Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Horror had a huge impact on the small press book market. Driven by hysterically high prices paid by collectors for first editions of, in particular, Stephen King, specialty publishers turned out more and more for the collector. Donald M. Grant, who had previously specialized mostly in the works of Robert E. Howard, published a deluxe “limited” edition of King’s The Gunslinger (1984), which, in addition to the genuinely limited signed version, had at least two printings of the trade edition, making it the commonest “rare” book of its generation. But this sort of thing proliferated. Dennis Etchison’s first book, a collection of stories called The Dark Country published by Scream Press in 1982, reportedly sold out 16,000 copies in four hardcover printings, very quickly. The conventional publishing wisdom was that a book of stories by a writer who did not have any novels would not be commercially viable at all, but a one-man small publisher had just done vastly better than a regular New York publisher would have with that book. Scream Press was one of many such horror-only imprints of the boom years. It also got into the Stephen King business with a deluxe, limited edition of King’s short fiction collection Skeleton Crew illustrated by J. K. Potter. For a time, fortunes were being made in the horror field at all levels, and there seemed to be no end to the public’s appetite for such product.

  Phenomenon followed phenomenon. The works of Anne Rice, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976), opened up vast new areas of erotic horror fiction, and virtually turned vampires into a genre all to themselves. (Indeed, Warren Lapine, the publisher of Weird Tales in the 1990s, had an all-vampire magazine titled Dreams of Decadence going for a while.) All manner of other vampiric fiction proliferated, among the most notable being Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s long series about the immortal Comte St. Germain, beginning with Hotel Transylvania in 1978; Les Daniels’s series about Don Sebastian de Villanueva, beginning with The Black Castle (1978); and Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981). Vampire fiction became historical, romantic, and even occasionally funny. A notable funny example is I, Vampire by Jody Scott (1984). Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980) brilliantly analyzed the character of its vampire, but with a quasi-science fictional rationale. Michael Talbot’s The Delicate Dependency (1982) was one of the outstanding vampire novels of the period, with a claustrophobic atmosphere, surprisingly little explicit violence, and a gay subtext. His vampires are secret masters, Illuminati, wiser than mankind and always feared. S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) tells of a vampire who is perpetually a child with an ethereally beautiful voice. In the twentieth century, he is a rock star.

  Explicitly erotic horror fiction also became a recognizable category. Jeff Gelb’s Hot Blood series of anthologies proved successful and long-running, and Cecelia Tan’s Circlet Press became an entire imprint devoted to erotica, much of it horror.

  The early career of Clive Barker was almost unprecedented in the history, not only of horror fiction, but of all literature. An unknown writer suddenly came out (in England) with six volumes of stories, the Books of Blood (1984–1985), most of them previously unpublished. They were soon an international sensation, and, as the originals had been paperbacks, specialty presses raced to publish deluxe hardcover editions for the collectors. Barker certainly had the field’s attention. Stephen King proclaimed him “the future of horror.” When his first novel, The Damnation Game, came out in 1985, his continued success was assured, but, as with Etchison, it was established that a writer could make a successful career with short fiction before he had a novel published.

  Even an extremely brief and selective list of significant authors and titles from the great horror boom of the late twentieth century demonstrates the extent to which this striking publishing and literary phenomenon affected popular perceptions of horror literature, for many of these titles have become iconic, even legendary, in the collective mind of two and three generations of readers:

  1975

  Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

  1976

  Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

  1977

  Stephen King, The Shining

  1979

  Peter Straub, Ghost Story

  1984–1985

  Clive Barker, The Books of Blood

  1986

  Stephen King, It

  1988

  Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

  Matt Cardin

  Anything seemed possible. Horror was prospering in many categories. It was on the best-seller lists. It was in the collector’s market. Small press horror magazines came and went at a bewildering rate. There was loud horror, quiet horror, erotic horror, erotic romantic horror, historical horror, contemporary horror, whole subgenres about zombies and vampires, with the occasional werewolf thrown in. Laurell K. Hamilton began a long series of vampire, erotic, noir, detective fiction with Guilty Pleasures (1993), the first novel in her series titled Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter.

  The stage was at this point set for the institution of a high-budget, high-prestige horror publishing project, and it came in the form of the Dell Abyss line of horror paperbacks, edited by Jeanne Cavelos and launched in 1991 with very high expectations. The first books seem to have done well, but before long it was clear that the majority of them did not. To make matters worse, the publisher took the one really successful discovery, Poppy Z. Brite, out of the line, to be published as mainstream instead of horror, so that thereafter, on paper at least, the entire enterprise looked even less profitable than it was. For a brief time Brite (Martin) was a genuine cultural phenomenon, with two vampire novels, Lost Souls (1992) and Drawing Blood (1993), which appealed strongly to a young, alienated, Goth audience, but this did Dell Abyss little good. In any case, two books, no matter how successful, could not sustain a failing imprint or genre for long. The last Abyss books were published in 1995 with much smaller print runs and far less publicity than the earlier ones.

  The obvious conclusion was that the horror bubble had burst. The horror sections in bookstores shrank or disappeared altogether. There would, of course, be survivors, revivals, and new trends. In the late 1990s there was a flurry of nonsupernatural serial-killer novels, inspired by the success of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988), and many horror writers tried to save their careers with a leap into the lifeboat of “dark suspense.” Others ended up writing media fiction, or fell silent. The really major figures, King, Straub, Campbell, Koontz, Rice, and a few others, rode out the collapse. The revival of interest in all things Lovecraftian, which was marked by the centennial anthology Lovecraft’s Legacy, edited by Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg in 1990, was just getting started. But horror bestsellers were rare. Much of it retreated to the small presses. The boom had definitely gone bust.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Horror Anthologies; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Three, Reference Entries: Arkham House; Barker, Clive; Books of Blood; Brite, Poppy Z.; Campbell, Ramsey; Charnas, Suzy McKee; The Damnation Game; Etchison, Dennis; The Exorcist; Farris, John; Grant, Charles L.; Harris, Thomas; Interview with the Vampire; Joshi, S. T.; King, Stephen; Klein, T. E. D.; Koontz, Dean; Ligotti, Thomas; McCammon, Robert R.; The Other; Rice, Anne; Rosemary’s Baby; Schweitzer, Darrell; Splatterpunk; Straub, Peter; Wilson, F. Paul; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1999. “Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950–1998.” In Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet, edited by Neil Barron, 199–344. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

  Glover, John. 2016. “The Life and Afterlife of Horror Fiction.” Postscripts to Darkness, June 12. https://pstdarkness.com/2016/06/12/1707.

  Hantke, Steffen. 2008. “The Decline of the Literary Horror Market in the 1990s and Dell’s Abyss Series.” Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 1: 56–70.

  Joshi, S. T. 2012. Unutterab
le Horror, a History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing.

  HORROR VIDEO GAMES

  From the outset, horror video games have been indebted to horror cinema. Indeed, famous game designers such as Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark, Infogrames, 1992) and Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Capcom, 1996) have overtly acknowledged that they take their inspiration from film and wish to give gamers the feeling of being the main character in a horror movie. As both Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil depict a mansion where the action takes place through predetermined camera angles, the connection could not be clearer. However, such a link should not obscure the bearing of literature on horror games. Fully as much as cinema, the horror video game—especially the third-person action-adventure games labeled as survival horror—borrows many of its themes and narratives, and much of its iconography, from the Gothic and from fantastic short stories and novels recast in an interactive media. As the Gothic is known to actively involve the reader in the construction of a story to provoke strong emotions of horror, fear, and terror, video game scholars have underlined how natural was its adaptation into games, what Tanya Krzywinska calls the “gamification of Gothic” (2015). The dominant tropes of the Gothic have found a renewed breath in games.

  The old mansion, the crypt, the sewer, the graveyard, or the abandoned public building, the deserted laboratory, the subway tunnel—all of these locales have to be explored by the horror gamer. The gloomy and oppressive mood described in detail in Gothic novels is transposed in a forthright manner to the videoludic realm (that is, the realm combining the visual [video] with gaming and play [the ludic]). Horror video games privilege atmosphere over action, providing a dreadful experience that needs to be lived, rendering the surroundings unsafe or likely to become dangerous without warning. This relationship to spatial exploration is intimately linked to the history of video games. As early as the 1970s, Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther, 1976) and Zork (Infocom, 1979) offered adventures in mysterious caves, dungeons, and houses to gamers who typed commands in textually depicted environments. Far from being disadvantaged compared to graphical representation, the use of words allowed the creation of vivid and deep fictional worlds. At a time when technology was a great obstacle to the pioneering attempts at the horror genre, text adventures offered great opportunities for ambiance and plot development. British video game publishing company CRL Group released games mostly based on landmark Gothic tales, such as Dracula (Pike & Ellery, 1986), Frankenstein (Pike & Derrett, 1987), and Wolfman (Pike & Derrett, 1988). Previously, The Rats (GXT, 1985), based on the eponymous novel by James Herbert, not only relied on the text adventure’s tools but also integrated simulation elements, allowing the gamer to organize the governmental response to the rat outbreak. Rodents would swarm the text as well, clouding the perception of the action and conveying the panic afflicting the characters. Such ludic experimentations became more and more frequent as the downfall of text adventures brought by technological advancement permitted the development of other types of games.

  The actional dimension of video games asks for an embodiment of the threat. Unlike the student filmmakers in The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), the player-character encounters actual evil foes during the videoludic adaptation Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (Terminal Reality, 2000). In side-scrolling platform games such as Ghost House (Sega, 1986), Castlevania (Konami, 1986), or Vampire: Master of Darkness (SIMS, 1992), the gamer faces the whole Gothic bestiary: ghosts, vampires, mummies, demons, skeletons, zombies, demons, and so on. While those monsters do not breed fear, as they are more obstacles to be destroyed in order to move on instead of monstrous evil threats, 3-D action games do stage frightening confrontations. This change is salient in the first-person shooters Clive Barker’s Undying (DreamWorks Interactive, 2001) and Clive Barker’s Jericho (Mercury Steam Entertainment, 2007). Additionally, with Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Action Game and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie, developed by Impact Software Development in 1990, the author of Cabal (1988) and writer-director of Hellraiser (1987) is one of the very few writers to have his name upfront regarding his involvement in the video game industry. Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Dreamers Guild, 1995) is another notable example.

  That said, one of the most influential authors on horror video games is, undoubtedly, H. P. Lovecraft. Since the famous text adventure The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987), dozens of adaptations of the Cthulhu Mythos have been made, demonstrating an important compatibility between Lovecraft’s horrific fictional universe and adventure video games: Lovecraft’s cosmic fear works well with, and makes up for, the slow pacing and lack of sensory-motor challenges in adventure games. Plus, their basic dynamic—putting together clues in order to unlock new areas with more mysteries—is at the heart of the Lovecraftian plot, and these mechanics remain an essential part of horror video games. Here, the literary influence is expressed in a manner specific to the videoludic medium. Lovecraft’s emphasis on the loss of cosmic landmarks and sanity allows for much experimentation: sanity meters, inherited from a first ludification of his universe through the role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium, 1981), appear in both Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, 2002) and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (Headfirst Production, 2005), and may lead the gamer to see the image on the screen distorted by hallucinations when his or her character loses his mind. More psychological than gore-oriented, the vision may be interpreted as obscured or unreliable, and the clear-mindedness of the protagonist questioned (like the loss of consciousness leading to the Otherworld in Silent Hill [Konami, 1999]). The unreliable narrator from fantastic literature, such as those found in so many stories by Edgar Allan Poe—whose short stories were adapted in The Dark Eye (Inscape, 1995)—has become an unreliable playable character. The testimony form cherished by this genre has also proved to be quite amenable to horror video games, which are filled with written texts and hidden secrets scattered everywhere, explaining what took place or giving access to a lost history (as with the many files and documents found in Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion). In Fatal Frame (Tecmo, 2001), the camera obscura allows the gamer to fight off or liberate ghosts by taking pictures of them, while in Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013) the gamer can use a video camera to record dreadful events.

  The subversion of aesthetics that is used to immerse the reader in literary horror has become characteristic of survival horror games, which merge the adventure and action genres. While adventure games rely mainly on finding objects and solving puzzles, horror games use these moments to trigger the appearance of the aforementioned embodied threats. Such is the case in Silent Hill, where the discovery of the first key item (a radio) leads to a creature bursting through the window. While action games emphasize confrontation and empowerment, games like Alone in the Dark make controls so clumsy, combat so difficult, and ammunition so scarce that players are better off avoiding fighting. They are forced to forsake their habits and circle around monsters rather than overcome them. Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005) created a new trend of horror games in which reflex and precision are required to defeat numerous enemies. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010)—whose engine is called “HPL,” after Lovecraft—transformed the genre once again by setting its action in the first-person perspective with enemies that cannot be looked at without draining sanity. Hence, the agonistic progression in first-person shooters in which the gamer always points a weapon at what he or she looks at eventually led to disarmament and a Lovecraftian perilous gaze. Going one step further, the “playable teaser” P.T. (Kojima Productions, 2014), developed for the canceled game Silent Hills, offered an experience voided of any confrontation: the gamer explores a never-ending corridor, filled with strange events and apparitions, and must solve its mysteries in order to escape. Fear and enigmas are the main obstacles within this impossible architecture of looping rooms
, with doors leading to different places each time, and with inverted floors, ceilings, and walls. Such experiences renew horror video games with the literary heritage of horror as they throw the gamer into dark and strange worlds that she or he tries to understand in order to reconstitute the story.

  A Timeline of Significant Horror Video

  (and Computer) Games

  1985

  The Rats (GXT), based on James Herbert’s 1974 novel

  1986

  Castlevania (Konami); Dracula (CRL Group); Ghost House (Sega)

  1987

  Frankenstein (CRL Group); The Lurking Horror (Infocom), based on H. P. Lovecraft’s 1923 short story

  1988

  Wolfman (CRL Group)

  1990

  Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Action Game and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie (Impact Software Development)

  1992

  Alone in the Dark (Infogames); Dark Seed (Cyberdream); Vampire: Master of Darkness (SIMS)

  1993

  Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (Sierra On-line, 1993)

  1995

  The Dark Eye (Inscape), based on the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe; Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Dreamers Guild)

  1996

  Resident Evil (Capcom)

  1999

  Silent Hill (Konami)

  2000