Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Interested in Tuttle’s short fiction? She has published several collections, including Stranger in the House (Ash Tree Press, 2010).

  Related work: A few new writers seem to be following in Tuttle’s feminist horror footsteps. The Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez’s collection Things We Lost in the Fire (Hogarth, 2017) is at times horrifying and skin-crawling; her supernatural stories are set against the backdrop of a brutal dictatorship. Like Tuttle, Enriquez renders her cast with powerful empathy, making them heartbreakingly human. The British author Naomi Alderman’s speculative novel The Power (Viking, 2016) imagines a world in which women have the ability to physically dominate men; her characters are reminiscent of the powerful women that Tuttle writes so well. An honorable mention goes to the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body, written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama; while not perfect, the film tries to push back against the patriarchal message in so many female possession stories, as Tuttle did in her books.

  Rewriting Snow White

  Tanith Lee

  1947–2015

  The British writer Tanith Lee was the prolific creator of more than ninety novels and two hundred short stories in various genres for both adults and young adults. She was a regular contributor to Weird Tales magazine and also wrote science fiction, horror, gothic, fantasy, crime, spy fiction, erotica, and historical fiction. She wrote two episodes for the British science-fiction show Blake’s 7. Nevertheless, in Lee’s obituary for the Guardian in 2015, the British writer Roz Kaveney stated that “all her work shares a tone…a gothic, not to say goth, sensibility in which the relentless pursuit of personal autonomy and sensual fulfillment leads her characters to the brink of delirium, as well as to a fierce integrity that can co-habit with self-sacrificing empathy.” Her career spans more than half a century, but she did some of her best work during the paperback boom of the 1980s.

  Lee was born to professional dancers Hylda and Bernard Lee (no, not the Bernard Lee who played M in early James Bond films). When asked in a 2012 interview for Weird Fiction Review if she was exposed to weird fiction while growing up, she said:

  “I was often up at midnight in glittering dance venues. And my parents and I would frequently discuss Hamlet, or Dracula—or Rider Haggard’s She. I’ve no doubt all this had its due effect.”

  As a result of then-undiagnosed dyslexia, Lee didn’t learn to read until age eight. She was an avid fan of radio dramas until she could read independently, and then she became a voracious reader. She read science fiction such as Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Silken Swift,” weird stories by Saki, and books by Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chekov. In the 2012 Weird Fiction Review interview, Lee recognized differences among the labels horror, gothic, and weird. But not surprisingly, considering her prolific output that encompasses numerous genres, she expressed greater interest in how those genres can intersect and meld with one another than in what separates them.

  Her story “Yellow and Red,” anthologized in the VanderMeers’ collection The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, feels like a nineteenth-century Gothic-tinged haunted house story, although it is set in the 1950s. The VanderMeers note an echo of “Casting the Runes” (published in 1911 in the collection More Ghost Stories by Longmans Green) by M. R. James, the early twentieth-century British ghost-story master. The narratives share a creeping dread, narrators who think themselves unshakably rational and faced with something out of their ken, and the presence of those always bothersome archaeological sites. (When will horror characters stop digging up artifacts and bringing them home?)

  Lee’s tale calls to mind another James story, “The Mezzotint,” published in the 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by Edward Arnold; both feature photography as a weird medium for spirits. Lee’s narrator employs whiskey to reveal the horrors that are somehow captured in his family’s snapshots, or, as he says, “using a spirit to show a spirit.” A mysterious undiagnosed malady has caused every member in his family, no matter how young, to waste away. He slowly learns the story behind what may have happened to his vanished relatives.

  Lee is probably best known for her award-winning Tales from the Flat Earth series, published by DAW, which comprises novels and stories beginning with Night’s Master from 1978 through “The Pain of Glass” from 2009. It chronicles life on a world that is literally flat, square, and composed of four layers, or realms: the Underearth, occupied by demons; the Flat Earth, where the people live; the Upperearth, realm of the gods; and the Innerearth, where the dead roam. The series features interconnected stories in the vein of One Thousand and One Nights. Its popularity prompted Penguin to rerelease twenty of Tanith Lee’s most popular DAW-published novels, starting in 2015 with The Birthgrave.

  The Birthgrave begins with a nameless woman waking up in the center of a dormant volcano, unsure of who she is. She sets off on an adventure of self-discovery through a brutal and dangerous landscape. The book, the first of a trilogy, is a prime example of how authors transcended the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s to create something wholly new—in this case, haunting speculative fiction.

  Lee was still writing at the time of her death from cancer, leaving work unpublished and incomplete. She was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award, for her 1979 book Death’s Master (DAW). She won the World Fantasy Award several times, including the Life Achievement Award in 2013; her other numerous honors include the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award, in 2009, and two Nebula Awards, in 1975 and 1980.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: White as Snow (Tor, 2000) is Tanith Lee’s retelling of Snow White, which earned her comparisons to Angela Carter’s reworking of fairy tales. Lee’s story is dark and mixes the familiar elements of the story—an angry aging queen, a huntsman, an innocent young woman, and small forest-dwelling folk—with the mythology of the goddess Demeter and her stolen daughter Persephone, creating a book about the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters.

  Also try: Along with Lee’s Flat Earth books, her Birthgrave trilogy—The Birthgrave, Shadowfire, and Quest for the White Witch (DAW, 1975, 1978, 1978; reissued by Penguin)—is finding popularity with twenty-first-century readers.

  In Disturbed by Her Song (Lethe Press, 2010) Lee shared a byline with her two characters, Esther Garber and Judas Garbah. Each tells their own story, and Lee and Esther tell a few together. This ambiguity between characters and author, or even the idea of writing as channeling, unmoors readers’ expectations about narrators. The stories focus on queer love and sexuality, and the collection was nominated for a Lambda Award for best LGBT science fiction, fantasy, or horror.

  Gothic is back.

  But what exactly is it? The term’s meaning is slippery or, perhaps more appropriately, foggy. More often than not, it is used interchangeably with “atmospheric” or “haunting” or some other equally vague adjective. Usually, the phrase “Gothic horror” describes a creative work whose atmosphere is gloomy and whose main characters are brooding, moody, and most likely clad in black. A blend of romance, costume drama, and dreariness also comes to mind. Imagine a sad girl wearing velvet, hanging around her dismal manor house. Her boyfriend might be a vampire, or at least strongly resemble one. Also Gothic: if the aforementioned manor house is haunted by a bevy of ghosts.

  However, as we discussed in Part One, Gothic fiction has both a strong literary tradition and a set of core characteristics that extends beyond moping around a dark, crumbling castle. Fiction that deals with themes of isolation, vulnerability, family strife, and the bubbling up of hidden secrets is undoubtedly Gothic, whether the story takes place on the moors, or in a country farmhouse, or in a city.

  Modern stories based on this literary tradition, which we call the new Gothic, leave behind the strict rules of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel and instead center on the main character’s struggle to understand reality in a world that embraces the supernatural. In the traditional Gothic
story, a female protagonist’s virginity was endangered; in the modern Gothic, the protagonist is still (usually) female, but what’s now at stake is her psyche, as she struggles against paranormal forces and risks losing her grip on reality.

  New Gothic writers also offer a “fix” for some of the sins of their foremothers. In the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century, for instance, being Italian or Spanish (or non-English, or nonwhite) was shorthand for being the villain. Modern Gothic writers challenge this tradition by creating a broad spectrum of characters that resonate better with twenty-first-century readers.

  The Gothic never really went out of style, but this new brand of Gothic horror began to emerge in the middle of the twentieth century, with novels like Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Viking, 1962), Michael McDowell’s The Elementals (Avon Books, 1981), and Stephen King’s The Shining (Doubleday 1977). The new Gothic is exemplified by films such as Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak and television series like Showtime’s Penny Dreadful and Netflix’s Alias Grace. The trend is also visible in comics and graphic novels, such as Emily Carroll’s highly praised Through the Woods (Faber & Faber, 2014), a collection of five graphic horror stories that read like dark fairy tales.

  In literature, the most Gothic contemporary author is probably Anne Rice. Her work is full of the lush atmospheres of the old South (think manor houses decorated with candelabras, and tree-lined drives framed by hanging Spanish moss). But she updates the Gothic narrative by swapping the love story of the poetic hero and virginal damsel for a romance between two men, and she places stories in the grimy urban underbelly of New Orleans.

  Writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Susan Hill, and Sarah Waters each create their own distinct versions of a Gothic heroine trapped inside a space with a mind of its own. Angela Carter has established herself as the reigning queen of fairy tale Gothic. And Jewelle Gomez, with her Afrofuturistic vampires, could be considered an heir to Anne Rice. In many ways, the rules no longer apply. Any place can be haunted by the supernatural, including the protagonist’s own mind.

  That’s not to say that these writers forget where the Gothic got its start. In particular, new Gothic authors writing for young adults seem to embrace the connection of the Gothic to the teenage experience, with its surging hormones, changing emotions, and deep tendency toward brooding and melancholy. Kiersten White’s The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Delacorte Press, 2018) is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic novel for a young adult audience. Orphan Elizabeth has lost everything when she is brought to the Frankenstein home, where she befriends the lonely Victor. As they grow up, the friends grow closer, but Elizabeth finds that romance with Victor pulls her life into a dark spiral. White has revisited Gothic material before; she wrote the YA novels And I Darken, Now I Rise, and Bright We Burn (Delacorte, 2016, 2017, 2018), a trilogy that follows the Dracul siblings. We think Bram Stoker would be proud.

  Another new Gothic author writing for young adults is Madeleine Roux. Her Asylum series (Asylum, Sanctum, and Catacomb; 2016, Harper Collins) is set in a dormitory, formerly a psychiatric hospital, that is haunted by the past. Her novels that most embrace the Gothic setting, however, are the House of Furies series (Harper Collins, 2017–19), in which a seventeen-year-old girl finds work as a maid at Coldthistle House, a manor that would be at home in any Charlotte Dacre or Mary Shelley novel. The house and its owner, Mr. Morningside, are full of secrets, and all guests are judged for past sins and punished, making the house a nightmare prison for its inhabitants.

  For adult fiction that embraces the new Gothic, consider Ania Ahlborn. As a child, Ahlborn was fascinated by cemeteries and was concerned with making sure all the gravestones had flowers. (This sounds to us like a second coming of Mary Shelley, whose fascination with graveyards is well documented.) Ahlborn’s horror novels unmistakably reveal her Gothic sentimentalities. Brother (Gallery Books, 2015) is about an impoverished Appalachian family with dark secrets. The Bird Eater (47 North, 2014) and Within These Walls (Gallery Books, 2015) feature haunted homes, but the true Gothic nature of the books is at work in the haunted protagonists, who have pasts to overcome before they can confront anything supernatural. The renewed interest in Gothic horror may be a response to modern fears, especially as technology advances at such a dizzying a rate that it is difficult to predict what consequences these new innovations will have (hello, Black Mirror). Horror has always been cathartic; it allows a safe space for readers to experience fears and confront danger. Although the world is constantly changing (in sometimes frightening ways), in new Gothic fiction the ghosts that haunt us are familiar. So are the possessed spaces, which are overgrown and decaying reminders of the past that can distract us from worries about the future.

  Whatever the reason, two and a half centuries after The Castle of Otranto, it seems that neither readers nor authors have tired of Gothic tropes yet.

  Queen of the Damned

  Anne Rice

  1941–

  Anyone who has been to New Orleans can tell you that the city possesses a strange magic. The place is a melting pot of cultures, a hazy mix of religious icons and voodoo dolls. The nights are long—hot and humid—rolling with loud music and booze-fueled revelers. The days are bright. Mornings in the French Quarter smell of soap and horses. Afternoons hold promises of gumbo and crawfish boils and magnolia blossoms.

  Then there is the city’s folklore. New Orleans is a city of vampires, of voodoo queens, of witchcraft, of ghost pirates. It’s where Madame La-Laurie allegedly tortured and killed enslaved people in the early 1800s. It’s where the jazz-loving serial killer known as the Axman roamed the streets looking for victims in 1918 and 1919.

  No author is more closely associated with New Orleans lore than Anne Rice. Born and raised in the city, Rice was named Howard, after her father, but began using Anne in first grade. After moving to Texas with her family in high school and attending several universities there, Rice dropped out and moved with a friend to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. She kept in touch with Stan Rice, whom she met in high school, and the two would reconnect during her visits back to Texas. They married in 1961 and moved to California, where Anne returned to school; she received a master’s in English and creative writing in 1972 from San Francisco State University.

  In 1966 the couple had their first child, a daughter named Michele, who passed away from cancer just five years later. Rice has said that she threw herself into writing after the devastating loss, creating vampire characters in part because of the alluring possibility of life after death. In 1978 Rice gave birth to a son, Christopher, who is a successful novelist like his mother. In the midst of raising a family, Rice worked odd jobs—waitress and insurance claims examiner, among them—before she turned to writing full-time.

  Her first book, Interview with the Vampire, was published by Knopf in 1976. The novel was an immediate success and set off Rice’s popular Vampire Chronicles series, which, as of this book’s publication, totals fifteen books. And it breathed new (unending) life into this quintessentially Gothic character.

  Gone were the soapy storylines; no maiden withering in the hands of a bloodthirsty fiend here (or, at least, that isn’t the main plotline). Instead, Rice’s vampires face existential dilemmas, struggling to cope with the realities of their undead nature. Rice’s character Lestat de Lioncourt is a fairly straightforward throwback to Bram Stoker’s Dracula; he loves his power, his immortality, his wealth and privilege. But his companion Louis de Pointe du Lac grapples with his conscience and expresses guilt and remorse for taking human life. Perhaps the best example of vampire existentialism is seen in the character Claudia who, having become a vampire when she was a child, is horrified to realize that she will never physically age. Though her mind matures to adulthood, her undead body will forever be that of a prepubescent child.

  Rice’s readers loved it all.

  The books were so popular that Hollywood took inter
est. The film rights were sold immediately, but it took almost twenty years for a movie to be produced. (Pop culture critic Eric Diaz speculated in a July 2018 Nerdist article that the delay was due to concerns about the novel’s erotic content.) Finally, in 1994, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt starred in the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire. Rice was skeptical of the decision to cast Cruise as the lead character (and outspoken about her doubts), but she loved the movie once she saw it. One of the sequels, The Queen of the Damned, was brought to the big screen in 2002, starring Stuart Townsend. In July 2018, Hulu announced that a television adaptation of The Vampire Chronicles is in the works, for which Rice will collaborate with her son Christopher, who will serve as writer and producer. Nearly three decades of adaptations starring Rice’s most famous character, Lestat, proves that a vampire truly never dies (in Hollywood at least).

  Beyond Belief

  Rice is a prolific writer who has authored thirty-six books, including a Christian series called Songs of the Seraphim (Penguin Random House, 2011–12), which features time travel, angels, and hit men; a series about the Mayfair family of witches; books about magical wolves; and reimagined fairy tales that often have an erotic bent. When looking at her body of work as a whole, it’s difficult to identify a singular pattern or put Rice in a single category. Broadly speaking, she writes supernatural fiction, particularly with Gothic overtones, sometimes with erotic elements.