by Matt Cardin
1981
Dennis Etchison, The Dark Country; Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (the novel that introduced Hannibal Lecter); Stephen King, Cujo and Danse Macabre; Robert R. McCammon, They Thirst; Sandy Peterson, The Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game); Whitley Strieber, The Hunger; F. Paul Wilson, The Keep; launch of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, edited by T. E. D. Klein, Michael Blaine, and Tappan King
1982
Thomas Tessier, Shockwaves
1983
William Peter Blatty, Legion (sequel to The Exorcist); Robert Bloch, Psycho 2; Susan Hill, The Woman in Black; Black Water, edited by Alberto Manguel; Fantastic Tales, edited by Italo Calvino; The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, edited by E. F. Bleiler
1984
Clive Barker, The Books of Blood; Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild”; Stephen King and Peter Straub, The Talisman; T. E. D. Klein, The Ceremonies; Alan Moore takes over DC’s Swamp Thing; John Skipp and Craig Spector, The Light at the End; S. P. Somtow, Vampire Junction
1985
Clive Barker, The Damnation Game; Stephen King, Skeleton Crew; T. E. D. Klein, Dark Gods; Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer; Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat; Ray Russell, Haunted Castle: The Complete Gothic Tales of Ray Russell; Dan Simmons, Song of Kali
1986
Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart; Stephen King, It; Brian Lumley, Necroscope; Lisa Tuttle, A Nest of Nightmares; “splatterpunk” coined by David J. Schow
1987
Clive Barker, Weaveworld; Stephen King, Misery; Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Michael Shea, Polyphemus and Fat Face; Whitley Strieber, Communion; founding of the Horror Writers Association (as Horror Writers of America) and establishment of the Bram Stoker Award Dean Koontz, Watchers
1988
Clive Barker, Cabal; Neil Gaiman, Sandman (launch of comic book series); Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs; Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned; John Skipp and Craig Spector, The Scream; Prime Evil, edited by Douglas A. Winter; revival of Weird Tales by George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer
1989
Neil Gaiman, Sandman #1; Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door; Joe R. Lansdale, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks; Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque; Anne Rice, The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned; Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort
1990
Robert Bloch, Psycho House; Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart; Thomas Ligotti, “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Robert R. McCammon, Mine; Anne Rice, The Witching Hour; Lovecraft’s Legacy, edited by Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg; Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, edited by Paul Sammon
1991
Clive Barker, Imajica; Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho; Thomas Ligotti, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; Alan Moore, From Hell (issue 1); launch of the Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks; founding of the International Gothic Association
1992
Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls; Tanith Lee, Dark Dance and Heart Beast; Kim Newman, Anno Dracula
1993
Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood; Ramsey Campbell, Alone with the Horrors; Stefan Grabiński, The Dark Domain; Laurell K. Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures
1994
Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon; Jack Ketchum, “The Box”; Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-Tep; Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary and The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales; Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
1995
Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie; establishment of the International Horror Guild Award (which will run to 2008)
1996
Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse; Ramsey Campbell, The House on Nazareth Hill; Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory
1997
Thomas Tessier, Fogheart
1998
Tom Holland, The Sleeper in the Sands; Caitlín R. Kiernan, Silk
1999
Michael Cisco, The Divinity Student; Thomas Harris, Hannibal; H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (first of three Penguin Classics volumes that help to canonize Lovecraft as a major American author); Peter Straub, Mr. X; launch of the journal Gothic Studies
2000
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves; Stephen King, The Bullet (published online as a freely downloadable eBook for the first week); Sarah Langan, The Keeper; Patrick McGrath, Martha Peake; China Miéville, Perdido Street Station; Jeffrey Thomas, Punktown
2001
Tananarive Due, The Living Blood; Neil Gaiman, American Gods; Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark (first novel in The Southern Vampire Mysteries, later adapted for television as True Blood); Stephen King and Peter Straub, Black House; Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen; Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby; Jeff VanderMeer, City of Saints and Madmen
2002
Matt Cardin, Divinations of the Deep; Neil Gaiman, Coraline; Thomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Done; China Miéville, The Scar; David Morrell, Long Lost
2003
Brian Keene, The Rising; Reggie Oliver, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini; Mark Samuels, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales; Jeff VanderMeer, Veniss Underground; awarding of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King; debut of Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead
2004
China Miéville, Iron Council; Adam Nevill, The Banquet of the Damned
2005
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian; Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling; John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead; Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts; H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, edited by Peter Straub and published by Library of America; Stephenie Meyer, Twilight; Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
2006
Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War; Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco; launch of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
2007
Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories; Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box; Sarah Langan, The Missing; John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Reggie Oliver, Masques of Satan; Dan Simmons, The Terror; establishment of the Shirley Jackson Awards
2008
John Langan, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters; Mark Samuels, Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes; Poe’s Children, edited by Peter Straub; launch of Creepypasta.com
2009
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Red Tree; John Langan, House of Windows; Joe McKinney, Dead City
2010
Laird Barron, Occultation and Other Stories; Matt Cardin, Dark Awakenings; Justin Cronin, The Passage; Joe Hill, Horns; Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race; Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies; Adam Nevill, Apartment 16; Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching; debut of The Walking Dead television series on AMC; launch of the academic journal Horror Studies
2011
Laird Barron, The Light Is the Darkness; Livia Llewellyn, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors; Adam Nevill, The Ritual; Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen; The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
2012
Laird Barron, The Croning; Richard Gavin, At Fear’s Altar; Jack Ketchum, I’m Not Sam; Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir; Adam Nevill, Last Days
2013
Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All; Joe Hill, NOS4A2; John Langan, The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
2014
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners; Adam Nevill, No One Gets Out Alive; Simon Strantzas, Burnt Black Suns; Jeff VanderMeer, the Southern Reach Trilogy
2015
Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels; Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall; Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (Penguin Classics edition with revised texts); Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts; National Medal of the Arts awarded to Stephen King
2015–2016
Alan Moore, Providence
2016
Laird Barron, Swift to Chase; Joe Hill, The Fireman; John Langan, The Fisherman; Livia Llewellyn, Furnace; Jon Padgett, The Secret of Ventriloquism
Part One: Horror through
History
HORROR IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Horror and the supernatural enter literature with one of the earliest extant literary documents, the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1700 BCE), which was a product of ancient Mesopotamian culture. This fragmentary text already features such elements as the superhero, prophetic dreams, a descent into the underworld, and the quest for eternal life. But it was the writers of classical antiquity, especially the Greeks, who, with their prodigal creation of gods and monsters, definitively infused terror and strangeness into literature. The term “classical antiquity” itself refers to the fusion of ancient Greek and Roman culture, lasting from about the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE, a period whose literature, art, and philosophy have exercised and continue to exercise an immense influence on Western civilization.
It is problematical to speak of “ancient Greece” as a unified entity, because the region was for centuries a series of largely autonomous and often warring city-states, chief of which were Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. The commencement of Greek civilization can be dated to around 1200 BCE (the approximate date of the Trojan War), although extant Greek literature does not emerge in abundance until the fifth century BCE. Alexander the Great did unify Greece politically and militarily in the later fourth century, but the Romans subjugated Greece two centuries later.
The Romans dated the founding of their city to 753 BCE, but did not emerge as a world power until the third century BCE. With the establishment and expansion of the Roman Empire in the course of the first and second centuries CE, the entire Mediterranean came under the sway of a single military power. The result was that both Greek and Latin literature flourished throughout the region, with leading writers emerging from Spain, North Africa, and elsewhere. The end of classical antiquity is canonically dated to 476 CE, when the Goths sacked Rome and overthrew the last Roman emperor.
The Greeks and the Romans initiated—and in many ways perfected—some of the major genres of literature, ranging from epic poetry (Homer, Virgil) to the drama, both tragic (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca the Younger) and comic (Aristophanes, Plautus), to lyric poetry (Pindar, Horace), to history (Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus), and even the novel (Lucian, Apuleius). Within these diverse genres there was abundant room for the expression of horrific themes, and both the Greeks and the Romans took occasional advantage of it.
In Homer’s Odyssey (codified around 700 BCE, but based on oral sources extending as far back as the twelfth century), Odysseus provides a first-person account of his travels throughout the known and unknown world that spans three books (books 9–12) and includes encounters with such curious entities as the Laestrygonians (a giant cannibal race who eat some of Odysseus’s men), the sorceress Circe (who can turn human beings into animals), the Sirens (hybrid creatures, half bird and half woman, whose songs are fatally alluring), and Scylla and Charybdis (the one a whirlpool, the other a sea creature with six heads and twelve feet). Perhaps most memorable is Odysseus’s battle with Polyphemus, a creature belonging to a race called the Cyclops (literally “round-eyed,” with the implication that the creature has only one eye in the center of his forehead). Some of these entities are only alluded to in the Odyssey, but they are described more exhaustively in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE), an account of the origin of the gods that is as close as the Greeks ever came to having a sacred text.
A Timeline of Horror in the Ancient World
ca. 750–700 BCE
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey feature tales of gods, monsters, and magic. The Odyssey features Odysseus’s trip to the underworld. Hesiod’s Theogony presents additional descriptions of monstrous and supernatural entities.
5th century BCE
Greek tragedy has its heyday in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, featuring supernaturalism and grisly scenes of physical horror.
3rd century BCE
Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica narrates Jason and the Argonauts’ encounters with multiple monsters and supernatural threats.
1st century BCE
The supernatural plays a significant part in the works of Horace and Virgil.
1st century CE
Petronius’s Satyricon presents the first extant account of a werewolf in ancient literature. Ovid’s Metamorphosis relates tales of human beings transforming into animals and plants. The plays of Seneca the Younger retell Greek stories full of blood and thunder.
2nd century CE
Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, a.k.a. The Golden Ass, includes transformation, witchcraft, and more.
Odysseus’s venture into the realm of the dead (book 11) has a number of curious features. First, this realm is not actually under the earth, as in the standard Greek view, but instead in a remote region far to the west. Homer does not name the region aside from calling it “the house of Hades,” referring to the god who rules the realm; but later sources sometimes use Hades to refer to the place itself. When he encounters the shades of the dead, Odysseus tries to embrace them, but they “fluttered out of my hands like a shadow / or a dream” (11.207–208). The suggestion is that the shades resemble the forms they had in life but are virtually immaterial.
Greek tragedy—flowering especially during the fifth century BCE in Athens, where annual contests were held among dramatists—contributed to the elaboration of Greek myth while at the same time probing human nature and social conflict with unprecedented subtlety and emotive power. Medea (whose name means “the cunning one”) was the focus of Euripides’s great play Medea (431 BCE). When her husband Jason, who brought her from Colchis (a remote city in Asia Minor) to be his wife, takes up with a younger woman, Medea appeals to Hecate (the goddess of magic and witchcraft) and prepares a dress and a golden diadem laced with poison. A Messenger’s speech telling of the grisly deaths of both Creon (Jason’s father-in-law) and Creon’s daughter (Medea, lines 1121–1230) is one of the most vivid passages of physical horror in classical antiquity. Somewhat similar, albeit nonsupernatural, is Euripides’s Bacchae (The Bacchantes; 405 BCE), in which women inflamed by the god Dionysus dismember King Pentheus of Thebes. (This event is also described by a Messenger rather than presented on stage.)
In Euripides’s Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis; ca. 425 BCE), Deianira gives Herakles a robe that has been poisoned by the blood of Nessus, a centaur who had attacked her. Herakles suffers horrible agony when he puts the robe on. The Herakles (Hercules in Latin) cycle, embodied in the twelve “labors” that he was forced to undertake, is largely separate from the Homeric cycle, but features such distinctive creatures as the snake-headed Hydra and the three-headed dog Cerberus, who guards the entrance to Hades.
Ghosts also make striking appearances in Greek literature. In Homer’s Iliad (ca. 750 BCE), the ghost of the slain soldier Patrocles berates his friend Achilles for not burying his corpse, thereby preventing him from crossing “the river” (i.e., the Styx, in Hades) and mingling with other shades in the underworld. Ghosts also appear in Greek tragedy, chiefly as baleful prognosticators of future woe. In Aeschylus’s Persae (The Persians; 472 BCE), a distinctive melding of contemporary history and supernaturalism, the Persian queen Atossa summons the ghost of King Darius, who is unaware that his forces have been decisively defeated by the Greeks in the battle of Salamis (480 BCE). In Aeschylus’s Eumenides (458 BCE—the middle play in the trilogy Oresteia), the ghost of Clytemnestra upbraids Orestes for murdering her and urges the Furies to plague him. The prologue to Euripides’s Hecuba (ca. 425 BCE) is spoken by Polydorus, the son of Hecuba and Priam of Troy, who now “hovers as a wraith over my mother’s head” (line 29).
With Athens’s defeat by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE), Greek literature entered a phase referred to as Hellenistic, when highly sophisticated writers used mythic figures
to display their own erudition and exhibit a bland cynicism about life and society. Many of the leading writers of the period flourished in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, although at this point it was thoroughly Greek in culture. Apollonius Rhodius’s epic Argonautica (third century BCE) recounts the quest for the Golden Fleece, as Jason gathers an illustrious band of cohorts for his voyage on the Argo. Along the way he encounters the bronze giant Talos; meets the prophet Phineus, who, having offended Zeus, is plagued by the Harpies (birdlike creatures; their name means “the snatchers”) who pluck his food away just as he is about to eat it; and braves the Clashing Rocks, immense cliffs that, at the Bosporus, clash together, crushing any ships that attempt to make their way through them. But a substantial portion of the Argonautica deals with Medea, who helps Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. At the very outset Medea is described as “something of a witch” (3.89); one of her most distinctive potions is a magic ointment made from the ichor of Prometheus, the demigod whom Zeus punished for giving the secret of fire to human beings.
The defeat of the Greeks at the battle of Corinth in 146 BCE spelled the definitive subordination of the Greek city-states to the increasing power of Rome. The sturdy, practical Romans developed a reputation in antiquity of scorning the fine arts, including literature, for the more “manly” arts of warfare and governance; and while it is true that many Latin authors—including the greatest of them, Horace and Virgil—were heavily reliant upon Greek models, Latin literature does include many imperishable works of poetry, drama, and history; and the supernatural plays a significant part in this array of writing.
