Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  After falling out with the Lovecraft circle, Barlow met Lawrence Hart and began publishing activist poetry. He eventually moved on to a successful career in anthropology at Mexico City College as an expert in Mesoamerican culture and the Náhuatl language. Barlow committed suicide in January 1951.

  Travis Rozier

  See also: Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Smith, Clark Ashton.

  Further Reading

  Barlow, R. H. 2002. Eyes of the God: The Weird Fiction and Poetry of R. H. Barlow, edited by S. T. Joshi, Douglas A. Anderson, and David E. Schulz. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Berutti, Massimo. 2011. Dim-Remembered Stories: A Critical Study of R. H. Barlow. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  BARRON, LAIRD (1970–)

  Laird Samuel Barron is a writer of weird fiction from the United States. He is one of the most significant early twenty-first-century writers of cosmic horror and has received many plaudits, award nominations, and awards for his work.

  Barron was born in Palmer, Alaska, and raised on a wilderness parcel in an isolated area, in general poverty. In Alaska he later worked as a fisherman on the Bering Sea and raced the Iditarod, a punishing long-distance sled-dog race, three times. The wilderness and the harsh conditions of his upbringing have fed his work.

  Barron’s work falls in the tradition of Lovecraft’s cosmicism by portraying humans as living at the mercy of inhuman metaphysical forces and entities whose nature and concerns dwarf the human perspective and emerge as intrinsically horrifying to it. But in contrast to Lovecraft, Barron’s outer entities are not utterly Other and indifferent to humankind. They are not expressions of a pessimistic shudder at the insignificance of the planet Earth and its civilizations. Instead, Barron’s cosmos is actively malevolent. In his stories, the things from the far corners of the universe are petty and cruel. In this, Barron’s fiction bears similarities to Thomas Ligotti’s. A black miasma underlies everything, and men and women are little more than puppets of this malicious vital force. But in Barron’s work, unlike in Ligotti’s, human life is not part of the toxicity. In fact, relationships, drinking, drugs, and sexual encounters offer a kind of reprieve from the torment.

  Barron’s fiction combines weird horror with other pulp modes, such as the Western (as in “Bulldozer,” 2004) and noir (as in “Hand of Glory,” 2012). His prose also contains revelatory moments of unnerving lyricism, especially when the weird is encountered. Barron has talked of the influence of Cormac McCarthy and Angela Carter on his work, and the approach of these two writers to language can be seen in his stories.

  Much of Barron’s work deals with the presence of hostile alien entities in Washington State, which was Barron’s home for some years. These works form a cycle known as the Pacific Northwest Mythos that shares characters and incidents. In fact, in all of Barron’s stories, players and events recur again and again. This has the uncanny effect of making them feel like recountings rather than fictions. Barron has also, in his most recent work, turned to metatextual, parodic stories, such as “More Dark” (2012), in which he and other prominent horror writers are characters; “More Dark” addresses some of the myth-making surrounding Thomas Ligotti in the community of horror writers and readers.

  In the early 2010s Barron moved to the Hudson Valley region of New York State, and in his fiction he has turned away from Pacific Northwest settings to focus on Alaskan themes. His 2016 book Swift to Chase (2016) collected some of his Alaskan stories.

  Barron’s work had a strong influence on early twenty-first-century weird fiction. In 2014, Word Horde published The Children of Old Leech, a tribute to Barron’s fiction. Barron is a multiple Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker award nominee and was a 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award winner for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007) and Occultation and Other Stories (2010). “Mysterium Tremendum” won a 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: Carter, Angela; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Shirley Jackson Awards.

  Further Reading

  Barron, Laird. 2010. “Why I Write.” Publishers Weekly, July 12. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/43795-why-i-write-laird-barron.html.

  Jarvis, Timothy. 2013. “Stages of Horrific Vision in ‘The Forest.’” Weird Fiction Review, April 9. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/04/101-weird-writers-laird-barron.

  Lockhart, Ross E., and Justin Steele. 2014. The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron. Petaluma, CA: Word Horde.

  Tourigny, Yves. They Who Dwell in the Cracks: A Look at the Works of Author Laird Barron. Accessed July 11, 2106. http://www.theywhodwellinthecracks.com.

  Vanderhooft, JoSelle. 2012. “Laird Barron: I’m a Magnet to Steel—Interview.” Weird Tales 66, no. 3: 21–25.

  An Interview with Laird Barron

  October 2016

  In this interview, Barron, whose writing is noted for its strong use of voice and setting, discusses the place of these elements in horror fiction. He also talks about the revitalization of weird fiction in the twenty-first century, the significance of H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti (and also Cormac McCarthy and T. E. D. Klein) for horror fiction, and the impressive breadth of the new millennium’s horror revival.

  Matt Cardin: One of the first things an astute reader notices when reading your work is the centrality of voice. Many have noted the use of a noir-type voice, tone, approach, in a significant amount of your work, but it goes beyond that. A distinct voice in general, whether noir-ish or otherwise, is crucial to everything you’ve written. Can you speak to why this is the case? Because not all horror fiction hinges so heavily on this quality. In fact, a great deal of modern horror fiction has been written in the same “style-less” style and voiceless prose that has characterized much mass-published fiction in the past few decades. Why is it different for you? And what do you see as the role of voice in horror fiction as a whole?

  Laird Barron: I’m heavily influenced by noir and pulp from the 1930s through the early 1980s. Most of the authors I admire skew toward narrative traditions that privilege sharp characterization and robust detail in setting and atmosphere.

  Music also played a significant role in my development. Country and Western songs from the 1960s and 1970s often defaulted to a ballad format. Singers such as Bobby Bare, Tom T. Hall, and Marty Robbins (and many others) possessed rich and distinctive voices and styles. As a consequence, I’m less interested in modes of contemporary prose that eschew all adornment or tend to neuter voice. Horror works best when synthesized with a strong point of view. Voice: the reason Stephen King reigns as the heavyweight champion of horror forty years into his career.

  MC: Setting is also crucial to your stories, as it is to a great deal of horror fiction in general. You’ve done some striking things with turning Washington State into a kind of haunted land of its own, reminiscent, perhaps, of what Stephen King has done with Maine, or what Lovecraft did with Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New England in general. You have also given some of the same treatment to Alaska. How do you understand the role of setting in horror literature? What would you say about it to readers of horror fiction—yours or anyone else’s—who are looking to increase their understanding, enjoyment, and experience of this particular type of literature?

  LB: Setting is integral to the kinds of literature that shaped my youth. For example, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, and Louis L’Amour dwelled on the physicality of their universes. These writers created pulp heroes who reflected (or stood in marked contrast [to]) the high deserts, frozen wastelands, lush jungles, and alien vistas so ubiquitous in their tales. Setting can provide critical elements to a horror story—perhaps it isolates the protagonist or acts as an obstacle. My own choice has been to occasionally elevate setting, to imbue it with its own agency, and, occasionally, treat it as another character.

  Real terror can be de
rived from a reactive universe. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian demonstrate opposite ends of the spectrum of how a reactionary setting illuminates and amplifies horror. In the context of cosmic horror, the vastness of the natural world, and beyond, reinforce the notion that man is minute, a flea upon the back of a behemoth.

  MC: The early twenty-first century has seen a reinvigoration of horror fiction and film, especially, but not exclusively, in the area of weird fiction. You are part of this wave. What do you think has happened? Why now? And what is different, if anything, from the original “horror boom” of circa 1975 to 1995?

  LB: These things tend to exist as cycles—perhaps we were simply due for a revival. The current boom separates itself from previous cycles in regard to volume and variety. I’m not sure there’s ever been so broad or deep an array of theme, style, or technique. Independent presses and the advent of digital technology are driving the movement.

  This latter point can’t be stressed enough: the independent press and digital technology have compensated for an ever-shrinking midlist. The Internet and forbearance of small publishers have encouraged authors to experiment and to push the envelope.

  MC: Two writers have frequently been mentioned in association with you and your work, and both of them are, like you, quite prominent in the twenty-first century’s new wave of horror. Their names may be taken here as questions for you to answer, problems for you to address, and/or enigmas for you to explain, whether in relation to yourself or in relation to the field at large. First: Lovecraft.

  LB: My interest in H.P. Lovecraft focuses mainly on the implications of his cosmic obsessions, rather than tilling the same patch of literary earth.

  Lovecraft has, with diligent labor by August Derleth and S. T. Joshi, arisen from the dust of obscurity to become a literary monument. He personifies what contemporary authors term cosmic horror. That said, it’s important to recognize Lovecraft for what he truly is—an artifact. Much of his personal philosophy is untenable and his visionary approach to fiction is simply a beginning, a jumping-off point for those of us who’ve followed the trail.

  Two major camps have arisen of late, the anti-Lovecraftians and the Lovecraft deifiers. The man made a serious contribution to weird fiction; this can’t be lightly dismissed on the basis of his purple prose or his abhorrent personal beliefs. Likewise, he isn’t the alpha or omega of the genre. Weird fiction and cosmic horror predate the Bible. Weird fiction and cosmic horror have succeeded Lovecraft and will succeed us as well.

  MC: Second: Ligotti.

  LB: I’ve written a substantial number of stories in response to Lovecraft and Lovecraft’s successors, especially early in my career. As I said, he’s a monument looming over a certain precinct of weird fiction. Conversely, Thomas Ligotti is, at this juncture, a massive subterranean structure, or the submerged bulk of an iceberg that dwarfs its surface presence. The worldview of both men drive their fiction. Lovecraft’s gaze turned almost impossibly outward, while Ligotti dwells upon the microcosmic. Somehow they wind up bumping into one another at the end of a long, dark journey.

  Ligotti’s core strength and main appeal is the sui generis quality of his work. Where Lovecraft (despite xenophobic tendencies) spoke to the interests of a broad spectrum of humanity, Ligotti speaks directly to the disaffected, the despondent, and the depressed in a naturalistic manner that knows no equal among horror writers. The adage goes that one mustn’t conflate an artist with his or her creations. Ligotti is an exception to the rule. His philosophy seems largely inseparable from the hellscape of his imagination.

  MC: Are there any additional authors and works that you would recommend to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important both for this genre and for literature as a whole?

  LB: While Cormac McCarthy isn’t widely considered a horror or weird fiction author, I beg to differ. His landmark novel, Blood Meridian, numbers among the seminal works of both cosmic horror and North American literature in the main. Few stories so brutally illustrate the minuteness of man in all his depravity, ambition, and hubris when contrasted with the implacability of nature and the larger universe.

  T. E. D. Klein’s horror collection, Dark Gods, is essential reading. To quote something I once wrote about this book: Dark Gods is a seminal collection of four dark fantasy novellas epitomizing all that was excellent with 1980s horror. Klein, former editor of Twilight Zone Magazine, is a master of creeping dread, of quiet, cerebral horror, requiring nary a drop of blood to nail home his point. One of the smoothest wordsmiths in the business, his knack with observed detail is astounding. His talent is certainly on par with the likes of [Peter] Straub and [John] Updike. Of especial merit: “Petey” and “Black Man with a Horn,” this latter an homage to H. P. Lovecraft.

  MC: What do you think is most important for contemporary readers to know, remember, bear in mind, about horror literature?

  LB: Circling back to comments about Cormac McCarthy (and earlier when I mentioned the role of the small press), I note that horror is where you find it. A welcome aspect to the current horror/weird fiction resurgence is a broad-spectrum approach to the subject. Cosmic horror and its kin aren’t confined to explicit genre niches—a new wave of writers continue to unearth and perfect techniques and delivery mechanisms far removed from the pulp trappings of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and other forefathers of the tradition. May this trend continue.

  BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821–1867)

  Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, critic, and translator whose visionary works signal the shift from romanticism to symbolism in the mid-nineteenth century and represent a definitive example of and inspiration for the Decadent movement of the later nineteenth century (which emphasized degeneration, perversity, and self-conscious artifice), thus paving the way for the crystallization of surrealism in the twentieth century as a philosophical and artistic movement dedicated to giving voice to the unfiltered contents of the unconscious mind. Baudelaire’s myriad stylistic and conceptual innovations were designed to create a flux of verse that could extract, from the abyss of urban experience, a vision of reality appropriate to the volatility and uncertainty of modern life. Twentieth-century horror literature, particularly in the weird and cosmic modes, owes a great deal to Baudelaire, whose hallucinatory and erotic meditations on possession, corpses, vampires, nightmares, ghosts, poison, pain, and death conjure overwhelming sensations of fear and wonder while turning inside-out traditional notions of space and time. Indeed, years before H. P. Lovecraft would define the weird in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), Baudelaire remarked, “The Beautiful is always strange” (Hyslop 1992, 36). Another of the early twentieth century’s important authors of cosmic horror, Clark Ashton Smith, explicitly acknowledged Baudelaire as an influence. Commercially successful in his day only for his popular translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, Baudelaire lived a turbulent life oscillating between idleness and debauchery, culminating in his contraction of syphilis and his death from a paralytic stroke at the young age of forty-six.

  Inspired by the Gothic writings of Poe, Baudelaire published, in 1857, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), an immeasurably influential volume comprised of 132 breathless poems dedicated to poet Théophile Gautier and later praised by such writers as Émile Deschamps, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. These metaphysically pessimistic works deconstruct the Romantic view of a harmonious relationship between inner and outer worlds in favor of an embrace of dizzying multiplicity, of an ironic fall from grace and a satanic rapture in the “spleen” of fear and flight. The ecstatic and funerary poems, included under the headings of “Révolte” and “La Mort,” best exemplify the volume’s anticipation of and role in shaping the genre of cosmic horror. Six poems from Les Fleurs du mal—“Les bijoux” (The Jewels), “Le Léthé” (Lethe—the river of forgetfulness in Hades), “A celle qui est trop gaie” (To She Who Is Too Gay), “Lesbos,�
� “Femmes damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte” (Women Doomed: Delphine and Hippolyta), and “Les métamorphoses du vampire” (The Vampire’s Metamorphoses)—were condemned and suppressed on grounds of moral indecency. In 1860, Baudelaire published Les Paradis artificiels, opium et haschisch (Artificial Paradise, Opium and Hashish), an investigation into the sensorial distortions and changes in perspective that come with the effects of opium and hashish. Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), published posthumously in 1869 and dedicated to writer Arsène Houssaye, collects fifty-one prose poems that study the melancholic drone of Parisian life in the nineteenth century through a macabre prism, best evidenced in the languid horror of “Chacun sa chimère” (To Each His Chimera) and the creeping dread of “Mademoiselle Bistouri.”

  Sean Matharoo

  See also: Gautier, Théophile; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Smith, Clark Ashton; The Sublime; Surrealism.

  Further Reading

  Balakian, Anna. 1947. Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New Mysticism in French Poetry. New York: New York University Press.

  Holland, Eugene W. 1993. Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  Hyslop, Lois Boe. 1992. Charles Baudelaire Revisited. New York: Twayne.

  Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1949. Baudelaire. Translated by Martin Turnell. London: Horizon.

  “THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS”

  W. F. Harvey’s now-famous story of a creeping, crawling disembodied hand, “The Beast with Five Fingers,” was originally published in the first volume of The New Decameron (1919), an anthology series that also saw contributions from Dorothy L. Sayers, Compton Mackenzie, and D. H. Lawrence. In the tradition of the fourteenth-century Italian Renaissance writer Boccaccio, volume one is presented as stories told by holiday-makers of disparate disciplines traveling together. “The Beast with Five Fingers,” the first story in the book, is billed as “The Psychic Researcher’s Tale.”