Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  The unnamed narrator of the story, a surveyor, attempts to discover the reason why an area in the vicinity of the town of Arkham, known as “blasted heath,” is avoided by the local people. Ammi Pierce, who used to farm land nearby, tells him what happened when a meteorite landed on the property of his neighbor Nahum Gardner, which brought with it some kind of radiant matter, whose “colour” is only identified by analogy, the radiation being external to the visual spectrum. Although the matter disappeared, it poisoned the ground and Gardner’s well, affecting crops and local animals in strange and ominous ways. Gardner’s wife and one of his sons went mad, and his other son disappeared. Pierce witnessed the destruction of the house and its last surviving resident as the blight’s gradual effect produced a horrific climax. The narrator and a company of associates undertake further investigations, but only succeeded in restimulating the mysterious radiation and occasioning the further spread of the blight.

  “The Colour out of Space” on the Screen

  “The Colour out of Space” is widely regarded as one of Lovecraft’s best stories, and he himself felt that it represented one of his more successful efforts to convey what he considered to be the essence of cosmic horror. It has remained prominent among his works not only because of its excellence but because of its various adaptations for other media. Chief among these are three film versions. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) stars an aging Boris Karloff and was released by American International Pictures, the same company behind the 1960s series of successful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. The Curse (1987) was directed by David Keith and starred Claude Akins, John Schneider, and Wil Wheaton. The German-language production Die Farbe (2010) is thought by many, including Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, to be the best adaptation to date.

  Matt Cardin

  Lovecraft was particularly fond of the story, believing that it captured the essential mood of “cosmic horror” that he was attempting to develop and refine better than stories that attributed their baleful manifestations to traditional supernatural causes, and permitting a measured description of decay and transfiguration that he thought particularly well adapted to the effect he was trying to achieve. Although his overall approach in “The Colour out of Space” was too new to make the story immediately popular, it eventually achieved classic status as readers gradually learned to appreciate it. Because it lacks the elaborate back-stories Lovecraft provided in some of his other major fusions of horror and science fiction, such as “The Shadow out of Time” and At the Mountains of Madness, the story develops in a more focused and measured fashion, but that has made it less tempting for extrapolation by subsequent contributors to the “Cthulhu Mythos,” requiring a significant generic shift in the most elaborate sequel by another hand, Michael Shea’s The Color out of Time (1984). “The Colour out of Space” has also been the subject of several cinematic adaptations, including Die, Monster, Die (1965), The Curse (1987), and Die Farbe (2010).

  Brian Stableford

  See also: At the Mountains of Madness; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Shea, Michael; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

  Further Reading

  Cannon, Peter H. 1989. “Cosmic Backwaters.” In H. P. Lovecraft, 82–96. Twayne’s United States Author Series, 549. Boston: Twayne.

  Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, 78–97. Winchester: Zero Books.

  Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2001. “The Colour out of Space.” In An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, 41–43. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

  COMMUNION

  Communion: A True Story (1987), by the American horror writer and later paranormal celebrity Whitley Strieber (1945–), was not the first book to explore UFO sightings and abductions. Twentieth-century culture was rife with examples of this trope, going back to such things as Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which thousands of people heard and believed to be factual; Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968), which posits that humanity has been visited and influenced by alien entities since before recorded history; and the enormous box-office success of Steven Spielberg’s beneficent aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). But Strieber’s book managed to crystallize and complicate the American public’s ongoing fascination, or obsession, with UFOs and aliens.

  In Communion Strieber tells the story of a paranormal abduction experience that occurred while he was staying at his upstate New York cabin in the winter of 1983. Whatever one may think of the veracity of this account, the narrative power of Communion is undeniable. An experienced writer with eight books already in print—including four horror novels, a dark fantasy, and a co-authored post–nuclear holocaust best seller—Strieber brought to Communion the professionalism and rigor of a story compellingly well told. The book’s greatest strength lies perhaps in the sympathy, and in some cases the empathy, it causes the reader to feel for Strieber because of the trauma he endured. His ability to stoke this flame makes for a gripping read.

  Communion bears more responsibility for originating the idea and image of the “alien gray” than any other single work of fiction or nonfiction. With its compelling (if outlandish, by conventional standards) story, presented as truth by the author, and with its iconic cover painting by artist Ted Seth Jacobs of a gray-skinned, bulbous-headed creature with large, jet-black, almond-shaped eyes, the book may justly be credited with planting the image of the alien gray in popular consciousness and catalyzing the modern fascination with the idea of alien abduction, which swept through American popular culture—and also intellectual culture (it was the subject of a 1992 conference at MIT)—in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The significance of Communion can still be felt in the twenty-first century, as movies, books, games, and television shows about UFOs, extraterrestrials, and paranormal abductions continue to proliferate, many of them following the basic conceptual and visual template outlined by Strieber in 1987.

  Matt Cardin

  The book’s subtitle, A True Story, is telling. Communion is not meant as a fiction taken to be real like Welles’s broadcast; nor is it a work of amateur archaeological speculation that is easily refuted like Von Däniken’s book; nor is it like Spielberg’s film, which is an obvious work of fiction that plays on wish fulfillment fantasies of transcendence. Strieber’s book mines a deeply felt human need to be part of something larger than oneself, to experience firsthand that which is boundless, unknowable, and true.

  Communion was a best seller when it was published, and it has remained in print ever since. Most readers have apparently accepted Streiber’s claims as true, or at the very least they have believed that Strieber himself believes he is relating a true experience. Critical reception, however, has been far less kind. In science fiction circles Strieber is regarded as something of an embarrassment, as his books share little with the ongoing science fiction narratives in which the genre’s best authors are substantively engaged.

  But to judge Strieber solely on his contributions to science fiction is to misunderstand his greater project. Communion is, at its heart, a work of mysticism, and its author is an explorer of alternate states of being in the tradition of such looming figures in the twentieth century’s esoteric and countercultural spiritual tradition as G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Carlos Castaneda, and Timothy Leary. The great irony of Communion is that while it is the most famous and influential alien abduction text ever produced, it never claims to be about extraterrestrials per se. While “the visitors,” as Strieber refers to them throughout the book, could be extraterrestrial, the possibility is entertained as well that they are figments that have penetrated the author’s mind, working from either an internal psychic space or from some extradimensional arena. The notion of the alien—in this case the gray alien or “grays” as they are referred to in ufology culture (a figure that, not incidentally, was largely solidified by Strieber’s book)—is thus complicated in Communion, where it functions as a symbol of something that is fundamentally Other and consequently unkno
wable.

  The book was filmed as Communion and released in 1989, with Christopher Walken playing the role of Strieber. A nonfiction sequel to Communion is Transformation: The Breakthrough (1988). Later novels by Strieber are presented as fiction and develop the notion of extraterrestrial visitors in more genre-familiar terms. At the same time, Strieber’s contributions in the specific role of horror author (which he has mostly, although not entirely, left behind in his post-Communion career) continue to have value, especially his werewolf novel Wolfen (1978), his vampire novel The Hunger (1981), and his underrated horror/dark fantasy novel Catmagic (1986), about the survival of ancient nature-based witchcraft in the modern world.

  Javier A. Martinez

  See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Occult Fiction.

  Further Reading

  Fenkl, Heinz I. 2000. “Folkroots: Abduction and Ascension—Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Realms of Fantasy 6 (February): 26–32.

  Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2014. “Better Horrors: From Terror to Communion in Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987).” Social Research 81, no. 4: 897–920.

  Pharr, Mary. 1996. “Adam’s Dream: The Gothic Imagination of Whitley Strieber.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 97–109. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

  Stanley, Wiater. 1988. “Beyond Communion: A Conversation with Whitley Strieber.” Twilight Zone 8, no. 1 (April): 22–25.

  “Whitley Strieber.” 2015. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

  CONJURE WIFE

  Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Conjure Wife, originally published in the pulp magazine Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds) in 1943 and released in book form a decade later, updates classic tales of witchcraft for a modern (sub)urban milieu. The novel’s premise is simple: witchcraft continues to survive amidst contemporary women, especially those with ambitious husbands whose career goals can be advanced through sorcerous means. The protagonist, Tansy Saylor, is the spouse of a sociology professor, Norman Saylor, who moves rapidly up the academic hierarchy as a result of Tansy’s potions and spells. A skeptic himself, Norman compels Tansy to give up her “neurotic” belief in the supernatural, at which point his career takes a turn for the worse, subjecting him to the conjuring wiles of his competitors’ spouses.

  Sharply satirical of small-town life, with its vicious gossip and petty rivalries, the novel is also profoundly frightening, especially a scene in which a stone gargoyle descends from a campus building to stalk Norman remorselessly. The horrific charge of the story derives from the eerie counterpoint between the secular mindset of modern suburbanites and the atavistic worldview of a secretive coven of female necromancers. As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the supernatural presence derives much of its power from the fact that skeptical modern people simply refuse to believe in it. Conjure Wife stands alongside a number of other Leiber stories of the 1940s—such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941) and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949)—in being a self-conscious updating of classic horror themes within a contemporary milieu. While there are some protofeminist aspects to the story, especially its vision of sorcerous female empowerment, the tale also relies on a number of gender stereotypes, such as the wife as selfless helpmate to her husband. Nonetheless, its vision of a furtive form of female agency, with durable ancient roots, suggests possibilities for gender solidarity that echo other protofeminist texts of the period, such as Jacques Tourneur’s classic film Cat People (1942).

  Conjure Wife was an immediate mainstream success, adapted as the 1944 film Weird Woman and, two decades later, as Night of the Eagle (1962; a.k.a Burn, Witch, Burn!). It has also been deeply influential in American popular culture, the ur-text for all manner of tales of modern witchery, such as the 1950 stage play Bell, Book, and Candle, the TV series Bewitched (1964–1972), and the best-selling 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Leiber, Fritz; Psychological Horror; Rosemary’s Baby; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Byfield, Bruce. 1991. “Sister Picture of Dorian Grey: The Image of the Female in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife.” Mythlore 17, no. 4: 24–28.

  Leiber, Fritz. 1973. “About Gather, Darkness and Conjure Wife.” Whispers 1, no. 2: 33.

  Murphy, Bernice M. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  COPPARD, A. E. (1878–1957)

  Alfred Edgar Coppard was an English poet and short story writer whose work often contains horrific elements, often along with allusions to folkloric motifs, Judeo-Christian imagery, and a sophisticated use of English and Irish vernacular; he likewise used to great advantage sudden and strange shifts in perception. His first fantastic story, “Piffingcap” (1921), concerns a haunted shaving mug: those shaved from it do not need to be shaved again. This seemingly light premise leads directly to the deaths of three men sent to retrieve it after it is thrown from a bridge.

  Coppard’s best-known story may be “Adam & Eve & Pinch Me,” published in 1921 in his book of the same title. It is a haunting and dreamlike account of an out-of-body experience in which Jaffa Codling witnesses three children—Adam, Eve, and Gabriel—playing in an exquisite garden. He cannot interact with them, and only Gabriel can see him. There are recurrent images and motifs—golden swords, brilliant lights, fish, fire, fruit, and the idea of good—and in the end Codling returns to his body and discovers his name is Gilbert Cannister, and that he has two children, but that his wife is pregnant with the one who will become Gabriel.

  Physical horror is never far from the surface of many of Coppard’s stories. In “The Old Venerable” (1926), the impoverished Old Venerable’s dreams of independence are destroyed when his dog is shot, and he must drown the unweaned puppies, for he cannot feed them. “The Green Drake” (1931) depicts a conversation between an amiable drake and a wandering poacher; it is a conversation full of the fantastic, but the fantastic lures the duck to its death. Equally horrible is “Arabesque: The Mouse” (1920; sometimes given as “Arabesque—the Mouse”): the narrator sits in his room, watching an inquisitive mouse and recalling the horrible death of his mother, whose hands were crushed in an accident, and recalling too an encounter with a beautiful woman whose eyes were “full of starry inquiry like the eyes of mice” (Coppard 1951, 75). All recollections conclude when the trap snaps and severs the feet of the poor mouse.

  Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to consider Coppard solely as a writer utilizing the physical horrors of everyday existence, for a number of his tales make effective use of psychic horror. The virginal Clorinda Smith in “Clorinda Walks in Heaven” (1922) is granted a glimpse of the afterlife, learning that heaven contains ghosts of her unrealized desires, but she fails to profit from her knowledge and dies alone and forgotten. Heaven is likewise denied the title character in “Father Raven” (1946) because he falsely attested to the virtue of his charges in order that they might enter heaven.

  Like such literary compatriots as M. R. James, Coppard had no belief in either the supernatural or the fantastic, stating in the introduction to his 1946 collection of supernatural fiction Fearful Pleasures that “I have not the slightest belief in the supernatural. If I should ever see a ghost I should know it was time for me to consult an oculist” (Coppard 1946, vii). His stories remain acute and often psychically terrifying, but though he has received occasional academic attention, Coppard is now largely out of print, and no comprehensive collection of his fantastic fiction is available.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Body Horror; Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Coppard, A. E. 1946. Fearful Pleasures. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

  Coppard, A. E. 1951. The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  Smith, Frank Edmund
. 1985. “A(lfred) E(dgar) Coppard.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 2, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 523–528. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Thompson, N. S. 2003. “A. E. Coppard.” In British Writers: Supplement 8, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  CRAWFORD, F. MARION (1854–1908)

  Francis Marion Crawford was one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world of his day. Although he wrote more than forty novels, mostly historical romances, today he is remembered for a few novels of some fantasy genre interest and for a handful of important short stories in the fantasy and horror genres. He was born in 1854 to American parents in Bagni di Lucca, Italy. His father, Thomas Crawford, was the sculptor who created the “armed liberty” sculpture atop the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Julia Ward Howe, the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was his aunt. A grandson, H. Marion-Crawford, an actor, portrayed Watson in the 1954 Sherlock Holmes television series. Francis knew eighteen languages and was an avid sailor who owned three yachts, an interest that is reflected in much of his fiction. He died in 1908.

  “The Upper Berth”: Creepy Maritime Horror

  First published in 1886, “The Upper Berth” is recognized as the finest of the small number of ghost stories written by the popular American novelist F. Marion Crawford throughout a long career. It is told in the typically indirect manner of the time. Men are sitting around chatting. Boredom threatens. Then Brisbane, a solid, sensible man, tells his companions that he once encountered a ghost, or something very much like one, on a steamship, while sharing a stateroom with a man who committed suicide on the first night at sea. This, he discovered, had happened several times before, in that very room. The berth above his own was haunted. A porthole kept opening itself. The place smelled dank. Eventually a revenant was flushed out of the upper berth, something more solid than a traditional ghost: the reanimated corpse of a long-drowned man.