by Paul Green
And with avenging flames, the palace burned.
The tyrant in a fright, for shelter gains
The neighboring fields, and scours along the plains.
Howling he fled, and fain he would have spoke;
But humane voice his brutal tongue forsook.
About his lips the gathered foam he churns,
And, breathing slaughters, still with rage he burns,
But on the bleating flock his fury turns.
His mantle, now his hide, with rugged hairs
Cleaves to his back; a famished face he bears;
His arms descend, his shoulders sink away
To multiply his legs for chase of prey.
He grows a wolf, his hoariness remains,
And the same rage in other members reigns.
His eyes still sparkle in a narrower space:
His jaws retain the grin, and violence of his face.^
Fantastic tales of folklore are an integral part of most cultures. The Norse legend of Brynhild in the Volsunga Saga contains an early reference to the story of a Sleeping Beauty (Brynhild), complete with a thorn that places her in a state of deep sleep and a hero (Sigurd) who breaks the spell and marries her. Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm would later adapt such tales to create the modern fairy tale. Whilst these stories contained many facets of horror and the supernatural, their original power was diminished with each adaptation as they eventually became tales suitable for small children.
Seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza and Gottfried Liebniz believed in the power of reason as the root of all knowledge. The senses could fall prey to illusions and could not be trusted as the final arbiters of truth. Reason by intellect ruled and any mention of the supernatural was frowned upon by society. Imagination was being stifled by Rationalism and the “Age of Enlightenment” with its strict boundaries of thought.
Romanticism and the Gothic novel channeled the imagination in the exploration of forbidden subjects. Repressed emotion found an outlet in tales involving sexual desire and aggression, rebellion against religion, sadomasochism, incest, necrophilia, perversions, torture, cannibalism and homo-eroticism. Medieval Europe was a major influence on the Gothic novel. The architectural backdrop played a key part in setting the general mood of anxiety and fear and also served as a metaphor for the inner turmoil and repression of the characters in many of the gothic stories.
The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, son of British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, marked the beginning of the Gothic movement. Inspired by a dream, the novel contained many of the elements that would come to define the Gothic novel, including the gloomy haunted castle:
The specter marched sedately, but dejected, to the end of the gallery, and turned into a chamber on the right hand. Manfred accompanied him at a little distance, full of anxiety and horror, but resolved. As he would have entered the chamber, the door was clapped to with violence by an invisible hand.
In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) the beautiful Emily St. Aubert is kidnapped by her step-uncle and imprisoned in the gloomy Castle Udolpho. Unlike most gothic writers of the period, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe preferred to give rational explanations for the supernatural events in her novels.
Nineteen-year-old Matthew Lewis caused a sensation in his time with his mix of incest, violence, torture and the supernatural in Ambrosio, or the Monk (1796), a tale of pious monk Ambrosio and his lust for a girl that results in her rape and murder. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin was the peak of the Gothic novels. Melmoth sells his soul to the Devil in return for near immortality but soon regrets his pact. He can only escape his torment by persuading another to take his place. The story invokes the legend of the wandering Jew and the plight of the social outcast. Oscar Wilde, recognizing this fact, went by the name of Sebastian Melmoth after serving time in Reading gaol.
One of the most influential tales of the Romantic movement was originally published anonymously. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley blends the gothic romance with a man-made creature of science in what many critics consider to be the first science fiction novel. Victor Frankenstein is the “Modern Prometheus” of the subtitle. Prometheus, a figure from Greek and Roman mythology, created mankind from clay and gave them the gift of fire, thus ensuring their independence from the gods. He suffered the wrath of Zeus, who had him chained him to a rock and tortured by the pecking of an eagle on his liver. The fate of Victor Frankenstein echoes Prometheus in its tragedy. He tampers with creation and pays the price.
I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body ... but now that I had finished, the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Shelley’s Frankenstein turned Rationalism on its head. The scientist attempting to “penetrate the secrets of nature” by an intellectual and reasoned response realizes his actions have nightmarish consequences. Shelley envisioned the double-edged sword of reason and the dangers of rampant science. She pointed to a future where unchecked technology could go seriously wrong and do immense harm.
The following year, 1819, saw the publication of the first gothic vampire story. Originally published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine, The Vampyre; A Tale by John William Polidori was mistakenly credited to Lord Byron. Polidori, physician to Byron, was part of the group that included Mary Shelley, staying at the Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. Persistent rain had prompted them to stay indoors and write stories of the supernatural. In the course of the next three days, the science fiction and modern vampire genres would be born.
The Gothic novel also explored perceived exotic locations. Spain, Italy, Africa and the Middle East were popular settings for an audience weary of Classical Greece and Rome. Vathek (1786) by William Beckford was set in the Middle East. Vathek, a caliph, becomes the servant of Eblis to gain forbidden knowledge, but is ultimately trapped in eternal torment. The plot device of making a pact with the Devil to obtain forbidden knowledge and to suffer eternally as a result had obvious roots in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would explore a similar theme in a work that had far-reaching effects in literature, music and philosophy. Faust: The Tragedy Part One (1808) tells of a man sealing a contract in his own blood to sell Mephistopheles his soul when he reaches the zenith of ultimate pleasure.
E.T.A. Hoffmann was also part of the German Romantic movement and a master of the macabre. Devil’s Elixir (1815–16) explored the folklore element of the doppelganger, a shadow character that also appeared in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl’s Amazing Story (1814) and Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson (1839).
Poe, arguably America’s greatest writer of supernatural literature, often linked horror with dysfunctional psychology. In one sense, much of his work can be viewed within a rational framework, but the reader is left with a sense of the supernatural due to the psychological horror of the circumstances involved. The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Black Cat (1843) and The Premature Burial (1844) all prey on deep-seated fears and insecurities.
While Britain’s Romantic movement was a reaction to the repression of the creative imagination, the American Dark Romantics rebelled against what they viewed as the egotistical optimism of Transcendentalism. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville had a darker vision of mankind. The irony is that both the Transcendentalists led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Dark Romantics were influenced by British and German Romanticism. One group saw hope for the individual in a deficient society, the other saw conflict and despair.
Nightmare Abbey (1818) by Thomas Love Peacock and Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen satirized the gothic novel and mocked its literary conventions. In Austen’s novel, Catherine Morland is an avid reader of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. She discusses her expectations of Northanger Abbey with Henry Tilney.
“You must b
e so fond of the abbey!—After being used to such a home as the abbey, an ordinary parsonage-house must be very disagreeable.”
He smiled, and said, “You have formed a very favourable idea of the abbey.”
“To be sure I have. Is not it a fine old place, just like what one reads about?”
“And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as ‘what one reads about’ may produce?—Have you a stout heart?—Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry?”
“Oh! yes—I do not think I should be easily frightened, because there would be so many people in the house—and besides, it has never been uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares, without giving any notice, as generally happens.”
The beginning of the end of the gothic novel was in sight. The more sober, if equally romantic, historical novel would replace it.
Romanticism gave rise to the idea of the individual as a person who could shape their own destiny. This played into the American notion of taking personal control of one’s own life. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were chosen by President Jefferson to explore the land purchased from France in the Louisiana Land Purchase of 1803, the West was born for European settlers. The exploration and taming of rugged and often hostile territory coupled with the cult of the individual gave rise to the mythology of the Old West.
Beadle’s Dime Novels became the first of the dime novel publications when on June 9, 1860, “Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter” by Mrs. Ann S. Stephens was featured in its premiere issue and launched a new era in publishing. The earliest dime novels were 4 × 6 inch booklets that cost a dime and consisted of approximately 100 pages. Irwin Beadle and Frank Tousey were two publishers willing to venture into new areas and place a twist on traditional dime novel subjects such as the frontier Western, Revolutionary War, American Civil War, colonial wars and adventures in foreign and exotic lands. Later dime novels, consisting of sixteen to thirty-two pages, sold for five cents. Aimed primarily at young boys, they usually consisted of crude writing and sensationalistic stories featuring one-dimensional characters and were printed on cheap pulp paper.
Edward Sylvester Ellis’ professional relationship with Beadle & Adams of New York began October 2, 1860, when his novel Seth Jones; or Captives of the Frontier was published in Beadle’s Dime Novels #8. A nationwide advertising campaign that posed the question “Who is Seth Jones?” helped fuel curiosity about the novel. Sales of the magazine soared and led to an initial four-year contract for Ellis. In later years, Ellis claimed 400,000 copies were eventually sold in the U.S. and the U.K.
Beadle launched a new independent publication on October 7, 1865: Irwin P. Beadle’s American Novels. Ellis was signed to a two-year contract to write exclusively for the publication. The Huge Hunter or The Steam Man of the Prairies was published in August 1868. It was later reprinted under the title Baldy’s Boy Partner or Young Brainerd’s Steam Man in 1888. In an age when sub-genres had no meaning, his story was simply viewed as a boy’s unusual adventure in a Western setting. But Ellis had unknowingly created a new genre.
Labeled today as the “Edisonade” after inventor Thomas Alva Edison, the dime novel stories involve an inventor (usually a boy or teenager) of fantastic mechanical creations exploring and conquering new environments. This was a wish fulfillment fantasy for young readers seeking control of their lives and freedom from parental interference. The dime novel stories tapped into the sensibilities and prejudices of the Victorian age. The “Edisonade” marked the beginnings of science fiction, before the genre was given a name and taken to a level of respectability and major influence under the craftsmanship of Jules Verne.
Essential to these stories was a sense of optimism. All problems would be overcome with the help of their invention. Technology equalled a sense of awe and superiority and pointed to a future where the white man could continue their imperialist subjugation of the heathen “savage” and therefore control the new frontier. Native American Indians had become strangers in their own land as the alien settlers gained control.
The dime novel fell out of favor partially due to increased criticism of its sensationalistic and violent content. In 1873, Anthony Comstock, secretary and chief special agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a post office inspector, succeeded in lobbying the U.S. Congress to pass the “Act of the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” The dime novels were targeted and confiscated in the mail. The moral ills of society, including malcontented and disrespectful youths, were blamed on the dime novels they read. In his book Traps for the Young (1883), Comstock detailed the effects of the novels on their innocent young readers.
They open the way for grossest evils. Foul thoughts are the precursors of foul actions ... vile books and papers are branding-irons heated in the fires of hell, and used by Satan to sear the highest life of the soul.
In a trend that persisted throughout the 20th century, the popular entertainment of the day was viewed by conservative traditionalists who espoused middle-class family values as having a corruptive influence on the youth. The novelty of the Western stories had started to fade in the 1880s, to be replaced by an increase in popularity of detective titles. Beadle & Co. went out of business in 1897. During its 37-year history, it published over 7,000 novels. Street & Smith continued to publish dime novels until 1915 before canceling all titles and transferring its full attention to pulp magazines. The common conception that the pulps rose from the smoldering embers of the dime novels is only partly true. The 7 × 10 inch magazines of the 1880s and 1890s, printed on slick paper and aimed at an older readership, were also an influence.
The year 1896 marked the entrance of the first pulp magazine. However, the 192-page Argosy published by Frank A. Munsey was slow to catch on with the public. It would be several years before a second pulp title, The Popular Magazine,was launched in November 1903 by rival publisher Street & Smith. Munsey countered with another new title, The All-Story Magazine, in 1905. Under its editor Robert H. Davis, this pulp would highlight new science fiction talent and publish Under the Moons of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
As sales of pulps slowly increased, so did the number of new titles. Early Western titles included the former dime novel The New Buffalo Bill Weekly (now titled Western Story Magazine), Ace-High Western Magazine, Action Novels, Lariat Story Magazine, Quick-Trigger Western Magazine, Ranch Romances, Rangeland Stories, Triple-X Western Magazine, True Western Stories, Two Gun Western Stories, West, Western Outlaws and another former dime novel, Wild West Weekly. Stories were standard adventures. The weird wasn’t a part of the Western genre at the birth of the pulps. But a pulp magazine concentrating entirely on the weird would reach the public in March 1923 with the introduction of “The Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual,” Weird Tales.
It soon became evident that Weird Tales was targeting an adult market with cover artwork by J. Allen St. John and Margaret Brundage of alluring females in various states of distress and undress. The magazine struggled under its first editor Edward Baird. He was replaced by Farnsworth Wright after 18 months. Despite its lurid approach, the pulp did attract authors of note including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith , C. L. Moore, Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard. Howard wrote an early example of a vampire Western for Weird Tales in “Horror on the Mound” and C. L. Moore chronicled the adventures of one of the first Space Western characters, Northwest Smith.
Science fiction pulps flourished following the launch of Amazing Stories. Planet Stories, launched in 1939, featured the Eric John Stark Space Western stories by Leigh Brackett. Allen Anderson’s cover art for the Summer 1949 issue featuring Brackett’s first Stark story “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” and the Lariat Magazine cover featuring “Last Ride of the Kill-Gun Angel” by William Heuman were obvious adaptations of the same art. An exotic female riding an alien horse replaced a cowgirl on her horse and S
tark and his sword replaced a cowboy and his gun in near-identical poses, thus making the connection between the space opera and the Western all too obvious.
Just as the dime novel influenced the pulps, the pulps in turn influenced the development of the comic book which often looked to the pulps for inspiration. Western comic books thrived in the post–World War II years when the superheroes began to lose their appeal. It was also the era when comic books devoted to horror and the supernatural first surfaced with the publication of the one-shot Eerie Comics from Avon in January 1947. American Comic Group’s Adventures into the Unknown followed in 1948 with the first issue featuring an adaptation of Horace Walpole’s gothic horror novel The Castle of Otranto. In October 1949, Atlas revamped Captain America Comics in an effort to boost sales. Captain America’s Weird Tales was a failure and the title was cancelled after two issues. William Gaines boarded the horror bandwagon in 1950 when his Entertaining Comics line began production of a series of titles including Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear and Vault of Horror. Prize Comics Group added Black Magic and Harvey published Tomb of Terror, Witches Tales and Chamber of Chills.
Weird soon became the new “in” word for publishers wanting to corner the horror market. Comic books published in the late 1940s and early 1950s included Adventures into Weird Worlds, Weird Chills, Weird Fantasy, Weird Horrors, Weird Mysteries, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and Weird Tales of the Future.
With the increase in horror titles came a backlash from conservative groups intent on blaming juvenile delinquency on the corrupting influence of comic books. German-born New York psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who specialized in the treatment of disturbed children and juvenile delinquents, led the critics. Following publication of Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee was charged with investigating the causes of juvenile delinquency and addressed the dangers of the comic book industry at the Foley Square U.S. Courthouse in New York City. The interim report stated, “It has been pointed out that the so-called crime and horror comic books of concern to the subcommittee offer short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror.... Many of the books dwell in detail on various forms of insanity and stress sadistic degeneracy. Others are devoted to cannibalism with monsters in human form feasting on human bodies, usually the bodies of scantily clad women.”
