Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  In 1959, Bloch wrote Psycho, the novel to which his reputation as a writer of horror and suspense fiction is inextricably bound. Inspired in part by the real-life crimes of Wisconsin serial murderer Ed Gein, it tells of Norman Bates, a motel operator whose jealous mother kills any female patron who catches Norman’s fancy. At the novel’s end, it is revealed that Norman killed his mother and her lover years before, and that, unhinged by guilt, Norman has absorbed her personality and acts out the dark side of their uncomfortably close relationship, sometimes even dressing up in her clothes to commit “her” murders. The novel is a narrative tour de force that doesn’t tip its hand, until the denouement, that the conversations Norman is having with his mother throughout are taking place entirely within his tortured psyche. Bloch’s novel, and the term “psycho,” became important fixtures in popular culture when Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel as his famous film of the same name in 1960.

  The notoriety of Hitchcock’s adaptation of Psycho helped to further Bloch’s career in Hollywood, where he had begun working as a screenwriter in the late 1950s. Bloch contributed scripts to the television programs Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, and Star Trek. England’s Amicus Studios released three anthology films—Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), and Asylum (1972)—that adapted mostly stories of his that were first published in Weird Tales, and also the movies The Skull (1965; based on Bloch’s story “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”) and The Deadly Bees (1966), filmed from Bloch’s scripts. Director William Castle also filmed the psychological suspense movies Strait-Jacket (1964) and The Night Walker (1964) from Bloch’s scripts.

  Bloch was an active contributor during the horror fiction boom of the 1980s and 1990s. His first novel of the supernatural, Strange Eons (1979), was an homage to H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. His novels American Gothic (1974) and The Jekyll Legacy (co-written with Andre Norton in 1990) were historical crime fiction that verged on horror fiction. He also wrote two sequels to Psycho, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), partly to try to reclaim control of Psycho, after having sold the rights to the cinematic story line. These stories are memorable for their depictions of a morally sick contemporary society that allows monsters like Norman Bates to flourish unrecognized in its midst. Not surprisingly, Bloch edited two anthologies of psychological horror fiction inspired by Psycho under the titles Psycho-Paths (1991) and Monsters in Our Midst (1993). Among his final books were the novel Lori (1989), a tale of ambiguous supernaturalism, and his nostalgic personal memoir Once Around the Bloch (1993), subtitled in his trademark pun-laden style An Unauthorized Autobiography.

  Bloch’s six-decade career as a horror writer was one of the longest in the twentieth century. He was one of the last of the generation of horror writers who made their reputations writing short stories rather than novels, and his often darkly funny tales, distinguished by their careful craftsmanship and imaginative flair, continue to be reprinted in collections and anthologies after his death. Bloch’s transition from writing supernatural horror stories to works of psychological suspense, and his ability to parlay his skills as a writer of fiction into work as a writer for television and film, are an object lesson in how a writer can maintain his relevance in a culture that changes over time. For his accomplishments he received the World Fantasy Convention’s Life Achievement Award in 1975 and the Horror Writer Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1989). Bloch died of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 77.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Arkham House; Bram Stoker Award; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Bloch, Robert. 1993. Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography. New York: Tor.

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2003. “Robert Bloch.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 99–114. New York: Thomson/Gale.

  Joshi, S. T. 2014. “A Literary Tutelage: Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft.” In Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, 548–565. New York: Hippocampus.

  Larson, Randall. 1986. Robert Bloch: Starmont Reader’s Guide No. 37. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  Moskowitz, Sam. 1966. “Robert Bloch.” In Seekers of Tomorrow, 335–349. New York: World.

  Punter, David. 1990. “Robert Bloch’s Psycho: Some Pathological Contexts.” In American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, edited by Brian Docherty, 92–106. New York: St. Martin’s.

  Shovlin, Paul. 2015. “Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch.” In The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, edited by Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks, 201–210. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

  Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2009. The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Winter, Douglas E. 1985. “Robert Bloch.” In Faces of Fear, 10–22. New York: Berkley.

  BODY HORROR

  The term “body horror” refers to a type of horror focusing on flesh and its transcendence, challenging the concept of the body as a bounded entity and transgressing the limits of the flesh by pushing toward new, transformed corporeal states. The posthuman configurations of body horror are often depicted as positive alternatives to the banality of the “old” human flesh, as in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1986): here, the body is a canvas, capable of twisting—with the right chemical and genetic alterations—into something at once frightening and ambiguously beautiful. Flesh is always unfinished, always in motion. Body horror celebrates this capacity for corporeal—and often ontological or metaphysical—transformation, reveling in the materiality of the body and its mutative possibilities.

  Though body horror is most often associated with cinema, it is prevalent in literature, video games, and other horror media, and is as old as the genre itself. Mary Shelley’s hybrid creature in Frankenstein (1818), who occupies a body that is both living and dead, human and nonhuman, provides an early example of the subgenre’s preoccupations with transitional or intermediate bodily states and the possibilities inherent in matter. Invasion, contagion, and mutation have been central concerns throughout the body horror canon, where the body’s permeability reveals the instability of both flesh and humanness itself. In John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938), an extraterrestrial being invades, mutates, and then reassumes the guise of its human hosts, grounding its plot—and its corporeal play—in the flexibility of flesh and the inability to determine humanness by sight. Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), in which the protagonist is confronted with the inevitability of his transformation into a half-human, half-fish creature, draws on the horror—and the disturbing ecstasy—that arises from surrendering to a body whose humanness is rapidly disappearing. At the story’s close, the young man embraces the newness of his flesh and the strange possibilities for being it affords him.

  The development of prosthetics-based special effects technologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s contributed much to body horror’s prominent place in 1980s horror cinema and is perhaps the reason why the subgenre is most associated with film. David Cronenberg’s films—widely considered to be the apotheosis of the subgenre—display special effects technologies to grand effect, celebrating transgressive corporeality and bodily possibility in classic body horror works such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986). In Videodrome, the protagonist Max Renn’s bodily transformation into a human-media corporeal hybrid opens onto new ontological possibilities best encapsulated in the film’s memorable line, “Long live the new flesh!”

  This idea of “new flesh” is central to body horror: where much of horror has turned on the fear of embodiment and the limits of the flesh, body horror celebrates the transformative capacities and potentialities inherent in embodiment. These bodily transformations are always ambiguous: the
y are at once violent and liberating, repulsively beautiful.

  Brittany Roberts

  See also: Books of Blood; The Grotesque; The Hands of Orlac; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Kafka, Franz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Palahniuk, Chuck; Splatterpunk; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

  Further Reading

  Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Kane, Paul, and Marie O’Regan, eds. 2012. The Mammoth Book of Body Horror. Philadelphia: Running Press.

  BODY SNATCHING

  Body snatching is the act of digging up newly buried bodies for the purpose of selling them to hospitals and anatomists to dissect for research, teaching, or other types of experimentation. Though the term “body snatching” was not adopted until the early nineteenth century, it was active throughout the eighteenth century, when body snatchers were referred to as “resurrection men.” Most studies of this still-mysterious subject have focused on Great Britain, particularly on areas of medical innovation in Edinburgh and London, but the practice also occurred in America. In tension with a concurrent fear of live burial, it inspired a series of protective devices and procedures, such as mortsafes, which are iron cages and locks placed around coffins to prevent entry. Body snatching, therefore, found a natural entry into the Gothic imagination, alongside this literary tradition’s creative uses of corpses and the abject.

  “The Body Snatcher”: Guilt and Grave-Robbing

  First published in the Pall Mall Christmas Extra in December 1884, this story features characters based on criminals employed by Robert Knox, the noted nineteenth-century Edinburgh surgeon who was implicated in the infamous Burke and Hare murders of 1828.

  Using a frame story, it narrates the tale of two men named Fettes and Macfarlane, who attended medical school together in Edinburgh under the tutelage of the famous doctor “K” (a disguised reference to Knox). They are responsible for acquiring dissection subjects and paying the suspicious men who arrive with the corpses. When Macfarlane brings in the body of a man named Gray, who recently heckled and insulted him, Fettes is convinced that Macfarlane murdered the man. But he keeps silent, and students dissect the body. Some time later, when the medical school is short on anatomical subjects, Fettes and Macfarlane exhume the body of a recently deceased farmer’s wife, but on the nighttime ride back to Edinburgh from the graveyard they accidentally break their lantern and, upon lighting the remaining one, discover to their horror that the body is actually that of the long-dead Gray. They leap, terrified, from the carriage, which continues rolling toward Edinburgh.

  Dismissed by some critics as a mere potboiler, “The Body Snatcher” shows Stevenson drawing upon his own family history—one of his uncles had trained under Robert Knox—as well as real-life events in Scottish history. It also shows the author’s long-running interest in guilt and moral culpability, which would reach its apex just two years later in his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  “The Body Snatcher” was adapted as a well-received 1945 Hollywood film directed by Robert Wise, produced by Val Lewton, and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their final screen appearance together. It has also been adapted for television, radio, and the classic horror comic book Creepy.

  Jon Greenaway

  Source: Richardson, Ruth. 2015. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher.” The Lancet 385, no. 9966 (January): 412–413. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60144-1.

  Body snatching arose because it was lucrative. Anatomists paid handsomely for bodies, with no questions asked: the fresher, the better. Dissection of the dead was considered to be a vital element of medical education, a concept that was still relatively new. However, there were few legal opportunities in Great Britain to obtain corpses. William Hunter’s successful anatomy school became popular in the mid-eighteenth century for its anatomy lectures, and William’s brother, John, facing the task of making sure there were enough bodies to meet the demand, turned to body snatching. He was certainly not alone in this. In the most famous case, William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen people in Edinburgh in 1828, using a suffocation technique called “burking” and selling the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox. After Burke’s execution, his body was, fittingly, dissected before an enthusiastic audience. Two pieces of legislation, separated by nearly a century, addressed concerns over body snatching, although they were not entirely effective. The Murder Act of 1752 gave anatomists the bodies of executed murderers as an additional punishment, while the Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed anatomists to take bodies not claimed from hospitals within forty-eight hours and without specific instructions.

  Body snatching in literature appeared as early as the 1797 novel The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey, attributed to a “Mrs. Carver,” though the best-known body snatcher is of course Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, who dug up anatomical parts for his creature wherever he could find them. Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” (1884) tells of two students of Knox who are caught up in an increasingly complicated situation involving body snatching for medical education purposes. H. P. Lovecraft also employed the theme of body snatching in his short fiction, although in his The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and Herbert West—Reanimator the practice is used less for dissection and more for resurrection.

  Tales of body snatching still resurface sometimes in the news today, and though such incidents tend to inspire less fear than they did in a former age, they still cause scandal and incur significant legal punishment. Within contemporary Gothic literature and film, body snatching has become a staple associated with mad scientists—who now typically procure the bodies themselves without the use of resurrection men—and with medical horror texts, such as Robin Cook’s Coma (1977). The ethics of the practice have now expanded beyond dissection and experimentation to include acts that involve both clear benefits, such as organ harvesting, as well as clear injustices.

  Laura R. Kremmel

  See also: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist.

  Further Reading

  MacDonald, Helen. 2005. Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  Marshall, Tim. 1994. “Frankenstein and the 1832 Anatomy Act.” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, 57–64. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

  Moore, Wendy. 2005. The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery. New York: Broadway Books.

  BOOKS OF BLOOD

  The Books of Blood are a collection of thirty short horror stories of varying lengths written by Clive Barker. The first three volumes, containing four to five stories each, were published individually by Sphere in Britain in 1984, with three further discrete volumes published in 1985 after the venture proved successful. The different volumes were eventually collected in two omnibus editions.

  Thematically, the Books of Blood are quite varied and mix modern horror with the Gothic tradition: well-known monsters such as ghosts, werewolves, and doubles appear in some stories, and one in particular—“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”—revisits Poe, but they also include new ones. The stories are marked by effect and are often driven by strong and memorable imagery—the founding fathers of “The Midnight Meat Train,” the giants in “In the Hills, the Cities,” the sow in “Pig Blood Blues,” the severed hands in “The Body Politic”—and by a reclaiming of the monstrous as psychologically complex, a notion Barker has also explored in later novels such as Cabal (1988).

  The uniting thread of the stories in the Books of Blood is the body of the medium Simon McNeal, whose flesh becomes the “book of blood” in the eponymous frame story, which is the first one in the collection and acts as a prologue. The dead, whom he has been mocking, decide to carve their stories (the ones included in the various volumes) on his body and to thus turn him into a living record of their tribulations.

  Despite th
e risk involved in publishing three volumes of short stories by an unknown author, Sphere’s investment in Barker paid off. After he was touted by Stephen King as “the future of horror” and the stories were commended by Ramsey Campbell, the Books of Blood became an overnight sensation. There are many things that distinguish these stories from previous horror fiction, such as Barker’s queer sensibility, but their legacy would be strongly connected to their graphic quality. Although “gore” had already been prominent in James Herbert’s The Rats (1977), the Books of Blood would be credited with generating mainstream interest in horror fiction and with leading to the birth of “splatterpunk,” championed by writers such as John Skipp and Craig Spector. The stories’ legacy has continued in cinema through a number of adaptations in the twenty-first century.

  Xavier Aldana Reyes

  See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Dark Fantasy; The Rats.

  Further Reading

  Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 42–51. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

  Meyer, Gus, and James van Hise. 1990. “The Books of Blood.” In The Illustrated Guide to the Masters of the Macabre, edited by James van Hise, 103–120. Las Vegas, NV: Pioneer Books.