Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Matt Cardin

  The novel has been described as a “monumental tribute” (Joshi 1990, 235) to the works of Arthur Machen, and especially to his short story “The White People” (1904), which tells the tale of a young girl’s mysterious interactions with her surrounding countryside. Machen’s story is famed for its portentous vagueness—a style that is very much emulated throughout the majority of The Ceremonies. Klein directly lifts and uses elements of Machen’s tale: for example, the narrator of the Green Book (the diary featured in “The White People”) refers mysteriously to “the ceremonies” and to something called the “dȏl” (Machen 2006, 119)—inspirations, surely, not only for the novel’s title, but for its monstrous entity, “the Dhol.” In another of his infamous and highly mysterious works, “The Great God Pan” (1890), Machen talks ominously of what he terms “that awful secret of the wood” (106). Though he never reveals what exactly this “awful secret” is, in The Ceremonies it seems to have been taken as Klein’s central subject, as the vast mysteries of the woodland haunt the novel throughout and are only somewhat revealed at its very end. Klein explicitly draws on the horrors of Machen when he has Jeremy eventually wonder, in horror, “what if Machen told the truth?” (484).

  Klein’s love and knowledge of Gothic literature extend well beyond the works of Machen and are vividly represented throughout The Ceremonies. The protagonist, Jeremy, is not only a scholar of literature, but of Gothic literature specifically. Throughout his time in Gilead, he is slowly working his way through an extensive collection of horror classics, and his reactions to each of these are recorded in detail. There are several instances in which Jeremy’s own experiences mirror the texts he reads—for example, when journeying into the wilderness of Gilead, he is reading about Jonathan Harker’s entering the woods of Transylvania (Dracula, 1897), and later, when one of the animals on the farm is possessed, he is reading about the demonic monkey in Le Fanu’s short story “Green Tea” (1872). There is thus a rich intertextuality throughout The Ceremonies, which firmly underlines Klein’s assertion that horror literature is—or should be—“a tradition-conscious genre” (Tibbetts 2011, 51).

  There are many reasons why The Ceremonies is seen as a modern horror “classic.” In addition to its use of intertextuality, it harbors many traditional elements of the Gothic, including possession, murder, and ultimately a monster. However, what may be most central to making the novel so utterly memorable is its haunting use of ambience. Early on, Klein has Jeremy muse on the main features of the Gothic, and he concludes that the notion of “setting as character” is the most “promising” of all (16). Certainly, this idea is successfully explored throughout The Ceremonies. Nature itself is an ominous presence from the outset, and as the novel progresses, it seems almost to become a malicious entity. The novel plays, most effectively, on our contradictory notions about the natural world: Gilead is, on the one hand, an idyllic retreat from modern urbanity, but on the other hand, it embodies the unknown and is a monstrous wilderness. Though Jeremy initially views the farm as a blissful retreat, he soon has the overwhelming sense that “it isn’t right to build so close to the woods” (26). He begins to think in terms of “man vs. nature” and to fear this unknown environment around him. This setting conceals a wealth of mysteries, secrets, and untold dangers. This is, in the one sense, wholly exciting: in the words of Jeremy, it is “exhilarating” to see evidence of “modern superstition” (265). However, when he eventually learns of the horrors that lie hidden inside nature, he is extremely disturbed.

  The Ceremonies is a truly terrifying tale that warns of humankind's naïveté in thinking they have evolved beyond outmoded superstitions. In it, Klein creates a rich and detailed world, which is both seductive and terrifying. It is little wonder, therefore, that this is a text to which fans return again and again—and one that has made such an indelible mark in the history of horror literature.

  Elizabeth Parker

  See also: Dark Gods; “The Great God Pan”; Klein, T. E. D.; Machen, Arthur; “The White People.”

  Further Reading

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

  Klein, T. E. D. 1984. The Ceremonies. New York: Viking Press.

  Machen, Arthur. 2006. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Leyburn: Tartarus Press.

  Mariconda, Steven J. 1986. “The Hints and Portents of T. E. D. Klein.” Studies in Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 (Summer), 19–28.

  Tibbetts, John C. 2011. “Certain Things Associated with the Night: T. E. D. Klein.” In The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media, 51–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  CHAMBERS, ROBERT W. (1865–1933)

  Robert William Chambers was a best-selling American novelist and short story writer who occasionally wrote horror fiction, including the classic work The King in Yellow (1895). Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1865, he studied art in Paris for seven years and initially became a magazine illustrator. He wrote a collection about Parisian life called In the Quarter (1894), but his second book, The King in Yellow, was the first to become highly successful. In addition to several more Parisian sketches, it contained five supernatural stories, and its success caused him to turn from illustration to writing. He wrote a few other early collections containing weird fiction, but he soon became more famous for his prolific output of commercial historical romances and society novels that earned him the nickname “the Shopgirl Scheherazade.” He died in 1933.

  Chambers was skilled at creating an eerie atmosphere in his weird fiction, and he often employed occultist themes and sometimes out-of-context folkloric elements. The imaginative visual imagery in his work reflects his artistic background. His love of the outdoors, hunting and fishing, butterflies, and Asian antiquities often surface in his fiction as well.

  In The Maker of Moons (1896), the titular story involves a Chinese sorcerer who is creating artificial gold near the Canadian border. The story involves a repellent creature called a Xin and headless Yeth hounds from Welsh folklore. However, the other fantasy stories in the collection are either light in tone or comical. The Mystery of Choice (1897), his second best collection, contains two groups of thematically related fantasies, involving revenants, death, white shadows, and strange dreamlike fugue states, and has fallen into undeserved obscurity. In Search of the Unknown (1904) is comprised of mostly humorous science fiction stories about a zoologist hunting for strange animals. But the first story in the book, “The Harbour Master,” features an amphibious humanoid creature that anticipates the gill-man from the classic 1941 Universal horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon and may have been an influence on H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” In The Tree of Heaven (1907), a mystic in the first story predicts the events of the following tales, many of which contain supernatural elements. Years later, Chambers returned to the horror genre with The Slayer of Souls (1920), which expands on the framework of “The Maker of Moons” and concerns a cult of sorcerers out to cause worldwide political discontent, and a psychic woman who is out to destroy them; and The Talkers (1923), about a hypnotist who tampers with a woman’s soul for his own ends.

  In his own day Chambers was a celebrity who wrote to entertain. Today he is remembered chiefly for his contributions to horror fiction, particularly The King in Yellow. He died in December 1933 following surgery for an intestinal ailment.

  Lee Weinstein

  See also: The King in Yellow; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

  Further Reading

  Lovett-Graff, Bennett. 1999. “Robert W. Chambers.” In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, 69–75. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 202. Detroit: Gale.

  Weinstein, Lee. 1985. “Robert W. Chambers.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 739–745. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  CHARNAS, SUZY MCKEE (1939–)

  Suzy McKee Charnas is an acclaimed fantasy and
science fiction author, best known in horror for her vampire fictions, which include the award-winning novel The Vampire Tapestry (1981). Apart from vampire stories, Charnas has also produced work inspired by other horror icons, several of which were collected in The Music of the Night (2001). Her darkly funny werewolf story, “Boobs,” won the 1989 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and has appeared in many anthologies. Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” inspired Charnas’s apocalyptic horror story “Lowland Sea” (2009), and The Phantom of the Opera inspired her “Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast” (1996), a finalist for both the Hugo (Best Novelette) and the James Tiptree Literary Awards in 1997.

  Charnas is also renowned for her groundbreaking feminist science fiction series, the Holdfast Chronicles, which includes seven novels, beginning with Walk to the End of the World (1974) and concluding with The Conqueror’s Child (1999). In 2003, the Holdfast series, along with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame, which recognizes significant positive gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender content in North American work published prior to 1998. Charnas has also been a finalist and recipient of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, winning retrospectively in 1994 for Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World, and in 2000 for The Conqueror’s Child. In 1994, Charnas also won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature for The Kingdom of Kevin Malone.

  Born on October 22, 1939, Charnas enjoyed a privileged education among the children of wealthy Manhattanites, but as a young woman, she spent two formative years in Nigeria working for the Peace Corps, which radically altered her perspective: “Teaching in Nigeria taught me much that American Education [sic] had falsified, misunderstood, or denied outright about human beings, culture, economics, history, and the world in general, and in the process did what the Peace Corps is, to my mind, supp[os]ed to do: it made me permanently marginal to my home culture” (Charnas 2011).

  Charnas describes her speculative fiction as operating in the “sociological and anthropological,” rather than the “technological” mode, where “smart white guys doing imaginary techno speak at each other” (Gordon 1999, 451–454). The central protagonists of her fictions tend to be women of all ages, often in subjected states, and children. Her writing is imbued with a strong eco-feminist political consciousness. For example, her werewolf story “Boobs” traces the adolescent development of young Kelsey’s body and its sudden vulnerability to sexual violence and objectification. The onset of Kelsey’s menstruation coincides with the onset of her lycanthropy. A decade later, this was the plot of the cult horror film Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett). Learning to love her powerful werewolf body, Kelsey avenges herself upon the boy who assaults her by devouring him without remorse.

  The Vampire Tapestry is a collection of five separately published novellas that, read together, weave the tale of the charismatic, alluring predator Dr. Weyland, mostly through the eyes of various humans who encounter him. For much of the novel, Charnas preserves ambiguity, causing the reader at first to doubt that Weyland is really a vampire and then to discover he is more of a science fiction creature than a traditional romantic vampire. Weyland appears first in “The Ancient Mind at Work” as a distinguished anthropology professor at a small college who uses his sleep research to batten upon students, but housekeeper Katje de Groot, a no-nonsense Boer from South Africa, realizes he is a vampire and, after he attacks her, shoots and critically wounds him. In “The Land of Lost Content,” the wounded Weyland turns up as a prisoner held by the unsavory Roger and his Satanist associate Alan Reese. Roger orders his young nephew Mark to tend to the captive, while he and Reese exploit Weyland, but Mark eventually rebels and frees the vampire. Attempting to get himself reinstated at his college, Weyland next appears in “The Unicorn Tapestry,” seeking psychotherapy with Dr. Floria Landauer. Fascinated by her patient’s vampire “delusion,” Floria wears down Weyland’s carefully constructed barriers against intimacy with the humans he regards as his prey. Weyland is then found in Charnas’s home state, New Mexico, attending Tosca (“A Musical Interlude”), during which, affected by his recent experiences and the splendor of the music, he loses control and kills a performer. “The Last of Dr. Weyland” wraps up the novel with Weyland, transformed by his encounters and menaced by discovery, entering a lengthy period of hibernation.

  The Vampire Tapestry was shortlisted for both World Fantasy and Nebula awards in 1981. “The Unicorn Tapestry” won the 1980 Nebula Award for Best Novella and has since been adapted by Charnas into the play Vampire Dreams. Along with “The Ancient Mind at Work,” this chapter also won the Spanish Gigamesh Award upon its translated publication in 1990.

  Aalya Ahmad

  See also: “The Masque of the Red Death”; Monsters; Poe, Edgar Allan; Vampires; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Charnas, Suzy McKee. 1997. “Meditations in Red: On Writing The Vampire Tapestry.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 59–67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  Cranny-Francis, Anne. 1990. “De-Fanging the Vampire: S. M. Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry as Subversive Horror Fiction.” In American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, edited by Brian Docherty, 155–175. New York: St. Martin’s.

  Davis, Kathy S. 2002. “‘Beauty in the Beast: The ‘Feminization’ of Weyland in The Vampire Tapestry.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1: 62.

  Gordon, Joan, and Suzy McKee Charnas. 1999. “Closed Systems Kill: An Interview with Suzy McKee Charnas.” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 3: 447–468.

  “THE CHIMNEY”

  “The Chimney” is a story by Ramsey Campbell, written in 1975, first published in the anthology Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Doubleday, 1977), and reprinted in Campbell’s story collections Dark Companions (1982), Dark Feasts (1987), and Alone with the Horrors (1993). One of the most gripping and personal of Campbell’s stories, it is the first-person account of a man (who never identifies himself, not even by his first name) who reflects on some traumatic events that occurred when he was twelve years old. As a boy he was plagued with fears—fears of the dark, and especially fears of his own upstairs bedroom—that caused his parents to be ashamed of him. The boy’s father is particularly harsh, chastising his wife for coddling the boy. As Christmas approaches, the boy’s terror focuses on the chimney in his room, and he remembers when, years before, he watched a television show about “two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping towards them” (Campbell 2004, 156). The boy is petrified, but his mother tries to reassure him that it is only Father Christmas: “He always comes out of the chimney” (157). The boy’s fears have only increased since that time, and he now insists on a fire being lit in the chimney in his room. Then, on Christmas Eve, he hears and then sees some red-costumed figure coming down the chimney—it looks as if it is charred. It turns out to be the boy’s father, dressed up as Father Christmas. Years later the boy’s father dies in a fire in his house: when the boy sees the burned body, he realizes that he saw a vision of it on that Christmas Eve years before.

  The story is a twisted version of the strange upbringing Campbell himself endured. Shortly after his birth in 1946, his Catholic parents became estranged; but because divorce was difficult, they devised a living arrangement whereby Campbell’s father remained upstairs in their house in Liverpool and had no contact with Campbell or his mother, who occupied the downstairs rooms. As Campbell testifies in a searing document, “At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour,” “For most of my childhood . . . my father was heard but not seen. . . . I used to hear his footsteps on the stairs as I lay in bed, terrified that he would come into my room. . . . Worst of all was Christmas, when my mother would send me to knock on his bedroom door and invite him down, as a mark of seasonal goodwill, for Christmas dinner. I would go upstairs in a panic, but there was never any response” (Campbell 2011). Campbell
has fused this painful episode in his early life with the British tradition of “Father Christmas” to produce an imperishable tale of domestic conflict and existential terror. “The Chimney” remains among Campbell’s most celebrated and widely anthologized stories.

  S. T. Joshi

  See also: Campbell, Ramsey; Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Campbell, Ramsey. [1993] 2004. “The Chimney.” In Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961–1991, 153–167. New York: Tor.

  Campbell, Ramsey. [1983] 2011. “At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour.” In The Face That Must Die. Kindle Edition. Necon E-Books.

  CISCO, MICHAEL (1970–)

  American writer Michael Cisco is among the most influential, erudite, and ambitiously experimental voices in twenty-first-century weird fiction and horror. Cisco’s large body of work encompasses novelistic and long-form fiction, short fiction, translations (including work by Julio Cortazar and Marcel Béalu), and theoretical and critical essays, and he often intermingles these forms to unsettling effect. Cisco’s first novel, The Divinity Student (1999), won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel for that year, and his 2011 novel The Great Lover was named Best Weird Novel of the year by the Weird Fiction Review and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year.

  While, like most of Cisco’s fiction, The Divinity Student plays vertiginously with language, it is probably the closest of his novels to traditional supernatural horror and parallel-world fantasy. Drawing on Judaic, Christian, and neo-Platonic philosophy, it unfolds in a crumbling urban landscape teeming with sinister beings and governed by dreamlike physical laws. Combining bleak horror and deep amazement, merging Bildungsroman (a story of someone’s formative education) and fable, it presents the education, death, resurrection, and strange second life of an eponymous protagonist, who embodies aspects of both the scientist and the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This hybridization of the doctor with his creation serves as an apt metaphor for Cisco’s authorial identity and ever-mutating writing. He even describes his literary approach in mad scientist terms, as experimenting in order “to create living monsters that will go out into the world and wreak havoc on readers” (Mills 2013). His other novels and long-form fictions, including The Tyrant (2003), The Narrator (2010), Member (2013), and Animal Money (2015), continue to combine linguistic and narrative experimentation with atmospheric horror, absurdist humor, and an exploration of alienation in many fabulous forms.