Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; The Lurker at the Threshold; Wandrei, Donald; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Copper, Basil. 2008. “August Derleth: A Giant Remembered.” In Basil Copper: A Life in Books, edited by Stephen Jones, 56–63. Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing.

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1998. “August Derleth.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 177–180. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

  Long, Frank Belknap. 2009. “The Contributions of August Derleth to the Supernatural Horror Story.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 466–473. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press. Originally published in Return to Derleth: Selected Essays, vol. 2, edited by James P. Roberts (White Hawk Press, 1995).

  Price, E. Hoffmann. 2001. “August W. Derleth.” In Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others, 267–295. Memories of the Pulp Fiction Era. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

  Spencer, Paul. 1992. “The Shadow over Derleth.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 114–119. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

  Tweet, Roald D. 1982. “August Derleth.” Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume II, edited by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Scribners.

  THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

  The Devil Rides Out, first published in 1934, is a novel by the British author Dennis Wheatley, who was known for his novels of occult horror infused with conservative values. It is the first and most famous of his eight black magic novels.

  Wheatley had an encyclopedic knowledge of and fascination with the occult, which underpins the idea of summoning interdimensional creatures from the otherworld and makes logical both the likelihood that, as in this novel, the devil could appear at an inn when a group of friends deliberately make a magic circle, and that faith, community, trust (all good, wartime values), occult knowledge, and muscle could control and defeat its monstrous powers. Like Wheatley himself, his recurring character, the Duke de Richleau, an occult investigator, has a fine library containing occult masterpieces, and he takes his impeccable research to far-fetched but logical extremes. The duke and his tough, strongly built friend Rex van Ryn pit their wits against a satanic cult in the British countryside in The Devil Rides Out, which presents a blend of imperial adventure and the occult. While staying at a country inn, the duke and his friends are endangered by the advent of the devil, a terrifying hoofed beast. They “could see the cabbalistic characters between the circles that ringed the pentacle, and the revolving bookcase, like a dark shadow beyond it, through the luminous mist. An awful stench of decay” (Wheatley 1934, 99). However, they fling a powerful jewel into the center of the circle, causing searing pain, destroying it and its power. As with Bram Stoker’s crucifix- and gun-wielding masculine vampire hunters in Dracula (1897), forceful men, harnessing occult and religious lore and objects, keep the violent, intrusive forces of evil at bay though they howl, beat their wings, or stamp their hooves.

  Wheatley’s horror is clean cut. Good and evil are distinct, and conservative morality regarding sexual behavior predominates. In The Devil Rides Out evil takes over bodies and souls of local people, who are nightly found dancing in circles in hollows in the darkened countryside lit with garish fires, clad in robes or seminaked, their souls in thrall to the devil. However, law, order, decency, fast cars, decisive action, and religious symbols beat back the forces of darkness, preventing the devil from riding out freely into the shires. The legacy of the investment by Wheatley and others in occult knowledge fused with adventure fiction emerges in much modern horror and fantasy, as in the character of librarian Giles in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Heroism, occult knowledge, and foreign evil reappear in the Indiana Jones films.

  The Devil Rides Out was adapted to film in 1968 by Britain’s Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and with a screenplay by Richard Matheson. Released in the United States as The Devil’s Bride, the film version is widely regarded as an excellent example of occult horror cinema.

  Gina Wisker

  See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Haggard, H. Rider; Occult Detectives; She; Wheatley, Dennis.

  Further Reading

  Baker, Phil. 2011. The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus.

  Caines, Michael. 2013. “Feasting with Dennis Wheatley.” The TLS Blog at The Times Literary Supplement. December 31. http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2013/12/feasting-with-dennis-wheatley.html.

  Wheatley, Dennis. 1934. The Devil Rides Out. London: Hutchinson.

  Wisker, Gina. 1993. “Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: The Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 99–110. London: Pluto.

  DEVILS AND DEMONS

  Devils and demons refer to specific monsters and minor deities from the occult and religious imagination and are often connected to other magical creatures such as witches and necromancers. Historically, demons can be good, bad, or neutral. Despite this, demon narratives frequently represent them as malicious personifications of evil. Demons have no single origin, although researchers in the area of demonology and ancient religions agree that they are one of the oldest forms of supernatural belief found in various occult and religious writings dating as far back as the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Representations of devils and demons are diverse and manifold and have been located in Egyptian, Babylonian, African, Persian, and ancient Iranian literatures. In pharaonic Egypt, demons were categorized by the illnesses that they created. In the ancient Persian culture of modern-day Iran, they were reputed to live in caves and enchant young women into marrying them. In European pagan folklore, they appear as benign nature spirits. In Christian theology, demons are malignant former angels that accompanied Satan in the fall from heaven. They are also frequently referred to in grimoires, a modern and European term to describe books of ancient knowledge and magical spells written during the medieval period. Grimoires had many purposes both practical and philosophical. The name demon is derived from the Greek word daimon, meaning god-like power and knowledge. Thus, one of the main purposes of grimoires was to obtain knowledge and power over nature and other worlds by summoning demons, angels, and other supernatural spirits. The sixteenth-century German legend of Faust is one of the most famous stories of the dangers of meddling with magic and demons. In the story, Faust uses a grimoire to conjure the demon Mephistopheles and bargain his soul for twenty-four years of power and pleasure. Needless to say, things don’t end well for Faust.

  During the eighteenth century, there was a revival of interest in demonology and grimoires among writers and intellectuals. The interest increased throughout the nineteenth century, led by the publication of Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1804), James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (1818), and the renaissance of interest in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–1321). A serious intellectual interest in the supernatural occult was maintained into the twentieth century by British occultist Aleister Crowley. In The Book of the Law (1904), Crowley claimed that a new religion called Thelema was dictated to him by a demon entity called Aiwass. Demon summoning, however, was not a frequent activity for a lot of occultists, and, throughout its long revival, the occult came to be associated with things secret and recondite, rather than with a direct knowledge of demons. Nonetheless, imaginative depictions of demons in art, philosophy, and literature remained throughout the fin de siècle (late nineteenth-century) period and well into the twentieth century.

  This was nowhere more true than in the burgeoning genre of horror fiction, which frequently features demons as nightmarish visions of metaphysical fallenness, moral temptation, and affliction. The use of demons in horror literature was concretized by the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in which the fall of
the character Ambrose is partly attributable to a licentious female demon called Mathilda. The demon lover as sexual predator, figure of conflict, and metaphor for unhealthy passions prevailed in European and American horror fiction. In those stories that center on a female protagonist, the demon often acts as misogynistic punishment for women who have stepped outside the perimeters of socially acceptable behavior. In those that focus on men, the demon lover motif tends to be a figure of decadence and moral ambiguity, signifying the sensualism, unhealthy obsessions, and queer sexuality connected to artistic genius. At the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the demon contributed to the iconic representation of urban horror in stories such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890). Representations of demonic queerness are also present but subverted in the works of late twentieth-century horror author Clive Barker—for example, in the sadomasochistic Cenobites of The Hellbound Heart (1986) and Baphomet the demon king of Meridian in Cabal (1988).

  The linking of demons to children is also prevalent in the horror literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diabolical sexual assaults and deformed children in Machen’s other stories are drawn from descriptions of incubi and succubi in the medieval occult. Similar devils and demons, distinguished by grotesque breeding, moral decay, and ancient religious practices, make up H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional universe, the Cthulhu Mythos. Walter de la Mare describes a child’s death at the hands of a demon in “The Guardian” (1955). A nice young girl is possessed by the devil in William P. Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971). A satanic impregnation occurs in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and a diabolic child features in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988). In Stephen King’s novels it is adults such as Randall Flagg in The Stand (1978) that are demons and children such as Franny’s unborn baby that are the antidote to their diabolical activities. Similarly in Desperation (1996) the boy, David, is led by visions and religious experiences into a battle with the demon, Tak.

  The presentation of demons in these and many other contemporary works of horror fiction is influenced by a Christian theology, but the handling of it is quite varied. Like demons and minor devils, the representation of the supreme demon, Satan, is often unstable and variable. In fact, Satan appears only a handful of times in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, but certain patterns and behaviors—for instance, Satan’s mysteriousness, his love of trickery and game playing, and his divided nature—can be traced back not only to the Bible but to later theological writings such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Other satanic ambiguous traits such as rebelliousness, fallenness, nihilism, and human advocacy are evidenced in diverse horror works such as Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1916), Robert Bloch’s That Hellbound Train (1958), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1966), Jeremy Leven’s Satan (1982), Harlan Ellison’s The Deathbird Stories (1974), King’s Needful Things (1991) and Barker’s The Damnation Game (1985).

  Eleanor Beal

  See also: Barker, Clive; Cthulhu Mythos; The Damnation Game; The Exorcist; Incubi and Succubi; Melmoth the Wanderer; Rosemary’s Baby; “Young Goodman Brown.”

  Further Reading

  Cardin, Matt. 2007. “The Angel and the Demon.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi, 31–64. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

  Carus, Paul. 2008. The History of the Devil. New York: Dover.

  Guiley, Rosemary. 1998. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. New York: Checkmark Books.

  Owen, Alex. 2007. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.

  DICK, PHILIP K. (1928–1982)

  The American writer Philip K. Dick was the author of 44 novels and 121 short stories that have exerted a profound effect on the science fiction field. His particular approach to science fiction also imbues his work with significance for the horror genre. The question of what it means to be human, the fear of losing identity, the threat of totalitarian government, and the disorienting impact of drug use and mental illness are central themes in Dick’s fiction. Many of his protagonists experience dread and disorientation as they are trapped in societies in which they have no control or understanding, and Dick employs different worlds, alternate universes, and imagined futures as settings for his protagonists facing psychological isolation and horror.

  Dick grew up in the San Francisco area and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied history, psychology, and philosophy. He left the university without a degree in 1949 and sold his first story in 1950. Throughout most of his career Dick struggled financially. He also became addicted to amphetamines, and after several mental health episodes, which included prolonged hallucinations, he attempted suicide in 1972. Despite his lack of financial success, Dick was popular with science readers and appreciated by critics for his genre-bending use of horror and science fiction. During his life he received the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the French Graquilly d’Or. He was also nominated for five Nebula awards.

  Despite his immense productivity and praise from critics and readers of science fiction, Dick never achieved either the sales or the popularity he wanted during his lifetime. It was only later, when his work began to be adapted for film and television, that his dark work became known to a wide and appreciative audience.

  The first major film adapted from one of his stories was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969). Released in 1982, Blade Runner—and especially the more cinematically successful director’s cut of the same film—is an excellent example of Dick’s combination of horror and science fiction. It is the story of a private bounty hunter working with police on a dying, dystopic earth, who finds to his growing horror that he might not be human. Dick suggests that empathy may be the way to face the fear of identity loss, but both the novel and the film posit growing despair.

  Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven, is based on Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966). Again Dick examines the boundaries of science fiction and horror as he explores the confusion and disorientation of a man who has been given a memory implant and cannot tell whether his memories are real or hallucinations.

  Dick employs the convention of alternate history rather than a futuristic setting in The Man in the High Castle (1963), which was adapted for television in 2015. He sets his story in an America that lost the Second World War to the Germans and Japanese, who now occupy the United States. In this alternate America the protagonist attempts to survive in a fascist world that has experienced one nuclear holocaust and is threatened by the real possibility of another.

  In these and Dick’s other works, the horror of losing one’s identity to an intrusive and powerful authority in a decaying world is dramatized and explored. Dick’s characters are powerless seekers caught in nightmare worlds. The continued interest in and popularity of his work, especially as it is presented in extraliterary adaptations, suggest that many readers experience similar fears.

  During the last decade of his life, Dick’s work as an author of fiction became increasingly intertwined with his existential reality as he experienced a series of spiritual and paranormal events that, he thought, indicated the everyday world of mundane reality is a kind of virtual construct presided over by a demiurgic higher power. He eventually termed this power VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System) and spent his final years writing novels and keeping a journal—published in 2011 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick—in which he laid out the details and ramifications of this vision. He died on March 2, 1982, after suffering two strokes.

  Jim Holte

  See also: Moore, Alan; Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Arnold, Kyle. 2016. The Divine Madness of Philip K
. Dick. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Rose, Frank. 2003. “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick.” Wired, December 1. http://www.wired.com/2003/12/philip/?pg=6.

  Sutin, Lawrence. 2005. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Carroll & Graf.

  DOUBLES, DOPPELGÄNGERS, AND SPLIT SELVES

  The uncanny shadow, reflection, twin, or double is a key device in Gothic and horror fiction. The dread these doubles often invoke is underpinned by ancient myth. From the earliest theologies, chaos and order or good and evil have used twins or doubles to figure primordial warring forces, such as Gilgamesh and Enkidu (Mesopotamia), Osiris and Set (Egypt), or Cain and Abel (Old Testament). Greek and Roman mythology abounds in twins, as do many storytelling cycles of Native American and African cultures. The double is a portent, one that can signify great fortune, but more often taken as a harbinger of misfortune. Celtic and other northern folklores regard seeing one’s double or “fetch” as foretelling death. Some cultures venerate twins, but many more have killed them at birth as unlucky signs.

  Since the eighteenth century, post-Enlightenment thinkers have understood the double less in metaphysical or theological terms and more as another part of the self. This has been integral to the development of modern psychology. Indeed, the demonic, persecutory “other” typical of Gothic fiction is inextricably related to the development of these psychological models of selfhood. Late nineteenth-century psychologists coined the term “double personality” and were fascinated that consciousness could apparently split spontaneously or be artificially induced to divide through hypnotism. Modern trauma theory continues this fascination through the terminology of dissociation or multiple personality.