Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Du Maurier often takes what would likely be clichés in the hands of lesser writers—haunted houses, environmental catastrophes—and cooks them down into terrifying morsels. A perfect example is “The Birds,” a short story that was first published in her collection The Apple Tree (Penguin, 1952) and is also found in Don’t Look Now (Doubleday, 1971). It is an environmental horror tale about birds that unleash a kamikaze-style killing mission on the denizens of Cornwall. The premise—apocalypse by seagulls—doesn’t quite inspire horror at first blush; yet du Maurier maintains a taut tension unlike any other thriller writer of her time. Alfred Hitchcock directed the film adaptation in 1963.

  Of all the du Maurier adaptations, none garnered as much scandal as the 1973 Nicolas Roeg–directed film Don’t Look Now, mostly due to a graphic sex scene between its stars, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, which nearly earned the picture an X rating. Du Maurier’s story originally appeared in her collection Not after Midnight (Gollancz, 1971). It deals with the aftermath of the death of a child and the complicated grief that plagues a married couple, complete with psychic visions, a creepy shadow child, and a serial killer. Both the story and Roeg’s film remain among the best psychological thrillers ever written.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Rebecca lives up to its reputation. Follow that with My Cousin Rachel (Doubleday, 1951), which packs a whirlwind of questions about identity, intent, and intrigue; it is a predecessor to novels that blur the lines between victim and killer, good and bad, such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Crown, 2012). Also highly recommended is the short story “Blue Lenses,” which is as thrilling as du Maurier’s novels. You’ll find it, along with “The Birds” and several other unsettling stories, in a reprint of the abovementioned collection Don’t Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier (NYRB Classics, 2008).

  Also try: Du Maurier penned masterful Gothic romances, including Frenchman’s Creek (Doubleday, 1941) and Jamaica Inn (Doubleday Doran, 1936). Skip the 1939 Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of the latter—it’s universally panned as his worst movie. Stick with The Birds to get your film fix.

  Related work: The thriller writer Patricia Highsmith is frequently compared to Daphne du Maurier, and for good reason: both are masters of suspense. Highsmith wrote horror as well, but those stories are not as frequently anthologized as her thrillers. If “The Birds” got under your skin, take a look at Highsmith’s snail stories “The Snail Watcher” (Gamma 3, July 1964) and “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” (Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967). Yes, snails are the predators. And, yes, Highsmith makes them terrifying. Both were collected in Eleven (Grove Press, 2011 reprint).

  Haunted by History

  Toni Morrison

  1931–

  Toni Morrison is one of the best-known authors in American history. If you weren’t assigned one of her novels for English class, perhaps you’ve seen her being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey or on The Colbert Report. She’s the recipient of high-profile awards and accolades, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She’s one of the most written about authors, up there with the two Wills, Shakespeare and Faulkner.

  Toni Morrison is awesome. But is she a horror writer? Is she part of the tradition of weird fiction?

  Our answer is yes, and our proof is her fifth novel, Beloved, published by Knopf in 1987.

  Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, George and Ramah, were migrants from Southern states. She studied the classics and humanities at Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, and Cornell, where she earned a master’s. She gained critical attention with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970, and she hasn’t slowed down since. She has published ten additional novels and worked as an editor for Random House and then as a professor at several universities. She has influenced numerous writers, including Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich. Morrison retired from teaching in 2006, and her papers and manuscripts are archived at Princeton University. But Morrison maintains an active literary life through writing and speaking and by recording audio book versions of her novels.

  Toni Morrison may not be a horror writer in the vein of Shirley Jackson or Anne Rice or Tananarive Due. But in addition to being a great historical novel of twentieth-century American literature, Beloved is a horror tour de force that evokes every trope of the genre while peeling back the bandages from the wound of slavery on Americans’ collective psyche. Writing within the horror genre affords authors an opportunity to show the most violent and terrifying parts of real life, and Beloved is a master class in that technique. Morrison tells a ghost story that makes visible the gut-wrenching true horror of slavery, especially as experienced by African American women, and forces readers to reckon with an often-ignored part of U.S. history and its haunting effects.

  Morrison is also no stranger to the supernatural. Several of her novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), and Home (2012), feature ghosts of the past. Her play Desdemona (Oberon Books, 2011) focuses on the ghost of Shakespeare’s character, giving her a voice (finally!) to explore what went wrong in her relationship with Othello; in letting this character speak, Morrison calls attention to the issues of race and class that Shakespeare glossed over in his play.

  Beloved, however, is a full-on ghost story from top to bottom. Morrison centers the story on the title character, the ghost of a deceased girl called Beloved, in order to explore the effects of trauma. It is a fictionalized reimagining of the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who, in 1856, attempted to escape her northern Kentucky slaveholder, along with her children, husband, and in-laws. The family crossed the frozen Ohio River into Cincinnati, where they were ambushed and recaptured. Because Garner believed that death was preferable to slavery, she tried to kill her children, and succeeded in slaying one of them.

  The subsequent trial, and accompanying fiery speeches, protests, and violence, presaged the Civil War. Testimony revealed that Garner’s owner had physically and sexually abused her. Ultimately she was returned to enslavement but sold to a planter in Louisiana. She and one of her children were traveling there by riverboat when their vessel sank in a fiery crash with another boat. Her child died but Garner survived; she died two years later in Louisiana of typhoid fever. Her husband recalled that her last words to him were: “live in hope of freedom.”

  Chains of Memory

  Morrison read a news clipping about Margaret Garner while doing research for another book, and she decided to try to imagine what caused a woman to commit infanticide. What does it mean to be a mother to children who literally belong to another person? What does it mean to face, every day, the possibility that your loved ones could be abused, tortured, maimed, killed, or sold away? What she created was a novel in the tradition of ghost stories, but in which the ghost represents more than just a person returning from the afterlife. The spirit also stands for the estimated sixty million people who died in the so-called land of the free during the time of enslavement.

  Beloved begins with the protagonist, Sethe, and her daughter Denver living in a home troubled by an angry ghost-child, whose torments prompted Sethe’s two older sons to run away. Mother and daughter attempt to communicate with the spirit because they believe it belongs to Sethe’s youngest daughter, whom Sethe killed, as Margaret Garner had done, after the family escaped slavery and was faced with recapture. Both Sethe and Denver find comfort in the haunting presence of the lost two-year-old child. Then the ghost comes back in physical form.

  Or does it? Like all good supernatural fiction, Morrison’s story can be explained one way or the other…or both. Regardless, as the women interact with the seemingly full-grown Beloved, each is
gripped by memories of a past full of trauma—physical, emotional, and sexual—experienced and witnessed. Ultimately, Denver learns about the painful past despite her mother’s attempt to protect her by refusing to speak about slavery.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: After Beloved, turn to Song of Solomon (Knopf, 1977), which is probably Morrison’s next most spectral read; it features a protagonist who is haunted by his parents’ and aunt’s pasts. By facing the ghosts, he learns where he came from and who he is. Love (Knopf, 2003) is a story of the strength of female relationships in the face of trauma and abuse, in which at least one of the narrators is a ghost.

  Also try: Beloved (1998) was adapted to the screen in 1998 by Akosua Busia and directed by Jonathan Demme, starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. It was not well received, perhaps because there’s something special in Morrison’s prose that can’t quite be translated to film. We think it’s worth a watch nonetheless.

  Related work: Steven Weisenburger’s Modern Medea (Hill and Wang, 1998) outlines the events surrounding Margaret Garner’s escape, recapture, and trial. It’s history that is as riveting as any modern-day drama. For more fiction centered on strong African American women living in a world tinged with supernatural possibilities, read Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (Ticknor & Fields, 1988). Like Morrison, Naylor also explores the haunting past of slavery and how it ruptures family histories.

  Tananarive Due’s novel The Good House (Atria, 2003) is on our required reading list. Due explores how family histories haunt homes by focusing on the titular residence and its place in the nexus of African American and Native American history. As in Naylor’s Mama Day, the story’s paranormal elements may have roots in an ancestor’s curse. Due’s story collection Ghost Summer (Prime Books, 2015) is an exemplary group of varied paranormal and apocalyptic tales; the title novella is a great follow-up to Beloved. In it, Due explores how we are haunted by history, whether we learned about it or not. She doesn’t shy away from violence; like the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Beacon Press, 1979; reprint, 2009), Due’s characters are physically injured by encounters with the past.

  Speaking of Kindred, if you haven’t read Butler’s time-travel novel about slavery, what are you waiting for?

  Monstrosity in the Mundane

  Elizabeth Engstrom

  1951–

  Elizabeth Engstrom was born Betty Lynn Gutzmer, known to some as Betsy, in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1951. She spent her childhood in two places: the Park Ridge suburb of Chicago, when living with her father, and Kaysville, Utah, north of Salt Lake City, where she lived with her mother. After a move west in search of warmer weather, she worked in advertising in Hawaii and eventually opened her own agency in Maui.

  In 1984 her life took a sharp turn after she signed up for a writing workshop on Kauai with Theodore Sturgeon, a prolific and Hugo Award winning American science-fiction and horror author. Sturgeon was a mentor to writers of the weird; rumors abound that he was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut’s recurring character Kilgore Trout. In 1986, Engstrom moved with her husband and two children to Oregon, where she was able to foster her writing career. She served for ten years as the director of the Maui Writers Retreat and was on the board of the nonprofit Wordcrafters. Engstrom holds a master’s degree in applied theology from Marylhurst University and works with Love and Mercy Ministries, a nondenominational outreach organization.

  It was in the workshop that Engstrom wrote her novella When Darkness Loves Us. Sturgeon loved the story and urged Engstrom to pair it with another of her works, Beauty Is. The two novellas were eventually published in a single volume by William Morrow in 1985, with an introduction by Sturgeon.

  When Darkness Loves Us is the tale of a dim-witted, or perhaps just naive, farm girl named Sally Hixon. She is high on life, pregnant and still in the newlywed glow of marriage. The honeymoon ends, however, when she becomes trapped in an underground cave. Literally trapped. There is no rescue, no happy ending. Sally must confront her deepest fears down in the cold darkness. And the pregnancy? Let’s just say that cave birth isn’t easy. What’s astounding about this particular story is that Engstrom was hit with inspiration at the happiest place on earth. She described the moment the story was conceived in a 2009 interview with Apex Magazine:

  “Strangely enough, When Darkness Loves Us came to me almost fully formed while in the midst of an excruciating bout of claustrophobia while riding the submarine in Disneyland. I’d always known I didn’t care for small, closed-in places, but being stuck in one with my kids almost had me clawing my way out.”

  Trauma and What Comes After

  Engstrom finds inspiration in the most mundane moments of life. In many of her works, the domestic space is one of both safety and danger. In Beauty Is, the main character, Martha, is a woman born without a nose. The world treats her with horrible hostility, but it’s memories of her home life—notably her father’s rejection and her faith-healer mother, who was taken advantage of by a group of drunk men—that truly haunt her. Engstrom’s writing as been called everything from speculative fiction to erotica, and these labels are not necessarily wrong. But she is also a writer of the best kind of horror fiction: stories that present the human condition coming to grips with the aftermath of trauma and grief.

  Engstrom’s horror fiction often draws comparisons to Anne Rice, largely because she wrote a book in the mid-1980s about vampires titled Black Ambrosia (Tor Books, 1986). But her writing covers many subjects. Another standout is Lizzie Borden (Tor Books, 1991), about the infamous unsolved ax murders committed in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts.

  Vampire, ax murderer, or other, Engstrom’s subjects often are people who have been pushed to their limits by unexpected encounters. In Guys Named Bob (IFD Publishing, 2018), a middle-aged woman is carjacked and must fight for survival. In Lizard Wine (Headline, 1995), university students find trouble in an abandoned campground when their car breaks down. Whatever the details, Engstrom’s characters are thrust into a world that they don’t know; often it’s so unfamiliar that they question their very reality. Her characters dig deep to find the person they didn’t know they could be—if that person is good or bad is left for the reader to decide.

  Engstrom was nominated for a Stoker Award in 1992 for best fiction collection, and her story “Crosley” was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), edited by Ellen Datlow. We think her body of work deserves more critical attention.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Engstrom’s talent sings in her short stories. Several collections are available, including Suspicions (Triple Tree 2002), Nightmare Flower (Tor Books, 1992), and The Alchemy of Love (Triple Tree, 1998), with an introduction by horror writer Jack Ketchum.

  Also try: Her novel Candyland (IFD Publishing, 2012) follows a couple who meet in a bar and embark on a nightmarish journey. It was adapted into the film Candiland in 2016, starring Gary Busey.

  Related work: Something Engstrom does well is explore how women push and pull against the roles that society has given them. Her literary successor may be Zoje Stage, whose novel Baby Teeth (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) is a nightmarish look at how far a mother will go to protect her daughter, who, by the way, may be trying to kill her. Entertainment Weekly called it “We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Gone Girl meets The Omen.”

  “She managed one scream, drowned by the earth–vibrating essence of the great engine above.”

  —When Darkness Loves Us

  In the 1980s, horror went mainstream in America. Children who grew up during this decade may recall such pop-culture touchstones as Freddy Krueger and the Garbage Pail Kids. Personally, we have vivid memories of walking through Blockbuster Video, shielding our eyes so we wouldn’t see the covers of certain VHS tapes. (It didn’t work.) We first became acquainted with Pinhead and Jason Voorhees years before summoning the courag
e to see their movies. And video-rental stores weren’t the only spaces where terror reigned. Horror lived on the covers of paperbacks that lined the shelves of every B. Dalton. Even grocery store aisles weren’t safe.

  For all the talk of horror and weird fiction taking over the new millennium—more about that in Part Eight—an earlier horror revolution occurred beginning in the 1970s. Highly successful horror chartbusters like The Exorcist triggered a deluge of lurid, bloody paperback horror fiction. Now-defunct trade publishers and imprints like Zebra and Leisure spat out novels at a dizzying pace, filled with Satan, sex, monsters, and murder.

  All of which was boldly displayed right on the book covers. It seemed that every paperback needed disturbing art to make it stand out against the competition. The two artists who beckoned readers better than anyone were women: Lisa Falkenstern and Jill Bauman.

  Falkenstern’s signature was a balance of the macabre with the innocent. Her cover for Piper, the 1987 novel by Brett Rutherford and John Robertson, published by Zebra, features two blonde children dancing around a jester clown that has a skull for a face. She also created the beautiful and creepy blonde children who populate the covers of V. C. Andrews’s books. Our favorite is her cover image for Ken Greenhall’s Childgrave (Pocket, 1982; reissued in 2017 by Valancourt Books), which depicts a wide-eyed girl—blonde again—hovering over a small town, the steeple of a church dangerously close to her cherubic blue eye.