by Matt Cardin
Morrison, Michael A. 1991. “The Delights of Dread: Clive Barker’s First Three Books of Blood.” In Clive Barker’s Shadows of Eden: The Books, Films and Art of Clive Barker, edited by Stephen Jones, 157–169. Lancaster, PA: Underword Miller.
BORGES, JORGE LUIS (1899–1986)
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinean author of short fiction that has had a massive impact on the fields of fantasy and supernatural horror literature. He began writing during the 1930s but only reached a significant international audience in the 1960s, when many of his most important stories were gathered into two major collections of English translations (with some overlapping content), Ficciones (1962) and Labyrinths (1962). Elliptical and haunting, Borges’s tales explore themes of memory, identity, power, and myth with an imaginative brilliance that, despite their idiosyncrasy, gives them the sweep and cogency of universal statements.
Borges’s fictions occupy a space somewhere between the short story and the philosophical essay: searching, meditative, wryly ironic, they delve into the profoundest mysteries of human experience with elegance and panache. Borges’s first work to appear in English, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), is characteristic: on the surface a tale of wartime espionage, it imagines history as a proliferating series of potential outcomes, branching off from decisive moments of action, in which protagonists elect their destinies and thus define a collective fate; here, Borges’s favored trope of the labyrinth becomes a model for history itself. An even more affecting treatment of this theme is “The Library of Babel” (1941), which evokes an archival universe made up of an infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms filled with all the books that have been or conceivably could be written, tended by a shadowy cabal of librarians; the possibility that some volumes may contain secret hermetic knowledge provides support for a messianic cult that ceaselessly roams the stacks. The story conveys a powerful otherworldly feel, a sense of dislocation into an alternate universe of occult intensity; Borges, who himself worked for many years as a librarian, manages to capture the bibliomaniacal fantasy of a world made wholly out of books.
Many of Borges’s stories inhabit such otherworlds, alternative time-spaces darkly estranged from our own. “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941) depicts a mythical world in which the eponymous game of chance dictates all dimensions of life, offering a kind of parable about the power of random chance to shape human destiny. A similar effect can be found in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), which illustrates the implications of epistemological solipsism (the belief that only the contents of one’s own mind are really knowable) in its evocation of a world whose inhabitants deny its own objective existence. In such tales, complex ideas take on palpable form; indeed, Borges’s stories are invariably conceptually driven, their characters and incidents subordinate to a larger speculative agenda that involves consistently blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality. These two realms interpenetrate at every level, including the very manner—nonlinear, reflective, recursive—in which the tales are told. Borges’s fictions often have dark and paranoiac textures, like a nightmare, and his world is one haunted by numinous presences, thick with ghosts, yet he largely eschews conventional depictions of the supernatural in favor of a hazy sense of lurking immensities, a creative treatment for which the term “Borgesian” has been coined.
Many commentators have observed the deep debts Borges’s work owes to Edgar Allan Poe in its oneiric (dreamlike) obsessiveness, its fondness for mercurial or unreliable narrators, and its complex mixture of precise cognition and irrationality. Borges also, in his 1975 story “There Are More Things,” highlighted a link with H. P. Lovecraft; though affirming that Lovecraft was, in his view, a lesser artist than Poe, Borges nonetheless produced a characteristically eccentric homage in this tale of a monstrous entity inhabiting a shunned house. While his own style is far from Lovecraftian, much of Borges’s work does suggest, as in Lovecraft, the highly precarious nature of human existence in the face of cosmic magnitudes beyond mortal ken, and he also has a fondness for furtive mystical or cabalistic cults hankering after forbidden forms of knowledge.
The influence of Borges can be discerned in authors as diverse as Robert Aickman, whose strange stories show a similar impulse to philosophical reflection, and Iain Banks, whose dark fantasy novels Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986) occupy textual dreamscapes of Borgesian complexity. The most powerful homage to Borges in recent years was Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000), a metafictional horror story set in the eponymous labyrinth, at whose heart lurks a deeply occulted mystery. The term “slipstream,” coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling in 1989 to describe a form of postmodern fiction that makes the reader feel “very strange,” can be seen as a contemporary variant of Borges’s playful speculations, wherein fantasy elements coexist with a drive toward rigorous logical thought. In acknowledgment of his importance to the field, Borges was honored with a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1979.
Rob Latham
See also: Aickman, Robert; Dreams and Nightmares; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; House of Leaves; The Numinous; Surrealism; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Bell-Villada, Gene H. 2000. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Buchanan, C. J. 1996. “J. L. Borges’s Lovecraftian Tale: ‘There Are More Things’ in the Dream Than We Know.” Extrapolation 37 (4): 357–363.
Burgin, Richard, ed. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Fraser, Howard M. 1977. “Points South: Ambrose Bierce, Jose Luis Borges, and the Fantastic.” Studies in 20th Century Literature 1 (2): 173–181.
Williamson, Edwin, ed. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BOWEN, MARJORIE (1885–1952)
Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell Long was born in Hampshire, England, to an alcoholic father who deserted the family soon thereafter and a cold and ineffectual mother. She wrote her first novel, The Viper of Milan, while still in her teens, though it did not see print until 1906, where it has remained under various publishers to the present day. History interpenetrates nearly all of Bowen’s work, whether she is writing a travel guide, an essay, a biography, crime fiction, or supernatural fiction; or attempting to recreate a specific historical event entirely from available evidence, or using that evidence as a springboard for her own imagination. As with Vernon Lee, her attention to period detail lends her settings and dialogue a sense of having been “lived in,” so that her characters act convincingly as integral players in events with recognizable human motives rather than as cogs in a machine.
All of her books appeared under pseudonyms—nearly one hundred under the name Marjorie Bowen, more than thirty as George Preedy, seventeen as Joseph Shearing, and the remainder by Robert Paye, John Winch, the ghost story anthologist Arthur Neale, and the thinly disguised author of the autobiography. Regardless of the pseudonym used, all twenty of the short story collections Bowen gathered include what she termed “twilight tales.” Although these are primarily supernatural, her interest in irony, venality, social injustice, and the annals of criminality also lends a macabre edge to her suspense fiction and much of her historical fiction. Thus, although there are only a handful of supernatural novels—Black Magic: A Tale of the Rise and Fall of Antichrist (1909), concerning the legend of Pope Joan; The Haunted Vintage (1921), chronicling the nineteenth-century appearance of the goddess Freya in the Rhine Valley; I Dwelt in High Places (1923), about the sorcerous adventures of John Dee; Five Winds (1927), about the inexorable working out of a family curse; The Shadow on Mockways (1932), a grotesque and not entirely successful Gothic melodrama; The Devil Snar’d (“by George Preedy,” 1932), a novel of diablerie; Julia Roseingrave (“by Robert Paye,” 1933), dealing with the subtle encroachment of witchcraft in a romantic relationship; and the doppelgänger tale The Man with the Scales (1954)—man
y of Bowen’s historical novels and novels based on classic crimes “by Joseph Shearing” focus on the darker side of history. Examples include The Master of Stair (1907), dealing with the massacre at Glen Coe, and The Poisoners (“by George Preedy,” 1936), set in the murderous cabal within the court of Louis XIV. Such novels turn very dark indeed, and even some of her novels on heroic subjects, like the Black Prince in The English Paragon (1930), contain episodes of a horrific nature.
This is not meant to imply that her work is unrelievedly grim. There is a tender or lyrical side on display in stories like “The House by the Poppy Field” (1916), “The Sign Painter and the Crystal Fishes” (1917), “Dark Anne” (1923), “The Avenging of Anne Leete” (1923), “Anne Mellor’s Lover” (1923), “The Breakdown” (1976), and the vision of the godlings toiling in the vineyard at sunrise in The Haunted Vintage, as well as grim humor to leaven the supernatural events in “Decay” (1923), “The Crown Derby Plate” (1931), and “Incubus” (1935). This compensates for the savagery of stories like “Giuditta’s Wedding Night” (1916), “The Fair Hair of Ambrosine” (1916), “The Last Bouquet” (1916), “Scoured Silk” (1919), “Kecksies” (1923), “Florence Flannery” (1929), and “The Bishop of Hell” (1929).
At her best, Bowen’s work teems with color, drama, pathos, and an often underappreciated metaphorical richness that belies the haste that leaves perceptible, if forgivable, flaws in many of her novels. These are among the qualities that have appealed to so many writers, including Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter de la Mare, Horace Walpole, William Roughead, Michael Sadleir, Edward Wagenknecht, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Graham Greene claimed that after reading Bowen’s first novel, “From that moment I began to write. All the other possible futures slid away. . . . It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject” (Greene 1951, 15–16).
Jim Rockhill
See also: Ancestral Curse; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Campbell, Margaret. 1939. The Debate Continues, Being the Autobiography of Marjorie Bowen. London: William Heinemann.
Greene, Graham. 1951. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. London: Eyre and Spottiswood.
Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. 1998. “The Supernatural Romances of Marjorie Bowen.” In Marjorie Bowen, Twilight and Other Supernatural Romances, xix–xl. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash-Tree Press.
Wagenknecht, Edward. 1991. “Marjorie Bowen.” In Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction, 152–181. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
BRADBURY, RAY (1920–2012)
Raymond Douglas Bradbury was an American short story writer, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter who produced more than six hundred works of horror, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction. He published in more than fifty books, and provided the creative inspiration for the U.S. Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair and the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World. His work continued to be published until a week before his death on June 5, 2012. Although he was most widely known as a science fiction writer, in his early writing life he focused more on horror, and this was a subject to which he returned repeatedly throughout his career.
Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, a town he frequently fictionalized as Green Town in works such as Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He included among his ancestors a woman who was tried as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. He saw magician Harry Blackstone several times when he was young, and when he was twelve a carnival magician who appeared under the name Mr. Electrico tapped him on the nose with an electrified sword and commanded him to “live forever.” Bradbury took the advice to heart and started writing every day for the rest of his life. He later said he imitated Edgar Allan Poe from the time he was twelve until he was eighteen.
Ray Bradbury: Horror Writer
Although he is more widely thought of as a science fiction writer—thanks largely to the branding he received as “the world’s greatest living science fiction writer,” an epithet printed on the covers of paperback editions of his books in the 1970s and 1980s—Ray Bradbury is actually better described as a writer of fantasy, and it is often quite dark fantasy, with much of it shading over into genuine horror. His first book, the short fiction collection Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, which at that point dealt only in supernatural horror. Dark Carnival was later transformed into The October Country (1955), which went on to become a cherished classic among horror readers. In these and many other works, Bradbury made significant and deliberate contributions to horror. He also spoke and wrote passionately, in stories, essays, and public talks, about the necessity of acknowledging and even celebrating, in art, the fearsome, dark, terrifying, and horrifying aspects of life. In a real sense, it would not have been inaccurate during his lifetime to have branded him as one of the greatest living horror writers.
Matt Cardin
When Bradbury was fourteen, the family moved to Los Angeles, by which time he already considered himself a writer. Unable to afford university, he educated himself after high school by going to the local library several days a week for the following decade. He supported himself by selling newspapers. He self-published some of his early work in magazines and fanzines, using pseudonyms to disguise his numerous contributions, and made his first professional sale in 1941, earning $15 for a story called “Pendulum” published in the November issue of Super Science Stories. Two years later, he became a full-time writer, supported by his wife, Marguerite “Maggie” McClure, whom he met in the bookstore where she worked.
He adopted a regimental approach to his chosen profession, drafting a new short story every week—first draft on Monday, revisions over the next several days, submission to a potential publisher on Saturday. His plots were often about the perceptions of children or memories of childhood, and he claimed to have total recall of his earliest years, including the moment of his birth.
Most of his work in the horror genre came during his twenties. He found a willing home for his stories in Weird Tales, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith, placing a story in every issue but one between March 1943 and September 1945. In the biographical sketch accompanying his appearances in the magazine, Bradbury said he didn’t care much for ghosts, vampires, or werewolves, since they had been killed with repetition. Instead, he said, there were good stories to be found in everyday things, as well as good stuff “buried in the green leaves of childhood and the heaped dead leaves of old age” (quoted in Schweitzer 1988, 31).
He made a significant sale to Mademoiselle in 1946 with “The Homecoming,” about a normal young boy who feels like an outcast in a family of witches and vampires. It was an unlikely story for the market, but Truman Capote, who was helping out around the editorial offices at the time, pulled it from the slush pile and recommended it to the editors. Charles Addams—of Addams Family fame—was hired to illustrate the story, which became the centerpiece of the magazine’s Halloween issue. Over the years Bradbury would return several times to the Elliot family of ghosts, ghouls, and other assorted monsters. The seven Elliot tales, including “Uncle Einar,” which was also written during this period, are collected in From the Dust Returned (2001).
Many of the stories from Weird Tales were collected in Bradbury’s first book, Dark Carnival, published by specialty press Arkham House in 1947. This edition consisted of slightly over 3,000 copies, and within a couple of years the book was out of print and would remain so until a limited edition reissue by Gauntlet Press in 2001.
Several stories in Dark Carnival have two-word titles, in the form “The Noun.” These include classics such as “The Jar,” about a farmer who buys a jar that has something strange floating in it from a carnival sideshow; “The Lake,” where the protagonist returns to his hometown after the body of his childhood friend who drowned a decade earlier is finally discovered; “The Crowd,” in which a character discovers the same people appearing in the crowds that gather around accident scenes; “The S
cythe,” wherein a man learns the burdens and responsibilities of reaping; and “The Emissary,” a gruesome tale in which the family dog drags the body of a beloved teacher to a bedridden boy. These stories arose from Bradbury’s early habit of writing lists of nouns to generate ideas. After creating these lists, he would do a free association exercise in which he investigated why he chose those particular words and what they meant to him. Dark Carnival also contains such notable stories as “Skeleton,” where a hypochondriac becomes convinced his skeleton is to blame for his health problems; and “The Small Assassin,” in which a woman thinks her newborn baby is conspiring to kill her. Given the opportunity to bring the book back into print in 1955, Bradbury decided instead to extensively revise several of the stories, lightly edit others, add four new tales to the mix, and remove twelve of the original twenty-seven that he deemed weak, primitive, or overly violent.
In the years between Dark Carnival and the publication of this revamped edition, titled The October Country, Bradbury produced some of his most notable works, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 (expanded from “The Fireman,” which was written in the basement of the UCLA library on a typewriter that he rented for ten cents per half hour), and The Golden Apples of the Sun, in addition to beginning work, in collaboration with film director John Huston in Ireland, on the script for the Hollywood film adaptation of Moby Dick. In addition to his two early collections, his only other foray into overt horror was Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), expanded from the 1948 short story “Black Ferris,” first as a screenplay for Gene Kelly (to whom the book is dedicated) to direct, and then into a novel when Kelly couldn’t get funding for the project. He then declared that he had said everything he had to say in the horror field.
Before moving into the realm of science fiction and fantasy, Bradbury tried his hand at writing crime fiction for pulp magazines such as Dime Mystery Magazine and Detective Tales, although these were more often tales of terror rather than whodunits or mysteries. He then started making regular sales to the higher-class and higher-paying “slick” magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harper’s.
