Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  For a time, Rice abandoned vampire stories and wrote books defending her religious beliefs. After being raised in a Catholic family, she had become an outspoken atheist until 1998, when she renewed her faith. During this period she wrote a memoir, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Knopf, 2008), and her Christ the Lord series, two novels that portray the life of Jesus Christ (Knopf, 2005 and 2008). Then, on July 28, 2010, Rice announced on Facebook that she was leaving organized religion. She wrote, “I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.” One reason for Rice’s ultimate break with the Catholic Church was its refusal to accept same-sex relationships.

  Having parted ways with religion, Rice returned to her supernatural beginnings, writing Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (Knopf, 2016) and, with her son, Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (Penguin Random House, 2017). In an interview with the Guardian on July 27, 2016, Rice called Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis “one of my greatest personal adventures.”

  Anne Rice’s personal struggle with her religious faith coloring her fiction can be seen as analogous to the arc of Gothic imagery as a whole. Traditional Christian mythology has long played a role in depictions of vampirism (see: crucifixes), and since its beginnings, Gothic literature has been full of evil monks and women who are sent to live in convents. But, like Rice’s stories, religion isn’t a fundamental component of new Gothic stories and monsters, vampires or otherwise. Today’s vampires are afraid of bigger, badder things than crucifixes and holy water. Just as these relics are losing their hold on our culture, so are the old Gothic vampires who cared about them.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Anne Rice wrote about far more than vampires. Violin, published in 1997 by Knopf, is her take on the ghost story. Like much of her work, it is rich with history, moving through time from nineteenth-century Vienna to modern New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, and tells a story of three musicians.

  Also try: Largely overlooked is Rice’s chronicle of the Mayfair witches, beginning with The Witching Hour (Knopf, 1990). This novel takes the familiar plot of a woman who discovers she has magical powers and weaves in history and folklore to make the story feel fresh. The Feast of All Saints (Simon & Schuster, 1979), a historical novel about free people of color in 1840s New Orleans, was adapted as a miniseries for Showtime in 2001, starring James Earl Jones, Forest Whitaker, Eartha Kitt, and Pam Grier.

  Related work: Fans of vampires set amidst a rich historical tapestry may enjoy the writing of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. She created the character of the Comte de Saint-Germain, who was introduced in the novel Hotel Transylvania (St. Martin’s Press, 1978) and developed over a series of novels and stories.

  Teller of Feminist Fairy Tales

  Helen Oyeyemi

  1984–

  Fairy tales are ubiquitous. Until recently, we have told them to children without a second thought about the message we might be spreading, for good or ill. The tales so many of us have recited or heard as children—about a mermaid who trades her voice in order to be human, about a brother and sister hiking in the woods who meet a witch—were once much darker, more disturbing stories. In the Grimm brothers’ version of Cinderella (titled “Aschenputtel”), her stepsisters are punished for their foul deeds by having their eyes pecked out by birds (and this is after they cut off parts of their feet to fit into those infamous slippers).

  Helen Oyeyemi understands that fairy tales are essentially horror stories—cautionary tales that tell us about ourselves and our place in society. Oyeyemi emigrated from Nigeria to Great Britain when she was four years old. Growing up in Lewisham, South London, she was a voracious reader. But when a book had an unsatisfying ending (she has mentioned Beth’s death in Little Women, for example), she simply rewrote the conclusion for herself. Her love of writing turned into a full-blown career while she was still a teenager. She wrote her first book, The Icarus Girl (Bloomsbury, 2005), while a student at London’s Cardinal Vaughan Memorial secondary school. The novel is a play on a Nigerian folktale: There once was a girl who didn’t quite fit in. Then she made a friend. But that friend—the ambiguous, near-dopplegänger girl TillyTilly—isn’t all that nice, especially when it comes to the neighborhood bullies. Oyeyemi’s debut was met with critical praise and set the tone for her work that followed, which also draws upon folklore and fairy tales, masterfully distorting her characters’ realities so that nothing is ever quite as it should be. The tension in Oyeyemi’s writing between the real world and the supernatural places are at the forefront of the new Gothic. Her follow-up to The Icarus Girl is The Opposite House (Penguin, 2007), a story inspired by Cuban mythology about two girls and two doors that open to alternate worlds.

  White Is for Witching, her third book (Nan A. Talese, 2009), has all the trappings of a modern Gothic novel. A young woman is plagued by pica, a peculiar eating disorder that drives her to consume things that aren’t food, like chalk and dirt. Following the death of her mother, her mental state only worsens and she moves to a house with her father and twin brother. Her father hopes to turn the house into a bed-and-breakfast, but the home seems to have a…personality, and it’s not a nice one. The novel addresses contemporary concerns such as xenophobia and includes traditional Gothic aspects like the haunted house, a woman struggling with insanity, and the uncanny doubling that exists with twins.

  In a 2014 interview with the Guardian, Oyeyemi said White Is for Witching is “about expanding the genre of the haunted house story.” The narration switches between characters—even the house is afforded its own voice—and Oyeyemi’s prose is as experimental as it is beautiful. She received much critical attention for the book, including the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a finalist spot in the Shirley Jackson Awards.

  Oyeyemi’s other works explore stories that are likely familiar to her readers. In Boy, Snow, Bird (Riverhead Books, 2014), she tackles the tale of Snow White, though this time the setting is 1950s America, and the name Snow White is a reference to racial passing. The book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Gingerbread (Riverhead Books, 2019) overtly borrows its name from the ubiquitous cookie of fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy.

  Oyeyemi’s novel Mr. Fox (Riverhead Books, 2011) is a retelling of the French Bluebeard folktale. Mr. Fox is a British author in love with his wife, Daphne. But he also loves another, Mary Foxe. Further complicating matters, Mary Foxe is imaginary—and Mr. Fox’s muse. The novel is dark and haunting; Mary Foxe isn’t the only spectral-like character. Once again, Oyeyemi wisely and deftly joins a dark fairy tale with a story of human relationships, in all their magic and disappointments. Both Gothic fiction and traditional fairy tales typically depict the victimization of women or children and comment on disturbing family situations. Women writers have used both forms to fight against oppression by reimagining vulnerable characters as more formidable protagonists.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: If you’re in the mood for a Gothic haunted house tale, you can’t go wrong with White Is for Witching. Oyeyemi’s other novels described above are more in the camp of the unsettling weird.

  Also try: Although young, Oyeyemi has already carved out a reputation as a writer of literary horror. She published two plays in 2005, Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese. They are available in one volume from Bloomsbury’s Methuen Drama imprint. In 2016, she published a collection of short stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which won the PEN Open Book Award.

  Related work: Fans of Oyeyemi’s fairy-tale reimaginings might enjoy Carmen Maria Machado’s short-fiction collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017). A finalist for the National Book Award, Her Body embraces the often antifeminist nature of some of the most enduring fairy tales and urban myths, giving them updated twists.

>   The Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin doesn’t write fairy tales so much as nightmares. Her novel Fever Dream (translated by Megan McDowell; Riverhead Books, 2017) focuses on the relationship between mothers and children, in a nightmarish, and—well—fevered dream kind of way. The past and the present bleed together as they do in White Is for Witching. If you like Oyeyemi’s writing for its near-poetic quality, try Linda Addison, the Bram Stoker Award winning writer of dark poetry.

  In interviews, Oyeyemi has cited Kelly Link as an inspiration, calling Link’s story “The Specialist’s Hat” a particular favorite. It shares with Oyeyemi’s stories such tropes as precocious children, twins, and a touch of magical realism (albeit dark magical realism).

  Modern Gothic Ghost Maker

  Susan Hill

  1942–

  When critics and readers consider the great writers of ghost stories, they usually think of nineteenth-century names such as Henry James or M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Dickens. Some may call to mind the more recent horror maven Shirley Jackson. But Susan Hill deserves to be included on any such list. The prolific contemporary writer has, to date, penned the Simon Serrailler detective series, a sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca titled Mrs. de Winter (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), and numerous books with a Gothic flavor. But she will always be remembered for her first ghost story, the ever-adaptable The Woman in Black (Hamish Hamilton, 1983).

  Hill was born in 1942 in Scarborough, England. As a child, she says she “was always wanting to tell stories, to my friends, to my dolls. I was always writing.” She studied English literature from a young age, publishing her first novel, The Enclosure (Hutchison, 1961), when she was fifteen years old. The book made a splash; although, Hill says, “it wasn’t a sex novel,” it dealt frankly with adult relationships. Hill’s headmistress told her, “You have brought shame and disgrace to this school.”

  But Hill was determined to write. She attended King’s College in London and then began her writing career. She married Stanley Wells, a Shakespeare scholar, in 1975, and the couple had three daughters, one of whom died in infancy. In 2013, Hill caused the gossip mills to turn when she reportedly left her husband for Barbara Machin, a screenwriter. Today, Hill writes everything from children’s books to crime fiction. Within her impressive body of work, The Woman in Black and her mysteries are most popular among her fans.

  Called “a rattling good yarn” by the Guardian, The Woman in Black opens on Christmas Eve. A lawyer named Arthur Kipps is gathered with his family to tell ghost stories, placing us in that British tradition as well as riffing on the frame story of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Kipps is reminded of the trauma he experienced at Eel Marsh House, the home of his late client, where he stayed in the course of settling her affairs; he refuses to share a story and leaves the room in a panic.

  Of course, as with all good ghost stories and all terrifying experiences, Kipps can’t let it lie. He decides to write out everything that happened; thus begins a slow burn of a tale in which Kipps recounts his experience of the Woman in Black who haunts Eel Marsh House. Hill pulls out all the traditional supernatural stops—his narrative includes secretive townspeople, cries in the night, a child’s scream in the fog, and a haunted nursery. The ultimate creepy detail, however, is Eel Marsh House itself, a residence that is surrounded by water when the tide is high, leaving Kipps unable to escape whatever haunts the property. Being stuck in a haunted house is one thing; being stuck in a haunted house on an isolated island is another turn in the screw of anxiety.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: The Woman in Black’s Gothic atmosphere and chilling ghost story make a great read, and it has been adapted many times. The stage adaptation by the English playwright Stephen Mallatratt debuted on Christmas 1987 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England; it is the second longest running stage play in the West End of London, after The Mousetrap. A movie version starring Daniel Radcliffe and written by Jane Goodman was released in 2012. (Another film adaptation was made in 1989 for the British television network ITV, which Hill did not like.) In February 2012, when asked by a reporter for the Guardian if the 2012 film would be the final version of her famous ghost story, she said, “Who knows? I can see her as an opera.”

  Also try: Hill’s 1970 novel I’m the King of the Castle (Hamish Hamilton, 1970), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, exemplifies her ability to craft a Gothic setting. Also check out The Bird of Night (Hamish Hamilton, 1972), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction.

  Hill’s supernatural tales all share a similar slow-burn quality so if you like The Woman in Black, you will most likely enjoy her ghost stories, including The Mist in the Mirror (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992) and The Man in the Picture (Overlook, 2008).

  In her 2012 review of Hill’s short novel Dolly (Profile Books, 2012), the English writer Sadie Jones notes a parallel between this tale of two children living alone in an old house and Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. But instead of a Jamesian psychological exploration of the ambiguity of evil, one of the children in Hill’s story believes herself to be truly evil, and she certainly acts like it. Of course there’s also a doll.

  Related work: Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall (PS Publishing, 2015) provides a modern spin on the Gothic. This time a folk band, not a young woman, comes to an old house to write and record an album. Events suggest that something supernatural is going on, but the novel never reveals anything truly haunting.

  Welcome to the Dark Séance

  Sarah Waters

  1966–

  It’s probably not hard to figure out how the Welsh writer Sarah Waters grew up to be a novelist. In a 2009 interview with the Guardian’s Robert McCrum, she noted that having a much older sister made her feel at times like an only child. She was close to both of her parents, especially her father, who told her science-fiction and ghost stories of his own creation. McCrum described her childhood as happy, though often solitary; Waters told him she spent her time reading and watching “an awful lot of telly, sci-fi, horror and Doctor Who.” Waters began her literary career in 1998 with her novel Tipping the Velvet (Virago), a Victorian drama with a lesbian love story at its center. The novel caused scandal—in New Zealand, for example, it was shrink-wrapped and labeled with a warning that it was only for readers eighteen and older—which seemed to only add to its allure. Waters was a bona fide literary star. Twenty years after its publication, she wrote of her debut novel:

  “ ‘What’s it about?’ people sometimes asked me, when they had heard I’d written a novel—and I always had to brace myself, slightly, to answer. There was the awkwardness of explaining the rather risqué title. There was the fact that I outed myself the moment I began to reveal the plot.”

  That first novel grew out of her identity and her academic work on lesbian and gay historical fiction, and it signaled her transition from scholarly study to representing lesbians in fiction.

  Waters returned to lesbian drama in Fingersmith (Virago, 2012), a novel about a couple caught up in crime and class struggle. But Gothic themes recur throughout her body of work. She writes in the tradition of the Victorians, crafting classic ghost stories set in gloomy mansions and haunted by ghosts of the past that are hell-bent on being heard by the present. Her keen attention to the development of her female characters and her exploration of feminist and queer themes put her horror in the new Gothic school.

  A terrific example of Waters’s marriage of traditional Gothic horror and modern feminist sensibilities is her second novel, Affinity, published in 1999 by Virago. It’s the story of Margaret Prior, a single woman of means in Victorian England who is recovering from a suicide attempt. She devotes herself to charity, working in a women’s prison, in an attempt to heal her wounds by helping others. There she meets a spiritualist medium named Selina Dawes who is charged with fraud and assault after one of her s
éances leaves a woman dead. Margaret is drawn to this mysterious woman, and the attraction leads to a romantic relationship. Soon, pulled under the seer’s control, Margaret becomes convinced of Selina’s mysterious powers.

  The novel lacks the mirth of Tipping the Velvet; it’s a mystery at its core, ominous and imbued with the terror of what Selina calls a “dark séance.” Waters goes deeper than the table taps and spirit guides of a nineteenth-century séance and captures the intricacies of the Spiritualist movement, balancing the mysteries that came together in those darkened rooms. Is the medium communing with the dead? Is she a fraud? Is she a criminal seeking to take vulnerable people’s money? Is she a victim of a patriarchy that is systematically stripping women of their livelihood? The book is a puzzle, and it provides no easy answers. But Waters builds the sinister suspense beautifully, as well as the love story.

  Perhaps Waters’s best-known supernatural yarn is The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009), which was her third novel to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. In it, Waters raises questions about post–World War II class changes, but, remarkably, she didn’t set out to write a horror story. Initially she wanted to write a novel that explored the experience of working-class people after the war. In a 2010 article for the Guardian, Waters wrote that the book’s tone shifted after she woke “with a shriek in the middle of the night” during a stay at Dartington Hall, an estate that was hosting a literary festival. On that night, she had her recurring nightmare of seeing a figure at the end of her bed. The dream prompted Waters to start thinking about how a ghost, particularly a violent poltergeist, could heighten the class tensions in her book project. She noted in the Guardian article that the incident seemed to be an appropriate spark for an unsettling horror story. Reviewers have noted influences of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins on this Gothic tale, which never loses Waters’s intended focus on class conflict.