Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Heavily influenced by Lord Byron and Romantic literature as well as Rosicrucianism and the Kabbalah, he took the Gothic novel in a metaphysical direction and explored the use of psychology and archetypal characters. His work represents a transition from Gothic to modern supernatural fiction. His actual beliefs are unclear, but he is known to have done extensive research into such areas as spiritualism, animal magnetism, and ritual magic.

  Bulwer’s early occult short stories include “The Tale of Kosem Kesamim” (1832), “Monos and Daimonos” (1830), and “Manuscript Found in a Madhouse”(1835). His main contributions to the genre, however, are his two occult novels Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862), and the novella The Haunted and the Haunters (1859). The titular character of Zanoni is an immortal magician belonging to an ancient secret society, who sacrifices himself for love. The novel also introduces the demonic entity called the Dweller of the Threshold, a guardian that haunts failed initiates to the society. “The Haunted and the Haunters” concerns a house haunted by the willpower of an immortal magician.

  “The Haunted and the Haunters”: A Prototypical

  Haunted House Story

  First published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters; or The House and the Brain” represents a transition from the Gothic novel to the modern ghost story. It is one of the earliest haunted house stories, and despite the Gothic elements of secret rooms and mysterious phenomena, it is set in a contemporary urban environment, and the haunting has physical effects. It is the prototypical story of people spending a night in a haunted house, and it exemplifies Bulwer’s philosophy that there are no truly supernatural forces, but only natural ones yet to be explained by science. Unlike those in later stories, the phenomena here have a pseudoscientific explanation. Many of the phenomena described were inspired by séances conducted in the author’s home by the noted spirit medium Daniel Dunglas Home.

  The protagonist hears of a purportedly haunted house for rent in London and decides to spend several nights there. He brings a servant and a dog, and experiences a variety of frightening manifestations. The normally fearless servant flees, and the dog dies of a broken neck, but the protagonist makes it through by sheer willpower. The story exists in a shorter form, in which the protagonist discovers and destroys an apparatus used to create the phenomena. In a second, unabridged version, he later meets the immortal magician responsible for the haunting.

  This story’s direct influence can be seen in such later works of supernatural horror as “No. 242 Rue Le Prince” (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram, The Haunting of Hill House (1962) by Shirley Jackson, and Hell House (1971) by Richard Matheson. “The Haunted and the Haunters” is directly or indirectly responsible for the establishment of an entire horror subgenre.

  Lee Weinstein

  A Strange Story has many elements in common with the previous stories and involves a magician, the elixir of life, alchemy, and possible reincarnation. It has been cited as an influence on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories. Bulwer regarded the magical forces depicted in his work as natural forces that were as yet unexplained by science, as opposed to actual supernatural forces. This is also true of his later science fictional utopia, The Coming Race (1871). “The Haunted and the Haunters” remains his most popular and influential work.

  His occult fiction in general was influential on the work of Sheridan Le Fanu, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marie Corelli, and Edgar Allan Poe, all of whom influenced succeeding generations of horror writers. He died in Torquay, UK, on January 18, 1873.

  Lee Weinstein

  See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Spiritualism.

  Further Reading

  Christensen, Allan Conrad. 1976. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The Fiction of New Regions. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

  Christensen, Allan C. 1983. “Edward Bulwer-Lytton (25 May 1803–18 January 1873).” In Victorian Novelists Before 1885, edited by Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman, 73–87. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 21. Detroit: Gale.

  Mitchell, Leslie. 2003. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. New York and London: Hambledon and London.

  Woolf, Robert Lee. 1971. “Strange Stories: The Occult Fiction of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton.” In Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction, 143–366. Boston: Gambit.

  BURNT OFFERINGS

  Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel Burnt Offerings began as an idea for a screenplay sometime around 1970, when Marasco was working as a high school teacher in Manhattan and had just attained some success with a Broadway production of his play Child’s Play. Burnt Offerings, which was originally conceived as a black comedy, charts the disintegration of the Rolfe family during a summer vacation in a crumbling country mansion that effectively acts as the book’s murderous villain.

  The narrative focuses primarily on Marian Rolfe, her son Davey, husband Ben, and his Aunt Elizabeth. Marian’s love of cleanliness, order, and beautiful furniture prompts her to pester Ben into renting a sprawling and suspiciously affordable house to get away from a suffocating city apartment. Marian throws herself into cleaning and caring for the house and cooking for the reclusive old Mrs Allardyce, who is never actually seen. Meanwhile, her family falls prey to a series of terrible accidents, as the house mysteriously repairs itself around them. What is most horrifying about the novel is how little Marian struggles against the house’s manipulation of her desire for domestic perfection, as she abandons her dying loved ones and is ultimately absorbed into the house, taking Mrs Allardyce’s place in a locked room at its heart, as a kind of supernatural housekeeper. A series of eerie photographs suggest that the house periodically restores itself to splendor in precisely this way, demanding blood sacrifices every few years.

  Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings, although it has receded from public memory in the decades since its publication, remains an influential haunted house novel, and it still provides a powerful jolt of supernatural horror for those readers who choose to seek it out. It has often been compared to Stephen King’s The Shining, which it preceded by four years, because both novels tell the story of middle-class families living as caretakers in an isolated mansion that proves to harbor an evil force, which infiltrates their psyches as it tries to destroy them.

  Matt Cardin

  Burnt Offerings cannot be separated from the American haunted house tradition, epitomized by writers from Charles Brockden Brown to Mark Z. Danielewski. Specifically, it emerged during a wave of late twentieth-century novels and films about supernatural domestic disturbances, such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1980), and is often compared to Stephen King’s The Shining (1977); indeed, King has written about the book on several occasions. When it was first published, reviewers found it effective and chilling, and for today’s readers, it offers a neat, convincing, often unnerving account of a woman driven by societal pressures to subordinate her personal affections to housework and a love of material objects.

  In this regard, it bears comparison to Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972), and King’s Carrie (1974), horror novels by American male writers focusing on issues affecting middle-class women and girls. While both the book and Dan Curtis’s star-studded 1976 film adaptation are relatively obscure today, Burnt Offerings remains an important contribution to horror’s explorations of the troubled and troubling relationship between women and the houses that dominate their lives.

  Dara Downey

  See also: Brown, Charles Brockden; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; House of Leaves; Rosemary’s Baby; The Shining.

  Further Reading

  Bailey, Dale. 1999. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. 1999. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

  King, Stephen. 1998. “Robert Marasco, Burnt Offerings.�
� 1998. In Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 217–218. New York: Carroll and Graf.

  BUTLER, OCTAVIA E. (1947–2006)

  Octavia Estelle Butler was primarily a science fiction writer whose well-crafted, intelligent, and emotionally resonating—and at times devastating—novels brought her much critical success during her lifetime. It can be argued nonetheless that her themes, which she revisited in all of her writing, are also central to horror fiction. Her sustained focus on alienation and marginalization, her examination of the crushing effects of power as it is wielded by alien forces, her investigation of bodies that have been colonized and refashioned into something Other yet which remain recognizably and in some instances tragically human, are common threads found in the best horror fiction.

  The five novels that together make up Butler’s Patternist Series—Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984)—tell a complex story, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing into the distant future, of an ancient creature and his son who breed with a female shape-changer to create a new breed of human. Her Xenogenesis trilogy—Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—tells the story of a visiting alien race that, through programmatic miscegenation (the interbreeding of different races), offers a dying humanity a chance to continue the species, albeit with changes. The Parable series was left unfinished at the time of her death. Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) take place in an early twenty-first century America that has collapsed into political, economic and ecological crisis. The latter of these was awarded the Nebula Award for best novel by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  These novels incorporate horror imagery and themes to varying and perhaps progressively lesser degrees, but her final work, Fledgling (2005), more fully embraces the horror treasury in its presentation of the vampire as a different species. The Ina are a shadow species that survive by feeding on human blood, and their saliva, in turn, extends the lifetimes of the humans they bring into their inner circle. Butler’s dominant theme—of unequal but beneficial symbiotic relationships that require sacrifice from both parties—plays out against a backdrop of familial infighting and power struggle. Shori, the novel’s main character, is an adult Ina who, because of a genetic experiment, resembles a ten-year-old black girl. A powerful family of Inas, all of which are white, see her as an aberration and set out to destroy her. The novel is especially bloody even for Butler, whose stories are often vicious in their telling, but Fledgling is nonetheless a powerful and insightful exploration of the intersection of identity and violence.

  Butler’s shorter fiction numbers barely more than half a dozen short stories, but of these, “Bloodchild” (1984) stands out as an extraordinary exercise in body horror and corporeal violation willingly given between alien and human. It was awarded the Locus, Nebula, and Hugo awards. Also significant is “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987), which details the horrific aftereffects of a cure for cancer. The children of those who took the cure are crippled by extreme psychosis and violent behavior. While the subsequent generation learns how to delay the onset of the aftereffects, the social alienation they experience as a result is no better than the afflictions they will eventually face.

  As a female African American science fiction writer, Butler’s was for years a lone but necessary voice. Indeed, no one but she could have written a novel like Kindred (1979), which illuminates the all-too-real horrors of slave culture. The novel follows an educated black woman in 1976 whose white slave-owning ancestor is able to call her back through time whenever his life is imperiled. She and her white husband are forced to confront, experience, and be complicit in the exploitation of black bodies and the violence wrought upon them. Butler’s influence on a current generation of writers, white and of color, is profound and cannot be overstated. Her sudden death from a head injury sustained in an accidental fall in her backyard robbed the field of one of its most distinctive and important voices.

  Javier A. Martinez

  See also: Body Horror; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Francis, Consuela, ed. 2010. Conversations with Octavia Butler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

  Octavia E. Butler. Accessed July 28, 2016. http://octaviabutler.org.

  Pfeiffer, John R. 1999. “Butler, Octavia Estelle (b. 1947).” In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Bleiler, 147–158. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Samatar, Sofia. 2013. “Strange Symbiosis in ‘Bloodchild.’” Weird Fiction Review, June 24. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/06/101-weird-writers-26-octavia-butler.

  BUZZATI, DINO (1906–1972)

  Dino Buzzati was, along with Italo Calvino, one of the most important modern Italian writers of fantastic and surrealistic fiction. A prolific author of novels, stories, plays, and journalism, Buzzati has had, via a handful of English translations, a modest impact on the more literary strains of horror and dark fantasy writing. His most celebrated and widely circulated novel, The Tartar Steppe (1945), potently echoes Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926) in its depiction of a labyrinthine military fort of inscrutable purpose, infested with self-important bureaucrats, to which the main character, Giovanni Drogo, is assigned in a kind of nightmarish exile; the atmosphere, brilliantly sustained, is one of ironic claustrophobia, with Fort Bastiani offering a potent allegory of psychological entrapment. In this novel, Buzzati, like Kafka, makes the absurd seem genuinely foreboding.

  Buzzati’s key theme is the way in which fantasy and desire—often incarnated in alluring dreams or visionary quests with vaguely supernatural overtones—manage to survive in a barren secular world. His short stories, many taking the form of crystalline parables that draw on fairy tales and myth, have been distilled into two excellent collections of English translations by Lawrence Venuti: Restless Nights (1983) and The Siren (1984). Buzzati deploys his considerable skills as a journalist to describe, in matter-of-fact prose, marvelous violations of everyday reality: hallucinations take on palpable form, leading to the death of “The Bewitched Bourgeois” (1948); an uncharted city persistently foils an avid traveler in “The Walls of Anagoor” (1955); time accelerates or freezes into stasis in “The Time Machine” (1954), a work that verges on science fiction (as does Buzzati’s 1960 novel Larger Than Life [trans. 1962], in which a scientist’s dead wife is seemingly reincarnated in a computer).

  Buzzati died in 1972, leaving behind a complex corpus of work, much of it still inaccessible to those unversed in Italian. His influence on modern horror literature has been less obvious than that of Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges, but it has nonetheless exerted a strange fascination for readers unafraid to grapple with its playful mysteries, and it has been cited by the contemporary American horror writer Thomas Ligotti as a significant influence.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Borges, Jorge Luis; Dreams and Nightmares; Kafka, Franz; Surrealism; The Uncanny.

  Further Reading

  Atchity, Kenneth. 1978. “Time in Two Novels of Dino Buzzati.” Italica 55 (1): 3–19.

  Cancalon, E. D. 1977. “Spatial Structures in the Narrative of Dino Buzzati.” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 11 (1): 36–46.

  Venuti, Lawrence. 1982. “Dino Buzzati’s Fantastic Journalism.” Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1): 79–91.

  BYRON, LORD (1788–1824)

  George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron, became the most famous poet of his era and the central figure of the English Romantic movement. His work was dominated by his image and seen primarily as an aspect of that image; his attire and attitude became enormously influential on the poses struck by young men ambitious to be seen as rebels against conformity, the former defining the dress code of English and French “dandies” for a generation—assisted by the influence of his disciple George “Beau” Brummell—and the latter shapi
ng their lifestyle fantasies. Prompted to flee England in 1816 after the breakdown of his marriage to Anne Millbanke, amid scandal generated by multiple affairs (most famously with Caroline Lamb) and rumors of incest (with his half-sister Augusta Leigh) and sodomy, he apparently poured his feelings of guilt into the classic Faustian fantasy Manfred and justified his promiscuity by representing “Don Juan” as a victim unable to resist female seduction rather than a predator.

  Byron was the orchestrator of the occasion that gave rise to the most famous legend in the history of horror fiction when his guests at the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva in 1816 embarked on a competition in which each would write a horror story. He and Percy Shelley never finished theirs, but Mary Shelley developed hers into Frankenstein, and Byron’s physician, John William Polidori, eventually produced “The Vampyre,” whose anonymous publication led to it being widely misattributed to Byron. The inspiration provided by that occasion thus produced two of the most important archetypes of English horror fiction, and the latter story, which recasts a character clearly based on Byron—given the same name as the villain of Caroline Lamb’s vengeful novel Glenarvon (1816)—brought out the “satanic” aspects of the Byronic pose in a lurid fashion, with the result that countless future vampires would be modeled, directly or indirectly, with various degrees of stigmatization, on the unwitting baron.

  Byron’s Manfred: A Gothic Metaphysical Drama

  Byron’s Manfred is a dramatic poem in the form of a closet drama (a play intended to be read, not performed). First published in 1817, it was written after Byron fled Britain following the breakdown of his marriage, amid scandalous rumor, mostly while he was traveling through the Alps after the famous evening spent at the Villa Diodati when he and his various companions discussed writing horror stories.