his young girlfriend Georgia for hundreds of miles down I-95! It would be profitless to follow all the ins and outs of this ridiculous narrative; suffice it to say that in the end we learn that Craddock had molested both Anna and Jessica and caused Anna’s death when she threatened to inform the police of his actions. Heart-Shaped Box is written in curiously flat, affectless prose that does little to enliven the characters or the overall scenario. We get plenty of
information on Judas, his relations with Anna (they had lived together for less than a year), the deaths (usually by suicide) of other members of his band, his difficult relations with his father, and so forth; but they fail to make Judas or anyone else particularly interesting. But the overriding problem with the novel is that there is far, far too much supernaturalism. Hill has watched too many horror films, where bizarre events take place for no reason, or merely to move the plot along, or to jolt the increasingly jaded viewer. The epitome of absurdity is reached when Judas and Georgia bring out a Ouija board—manufactured by Parker Brothers—and effortlessly contact the spirit of Anna. Even Judas’s dogs somehow gain a supernatural dimension, warding off Craddock until they themselves perish. Judas claims that the dogs may be some kind of familiars—but that would make him a witch or warlock, which certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. I humbly suggest that Hill move on to mainstream fiction, which better suits his literary talents. His use of the supernatural is beyond clumsy: the critical element of plausibility is lacking. His strengths are the portrayal of human character and of human relationships, which is the domain of mainstream fiction. A much more promising writer than Joe Hill is Jonathan Thomas. Thomas began by publishing a now very rare and not particularly notable slim collection, Stories from the Big Black House (1992). After a hiatus of a decade and a half, he resumed writing, publishing the noteworthy collection Midnight Call and Other Stories (2008), whose first story, “Eben’s Portrait,” is one of the most chilling tales in contemporary horror fiction. Thomas has a pungently jaundiced view of human foibles, a lively, evocative prose style, and an ability to develop a sense of cumulative horror —especially in such novelettes as “Tempting Providence” and “Dead Men’s Shoes,” both included in his second collection, Tempting Providence and Other Stories (2010)—that is enviable. His Lovecraftian novel, The Color Over Occam (2012), a loose sequel to “The Colour out of Space,” is one of the most terrifying supernatural works of the past half-century. Its insidious display of regional horror (it is set in and around the town of Occam, which, in this novel, is postulated as the original spelling of Lovecraft’s Arkham), and its climatic scene, in Occam’s sewer system, is one of the most gripping set-pieces in contemporary weird fiction. I cannot conclude this chapter without a brief note on contemporary Lovecraftian writing. Several recent writers, having absorbed the findings
of the new wave of Lovecraft scholarship that began in the 1970s, have come to understand the true nature of Lovecraft’s unique brand of cosmic horror, and they have used his conceptions and imagery as springboards for work that goes far beyond mechanical pastiche. W. H. Pugmire (b. 1951), although he began publishing as early as the 1970s, is finally gaining recognition as one of the more skilled prose-poets of weird fiction; the story collection The Tangled Muse (2011) features much of his best work. Donald Tyson has written a fascinating historical-supernatural novel, Alhazred (2006), about the author of the Necronomicon. Michael Shea’s Copping Squid (2009), Brian Stableford’s The Womb of Time (2010), and Rick Dakan’s Cthulhu Cult (2011) are only three of the more interesting treatments of the Cthulhu Mythos to emerge in recent years.
Epilogue It is very difficult to identify even the broadest trends in current supernatural fiction, let alone to determine which authors will or will not survive the inexorable winnowing process of posterity. The very act of writing—or, perhaps more precisely, the dissemination of written material, ranging from fabulously expensive limited editions numbering in the dozens of copies to free downloads on the Internet—has changed radically in the past few decades, so that the mere concept of a “canon” of writers in any given genre who are widely recognised as the chief representatives of their genre is now in question. I have, in the preceding chapter, touched upon the work of those authors who I believe will endure, or deserve to endure, in the coming decades. I do not pretend to have discussed more than a fraction of those who, in other readers’ or critics’ eyes (or even my own), should have been dealt with; but I did not wish this chapter to descend into a mere annotated list of authors and works. Some of those contemporary writers who perhaps deserved inclusion are Michael Aronovitz, Gary A. Braunbeck, Jack Cady, Thomas M. Disch, Tom Fletcher, Stephen Gallagher, Cody Goodfellow, Stephen Gregory, Lois H. Gresh, Elizabeth Hand, M. John Harrison, Rick Hautala, Glen Hirshberg, Nancy Holder, K. W. Jeter, Brian Keene, Jack Ketchum, A. F. Kidd, Marc Laidlaw, John Langan, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Michael McDowell, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Massie, Richard Christian Matheson, Tom Piccirilli, Simon Raven, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Al Sarrantonio, Darrell Schweitzer, Michael Marshall Smith, William Browning Spencer, and Jeff VanderMeer. It is conceivable that several of these authors are more worthy of discussion than those I actually discussed in my final chapter. I have also not had the space to deal much with young adult horror writing, including such authors as Joan Aiken, John Bellairs, Robert
Westall, and R. L. Stine. My coverage of non-Anglophone literature is also, no doubt, very inadequate. All this points to several incontrovertible facts. One is that far more criticism, ranging from penetrating book reviews to critical analyses of individual authors and works to studies of trends, patterns, and motifs of both older and contemporary literature to ponderous histories such as this one, is needed in order for us to have a truly comprehensive understanding of the realm of weird fiction past and present. But a more important fact may be that we are in a kind of renaissance of weird writing—a renaissance caused, paradoxically, precisely by the demise of horror as a widely popular phenomenon. But the paradox is only on the surface; if I am correct in believing that the “horror boom” of the 1970s and 1980s was in some senses an artificial—or, more precisely, an accidental— phenomenon resulting from the happenstance conjoining of literature and film, and if its appeal was largely to those masses of readers who are not critically astute or well-versed in the history and traditions of weird fiction, then it is understandable that the demise of popular horror has opened a path for genuine literary artists to cater to a numerically smaller but aesthetically more sophisticated readership. I am not maintaining that we are in the midst of another “golden age” of horror such as the period between the years 1880 and 1940, which saw such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, H. P. Lovecraft, and many others to emerge; for that golden age was itself a product of unique historical, cultural, and aesthetic forces. But it is safe to say—with such writers as Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, John Shirley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Norman Partridge, and so many others continuing to write or reaching their prime—that we are in a distinguished silver age that augurs well for the continued vitality of the field. Even in these tough economic times, many of the leading small presses continue to flourish, while at least a few commercial publishers issue the occasional horror novel or (more rarely) story collection or anthology. More significantly, the prejudice against weird literature that seemed so ingrained in mainstream critics and readers of a prior age seems largely to have dissipated. The future looks bright for weird fiction, and if no one can predict what direction it will take or who will emerge as a dominant figure, we can be
sure that vibrant, thought-provoking work will continue to emerge from the imaginations of a wide array of writers for many years to come.
Bibliographical Essay A number of the books I cited in the bibliographical essay in the first volume of this study are of relevance to the authors and works discussed here, so I shall not repeat the citations here. I can add some other general studies of twentieth- and twenty-first-century supernatural fiction, such as Mark Jancovich’s Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester University Press, 1996). Allan Lloyd-Smith’s American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (Continuum, 2004) is a disappointingly brief and superficial survey; even worse is Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond, edited by Clive Bloom (St. Martin’s Press, 1998). The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), is ponderously academic but of occasional use, as is The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (Routledge, 2007). The four “titans” of the early twentieth century, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James, have still not received the critical attention they deserve. My Penguin Classics editions of Machen (The White People and Other Weird Stories, 2011), Dunsany (In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales, 2004), Blackwood (Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories, 2002), and James (Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, 2005) provide information on secondary sources. H. P. Lovecraft, on the other hand, has been discussed more exhaustively than any writer in the field, including Poe. My H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography (University of Tampa Press, 2009) supplies a wealth of citations of books, articles, and other works on Lovecraft. Writers of the mid-twentieth century are also somewhat underdiscussed, although Ray Bradbury has been perspicaciously treated in Jonathan R. Eller and William Touponce’s Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2004) and in Eller’s Becoming Ray Bradbury
(University of Illinois Press, 2011), the first of a two-volume set. Shirley Jackson is finally receiving some attention, as witness Judy Oppenheimer’s biography (Putnam, 1988), Joan Wylie Hall’s Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1993), and Darryl Hattenhauer’s Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic (State University of New York Press, 2003). Rod Serling has been the subject of two biographies, by Joel Engel (Contemporary Books, 1986) and Gordon F. Sander (Dutton, 1992). See also Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion (Silman-James Press, 1992). Robert Aickman is criminally underappreciated, but Gary William Crawford’s Robert Aickman: An Introduction (Gothic Press, 2003) and Philip Challinor’s Akin to Poetry: Observations on Some Strange Tales of Robert Aickman (Gothic Press, 2010) offer numerous insights. Books on Stephen King abound, but few are of any value. Two Twayne volumes, by Joseph Reino (1988) and Tony Magistrale (1992), are no more than adequate. The same can be said for Bette B. Roberts’s book on Anne Rice (Twayne, 1994). Douglas E. Winter’s Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic (HarperCollins, 2001) is an interesting treatment of that author, as is Bill Sheehan’s At the Foot of the Story Tree (Subterranean Press, 2000), a study of Peter Straub. My own Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2001) covers Campbell’s fiction up to about the year 2000. The Thomas Ligotti Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (Wildside Press, 2003) is an excellent compilation.
Bibliography
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———. The Scarf. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1966. ———. Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of. New York: Ballantine, 1979. Bowen, Elizabeth. Collected Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Bradbury, Ray. The October Country. New York: Ballantine, 1956. [Abbreviated in the text as OC.] ———. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Bantam, 1963. ———. The Stories of Ray Bradbury. New York: Knopf, 1980. Brennan, Joseph Payne. “Levitation.” In Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Stories Not for the Nervous. New York: Random House, 1965. 31–35. Buchan, John. The Complete Short Stories. Edited by Andrew Lownie. London: Thistle, 1997. 3 vols. Burke, Thomas. Night Pieces. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. Campbell, Ramsey. Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961–1991. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1991. [Abbreviated in the text as AH.] ———. Ancient Images. New York: Scribner, 1989. ———. The House on Nazareth Hill. New York: Tor, 1997 (as Nazareth Hill). ———. Incarnate. New York: Tor, 1984. ———. Midnight Sun. New York: Tor, 1991. Capes, Bernard. The Black Reaper. Edited by Jack Adrian. Wellingborough, UK: Equation, 1989. Case, David. “The Cell.” In The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories, ed. Herbert Van Thal. London: Pan, 1970. 9–71. ———. “The Dead End.” In The 13th Pan Book of Horror Stories, ed. Herbert Van Thal. London: Pan, 1972. 89–220. ———. Fengriffen. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970. Collier, John. Fancies and Goodnights. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1965. Coppard, A. E. Fearful Pleasures. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1946. Dahl, Roald. Someone Like You. New York: Pocket, 1972. Daniels, Les. The Black Castle. New York: Scribner, 1978. de la Mare, Walter. The Return. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. ———. Short Stories. Edited by Giles de la Mare. London: Giles de la Mare, 1996–2001. 2 vols. Derleth, August. Lonesome Places. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1962. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Tales of Terror and Mystery. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
Dunsany, Lord. The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer and Other Fantasms. Edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1980. ———. In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin, 2004. ———. The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders. London: Jarrolds, 1950. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991. Ewers, Hanns Heinz. “The Spider.” In Dashiell Hammett, ed., Creeps by Night. New York: John Day Co., 1931. 143–85. Finney, Jack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New York: Dell, 1978. Glasgow, Ellen. The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow. Edited by Richard K. Meeker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963. Grant, Charles L. The Hour of the Oxrun Dead. New York: Popular Library, n.d. Hamilton, Laurell K. Guilty Pleasures. New York: Jove, 2002. Hartley, L. P. Complete Short Stories. New York: Beaufort, 1986. Heard, H. F. The Great Fog: Weird Tales of Terror and Detection. Garden City, NY: Sun Dial Press, 1946. [Abbreviated in the text as GF.] ———. The Lost Cavern and Other Stories of the Fantastic. New York: Vanguard Press, 1948. [Abbreviated in the text as LC.] Hodgson, William Hope. The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Edited by Jeremy Lassen. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2003–07. 5 vols. [Abbreviated in the text as CF.] Howard, Robert E. The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. New York: Ballantine, 2008. [Abbreviated in the text as H.] ———. The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. New York: Ballantine, 2004. [Abbreviated in the text as K.] Hunt, Violet. Tales of the Uneasy. London: Heinemann, 1911. Jackson, Shirley. Come Along with Me. Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Popular Library, n.d. ———. Hangsaman. New York: Popular Library, 1976. ———. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Popular Library, 1977. James, M. R. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin, 2005. ———. The Haunted Dolls’ House and Other Ghost Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Pengui, 2006. Johnson, Robert Barbour. “Far Below.” In Far Below and Other Horrors, edited by Robert Weinberg. West Linn, OR: FAX, 1974. 11–22.
Joshi, S. T., and Steven J. Mariconda, ed. Dreams of Fear: Poetry of Terror and the Supernatural. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum H. Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1983. Kersh, Gerald. Nightshade and Damnations. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1968. Kiernan, Caitlín R. The Ammonite Violin and Others. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2010. King, Stephen. The Dark Half. New York: Viking, 1989. ———. Different Seasons. New York: Viking, 1982. ———. Misery. New York: Viking, 1987. ———. The Stand. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Kirk, Russell. Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales. Edited by Vigen Guroian. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004. Klein, T. E. D. Dark Gods. New York: Viking Press, 1985. [Abbreviated in the text as DG.] ———. Reassuring Tales. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2006. [Abbreviated in the text as RT.] Koja, Kathe. The Cipher. New York: Dell, 1991. Koontz, Dean R. Phantoms. New York: Berkley, 1983. ———. The Taking. New York: Bantam, 2004. Kuttner, Henry. Terror in the House. Edited by Stephen Haffner. Royal Oak, MI: Haffner Press, 2010. Laymon, Richard. The Cellar. New York: Leisure, 2006. Leiber, Fritz. Conjure Wife. New York: Ace, 1981. ———. Night’s Black Agents. Rev. ed. New York: Berkley, 1978. [Abbreviated in the text as N.] Leroux, Gaston. The Phantom of the Opera. [No translator given.] London: Sphere, 1975. Levin, Ira. Rosemary’s Baby. New York: Dell, 1968. Ligotti, Thomas. Grimscribe. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991. [Abbreviated in the text as G.] ———. Noctuary. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. ———. Songs of a Dead Dreamer. London: Robinson, 1989. [Abbreviated in the text as SDD.] Little, Bentley. The Ignored. New York: Signet, 1997. Long, Frank Belknap. The Hounds of Tindalos. New York: Jove/HBJ, 1978.
———. The Rim of the Unknown. New York: Condor, 1972. Lovecraft, H. P. The Fiction. [Edited by S. T. Joshi.] New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008. [Abbreviated in the text as F.] McGrath, Patrick. The Grotesque. New York: Ballantine, 1990. Machen, Arthur. The Hill of Dreams. New York: Knopf, 1922. ———. The Line of Terror and Other Essays. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Bristol, RI: Hobgoblin Press, 1997. ———. The Three Impostors and Other Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 2000. ———. The White People and Other Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 2003. Martin, George R. R. Fevre Dream. New York: Pocket, 1983. Masterton, Graham. The Manitou. New York: Pinnacle, 1976. Matheson, Richard. Collected Stories. Edited by Stanley Wiater. Colorado Springs, CO: Edge, 2003. 3 vols. [Abbreviated in the text as CS.] ———. I Am Legend. New York: Tor, 1995. Merritt, A. Dwellers in the Mirage. New York: Avon, 1967. ———. The Metal Monster. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002. ———. “The Moon Pool.” In Sam Moskowitz, ed. Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Meyrink, Gustav. The Golem. [With The Man Who Was Born Again by Paul Busson.] Translated by Madge Pemberton; revised by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1976. Moore, C. L. The Best of C. L. Moore. Edited by Lester Del Rey. New York: Ballantine, 1976. Morrow, Bradford, and Patrick McGrath, ed. The New Gothic. New York: Random House, 1991. Munn, H. Warner. The Werewolf of Ponkert. New York: Centaur, 1976 Nesbit, E. Fear. London: Stanley Paul, 1910. Newman, Kim. Anno Dracula. New York: Avon, 1994. Nolan, William F. William F. Nolan’s Dark Universe. Lancaster, PA: Stealth Press, 2001. Onions, Oliver. The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions. New York: Dover, 1971.
Pain, Barry. The Undying Thing and Others. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011. Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur. The Horror on the Stair and Other Weird Tales. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2000. Rolt, L. T. C. Sleep No More. Stroud, UK: History Press, 2010. Rud, Anthony M. “Ooze.” Weird Tales no. 4 (1983): 219–49. Russell, Ray. Unholy Trinity. New York: Bantam, 1967. Saki. The Penguin Complete Saki. London: Penguin, 1982. Sammon, Paul, ed. Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Schow, David J. The Shaft. London: Macdonald, 1990. Serling, Rod. The Season to Be Wary. New York: Bantam, 1968. ———. Stories from The Twilight Zone. New York: Bantam, 1989. [Abbreviated in the text as TZ.] Shiel, M. P. The House of Sounds and Others. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005. Shirley, John. Wetbones. New York: Leisure, 1999. Simmons, Dan. Carrion Comfort. New York: Warner, 1990. ———. Prayers to Broken Stones. Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1990. ———. Song of Kali. New York: Tor, 1986. Sinclair, May. The Intercessor and Other Stories. London: Hutchinson, 1931. Smith, Clark Ashton. Collected Fantasies. Edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2006–10. 5 vols. Straub, Peter. Ghost Story. New York: Pocket, 1980. Strieber, Whitley. The Hunger. New York: Morrow, 1981. Sturgeon, Theodore. Some of Your Blood. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. Tem, Steve Rasnic, and Melanie Tem. The Man on the Ceiling. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2008. Tryon, Thomas. Harvest Home. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1974. ———. The Other. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1972. Tuttle, Lisa. A Nest of Nightmares. London: Sphere, 1986. Visiak, E. H. Medusa. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. Wandrei, Donald. Don’t Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei. Edited by Philip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler. Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer, 1997.
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Lolly Willowes. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964. Wheatley, Dennis. The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 2007. White, Edward Lucas. Lukundoo and Other Stories. London: Ernest Benn, 1927. Whitehead, Henry S. Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1946. Williamson, Jack. Darker Than You Think. New York: Dell, 1979. Wilson, Colin. The Mind Parasites. St. Albans, UK: Panther, 1969. ———. The Philosopher’s Stone. New York: Warner, 1974. Wilson, F. Paul. The Keep. New York: Berkley, 1982. Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. Hôtel Transylvania. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978.
B. Secondary Texts Aickman, Robert. The Attempted Rescue. London: Gollancz, 1966. ———, ed. The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. London: Fontana, 1966–72. 8 vols. [Abbreviated in the text as F1, etc.] Benson, E. F. Final Edition. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940. Blackwood, Algernon. “Dreams and Fairies.” Bookman (London) no. 459 (December 1929): 173–75. ———. Episodes Before Thirty. New York: Dutton, 1923. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber & Faber, 1977. Byfield, Bruce. Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1991. Campbell, Ramsey. Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Harrogate, UK: PS Publishing, 2002. Cox, Michael. M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. London: Oxford University Press, 1983. Daniels, Les. Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. New York: Scribner, 1975. de la Mare, Walter. “Introduction.” In They Walk Again, ed. Colin de la Mare. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1931. 9–32. Dunsany, Lord. Patches of Sunlight. London: Heinemann, 1938. ———. The Sirens Wake. London: Jarrolds, 1945. ———. While the Sirens Slept. London: Jarrolds, 1944. Dziemianowicz, Stefan. The Annotated Guide to Unknown and Unknown Worlds. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1991. Engel, Joel. Rod Serling: the Dreams and Nightmares in the Twilight Zone. Chicago: Contemporary, 1989. Gafford, Sam. “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction no. 11 (Spring 1992): 12–15. Baselee, Stephen. “Montague Rhodes James: 1862–1936.” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 418–33. Hackett, Alice Payne, and James Henry Burke. 80 Years of Best Sellers: 1895–1975. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977.
Hartley, L. P. “Introduction.” In The Third Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith. 1955. New York: Beagle, 1970. vii–ix. Hichens, Robert. Yesterday: The Autobiography of Robert Hichens. London: Cassell, 1947. Hughes, Martin. “A Maze of Secrets in a Story by M. R. James.” Durham Universisty Journal 85 (January 1993): 81–93. Joshi, S. T., and Rosemary Pardoe, ed. Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2007. Leiber, Fritz. “My Life and Writings.” In Fafhrd & Me. Edited by John Gregory Betancourt. Newark, NJ: Wildside Press, 1990. 55–64. ———. “Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex: An Autobiographic Essay.” In The Ghost Light. New York: Ace, 1991. 251–365. Leslie, Shane. “Montague Rhodes James.” Quarterly Review 304 (January 1966): 45–56. Lovecraft, H. P. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Rev. ed. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012. [Abbreviated in the text as S.] ———. Collected Essays. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–06. 5 vols. [Abbreviated in the text as CE.] ———. Letters to Robert Bloch. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993. ———. Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1995. ———. Selected Letters. Edited by August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–76. 5 vols. Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988. Penzoldt, Peter. The Supernatural in Fiction. London: Peter Nevill, 1952. Pfaff, Richard William. Montague Rhodes James. London: Scolar Press, 1980. Smith, Clark Ashton. Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by David E. Schultz and Scott Connors. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, ed. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Warren, Austin. “The Marvels of M. R. James, Antiquary.” In Warren’s Connections. Ann Arbor: Universisty of Michigan Press, 1970. Wetzel, George T. “Edward Lucas White: Notes for a Biography.” Fantasy Commentator 4, No. 2 (Winter 1979–80): 94–114; 4, No. 3 (Winter 1981): 178–83; 4, No. 4 (Winter 1982): 229–39; 5, No. 1 (Winter 1983): 67–70, 74; 5, No. 2 (Winter 1984): 124–27. Whistler, Theresa. Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare. London: Duckworth, 1993. Winter, Douglas E. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley, 1985. Yeats, W. B. Prefaces and Introductions. Edited by William H. O’Donnell. New York: Macmillan, 1989. ———, and Bernard Shaw. “Irish Academy.” Manchester Guardian (19 September 1932): 9.
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