Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Even more pointedly, the final book of Roman poet Lucretius’s De rerum natura (55 BCE), whose vision of universal atomic transformation and decay had a profound effect on the development of modern cosmic horror, provides a harrowing account of the effects of the plague at Athens derived from the historian Thucydides. Its horrors, however, are wielded as didactic weapons by Lucretius, who uses the inevitable terror and sufferings of death as the capstone for his attempt to persuade the reader of the value, even the necessity, of rejecting religious superstitions and accepting Epicurean epistemology and ethics. Lucretius emphasizes that it is the lack of comprehension of the nature and necessity of death that leads the plague’s victims to their violent and irrational behaviors.

  However, Lucretius’s modern reception also suggests the degree to which horror’s visceral manifest content can entirely overshadow its ability to function as social criticism, as it is the poem’s visions of suffering and disintegration that made the greatest impression on most of its readers throughout the intervening millennia, to the extent that its vision of panicked putrescence is echoed by two of the most important early examples of literary body horror, Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) and H. P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) “Cool Air” (1928). In both these tales, the attempt to prolong human life through (pseudo) scientific means leads to putrid conclusions.

  Some literary works use horror to effect social criticism more overtly and explicitly than others, often through an emphasis on the allegorical or symbolic dimensions of supernatural threats. In works of literary horror from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which satirizes Roman Catholic beliefs, to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), which crystallizes and interrogates Cold War and civil rights–era anxieties, to Joe Hill’s The Fireman (2016), which connects a deadly infection to the escalating role of outrage in contemporary cultural politics, elements of supernaturalism are often used to frame social issues.

  When handled this way, horror as a form of social criticism can potentially be pointed and specific, and tends to function much like satire; where the latter targets certain beliefs, behaviors, or types of people by ridiculing them, the former transfigures anxieties about certain beliefs, behaviors, or people into objects of terror. The use of supernatural threats as allegories of social crisis goes back at least to the early modern era; one striking example occurs in the early eighteenth century, during the apparent epidemic of bloodthirsty revenants in Eastern Europe that helped spark the popular rise of the literary vampire. In response to various accounts of corpses rising from their graves and attacking their family and neighbors, one anonymous commentator wrote to the British journal The Craftsman: “These Vampyres are said to torment and kill the Living by sucking out all their Blood; and a ravenous Minister, in this part of the World, is compared to a Leech or a Blood-sucker, and carries his Oppressions beyond the Grave, by anticipating the publick Revenues, and entailing a perpetuity of Taxes, which must gradually drain the Body Politick of its Blood and Spirits” (Butler 2010, 53).

  Of course, the history of horror fiction, like the history of literary satire, offers many examples of social criticism that are more likely to be understood as reactionary rather than radical. For example, The Monk notably propagated a wide variety of specious Anglican stereotypes about Roman Catholic belief; Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is inseparable from its author’s patriarchal, Victorian anxieties about the social dangers of female sexuality and the “dangers” of foreign immigration into England; Lovecraft’s obsession with the “corrupting” dangers of multiculturalism and his desire to police the boundaries of white, Anglo-American culture are writ large even in many of his least polemical fictions; and Dean Koontz’s (1945–) conservative family values are obvious in many of his horror novels. This prevailing tendency led King, in his influential autobiographical study of horror, Danse Macabre (1981), to compare horror writers to Republican bankers in three-piece suits, exploiting social anxieties for their own gain.

  On the other hand, there are many examples of classic horror fictions producing positive social change through pointed criticism. While her best-known tale, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), is a chilling psychological variation on the ghost story often reprinted in Gothic anthologies, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) expressly wrote it as a critique of the Victorian medical profession’s damaging, infantilizing treatment of women diagnosed with hysteria. Though the story became widely read and vitally influential, Gilman was aware that many readers, appreciating it primarily as a work of fictional horror, remained unaware of the story’s autobiographical and social-critical context, and wrote the brief essay “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (1911) nearly two decades later in an attempt to counter this. The tendency of Gilman’s readers to understand “ghost story/horror story” and “literary social criticism” as mutually exclusive categories anticipates a prevailing critical tendency through much of the twentieth century to see horror fiction, as well as related speculative genres, as purely pop-cultural entertainment, and therefore divorced from the probing social and moral scrutiny associated with and expected from “high” literature. This misperception of horror, as well as the other speculative genres, is both as widespread and as mistaken today as it was in Gilman’s time. As influential American writer Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) states, “The essential horror springs from life—fiction is a mirror of life, sometimes distorted in the interests of meaning, sometimes raw and unmediated. There is no fiction so horrifying as the horror of actual life—not just life in wartime, or life amid violence, but the incursions of our ordinary lives upon us: aging, illness, gradual loss of family and friends. Sometimes to tell a realistic story, you must choose a non-realistic form to emphasize a point—this is the power of genre” (Morton 2014).

  Despite this recognition, the perceived association between horror and, on the one hand, purely sensationalistic entertainment and, on the other, a departure from realism and an embrace of fantastic and supernatural elements, has led many modern and contemporary writers to query or outright reject the label “horror” as applied to their work. American writer Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), for example, known for her use of Gothic and grotesque elements, viewed classification of her stories as “horror” as misguided, writing, “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror” (O’Connor 1988, 90). Contemporary weird fictionist Caitlín R. Kiernan has similarly rejected the term “horror” for her fiction, precisely because she sees it as antithetical to her desire to pose ethical questions and challenge the reader’s ability to empathize and identify with the Other.

  If “horror” is defined primarily as the intention to elicit a strong emotional response from readers that combines fear and disgust with other affective, ethical, or aesthetic concerns viewed as only secondary effects, then surely O’Connor and Kiernan are right to reject the label. Understood this way, horror is necessarily an exploitative genre, predisposed to demonize and denigrate difference and change, converting it into a transient “buzz” of subjective intensity. While this description surely seems suited to some works of horror fiction, it is ultimately reductive. If, however, influential film theorist Robin Wood’s view that what constitutes “radical,” and therefore valuable, horror is that it cultivates the audience’s (or reader’s) sympathy for the monster, and uses this sympathy to challenge normative and hegemonic assumptions, then the possibilities for horror’s functioning as a form of radical social commentary are greatly expanded.

  The Heresy of the Didactic

  In his posthumously published essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850), Edgar Allan Poe articulated what he called the “heresy of the didactic,” rejecti
ng the idea that literature should provide moral instruction; instead, the province of art, he said, was the creation of beauty, of effect, of atmosphere. Thus Poe anticipated much of the art for art’s sake sensibility of the later Symbolist and Decadent movements, as well as twentieth-century movements including Dada and surrealism, which influenced twentieth-century horror and weird fiction.

  However, the rejection of overt didacticism and the possibility of literature as social criticism are not mutually exclusive. Poe’s attack on the nineteenth century’s idol of didacticism was itself a social criticism. As many readers have noted, Poe’s tales are not without moral undercurrents or social engagements. Indeed, the question of moral culpability is one Poe turns to time and again in tales like “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). The social relevance of such tales is amplified as they were written at a moment when British and American jurisprudence wrestled with the complex issue of legal culpability in cases where mental illness was a factor, an issue that would lead to the M’Naghten rules in British law in 1843, and one that continues to haunt, and be haunted by, contemporary horror fictions including Patrick McGrath’s Spider (1990) and Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995).

  Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Literary Criticism IV. Edited by James A. Harrison. New York: Society of English and French Literature.

  While they are arguably examples of science fiction as much as of horror, vampirism-focused fictions including Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980), Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), and Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005) demonstrate this possibility by using many recognizable tropes of horror fiction to produce salient and nuanced examinations of the way racial and sexual difference is constructed in contemporary American society. Both of these novels suggest and problematize parallels between their “supernatural” protagonists and marginalized social groups, refusing easy allegorical interpretations while still vividly reframing widespread cultural concepts.

  The critical role played by horror literature also need not be limited to its overt framing of particular topics. Indeed, if Poe’s rejection of the “heresy of the didactic” and his criticisms of allegory are taken seriously, horror, like any literary form in which affect, tone, and atmosphere are crucial, will tend to be more effective when its social-critical or symbolic aspects are an undercurrent, however forceful. More broadly, critics and theorists of horror including Barbara Creed and Noël Carroll have argued that horror can itself best be understood through the work of abjection (confrontation with the fear and loathing of the rejected “other”) and the transgression of cultural categories, in which case horror only exists as a literary mode when it offers unsettling challenges to accepted cultural norms.

  As Gina Wisker writes, “the objects and subjects of horror are not always what they appear to be and are very often socially, politically, and culturally transgressive and challenging. Restoring order, which is itself dubious and questionable, destructive, and illegitimate (oppressive gender roles, slavery, imperialism, capitalism, etc.) is not always the aim of the radical horror writer” (Wisker 2005, 10). This view is shared by influential British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, who states: “Horror fiction is in the business of going too far, of showing the audience things they’ve avoided seeing or thinking. Very much like humour, it’s in the business of breaking taboos, and it follows that once those taboos are broken the fiction tends to lose power, to become ‘safe’” (quoted in Joshi 2001, 20).

  Sean Moreland

  See also: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; Horror Criticism; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Three, Reference Entries: Butler, Octavia E.; Campbell, Ramsey; Charnas, Suzy McKee; Hill, Joe; I Am Legend; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Koontz, Dean; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Monk; Oates, Joyce Carol; O’Connor, Flannery; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

  Further Reading

  Butler, Erik. 2010. Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Unnumbered). Rochester, NY: Camden House.

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

  Morton, Lisa. 2014. “Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Nightmare Magazine 25. http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-joyce-carol-oates.

  O’Connor, Flannery. 1988. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. Collected Works XI. Edited by James A. Harrison. New York: Crowell. 71. See also X, 60–71; XI, 67–85; and XIII, 148–155.

  Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An introduction. New York: Continuum.

  HORROR LITERATURE IN THE INTERNET AGE

  The Internet age is the current period of contemporary history. Alternatively referred to as the computer age, the digital age, or the new media age, this period is marked by the computerization of information and the growth of online connectivity via social, financial, and informational networks. In addition, it also corresponds to the growth of digital technology. Though much of the relevant technology has its origins in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the Internet age is largely considered an umbrella term for the twenty-first century so far. The advent of Web 2.0 is of particular significance, since this saw the Internet change from a largely static information source to a fluid, user-generated, networked community. It was crucial in the movement toward an interactive online “life.”

  As with all technological and cultural developments, the Internet age and its attendant technologies has had a profound impact on the landscape of horror. The increasing power of digital technology has afforded filmmakers, game designers, and artists the means to create horror with unprecedented visual sophistication. Equally, online networks provide both a marketplace for global sales of horror media and the opportunity for fans of the genre to meet, discuss, and create. The Internet is full of websites devoted to horror in all its guises.

  In addition to advancing both the production and promotion of horror, the Internet has also become the focus of horror in its own right. Horror has always exploited anxieties about new technologies, and in recent years the Internet has become a recurrent trope, particularly in cinema. Recent horror films such as Fear.com (dir. William Malone, 2002), Pulse (dir. Jim Sonzero, 2006), Unfriended (dir. Leo Gabriadze, 2014), and Friend Request (dir. Simon Verhoeven, 2016) emphasize the terrifying potential of the Internet’s indistinct relationship with reality. The more recent films dwell much more heavily on the inherent menace posed by social media, imposing a supernatural horror aesthetic over real-world concerns about privacy, anonymity, and the misuse of information.

  In comparison with cinema, horror fiction’s engagement with the Internet initially appears relatively slight. At first glance the Web seems to have gained less of a foothold in horror fiction than it has in science fiction or the mainstream techno-thriller. However, closer scrutiny reveals a significant link between online culture and the horror writing of recent years. Though the Internet has yet to become as common a trope within horror fiction as it has within the horror movie, there are a number of important contemporary novels that either feature the Internet as a major concern or that are influenced by its formal properties.

  One of the first horror novels to interact with the Internet was Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). The novel is now widely considered a key text in twenty-first-century horror, due largely to its reorientation of what a “book” can do. Much of the attention is focused on the novel’s experimentation with text and its interest in modern media. Though House of Leaves makes little direct reference to the Internet, it is worth noting that much of the early interest in the novel was raised by its online presence. Before the book was bought for mainstream publication, Danielewski uploaded a fifty-page exc
erpt to his own website in 1997. The file was copied and appeared in various places around the Web in an early (and unplanned) example of viral proliferation. Encountering House of Leaves in this way effectively furthered the blurring of realities that is so crucial to the novel’s plot and form. Danielewski’s novel maintains the pretense that it is a “found” document, in which competing narratives consistently query each other’s authenticity. Indeed, it directly addresses a parallel concern of the digital age: the waning of trust in the photographic or video image. House of Leaves’ central narrative behaves like an urban legend, in which not only is verification impossible, but that impossibility is the point. Danielewski’s novel is not about the Internet per se, but it does construct a terrifying narrative around the very anxieties that mark the Internet era: worries about accuracy, authenticity, and basic truth.

  These same issues recur in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh Trilogy. Comprising Feed (2010), Deadline (2011), and Blackout (2012), the trilogy depicts the aftermath of a zombie uprising in which online blogging has usurped conventional journalism. The story follows a team of young bloggers who are invited to cover a presidential campaign, during which they stumble across a major political conspiracy. While the postzombie backdrop is well developed and fairly original (insofar as the world has come to terms with the outbreak and civilization endures), Grant’s major innovation is in using the outbreak to reveal the inadequacy of mainstream journalism as an information source. In this way the Newsflesh trilogy can be read as a commentary on real-world media responses to global issues, especially relating to politics and disaster scenarios. In Feed in particular, the importance of firsthand accounts via professional bloggers corresponds to the media’s increasing reliance on amateur footage and the way that traditional news channels fail to keep pace with user-generated sources such as YouTube and Twitter.