Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  One of the most remarkable features of “The Upper Berth” is the deftness with which the details are handled. The hero does not overlook the obvious. The upper berth is searched with a bright light and found to be empty and dry. The porthole is screwed tightly shut. But the manifestations occur anyway. The story itself is a refutation of the old canard that the ghost story became obsolete with the invention of bright lights. When the lights come on in the story narrated by Brisbane, the Thing is still there and just as frightening.

  Although Crawford’s mainstream writings were critical successes in their day, it is only his ghost stories that have withstood the test of time. “The Upper Berth,” which has been anthologized many times, is chief among them.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Crawford was an accomplished writer, a romanticist who created vivid characters and colorful backgrounds, but he saw himself as a paid entertainer rather than as an artist. He led a colorful life and was convinced by friends to turn his real-life experiences into stories. His first venture into fiction writing was Mr. Isaacs (1882), based on people he knew in India, and cast himself pseudonymously as the first-person narrator, something he was to do repeatedly. It has only minimal fantasy or occult elements, but its success convinced him to become a novelist.

  Khaled (1891) is an Arabian fantasy about a genie who is made mortal as a form of punishment and has been compared favorably to William Beckford’s Vathek. The Witch of Prague (1891) is Crawford’s one true horror novel, in which Unorna, feared as a witch, and her dwarf cohort experiment to extend the human lifespan by means of her possibly supernatural hypnotic powers.

  Crawford is chiefly remembered today for eight ghostly short stories, written throughout his career and collected posthumously as Wandering Ghosts (1911). “The Upper Berth” (1886) is one the most frequently reprinted of all ghost stories. “The Dead Smile” (1899) is a tale of evil and incest, and it inspired Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin story, “The Jest of Warburg Tartaval.” “Man Overboard” (1903), a novella originally published as a separate small book, is a seagoing tale about a pair of identical twins, one of whom is murdered by the other during a storm, and who returns as a vengeful ghost. “For Blood is the Life” (1905) is an unusual story about a female vampire. “The King’s Messenger” (1907), not in the original collection but in recent reprints, involves dreams, premonitions, and death. Crawford’s popular “The Screaming Skull” (1908) has been adapted for film twice, once in 1958 as The Screaming Skull (although the screenplay’s basis in Crawford’s story was unacknowledged) and again in 1973 for an American made-for-television production. Crawford died of influenza in 1908 while doing relief work for refugees from an earthquake in southern Italy.

  Lee Weinstein

  See also: “The Screaming Skull”; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 2004. “F. Marion Crawford: Blood and Thunder Horror.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 26–38. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Moran, John C. 1981. An F. Marion Crawford Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Morgan, Chris. 1985. “F. Marion Crawford.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 747–752. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  CTHULHU MYTHOS

  “Cthulhu Mythos” is a term posthumously applied to a body of stories originated by H. P. Lovecraft and expanded upon in his lifetime and afterward by his contemporaries in Weird Tales and other fiction venues. Consequently, it represents the earliest example of a “shared universe” in popular culture. Cthulhu Mythos stories typically share four common elements: a scholarly narrator; otherworldly entities called the Great Old Ones; occult spellbooks such as Lovecraft’s mythical Necronomicon, which are employed to invoke or understand them; and often—but not exclusively—a New England setting.

  The Cthulhu Mythos originated with Lovecraft’s 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” which focused on an extraterrestrial being imprisoned in an undersea Pacific Ocean vault, who reaches out to psychically sensitive human beings via telepathic dreams aimed at enticing potential victims into furthering his release. Cthulhu is vast, preternatural, and, like the mythological Kraken whom he resembles, prophesied to signal the end of the world when his enforced slumber concludes. Many Mythos concepts are conscious perversions or inversions of classical mythology.

  Cthulhu Mythos Close-up: Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Return of the Sorcerer”

  “The Return of the Sorcerer” by Clark Ashton Smith first appeared in the September 1931 issue of the pulp magazine Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror and was subsequently reprinted in the Arkham House collection Out of Space and Time (1942). It is of some note as an early example of a story written by one of H. P. Lovecraft’s friends who accepted the latter’s invitation to appropriate the imagery of what subsequently became known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

  In the story the narrator, in need of employment, is contacted by the reclusive scholar John Carnby, who wants his help in translating an Arabic manuscript related to the original text of the fabled Necronomicon—but Carnby has acquired it by nefarious means, and his insistence that the strange sounds the narrator can hear are only due to an infestation of rats ring false. In fact, the relative he murdered to get it has made use of its nasty secrets to ensure a suitably gruesome revenge.

  The story follows the standard formula of Lovecraftian horror fiction methodically, but with a measured elegance unusual in what was still at the time a species of pulp fiction, demonstrating the fashion in which the flexible template might be modified in both stylistic and imagistic terms. It thus became, and remains, a valuable exemplar for practitioners of the subgenre.

  Brian Stableford

  Lovecraft penned only three purely Mythos stories—“The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”—before his contemporaries commenced borrowing his concepts, characters, and impedimenta in the pages of Weird Tales. This pantheon was expanded especially in the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert Bloch. Lovecraft himself was the first to indulge in such borrowings, including formative Mythos concepts in stories he ghostwrote for Zealia Brown-Reed Bishop and Adolphe de Castro, among others. The conceit, which functioned partly on the level of a series of sly in-jokes, proliferated rapidly among the so-called Lovecraft Circle of horror writers.

  Writing to August Derleth in 1931, Lovecraft observed of his self-described “Pseudomythology,” “The more these synthetic daemons are mutually written up by different authors, the better they become as general background-material! I like to have others use my Azathoths and Nyarlathoteps—& in return I shall use Klarkash-Ton’s Tsathhoggua, your monk Clithanus, & Howard’s Bran” (Joshi 2008, 21).

  After Lovecraft’s 1937 death, novelist Derleth launched Arkham House Books, reprinting Lovecraft’s stories as well as those by other members of the Lovecraft Circle. In his own Mythos contributions, Derleth commenced adding elemental beings and codifying the Mythos in terms of a Christian worldview of good and evil—something to which the arch-materialistic Lovecraft did not subscribe during his life. To Derleth goes the credit for coining the term “Cthulhu Mythos,” even though Cthulhu himself was a relatively minor godlet in the growing pantheon of Great Old Ones, which included Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, and other cosmic beings.

  Until his 1971 death, Derleth exerted a proprietary influence over the Mythos, sanctioning some stories and actively suppressing others. Since his death, the Mythos has been disconnected from Derleth’s peculiar set of imposed and specious limitations and his own contributions relegated to a discredited subcategory dubbed the Derleth Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos is today recognized as the property of no individual, thus liberating any author who cares to write a story set in Lovecraft’s milieu to explore and expand upon it unchallenged.

  Approaching one hundred years after Lovecraft’s seminal story, the Cthulhu Mythos has exploded into a cottage industry, with new themed a
nthologies appearing every year. The list of contributors includes such luminaries as Colin Wilson, Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Fred Chappell, Brian Lumley, T. E. D. Klein, and Karl Edward Wagner, among others. The Mythos has also formed the basis of a long series of role-playing games, board games, and computer games, the most prominent of which is arguably the role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu, first released in 1981. Elements of the Mythos have also proliferated throughout heavy metal music, as in Metallica’s songs “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be.” The Mythos has also become something of a staple in monster-themed apocalyptic horror movies such as The Gate (1987), the Hellboy movies (2004 and 2008), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012). Ever expanding, Lovecraft’s dark and disturbing universe-view promises to endure as long as practitioners of the formal horror story continue to push the boundaries of the genre beyond the mundane monsters of mythology.

  Will Murray

  See also: Arkham House; At the Mountains of Madness; Barlow, R. H.; “The Call of Cthulhu”; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; Derleth, August; Devils and Demons; “The Dunwich Horror”; Howard, Robert E.; The King in Yellow; Long, Frank Belknap; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; The Mind Parasites; Schweitzer, Darrell; Smith, Clark Ashton; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 2008. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books.

  Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  D

  DAGON

  Dagon is a Southern Gothic novel by Fred Chappell published in 1968. Chappell is an award-winning poet and Southern regionalist writer, and his overt references in the novel to names and themes from the Cthulhu Mythos were recognized as one of the first efforts in the literary mainstream to acknowledge the literary legacy of H. P. Lovecraft.

  The novel focuses on the dramatic spiritual and psychological decline of Peter Leland, a Methodist minister on sabbatical from his church in South Carolina. Peter and his wife Sheila have just moved to a farm he has inherited in an unnamed Southern town so that he can work on Remnant Pagan Forces in American Puritanism, a book whose theme has grown out of a sermon that he delivered regarding the persistence in modern times of the worship of Dagon (who is, not coincidentally, an aquatic entity worshipped as a god in Lovecraft’s fiction, notably in his story “The Shadow over Innsmouth”). Dagon, as Peter explains it, is a pagan god named in the Bible whose association as a fertility symbol resonates with the “frenzied, incessant, unreasoning sexual activity” (Chappell 1996, 22) that he sees rampant in the American culture of the time. During a picnic with Sheila, Peter unexpectedly meets Ed Morgan, a sharecropper living on his farm, and later Ed’s daughter Mina. Though Mina is slatternly and unattractive—her fishlike features are redolent of those borne by the human-amphibian hybrids in Lovecraft’s tale—Peter looks on her with “the fascination he might have in watching a snake uncoil itself lazily and curl along the ground” (19). Under the spell of Mina’s erotic allure, Peter kills Sheila and moves in with the Morgans.

  Over the next few months Peter is cruelly dominated by the abusive Mina and fed a steady diet of moonshine until he is reduced to a near-bestial state. Emasculated by his lover, he increasingly comes to resemble a latter-day Samson—who, as Peter reminds the reader early in the story, destroyed the temple to Dagon where he was to be sacrificed. The book’s final chapters resonate with snatches of Lovecraftian references Peter hears throughout the novel as he is ritually prepared by Mina and a band of cultists as a sacrifice to Dagon.

  Chappell leaves ambiguous how much of what Peter experiences in his final moments is a genuine confrontation with the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft’s fiction and how much is a symbolic rendering of his collapse into mania. Nevertheless, Peter’s appreciation of his suffering as “the one means of carving a design upon an area of time, of charging with human meaning each separate moment of time” (82) is an astute interpretation of the plight of humanity in an indifferent and insentient universe that informs Lovecraftian horror fiction.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H.P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

  Further Reading

  Chappell, Fred. [1968] 1996. Dagon. Raleigh, NC: Boson.

  Clabough, Casey. 2003. “Appropriations of History, Gothicism, and Cthulhu: Fred Chappell’s Dagon.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36, no. 3: 37–53.

  Lang, John. 2000. Understanding Fred Chappell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “A Talk with Fred Chappell.” Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Summer 1994, 40–43.

  THE DAMNATION GAME

  The Damnation Game is the first novel by the British writer Clive Barker. Published in 1985 by Sphere and met with critical praise upon publication, the novel quickly followed from Barker’s celebrated debut with the Books of Blood (1984–1985). The Damnation Game is a Gothic-horror Faustian pact tale concerning an infernal arrangement between the mysterious, near-immortal European gambler Mamoulian and the reclusive wealthy businessman Whitehead. Beginning in war-torn Warsaw, the mysterious wager between Mamoulian and Whitehead, a talented gambler, is agreed over a game of cards, later resulting in Whitehead’s ascent into wealth, power, and near immortality. Decades later, having profited from their dark arrangement, Whitehead now wishes to renege on his pact with Mamoulian, which has expectedly come due, and hires convict-turned-bodyguard Marty Strauss to protect him.

  Barker’s antiheroes like Marty Strauss are typically loners who withdraw from the everyday world, enabling them to experience something profound or magical that is hidden from everyday view. Aided by his undead zombie acolyte Breer, Mamoulian’s plan to collect his infernal wager from Whitehead by any means necessary is revealed to be driven by abject loneliness; weary from immortality, Mamoulian craves a worthy companion to join him in the release of death. Strauss, a redeemed man caught between supernatural forces and his personal demons and addictions, falls in love with Whitehead’s daughter Carys, a young psychic seer troubled by drug addiction. Together, Marty and Carys attempt to save Whitehead from these supernatural threats that threaten to engulf them all.

  The Damnation Game established Barker as a serious author working beyond his debut in the short story medium, emphasizing his interest in combining traditional Gothic tropes such as the Faustian pact with his uncompromising celebration of graphic body horror. This novel affirms his unique style of tight yet lyrical prose, with his material disciplined from his years of short story composition and his close editorial relationship with his publisher, Sphere. The theme of Faustian exchange and forbidden experiences would become a repeated feature in much of Barker’s later fiction, as many of his novels and film adaptations explicitly revisit this motif. The Damnation Game is best understood, then, as a foundational text to understand Barker’s core preoccupations; it reveals his authorial thematic touchstones of transcendence and metamorphosis, infernal arrangements, and the enduring hope and redemptive nature of love in the face of horror.

  Drawing upon contemporary cultural and economic divisions within 1980s Britain, the novel’s depiction of social inequality and insatiable avarice lends itself neatly to the contemporary invocation of the Faustian tale amidst the pronounced misery of Thatcher’s economically riven era. In Barker’s novel, no one is immune to the temptations of money, power, or a game of chance. It is not the most well known of Barker’s horror novels (compared to, for example, The Hellbound Heart [1986] or Cabal [1988], which enjoyed film adaptations directed by Barker), but it is certainly the most devoted to the horror genre. It offers insight into Barker’s rise as an influential author of visceral horror fiction, literate in the Gothic tropes and artfully splicing them into tales that feel new and speak to contemporary concerns.

  Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

  See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Books of Bloo
d.

  Further Reading

  Badley, Linda. 1996. “Clive Barker Writing (from) the Body.” In Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice, 73–104. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Hoppenstand, Gary. 1994. Clive Barker’s Short Stories: Imagination as Metaphor in the Books of Blood and Other Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Ní Fhlainn, Sorcha, ed. 2017. Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

  Winter, Douglas E. 2001. “Nowhere Land: The Damnation Game (1985).” In Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, 172–187. New York: HarperCollins.

  THE DAMNED

  Là-Bas (translated as Down There or The Damned) is a novel by French writer J. K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans, first published in 1891, and not published in English—and then only in a private edition—until 1928. It is the story of the author Durtal, whose research on Gilles de Rais—marshal of fourteenth-century France, whose career ended in a notorious trial for Satanism, pedophilia, torture, and child murder—leads him to a firsthand encounter with the occult. Its attempt to blend naturalism with the mystical into a kind of “supernatural realism” proved influential on subsequent horror writers, most importantly H. P. Lovecraft.

  The narrative (like most of Huysmans’s work) is not linear, but rather a series of tableaux. It is punctuated by discussions between Durtal and fellow novelist des Hermies as they enjoy the hospitality of the local bell ringer and his wife. When Durtal says he wants to strengthen his understanding of de Rais’s satanic practices, des Hermies tells him that such activities still exist. Meanwhile, Durtal is contacted by a female reader, Hyacinthe Chantelouve, who leads him further into the occult underworld.