Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  The relationship between Laura and Carmilla has been categorized by many readers and scholars as a lesbian relationship. During the Victorian period, especially approaching the fin-de-siècle—the late nineteenth-century period in Europe and Britain characterized by a growing sense of cultural exhaustion, pessimism, and fears of societal degeneration and civilizational collapse—there was a growing concern over what was perceived to be sexual abnormality, including homosexuality. Carmilla’s choice of prey, young women, suggests that she is a predatory deviant, and the trope of vampirism is used to explore these fears. Carmilla’s vampirism is horrifying because it represents an attack on societal codes. Le Fanu’s novella may have been influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lyrical poem “Christabel” (1797), which also features a close friendship between a young woman and a female supernatural creature.

  Carmilla falls into the genre of Gothic horror. Like earlier Gothic stories it features an absent mother (Laura’s mother is dead), which makes Laura vulnerable to attack. The Styrian landscape is replete with forests, abandoned villages, and a gloomy graveyard in which stands a tomb to the ancient Karnstein family. A foreign setting in mainland Europe is regularly used in early Gothic narratives. The horror elements are seen in Carmilla’s attack on innocent young women and her vampiric identity. Laura notices a similarity between Carmilla and a portrait of one of her ancestors, a typical Gothic conceit and a cause for uncanny unease. At the end of the novel Carmilla is discovered lying in a coffin full of blood, adding to the sense of horror.

  Although less popular than Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Carmilla influenced Stoker, whose notes show that his novel was originally to have opened in Styria where Jonathan Harker, the protagonist, would meet with a beautiful female vampire. Though Stoker ended up changing the opening setting of his novel to Transylvania, there is a parallel between the character of Baron Vordenburg in Le Fanu’s novella and the character of Doctor Van Helsing—another vampire expert—in Stoker’s novel. Likewise, Carmilla’s ability to transform into a cat to attack Laura is echoed in Dracula’s ability to shape-shift. Both Le Fanu and Stoker were Irish, and their vampire stories have been analyzed as engaging with Irish politics and as part of the Irish Gothic tradition.

  Carmilla has been adapted for film a number of times. Notable adaptations include Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), though the lesbian sexuality was excised, and Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1960). Le Fanu’s vampire heavily influenced the British Hammer Horror film productions of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Vampire Lovers (1970), which starred Ingrid Pitt and was the first installment of the Karnstein Trilogy. Most recently the novella has been adapted as a Web series on YouTube also titled Carmilla (2014–2015).

  Kaja Franck

  See also: Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Nethercott, Arthur H. 1949. “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla.” Modern Philology 47: 32–38.

  Signorotti, Elizabeth. 1996. “Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula.” Criticism 38: 607–632.

  Ulin, Julieann. 2013. “Sheridan Le Fanu’s Vampires and Ireland’s Invited Invasion.” In Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 39–55. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

  CARRION COMFORT

  Carrion Comfort is Dan Simmons’s second novel, published by Dark Harvest in 1989. In it, Simmons reinvents the concept of vampires by applying the word to characters who gain strength and forestall aging by forcing others, through mind control, to perpetrate acts of violence. The book’s title is taken from a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet that chronicles the protagonist’s struggle with the temptation to yield to despair. In a blurb on the book’s cover, Stephen King called Simmons’s novel “one of the three greatest horror novels of the 20th century.”

  The plot centers on three “mind vampires,” Nina Drayton, Melanie Fuller, and Willi Borden, who have been playing a game for half a century. They gather annually to award each other points based on the difficulty of individual feats of mind control and on the amount of notoriety each violent incident gains. Rivalries and decades-old animosities spark a power struggle within their group. America becomes the playing field for their conflict, and they turn innocent bystanders into the weapons in their attacks against each other. Only Willi wants to join with and control other mind vampires—powerful gifted individuals who have infiltrated almost every level of American society.

  The book’s Van Helsing is holocaust survivor Saul Laski, who has been hunting Willi for decades. He enlists the help of Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry and photographer Natalie Preston, both of whom have been exposed to the violence arising from the vampires’ battles. Gentry is killed halfway through the book, and the remaining human combatants stage an attack on a private island where the elite group meets to play chess with human pieces. They kill all of the vampires except for Melanie, whose thoughts turn to the possibility of controlling a nuclear submarine in the closing pages.

  The supernatural creatures in Carrion Comfort are considered vampires because the author says they are. They rarely come into direct contact with their victims, and they do not extract anything material from them. Their main driving force is a lust for power rather than hunger, although they do benefit physically from feeding. Simmons uses his unconventional concept of vampires to explore the corrupting influence of nearly limitless power and the effect such power has on those who refuse to be victims of it.

  At roughly half a million words, Carrion Comfort is an ambitious epic, part horror novel, part thriller, with an enormous cast, multiple viewpoint characters (including Melanie’s first-person narrative), and numerous settings.

  The opening section of Carrion Comfort was published as a novella of the same name in OMNI (1983) and collected in Prayers to Broken Stones. Mainstream American publishers deemed the book too long, though, so its hardcover release came from a small press. It won August Derleth, Bram Stoker, and British Fantasy awards for Best Novel and found a wider audience in paperback the following year.

  Bev Vincent

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Simmons, Dan; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Gelder, Ken. 1994. Reading the Vampire, 130–133. New York: Routledge.

  Simmons, Dan. 2009. “Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Carrion Comfort.” In Carrion Comfort, ix–xxxi. New York: Thomas Dunn Books.

  CARROLL, JONATHAN (1949–)

  Jonathan Carroll is an American writer (long resident in Vienna, Austria) whose work can be characterized as surrealism or American “magic realism.” He tends to write about sophisticated, artistic people, reflecting his background as the son of noted screenwriter Sidney Carroll and Broadway actress and lyricist June Carroll (Sillman). Carroll’s stories often establish a realistic, contemporary setting and a convincing narrative voice. Somewhere along the way, the story will get very strange, merely because life is strange, without any rational explanation. Carroll has said in an interview that he is not consciously writing in a fantasy or horror tradition (Schweitzer 2013, 38).

  His approach is typified by his masterful first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), which is about two people who are great fans of a famous children’s book author, Marshall France. The narrator, Thomas Abbey, hopes to write France’s biography. He is invited by the author’s daughter to come to France’s hometown, live in his house, and do research. But gradually he is bringing France’s works and then France himself to life. For about 60 percent of the way through, this is a realistic novel that lovingly conveys a sense of literary worship. But then, startlingly, the fantastic
begins to intrude. The book ends as the townspeople go to the train station to greet Marshall France, who is coming back from the dead. The fate of Thomas Abbey and his companion is uncertain, now that he has fulfilled his usefulness to the townspeople, who may well be France’s creations as well.

  Carroll can achieve similarly sinister effects in his short fiction. In the World Fantasy Award–winning “Friend’s Best Man” (1987), a man loses a leg saving his dog from a train. While in the hospital, he befriends a terminally ill young girl. The girl seems to be able to talk to the dog. This seems a charming fancy until, just before her death, the girl warns the man that soon animals will revolt and wipe out humans. There are increasing signs that other things the girl learned from the dog are true, so this may be true as well.

  Carroll has written (as of 2016) fifteen novels and two novellas published as separate books. Bones of the Moon (1987) takes place within the serial dreams of a woman who is led through them by the spirit of the aborted child she never had. (Dreams are a very important motif in Carroll’s work and often a major plot element.) Sleeping in Flame (1988) is loosely based on the Rumpelstiltskin story. It is about a writer/actor who begins to develop magical talents. Most of Carroll’s novels are about people from the normal, everyday world slipping into strangeness. The Ghost in Love (2008) reverses this by starting in the afterlife. There is a certain sameness to some of Carroll’s later novels, but this is not a major defect because of their uniformly high quality.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Dark Fantasy; Dreams and Nightmares; Surrealism.

  Further Reading

  Rottensteiner, Franz. 1986. “Jonathan Carroll: The Wonder and the Threat of Existence.” Fantasy Review 9, no. 11 (December): 10–13.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 2013. “Jonathan Carroll” (an interview). In Speaking of the Fantastic, 38–58. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press.

  Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Carroll, Jonathan 1949–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 1, edited by Richard Bleiler, 201–207. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  CARTER, ANGELA (1940–1992)

  Angela Carter was an English novelist whose revival of Gothic horror in the early days of second wave feminism exposed complacencies of romance and domestic relationships, emphasizing the essential performativity, and imposed and internalized imprisonment, of gender roles. Her work won several awards, including the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for The Magic Toyshop (1967), the Somerset Maugham award for Several Perceptions (1968), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Nights at the Circus (1987). Influenced by William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, and Charles Dickens, always irreverent, and mixing disturbingly dark, glittering, and bawdy carnivalesque themes with horror, her work grows from and rewrites myths, fairy tales, popular fictions, the Marquis de Sade, and Hollywood movies. It undercuts and exposes their sexually constraining, damaging narratives.

  Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and H. P. Lovecraft, Carter was more down to earth than any of these three, using fantasy and humor, finding the terrible and vicious in the everyday, such as in domestic tyranny and incarceration in The Magic Toyshop, where a severed hand in a kitchen drawer suggests bondage, and orphaned Melanie is turned into a living puppet playing Leda to puppeteer Uncle Philip’s gross, homemade swan, Zeus (as in the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan). This latter event indicts classical art and mythology as patriarchal sadism, while satirizing the vanity and violence of attempts to control women’s sexuality and agency, here through the figure of the lumpy, comedic, homemade swan. Carter uncovers the horror latent in the familiar, in domestic servitude (as with Aunt Margaret in The Magic Toyshop, silenced by her necklace choker), and in pornographic reification and fetishization of women (as in Nights at the Circus with its protagonist Fevvers, a Cockney winged circus aerialist, and her friends in alcoves at Madame Schreck’s all-female freak show).

  Carter’s living dolls fight back, even destroying their puppet masters, so in “The Loves of Lady Purple” (1974), a marionette, “petrification of a universal whore” (Carter 1995, 44), refuses her nightly titillating and punished performance, coming to vengeful life, draining the puppeteer’s blood, and stalking off to the village brothel. Carter rewrites romantic fictions of eternal undying love and horror scenarios (which they often resemble). In the reversed vampire myth of “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979), Dracula’s descendant mourns her vampire nature, falls in love, and is ultimately betrayed/released by a kiss from a traveling bicyclist on his way to die in the First World War.

  Carter’s version of the romantic lies and tortuous entrapment of the popular “Bluebeard” tale in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) links de Sade with feminism, revealing a penniless young wife’s sexual desires, a duke’s commodification of her as so much meat on a slab, and a warrior mother’s rescue of her daughter. In Carter’s werewolf tale, “The Company of Wolves” (1979), she empowers Rosaleen, a feisty Little Red Riding Hood, to recognize, come to terms with, and celebrate the beast in herself and the lover in the beast, embracing the werewolf. Technically and linguistically, her work operates at the level of paradox, irony, and the oxymoron, refusing binary gender and power divisions, and the Otherizing of difference. Both in its theme and in its form, Carter’s writing blends the everyday with the monstrous. She confronts the gender imbalances in traditional fairy tales, showing conventional horror as patriarchal fabrication based on conservative values to control woman as hag, victim, and whore, her virginity a talisman, her innocence a jewel to own and preserve. Lorna Sage, recognizing Angela Carter for her gendered, politicized Gothic horror as “a witch or wise woman” (1994, 1), says her “fictions prowl around the fringes of the proper English novel like dream monsters—nasty, exotic, brilliant creatures that feed off cultural crisis” (Sage 1977, 51).

  A number of Carter’s works have been adapted for radio, television, and film. Probably the most prominent among these are The Magic Toyshop, adapted to film in 1987 with a screenplay by Carter, and The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan and with a screenplay by Jordan and Carter.

  Gina Wisker

  See also: Dracula; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Vampires; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Carter, Angela. 1995. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. New York: Penguin.

  Cavallaro, Dani. 2011. The World of Angela Carter: A Critical Investigation. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

  Munford, Rebecca. 2013. Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Sage, Lorna, ed. 1994. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago.

  Sage, Lorna. 1977. “The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter.” New Review 39/40: 51–57.

  Wisker, Gina. 1993. “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror.” In Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 161–175. London: Pluto Press.

  THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD

  At 51,000 words, this is H. P. Lovecraft’s one true novel, if a short one. It is the most Gothic of his major works, a final exercise in that mode before he turned to more science fictional tales such as At the Mountains of Madness. Joseph Curwen, of Salem, moves to Providence, Rhode Island in the late seventeenth century. He establishes himself as a merchant, but attracts undue attention by his failure to age. Even when he marries into a respectable family, he cannot dispel sinister rumors of secret experiments and mysterious cemetery delvings. In 1771, a posse raids Curwen’s farm in nearby Pawtuxet, when Curwen, still young and vigorous, should be nearly a century old. What they find is only hinted at. Curwen is killed. As much as possible, all trace of him is erased from the historical record.

  In 1918, a teenager, Charles Dexter Ward, discovers that he is Curwen’s descendant. Already obsessed with the past, he devotes all
his energy (indulged by wealthy parents) to learning about his ancestor. He finds Curwen’s grave, and by replicating certain of Curwen’s own techniques, resurrects him from his “essential saltes.”

  Charles Dexter Ward by Any Other Name

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has been the subject of two well-regarded cinematic adaptations, but neither of them used its title. In the first, director Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963), the Lovecraft connection is buried beneath a veneer of Poe; “The Haunted Palace” is the title of an 1839 poem by Poe, and the movie was marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace” in order to promote it as another entry in Corman’s popular series of Poe adaptations for American International Pictures. But the plot was directly drawn from Lovecraft’s short novel (with the screenplay penned by Charles Beaumont), right down to the fact that the film’s protagonist is named Charles Dexter Ward. The Haunted Palace is widely considered a high point in Lovecraftian cinema.

  The second Charles Dexter Ward adaptation arrived twenty-eight years later under the title The Resurrected (1991), although The Ancestor and Shatterbrain were alternative titles before its release. Directed by Dan O’Bannon, who was already a known quantity in the horror world for writing Alien (1979) and directing Return of the Living Dead (1985), the film is dark, frightening, and smart, and is regarded as another high point in Lovecraftian cinema. Despite this, it received only a tiny theatrical release (although a wider one had been planned) and was shunted to video in 1992.