Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

Other noteworthy stories include “Ancient Sorceries” (1908), the original inspiration behind Jacques Tourneur’s celebrated 1942 horror film Cat People. The tale concerns Arthur Vezin’s weird encounters in a mysterious little town in northern France. The sleepy populace first baffle, then seduce the lone tourist, before the narrative culminates in a diabolical ritual in service of the “Great Ones,” vividly rendered as a dreamlike vision. The increasingly hallucinatory quality of Vezin’s experience is intensified when he becomes aware that his will is being sapped from him, rendering him unable to make decisions or initiate the process of departure. He becomes inexorably absorbed into the spell lying over the community as his volition is sapped, and he is transfixed by the seductive and mercurial daughter of the hotelier, who seems to toy with him like a cat batting about a concussed mouse between her paws. Blackwood effectively employs the same trope of the seduction of an older man by a mysterious younger woman in “The Glamour of the Snow” (1911), in which the protagonist (a middle-aged writer in thrall to the mountains—Blackwood himself, in other words) has a strange encounter with a lone skater on a mountain resort ice rink at midnight, a beautiful young woman who is in fact an embodiment of both the pleasures and dangers of snow. The protagonist is gradually isolated from the rest of the tourist party and pursues his obsession with the girl—who, it transpires, is actually some type of elemental spirit—with near fatal consequences.

  In 1912’s “The Man Who Found Out,” ancient Chaldean tablets detailing the ultimate secret of the universe extinguish the spirit of anyone who reads them (typically of Blackwood, marked by the “crumbling away” of personality). The story can be read as a cautionary account of the dangers of scientific overreaching, or—and anticipating Lovecraft’s work—a more profoundly pessimistic rumination on complacent belief in the primacy of humanity’s place in the universe. Blackwood’s occasional cosmic scope is contrasted by low-key pieces like “The Little Beggar” (1919), in which a devastatingly personal blow is dealt to an aging gentleman walking to his club one evening when he experiences a counterfactual encounter with his son-who-never-was, the progeny of a marriage that never happened due to the death of his fiancé twelve years earlier.

  As well as his unique and sophisticated contributions to the horror genre, Blackwood also produced more formulaic, though nevertheless engaging writing. For example, 1906’s The Empty House is an uncomplicated ghost story. “The Nemesis of Fire” (1908), a John Silence story, is a particularly well-executed example of the Edwardian “occult detective” genre, featuring an ancient Egyptian curse causing havoc in an English manor house. Similarly, another Silence adventure, “The Camp of the Dog” (1908), uses the traditional horror trope of the werewolf.

  In his later years Blackwood became something of a celebrity due to frequent appearances on British television, mesmerizing the nation with his peerless skill at delivering a chilling tale to the camera. He died at the age of eighty-two, leaving little in the way of personal effects or papers, most of which had been destroyed during the bombing of London during the Second World War. Blackwood’s influence on horror fiction was considerable even in his lifetime. Many of the writers associated with Weird Tales, including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, cited “The Willows” as among their favorite short stories. Blackwood’s impact on Lovecraft can be most keenly felt in Lovecraft’s foregrounding of marshlands and backwoods as places replete with immanent evil and supernatural threat in stories such as “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

  Blackwood’s character John Silence is a key link in the development of the “occult detective” genre, representing an early twentieth-century rendering of nineteenth-century forerunners such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius and Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing. The legacy of Blackwood’s John Silence stories—as well as William Hope Hodgson’s similar Carnacki tales, which they influenced—can be felt through ensuing genre and popular culture from the pulp magazines to television’s The X Files and Supernatural.

  James Machin

  See also: John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Numinous; Occult Detectives; “The Willows.”

  Further Reading

  Ashley, Mike. 2001. Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood. London: Constable.

  Blackwood, Algernon. 1912. The Centaur. London: Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/centaur00blacgoog.

  Blackwood, Algernon. 1923. Episodes Before Thirty. London: Cassell.

  Blackwood, Algernon. 1998. The Complete John Silence Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Dover.

  Blackwood, Algernon. 2002. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin.

  Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  BLEILER, E. F. (1920–2010)

  Everett Franklin Bleiler was an American editor and scholar. In 1948, a youthful interest in fantastic fiction, combined with his scholarly abilities, led the owners of Shasta Publishers to pay him $500 to compile the book that became The Checklist of Fantastic Literature.

  From 1949 to 1954, with T. E. Dikty of Shasta, he co-edited the first “best of the year” science fiction anthologies before joining Dover Publications in 1955. While at Dover, he edited a number of collections, including the supernatural works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs. Riddell, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and M. R. James, as well as anthologies reprinting Gothic novels and Victorian ghost stories, as well as an edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature. All the books contained serious introductions that provided biographical data and contextualized the works as literary history. Bleiler left Dover in 1977 and joined Charles Scribner’s Sons, editing and introducing collections of Victorian genre fiction and two massive bio-critical reference works, Science Fiction Writers (1982) and Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror (1985). In 1983 Kent State University Press published his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, which attempted to conceptualize a field of literature by providing a summation of, and thematic indexes to, every work of supernatural fiction published prior to 1960. He later published two analogous works dealing with the history of science fiction. In 1978 Bleiler received a Special Award (Professional) from the World Fantasy Awards; in 1988 he was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1984, he received the Pilgrim Award for his contributions to science fiction scholarship.

  Bleiler’s editorial work and introductions were solid and scholarly, but he was under no illusions about their durability, for inevitably new scholarship emerged, sometimes obviating his earlier efforts, and over his lifetime the concept of editorship changed. It was no longer sufficient to reprint what were deemed an author’s “best” or most representative works; researchers wanted and needed the author’s oeuvre, however mediocre or discreditable some of it might be. Bleiler came to see himself as a living fossil and was often dismissive of his earlier work, but he took genuine pleasure in assisting in the bibliographic discoveries and scholarly insights of others. Without his contributions, many premodern writers of the fantastic would not have been readily discovered.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Blackwood, Algernon; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Dirda, Michael. 2012. “Let Us Now Praise Dover Books: The Literary Legacy of E. F. Bleiler.” The American Scholar, December 28. https://theamericanscholar.org/let-us-now-praise-dover-books.

  Showers, Brian J. 2006. “All Hallows Talks with . . . E. F. Bleiler.” All Hallows 42. http://www.brianjshowers.com/articles_bleiler.html.

  BLOCH, ROBERT (1917–1994)

  Robert Bloch was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who, early in his career, was recognized as a representative
of the Weird Tales school of pulp horror fiction and one of the most talented contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of stories that colleagues of H. P. Lovecraft wrote in homage to his cosmic horror fiction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bloch sublimated his talent for writing horror fiction in a succession of crime novels that culminated in the publication of Psycho (1959), a landmark novel that established him as a leading exponent of psychological horror fiction.

  Psycho: A Landmark of Psychological Horror

  Bloch’s novel Psycho (1959) has been hailed as a landmark of psychological horror, and it was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic 1960 film adaptation. Bloch explained in his autobiography that the case of real-life serial murderer Ed Gein inspired him to write a novel featuring an apparently ordinary rural character who is actually a psychotic murderer. In Psycho this character is Norman Bates, proprietor of the Bates Motel on the outskirts of the Midwestern town of Fairvale. Norman is dominated by his emasculating, verbally abusive mother, who, when Norman shows interest in the newly checked-in Marion Crane, murders her—or so it would appear. When people begin investigating Marion’s disappearance, they find discrepancies in Norman’s claim that he lives alone with his mother, not the least of which is that local authorities remember attending Mrs. Bates’s funeral years earlier. Eventually, it is revealed that the psychologically unhinged Norman, who was morbidly close to his mother, exhumed her corpse, preserved it, and now dresses up like her to sustain the illusion of her continued presence. Any encounter that threatens their relationship causes Norman’s “mother” to lash out protectively, as she has done several times before (after which Norman dutifully disposes of the corpses in a swamp behind the motel).

  In Bloch’s novel, as in the movie, the story is sustained by narrative misdirection. The reader is not aware until the denouement that the conversations between Norman and his mother are taking place entirely inside his head. Bloch wrote two sequels, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), both concerned with how the sickness of the serial killer is mirrored in the society that nurtured him. Hitchcock’s film also inspired several sequels and, in 2013, the A&E cable network’s series Bates Motel. It is sometimes cited as an influence on the slasher film subgenre.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  Bloch became a fan of Lovecraft’s fiction in 1927, shortly after he started reading Weird Tales, and in 1933 he began corresponding with him. At Lovecraft’s suggestion Bloch submitted his early ghost story “Lilies” (1934) and his fantasy “Black Lotus” (1935) to William Crawford, publisher of the semiprofessional magazines Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories. Bloch first appeared in print professionally in the January 1935 issue of Weird Tales with “The Feast in the Abbey,” a Gothic shocker about a traveler through the forests of medieval France who stumbles upon a monastery of cannibal monks. Written in overwrought purple prose, but perfectly orchestrated for its chilling climax, the story is a prime example of the neo-Gothic horror fare that Weird Tales, in its early years, peddled to its audience. It would become one of Bloch’s (and the magazine’s) most reprinted stories.

  Between 1935 and the end of 1939, Bloch placed twenty-six stories in Weird Tales, which was virtually his exclusive market for fiction. In “The Secret in the Tomb” (1935), he first made mention of Ludvig Prinn’s The Mysteries of the Worm, a book of occult lore that was to become one of the canonical grimoires of the Cthulhu Mythos. Most of Bloch’s mythos tales are routine horror stories clearly written to please Lovecraft, although several rise above simple pastiche. “The Mannikin” (1937), about a hunchback whose deformity is an undeveloped twin alive to the influence of supernatural evil, ends with a perfectly timed O. Henry–type twist that was to become one of Bloch’s trademarks. Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935) might have been considered a minor mythos tale but for the decimation of its main character, who was clearly modeled on Lovecraft—an example of how much early Cthulhu Mythos fiction was written as an elaborate in-joke among participating writers. Lovecraft responded in 1936 with one of his masterpieces, “The Haunter of the Dark,” in which he killed off one “Robert Blake,” and Bloch made the story cycle a triptych when, in the September 1950 issue of Weird Tales, he responded with “The Shadow from the Steeple,” a story that updated the mythos for the then-nascent nuclear age.

  A handful of Bloch’s mythos tales—including “The Faceless God” (1936), “The Brood of Bubastis” (1937), “The Secret of Sebek” (1937), and “Fane of the Black Pharoah” (1937)—fuse ancient Egyptian lore with Lovecraftian horrors but are part of a larger cycle of Egyptian tales that include “The Opener of the Way” (1936), “The Eyes of the Mummy” (1938), and “Beetles” (1938), which are Lovecraftian in tone but without mythos content. The majority of these stories feature unsympathetic protagonists—greedy tomb-robbers, self-interested businessmen, and the like—who are served poetically just desserts for their transgressions. These stories show Bloch attempting to distinguish his writing as more than just a slavish imitation of Lovecraft’s.

  Lovecraft’s death in 1937 devastated Bloch, but it also propelled him out of the creative rut he had dug himself working in Lovecraft’s shadow. He began attempting stories with diverse horror themes: voodoo in “Mother of Serpents” (1936); Native American curses in “The Totem-Pole” (1939); and deals with the devil in “Fiddler’s Fee” (1940). Bloch also began writing for markets other than Weird Tales, among them the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and the fantasy pulp Fantastic Adventures, both edited by Raymond A. Palmer, whom Bloch had met through his involvement with the Milwaukee Fictioneers, a writing group that he had joined in 1935.

  Also in 1939, Bloch began writing for Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), a magazine of “logical” fantasy fiction launched by editor John W. Campbell as a companion to Astounding Science-Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. Bloch’s “The Cloak” (1939), a comic story about a man turned into a vampire when he dons the cloak of a former vampire owner, lampooned many of the Gothic clichés of horror fiction and broke ground for him as a writer of humorous fantasy. For two more comic fantasies published in Unknown, “A Good Knight’s Work (1941) and “The Eager Dragon” (1943), Bloch adopted a slangy contemporary storytelling voice inspired by the work of Damon Runyon. He would use the same voice in Fantastic Adventures to relate the adventures of Lefty Feep, a born loser with the gift of gab and a penchant for getting caught up in preposterously fantastic escapades. Filled with topical jokes and bad puns, they were not Bloch’s best work, although some rose above the others in cleverness, notably “The Weird Doom of Floyd Scrilch” (1942), whose protagonist is such an average person that the products he orders from ads in the back pages of pulp magazines—which are notorious for fulfilling the promises of their manufacturers only for the average person—prove fatally effective for him. Bloch also took a cue from fantasist Thorne Smith and, in stories such as “Nursemaid to Nightmares” (1942) and its sequel “Black Barter” (1943), and later “The Devil with You” (1950) and “The Big Binge” (1955), wrote the equivalent of supernatural screwball comedies in which characters become caught up in a series of bizarre events with amusing outcomes. More than any other writer of weird fiction in the twentieth century, Bloch showed that horror and humor were opposite sides of the same coin in stories such as “House of the Hatchet” (1941) and “The Beasts of Barsac” (1944), which mix irony with serious dramatic incidents, and “Catnip” (1948) and “Hungarian Rhapsody” (1958), which end with darkly amusing puns.

  In his autobiography Once Around the Bloch (1993), Bloch recalled a primal moment from his childhood when he was frightened by Lon Chaney’s unmasking scene in the 1925 film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Horror films and the relationship between their illusory horrors and the macabre possibilities in real life became a recurrent theme in a significant number of his stories, including “Return to the Sabbath” (1938), “The Dream Makers” (1953), “Terror over Hollywood” (1957), “Sock Finish” (1957), “Is B
etsy Blake Still Alive?” (1958), and “The Movie People” (1969). In the late 1930s and 1940s, Bloch also began to explore the intersection of crime and weird fiction in stories such as “Slave of the Flames” (1938), which provides the pyromaniac responsible for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 with a supernatural motivation, and “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade” (1945) and “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” (1946), in which contemporary characters acting under the supernatural influence of legendary murderers are compelled to recapitulate their crimes. Bloch’s classic in this vein is “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943), in which it is revealed that the titular character is alive in contemporary America and committing another spate of serial murders to appease dark gods in exchange for their gift of personal immortality. The year after its publication, this story, among Bloch’s best-known works, was adapted for the radio program The Kate Smith Hour. It was part of the program of radio adaptations of thirty-three of Bloch’s weird tales aired in his native Milwaukee as Stay Tuned for Terror.

  In 1945, to fill out his first hardcover collection of short fiction, The Opener of the Way (1945), Bloch wrote “One Way to Mars,” the story of a hopped-up musician whose slipping grasp on reality—and eventual spiral into psychosis—manifests in the form of a strange-looking man in a brown coat who appears to him repeatedly and offers to sell him a one-way ticket to Mars. It was a foretaste of things to come in his writing, not just tales of psychological horror such as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1949), in which a mentally challenged young man who believes a stage magician’s illusions are real attempts to reproduce them with disastrous results, and “Lucy Comes to Stay” (1952), in which a woman projects her psychotic proclivities onto an imaginary friend, but in his work as novelist. In 1947 Bloch published his first novel, The Scarf, about a man with a dual personality, one of which is a serial strangler of women. Over the next three decades, Bloch wrote a succession of crime novels, including Spiderweb (1954), The Kidnapper (1954), The Will to Kill (1954), The Dead Beat (1960), Firebug (1961), The Couch (1962), and Terror (1962), that are memorable for their explorations of the aberrant psychology of their antagonists. These characters descend directly from the unsympathetic protagonists of Bloch’s weird fiction, and the world he presents, as seen through their eyes and shaped by the motivations by which they rationalize their behavior, is as skewed and abnormal as the horror of his supernatural fiction.