But as Freud remarked in his essay on the uncanny,
horror shares with humor the aspect of recognition—
even if an individual does not respond with the intended
emotional response, he or she recognizes that that material is supposed to be humorous or horrific. Indeed, one common response to horror that does not horrify is
laughter. Note again the M.R. James comment above.
The experience of seeing an audience of teenage boys
at the movies laugh uproariously at a brutal and grotesque horror film is not uncommon. I have taught horror literature to young students who confess some
emotional disturbance late in the course as the authentic
reaction of fear and awe begins to replace the dark
humor that was previously their reaction to most horror.
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David G. Hartwell
Boris Karloff remarked, in discussing his preferred
term for the genre, “horror carries with it a connotation
of revulsion which has nothing to do with clean terror.”
Material on the edge of repression is often dismissed as
dirty, pornographic. It is not unusual to see condemnations of genre horror on cultural or moral grounds. One need only look at the recent fuss over Bret Easton Ellis’
novel, American Psycho (1990), to see these issues in the
foreground in the mainstream. Certain horror material
is banned in Britain.
And I have spoken to writers, such as David Morrell,
who confess to laughing aloud during the process of
composition when writing a particularly horrific scene
— which I interpret as an essential psychological
distancing device for individuals aware of confronting
dangerous material. L.P. Hartley, in the introduction to
his first collection, Night Fears (1924), said: “To put
these down on paper gives relief. . . . It is a kind of
insurance against the future. When we have imagined the
worst that can happen, and embodied it in a story, we
feel we have stolen a march on fate, inoculated ourselves,
as it were, against disaster.” Peter Penzoldt, in his book,
The Supernatural in Fiction, concurs: “ . . . the weird tale
is primarily a means of overcoming certain fears in the
most agreeable fashion. These fears are represented by
the skillful author as pure fantasy, though in fact they are
only too firmly founded in some repression. . . . Thus a
healthy-minded even if very imaginative person will
benefit more from the reading of weird fiction than a
neurotic, to whom it will only be able to give a momentary relief.”
There is a fine border between the horrific and the
absurdly fantastic that generates much fruitful tension in ■
the literature, and indeed deflates the effect when handled indelicately. Those who never read horror for pleasure, but feel the need to condemn those who do, like
to point to the worst examples as representative of the
genre. Others laugh. But the stories that have gained
Introduction
15
reputations for quality in the literature have for most
readers generated that aesthetic seizure which is the
hallmark of sublime horror.
Ill
Category, Genre, Mode
The modern imagination has indeed been well
trained by psychiatry and avant-garde novels to
accept the weird and horrible. Often, these works
are themselves beyond rational comprehension.
But stories of the supernatural— even the subtlest
— are accessible to the common reader; they make
fewer demands on the intellect than on the sensibility.
— Jacques Barzun, Introduction to
The Penguin Encyclopedia o f Horror
and the Supernatural
Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social
contracts between a writer and a specific public,
whose function is to specify the proper use of a
particular cultural artifact.
— Frederic Jameson, Magical Narratives
A category is a contract between a publisher and a
distribution system.
— Kathryn Cramer, unpublished dissertation
. . . one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real,
in fact, that we cannot quite be sure that it couldn’t
exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and
our awareness, but it does not ask or require our
consent to use them. Indeed, both at the individual
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David G. Hartwell
and collective levels, horror operates with an eerie
autonomy.
— Thomas Ligotti,
“Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on
Supernatural Horror”
Sir Walter Scott, to whom some attribute the creation
of the first supernatural story in English, said, “The
supernatural. . . is peculiarly subject to be exhausted
by coarse handling and repeated pressure. It is also of
a character which is extremely difficult to sustain
and of which a very small proportion may be said to be
better than the whole.” This observation, while true, has
certainly created an enduring environment in which
critics can, if they choose, judge the literature by its
worst examples. The most recent announcement of the
death of horror literature occurs in Walter Kendrick’s
The Thrill o f Fear (1991), which demise Kendrick attributes to the genrification of the literature as exemplified by the founding of Weird Tales: “ Weird Tales helped to
create the notion of an entertainment cult by publishing
stories that only a few readers would like, hoping they
would like them fiercely. There was nothing new to
cultism, but it came fresh to horror. Now initiates
learned to adore a sensation, not a person or a creed, and
the ephemeral embarked on its strange journey from
worthlessness to great price. . . . By about 1930, scary
entertainment had amassed its full inventory of effects.
It had recognized its history, begun to establish a canon
and even started rebelling against the stultification canons bring. Horrid stories would continue to flourish; they would spawn a score of sub-types, including science-fiction and fantasy tales.. . .” But three lines later he
ends his discussion of literature, and his chapter, by
declaring that by 1940, films had taken over from
literature the job of scary entertainment. Thus evolution
marches on and literature is no longer the fittest. It seems
Introduction
17
to me very like saying that lyric poetry is alive and well in
pop music.
That an intelligent critic could find nothing worthwhile to say about horror in literature beyond the creation of the genre is astonishing in one sense (it
betrays a certain ignorance), but in other ways not
surprising. Once horror became a genre (as, under the
influence of Dickens in the mid-nineteenth century, had
the ghost story told at Christmas), it became in the hands
of many writers a commercial exercise -first and foremost. One might, upon superficial examination, not perceive the serious aesthetic debates raging among
many of the better writers, from those of the Lovecraft
circle, to Campbell’s new vision in Unknown, to today’s
discussions among Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey
Campbell, David Morrell, Karl Edward Wagner and
others on such topics as violence, formal innovation,
appropriate style (regardless of current literary fashion)
and many others. That money and popularity was a
serious consideration for Poe and Dickens, as well as
King and Straub, does not devalue them aesthetically.
Never mind that Henry James was distraught that he was
not more popular and commercial, and expressed outrage at “those damned scribbling women” who outsold him— even his so-called “potboilers.”
The curious lie concealed in James’ last phrase (which
he used to describe “The Turn of the Screw”), and in the
public protestations of many writers before and since, up
to Stephen King, today, is illuminated by Julia Briggs. In
her Night Visitors, she states her opinion, based upon
wide reading and study, that the supernatural horror
story “appealed to serious writers largely because it
invited a concern with the profoundest issues: the relationship between life and death, the body and the soul, man and his universe and the philosophical conditions
of that universe, the nature of evil. . . . It could be made
to embody symbolically hopes and fears too deep and
too important to be expressed more directly.” She then
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David G. Hartwell
goes on to say, “The fact that authors often disclaimed
any serious intention . . . may paradoxically support
this view. The revealing nature of fantastic and imaginative writing has encouraged its exponents to cover their tracks, either by self-deprecation or other forms of
retraction. The assertion of the author’s detachment
from his work may reasonably arouse the suspicion that
he is less detached than he supposes.”
To further complicate the matter, the marketing of
literature in the twentieth century has become a matter
of categories established by publishers upon analogy
with the genre magazines. Whereas a piece of genre
horror implies a contract between the writer and the
audience, the marketing category of horror implies that
the publisher will provide to the distribution system a
certain quantity of product to fill certain display slots.
Such material may or may not fulfill the genre contract.
If it does not, it will be packaged to invoke its similarity
to genre material and will be indistinguishable to the
distribution system from material that does. As we
discussed above, horror itself may exist in any genre as a
literary mode, and, as a mode, is in the end an enemy of
categorization and genrification. It is in part the purpose
of this anthology to bring together works of fiction from
within the horror genre together with works ordinarily
labelled otherwise in contemporary publishing, from
science fiction to thriller to “literature” (which is itself
today a marketing category).
I have previously discussed, in the introduction to The
Dark Descent, my observations that horror literature
occurs in three main currents: the moral allegory, which
deals with manifest evil; the investigation of abnormal
psychology through metaphor and symbol; the fantastic,
which creates a world of radical doubt and dread.
Whether one or another of those currents is dominant in
an individual work does not exclude the presence or
intermingling of the others. Rather than taking the
myopic stance that horror means what the marketing
Introduction
19
system says it does today, I have applied my perceptions
of horror to the literature of the past two centuries to find
accomplished and significant works that manifest the
delights of horror and which mark signposts in the
development of horror. Horror literature operates with
an “eerie autonomy” not only without regard to the
reader, but without regard to the marketing system.
Critic Gary Wolfe’s observation that “horror is the only
genre named for its effect on the reader” should suggest that the normal usage of genre is somewhat suspect here.
IV Short Torms
Why an ever-widening circle of connoisseurs and
innocents seek out and read with delight stories
about ghosts and other horrors has been accounted
for on divers grounds, most of them presupposing
complex motives in our hidden selves. That is what
one might expect in an age of reckless psychologizing. It is surely simpler and sounder to adduce historical facts and literary traditions. . . .
—Jacques Barzun, Introduction to
The Penguin Encyclopedia o f Horror
and the Supernatural
It is all the more astonishing to find English weird
fiction the property of the drama in Elizabethan
days, and later see it confined to the Gothic novel.
On first reflection this development seems strange
because the supernatural appears to flow more
easily into the short tale in verse or prose. The
human mind cannot leave the solid basis of reality
for long, and he who contemplates occult phenomena must sooner or later return to logical thinking
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David G. Hartwell
in terms of reality lest his reason be endangered. . . .
— Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction
A horror that is effective for thirty pages can
seldom be sustained for three hundred, and there is
no danger of confusing the bare scaffolding of the
ghost story with the rambling mansion of the
Gothic novel.
— Julia Briggs, Night Visitors
Commentators on horror agree that the short story
has always been the form of the horror story: “Thus
if it is to be successful the tale of the supernatural must
be short, and it matters little whether we accept it as an
account of facts or as a fascinating work of art,” says
Peter Penzoldt. At the same time, most of them have
observed that some of the very best fiction in the history
of horror writing occurs at the novella length. Julia
Briggs, for instance, after having given the usual set of
observations on the dominance of the short form, states:
“There are, however, a number of full-length ghost
stories of great importance. Most of these, written in the
last century, are short in comparison to the standard
Victorian three-volume novel, though their length would
be quite appropriate for a modem novel. More accurately described as long-short stories, or novellas, they include [Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Oscar
Wilde, Arthur Machen, Henry James]. They are quite
distinct from the broad-canvas full-length novel of the
period not only in being shorter, but also in using what is
essentially a short-story structure, introducing only a few
main characters within a strictly limited series of events.
The greater length and complexity is often the result of a
sophistocated narrative device or viewpoint. In each of
these the angle or angles from which the story is told is of
Introduction
21
crucial importance to the total effect, while the action
itself remains comparatively simple.”
Only in a collection of this size could one gather a
significant selection of novellas, and I have included a
number of them to emphasize the importance of that
length. I have excluded familiar masterpieces such as
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,”
Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Conrad’s
“The Heart of Darkness” in favor of significant works
such as Daphne Du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” and
H.P. Lovecraft’s sequel to Poe’s Narrative o f Arthur
Gordon Pym, “At the Mountains of Madness,” John W.
Campbell, Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” (from which the
classic horror film, The Thing, was made), Gerald
Durrell’s “The Entrance” and others.
I have included several examples of horror from the
science fiction movement by writers such as Robert A.
Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick, Octavia
Butler and George R.R. Martin, wherein horror is the
dominant emotional force for the fiction, and a sampling
of horror stories by women often excluded from notice
in the history and development of horror, such as
Gertrude Atherton, Violet Hunt, Harriet Prescott
Spofford and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Contemporary
masters and classic names in horror are the backbone of
the book, Peter Straub and Arthur Machen, Clive Barker
and E.T.A. Hoffmann and many others, but for most
readers there will be a few literary surprises. Horror
literature is a literature of fear and wonder. Here, then,
the Foundations o f Fear.
This is the third of three volumes, published in
paperback by Tor Books, that together comprise the
entire contents of the large hardcover book, Foundations
o f Fear. The whole work, subtitled “An Exploration of
Horror,” is a sequel to The Dark Descent, the anthology
that defies the nature of horror literature for contemporary times. Readers whose interests are piqued by the general introduction and the story notes in this book
would do well to go back to The Dark Descent, in which
similar concerns are addressed.
All of that having been said, the primary purpose of
this book is to entertain. The devotee of the weird,
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 3
