Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  This is also true of his short fiction, which can be found in numerous anthologies, including The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Leviathan III and IV, Album Zutique, Grimscribe’s Puppets, and Aickman’s Heirs. A selection from his novella The Genius of Assassins was included in the VanderMeers’ influential omnibus, The Weird, and many of his earlier short stories are included in the collection Secret Hours (2007).

  While it often incorporates horrific imagery and transfigures conventions of the horror genre, Cisco’s work, like Caitlín R. Kiernan’s, evades easy classification. He has described it as “de-genred” fiction, stating, “I don’t negate or deny genres but to me they’re like a spice rack, to be thrown together entirely along the lines of taste” (Moreland 2013). Cisco’s work draws on and transfigures writing by a vast array of influences, some of the more important being Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Ligotti, and Robert Aickman. While Cisco sees pastiche as central to his literary approach, the results of his incisive engagements with other writers are often startlingly original, creating powerfully affecting, philosophically rich, and deeply troubling narratives. There is therefore ample reason to take Jeff VanderMeer’s characterization of Cisco as “The American Kafka” seriously, for, in VanderMeer’s words, Cisco “has forged a singular path in creating visionary, phantasmagorical settings, uniquely alienated anti-heroes, and genuinely creepy happenings—while also exhibiting a healthy absurdism and dark sense of humor” (VanderMeer 2015).

  Sean Moreland

  See also: Aickman, Robert; Kafka, Franz; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Smith, Clark Ashton; Surrealism; VanderMeer, Jeff.

  Further Reading

  Mills, Adam. 2013. “Interview with Michael Cisco.” Weird Fiction Review, October 15. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/10/interview-with-michael-cisco.

  Moreland, Sean. 2013. “An Interview with Michael Cisco.” Postscripts to Darkness, November 22. https://pstdarkness.com/2013/11/22/an-interview-with-michael-cisco.

  VanderMeer, Jeff. 2015. “American Kafka? The Weird, Uncanny Work of Michael Cisco.” Literary Hub, May 27. http://lithub.com/american-kafka.

  VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2012. “The Weird: An Introduction.” In The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, xv–xx. New York: Tor.

  COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (1772–1834)

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by means of his practice as a poet as well as his lectures and publications in philosophy and literary criticism, became one of the prime movers of the English Romantic movement (ca. 1798–1832), in collaboration with his more prolific but less gifted collaborator William Wordsworth. His introduction to England of the ideas of German idealism, which had helped to guide the German literature of sturm und drang (storm and stress) and provided an important element of Gothic fiction, provided a similar impetus to the more sophisticated practitioners of the English movement, where they blended well with the inspiration of Byronism. His earlier friendship with the poet Robert Southey—the two of them married the sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker in 1795—caused them to make plans to found a utopian community in America under the guidance of a philosophy they called Pantisocracy, but the practical organization proved too much for them. His contributions to literary theory included the popularization of the requirement to seduce the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to underpin fantastic materials.

  Coleridge suffered throughout his life from poor health, complicated by mental problems difficult to diagnose retrospectively, for both of which he made extensive use of laudanum as a palliative. As with Thomas De Quincey, the hallucinations produced by the laudanum became an important source of raw material for his literary work, especially its horrific aspects. The composition of “Kubla Khan” under that influence was famously interrupted, and he also failed to finish the equally phantasmagorical “Christabel,” the first account in English of a perversely eroticized female vampire, both of which were belatedly published in 1816. The longest and most spectacular of his opium-fueled visions, however, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the first version of which was published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), was and remains his masterpiece; its vision of the horrific experiences of a mariner in unknown Antarctic waters, having been cursed after killing an albatross, was enormously influential on the imagery of subsequent marine horror stories and became a frequent reference point for subsequent writers of fantastic fiction, from Mary Shelley to William S. Burroughs and Douglas Adams. Coleridge added “glosses” to later versions that add to the intrinsic doubts as to the hallucinatory narrative’s reality, occasioned by the fact that it is insistently told to a bewildered “wedding-guest.”

  In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the eponymous narrator’s account of a doomed Antarctic voyage includes many frightful moments of nightmarish dread, as when the sailors, stranded and drifting because of the narrator’s sinful killing of an albatross, encounter a ghostly ship carrying two terrible presences:

  Are those her ribs through which the Sun

  Did peer, as through a grate?

  And is that Woman all her crew?

  Is that a Death? and are there two?

  Is Death that woman’s mate?

  Her lips were red, her looks were free,

  Her locks were yellow as gold:

  Her skin was as white as leprosy,

  The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,

  Who thicks man’s blood with cold. (Coleridge 1845, 62)

  The two, Death and Life-in-Death, are gambling for the sailors’ fates:

  The naked hulk alongside came,

  And the twain were casting dice;

  “The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”

  Quoth she, and whistles thrice. (62)

  The nightmarish Life-in-Death’s whistle causes the sun to sink and the stars to come out, along with a “horned moon, with one bright star / within the nether tip.” Then the terrible outcome of the game becomes clear as the narrator’s fellow sailors turn to look at him:

  One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,

  Too quick for groan or sigh,

  Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,

  And cursed me with his eye.

  Four times fifty living men,

  (And I heard nor sigh nor groan)

  With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

  They dropped down one by one. (62)

  The sailors’ souls fly from their bodies, headed “to bliss or woe,” and the narrator himself is left to suffer the dreadful fate of remaining in living death, completely alone.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1845. The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prose and Verse. Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co.

  Coleridge continued writing doggedly during the 1820s, when he was living in Highgate with the family of his physician James Gillman, mostly working on a synthesis of his philosophical explorations that he called his “opus maximus.” He failed to complete it, although Gillman’s house became a place of pilgrimage in the meantime for his many literary disciples.

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Gardner, Martin. 1974. The Annotated Ancient Mariner. New York: New American Library.

  Keane, Patrick J. 1994. Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

  COLLIER, JOHN (1901–1980)

  John Henry Noyes Collier was an English writer, poet, and screenwriter. Assessing him is difficult, for he was a writer of many parts, some of them seemingly contradictory. The best of his stories reveal him as intensely literate, a superbly gifted miniaturist, a fine satirist, adept at fantasy as well as mainstream literature, and remarkably mischievous if
not at times outright cruel and misanthropic about his characters. Although there are horrific situations in his novel Tom’s A-Cold (1933), an early postcivilization novel, it was in Collier’s short stories that his talents had their best showcase, for like such earlier writers as Saki, Collier could present horrific situations and outcomes lightly and even elliptically: the murderously scheming protagonist in “Another American Tragedy” (1940) thus gets to see himself unpacked “like a Gladstone bag,” whereas the vainly lecherous protagonist of “The Bottle Party” (1939), imprisoned by a jinn, finds his bottle purchased by some sailors who “used him with the utmost barbarity.” “Green Thoughts” (1931) not only transforms characters into sentient plants but concludes with a horrible play on words involving the idea of cutting off somebody.

  In Collier’s world, love is often shown to be no protection and no solution: the narrator of “Evening Primrose” (1940) conceals himself in a department store and discovers it is inhabited by malign wraith-like beings, and though he falls in love with the girl they use as their servant, happiness is not theirs. Horrible is Maria Beasley of “Incident on a Lake” (1941), for she is “prepared to endure Hell herself if she could deprive her husband of a little of his heaven” (Collier 2003, 113), but her scheming undoes her, as it does the banal and vulgar Alice and Irwin of “Over Insurance” (1951), who insure each other and have similar ideas about expediting the collection process. Assaults on stability and happiness can come from all directions, including a droopy old parrot of “Bird of Prey” (1941), whose repetitions reveal secrets and awaken psychological horrors, but whose real secret is terrifying and reveals the vulnerability of relationships. Demons and devils may be lightly presented, as in “After the Ball” (1933), “The Devil, George, and Rosie” (1934), and “Fallen Star” (1951), among others, but there is at the stories’ core the threat of perpetual damnation and, in the latter two, rape, however amusing and distracting a line such as “I said bed. It’s singular, that is, and it’d be a lot more singular if it were plural” (Collier 2003, 46) happens to be.

  Still, sometimes power encounters greater power, as in “Thus I Refute Beelzy” (1940): while pretending to be a loving parent, Simon Carter is deliberately cruel to his son Simon, belittling the boy and attempting to get the boy to renounce his imaginary friend Mr. Beelzy, but young Simon remains true to his friend, and the not-imaginary Mr. Beelzy most horrifically concludes the sham. Also oddly positive is “Mary” (1939), in which an innocent young man finds himself in thrall to a jealous pig, but true love does find a solution to Fred’s problem, and sausages are on the menu. More often, though, things end just before the worst is about to occur, and in cheerfully presenting this kind of story, Collier was peerless.

  “Evening Primrose” remains one of Collier’s best-remembered works, both because it has been widely anthologized and because it has been adapted for radio, stage, and television, including as a one-hour musical production written for the short-lived American television anthology series ABC Stage 67 in 1966, featuring songs by Stephen Sondheim. Collier won both an International Fantasy Award and an Edgar Award for his now-classic 1952 fiction collection Fancies and Goodnights. He died of a stroke in 1980.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Devils and Demons; Saki.

  Further Reading

  Collier, John. [1931] 2003. Fancies and Goodnights. New York: New York Review Books.

  Indick, Ben P. 1999. “Sardonic Fantasistes: John Collier.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 121–127. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

  Kessel, John. 1985. “John Collier.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 577–583. New York: Scribners.

  Warren, Alan. 1996. “John Collier, Fantastic Miniaturist.” In Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 68–75. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

  COLLINS, WILKIE (1824–1889)

  William Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a major Victorian (British) novelist and writer, whose The Woman in White (1859) is often considered one of the first great sensation novels. Like his friend Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins wrote voluminously on a variety of subjects, often with a view toward showing the workings of fate on humanity, but unlike Dickens, Collins was not a sustained literary genius, and it has been reasonably claimed that he outlived his talent. He was not helped by an addiction to laudanum that almost overwhelmed him.

  There are dark and horrific elements in Collins’s three most notable novels, The Woman in White, Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868). The first involves criminals attempting to use a woman, unjustly imprisoned and with a falsified identity, to maintain their position. The second involves prophetic dreams, false identities, and murder, with an attractive and unrepentant female villain. The third has as key plot elements sleepwalking, mysterious Indian performers, and a stolen idol’s eye. All made Collins one of the more popular writers of the time and established his friendship with Charles Dickens, then editing Household Words, though Dickens was quite willing to reject Collins’s writing if he did not feel it would be appropriate for his readers. The Moonstone has also been claimed as the first modern English detective novel and exerted a seminal influence on later writers in the genre, including, most notably, Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Although not overtly fantastic, distinctly horrific work can be found in Collins’s After Dark (1856), a collection of six linked stories. “The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed” (originally published under the title “A Terribly Strange Bed” in 1852), in which a successful gambler gradually realizes that his hotel bed is not only strange but lethal, is as tense and horrific as anything ever written. It has been fairly widely anthologized, and it might be Collins’s best-known short story. Overtly horrific and occasionally fantastic work can be found in The Queen of Hearts (1859), a collection of ten loosely connected stories that is Collins’s most substantial collection of these. “The Siege of the Black Cottage” (1857) describes a resourceful young woman protecting herself, her money, and her cat from dangerous burglars. “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman” (first published as “The Ostler” in 1855) involves a terrifying dream and its outcome: Isaac Scatchard dreams of a woman trying to stab him, then seven years later marries Rebecca Murdoch, the image of the woman in the dream, and—of course—elements of the prophecy come to pass. “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dead Hand” (first published as “The Double-Bedded Room” in 1857) begins with an unsettling situation, in which the traveling Arthur Holliday is forced to share a room with a dead body in the other bed, then gets even more uncomfortable, for during the night, the body moves. “Brother Griffith’s Story of Mad Monkton” (first published as “The Monktons of Wincot Abbey” in 1855) details the working-out of a prophetic curse connected with the ancient Monkton family: unless all are buried in the family vault, the line will perish. With this as the premise, it is but a matter of awaiting the inevitable when the uncle of young Alfred Monkton goes missing on the European continent. His body is found, then irretrievably lost when the transport ship sinks: and so end the Monktons, done in by Fate.

  Although Collins was uneven as a writer, his best stories are as good as anything of their kind. In his final years he suffered a prolonged period of declining health, and he died in 1889 several months after suffering a stroke. His two most popular novels in his lifetime, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, remain in print and continue to be his best known works, and both have been adapted several times for film and television.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Ancestral Curse; Dreams and Nightmares.

  Further Reading

  Ackroyd, Peter. 2012. Wilkie Collins. London: Chatto & Windus.

  Gasson, Andrew. 1998. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Sanders, Judith. 2009. “A Shock to the System, a System to the Shocks: The Horrors of the
Happy Ending in The Woman in White.” In From Wollstonecraft to Stoker: Essays on Gothic and Victorian Sensation Fiction, edited by Marilyn Brock, 62–78. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Taylor, Jenny B. 1988. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth Century Psychology. London and New York: Routledge.

  “THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE”

  “The Colour out of Space” was the only story H. P. Lovecraft published in the first pulp “scientifiction” magazine Amazing Stories, in the September 1927 issue. The difficulty of exacting meager payment for the story apparently deterred him from further attempting to direct his work at this particular market. This in turn probably slowed down the transformation of the implied metaphysical context of his work and maintained its obliquity until he made a more decisive move in the belatedly published At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931 but not published until 1936. That said, “The Colour out of Space” might well have influenced other horrific tales of creeping extraterrestrial corruption published in the Gernsback pulps, such as A. Rowley Hilliard’s “Death from the Stars” and P. Schuler Miller’s “The Arrhenius Horror” (both published in 1931).