Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  One of the most prominent instances of this influence may be seen in the iconic “Nightmare” series of paintings by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, which depict a woman lying unconscious on a bed or couch with an ugly demon squatting on her chest and a supernatural horse peering out from behind a curtain in the background. This basic image, which is believed to have been inspired by Fuseli’s own personal experiences with the nightmare state in question, has sometimes been called the master image of the Gothic horror genre, and it has exerted a powerful influence on literature, as in, to name just one notable case, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, wherein Shelley’s description of the scene when Victor Frankenstein bursts into the bedroom on his wedding night to find that his monster has murdered Elizabeth is probably modeled on Fuseli’s paintings. Other instances of the classic nightmare being used to powerful effect by horror authors include E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (German: Der Sandmann, 1816) and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887), which stands as the paradigmatic example of the use of the hypnogogic dream in horror fiction.

  In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the dream was used as a framing device for the allegorical tale. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nightmares became prominent in the fiction of the Romantics, who saw emotion as the authentic source of aesthetic experience. Dreams featured in many Gothic novels, notably Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796) and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century (1806). By the mid-nineteenth century, writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey showed intense interest in altered states of consciousness, including nightmares. As early as 1866, when Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” was published, dreams were being used as a central narrative component of horror fiction; subsequent far-reaching “dream worlds” were created by authors as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft (The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath) and Philip K. Dick (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch).

  In the short story, many writers used dreams as key elements of their tales. Edward Lucas White (1886–1934) claimed that his plots came from actual nightmares. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom” (1903) relates how the sounds, odors, and other sensations “leak” from the narrator’s dreams into reality. F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood Is the Life” (1911) draws parallels between the effects of chronic nightmares and vampirism. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), set in the far future, is told in the form of the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century. During this period, nightmares are conspicuous in the work of Algernon Blackwood, Nikolai Gogol, Stefan Grabiński, Arthur Machen, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and others.

  The Symbolists pushed past literal narrative to accentuate dreams and the associative powers of the imagination. Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, 1846–1870), Georges Rodenbach, Stefan Grabiński, and Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) created stories in which images and metaphors become the actual—rather than merely the literary—representations of perception. By the mid-1920s, the Surrealists declared dreaming to be no less vital than waking. Subsequent writers including Bruno Schulz, Jean Ray, Michel de Ghelderode (1898–1962), and others used a sense of intense estrangement from the generally accepted sense of reality as a source of horror. This stream reaches its apex in the “weird” work of Thomas Ligotti, whose tales often employ incongruous images to produce an effect of terror.

  Steven J. Mariconda

  See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Blackwood, Algernon; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Dick, Phillip K.; Gogol, Nikolai; Grabiński, Stefan; “The Horla”; Incubi and Succubi; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; The Night Land; Ray, Jean; “The Sand-man”; Schulz, Bruno; The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror); Surrealism.

  Further Reading

  Brook, Stephen, ed. 2003. The Oxford Book of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Jones, Ernest. 1931. On the Nightmare. London: Hogarth Press.

  Khapaeva, Dina. 2012. Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project. Boston: Brill.

  Pepper, Dennis. 2001. The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  THE DROWNING GIRL

  Irish American writer Caitlín R. Kiernan’s novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) has received widespread critical acclaim, winning both a Bram Stoker and a James Tiptree Jr. award. Combining complex psychological realism with elements of dark fantasy, its fragmentary first-person narration and meta-fictional focus, like those of Kiernan’s 2008 novel The Red Tree, are a stylistic departure from her earlier series of dark fantasy novels, from Silk (1999) through Low Red Moon (2005). The Drowning Girl is nonetheless connected to them both thematically and through shared settings.

  Haunted by memories of her mother’s suicide, The Drowning Girl’s narrator, a young woman named India Morgan Phelps who refers to herself as Imp, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Imp struggles to comprehend a series of uncanny events linked to her childhood fascination with a painting titled “The Drowning Girl” by (fictional) American painter Philip George Saltonstall, and her encounter with an enigmatic woman named Eva Canning, whom Imp at various points in the novel imagines as a mermaid, a werewolf, or a ghost. Imp gradually uncovers connections between Eva Canning and Jacova Angevine, the leader of a cult called the Open Door of Night, whose worship of the Lovecraftian marine deity Mother Hydra and eventual mass suicide are recounted in a number of Kiernan’s earlier fictions, most notably the story “Houses Under the Sea” (2007). Imp’s growing obsession with Eva alienates her from her lover Abalyn Armitage, leading her ever further into a mysterious world that she, and the reader, can never be entirely sure is not the product of her own schismatic psyche.

  With its dedication to Peter Straub, whose classic Ghost Story (1979) Kiernan has often cited as an influence, and with Imp’s opening statement that she is “going to write a ghost story now” (Kiernan 2012, 1), The Drowning Girl situates itself within the long tradition of ghost stories, but in an untraditional way. With its stream of consciousness technique, it draws inspiration from Modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf, and from postmodern novels including Mark Danielew-ski’s House of Leaves (2000). Like most of Kiernan’s fictions, The Drowning Girl engages in what she calls a “feminization of the weird”; incorporating concepts and quotations from Poe, Lovecraft, and other writers associated with the history of weird fiction into her narrative, Imp (whose name itself echoes Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse”) interrogates them from a queer and feminist perspective, even as she attempts to understand how they shape her own self-perception and identity. In this respect, The Drowning Girl also works within the female Gothic tradition. Originating with eighteenth-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe and continuing through the work of writers including Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the nineteenth century and Shirley Jackson in the twentieth, the female Gothic focuses on women’s struggles to define their identity against patriarchal, and often predatory, authorities.

  Sean Moreland

  See also: Dark Fantasy; House of Leaves; Jackson, Shirley; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Radcliffe, Ann; Straub, Peter; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

  Further Reading

  Brusso, Charlene. 2012. “Pernicious Thought Contagions: PW Talks with Caitlín R. Kiernan.” Publishers Weekly (January 30): 39. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/50378-pernicious-thought-contagions-pw-talks-with-caitlin-r-kiernan.html.

  Kiernan, Caitlín R. 2012. The Drowning Girl. New York: ROC.

  Moreland, Sean. 2016. “‘Not Like Any Thing of Ours’: Waking (to) Poe and Lovecraft in Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl.” In The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation and Transformation. Lanham, MD: Lehigh University Press.

  DU MAURIER, DAPHNE (1907–1989)

  Daphne du Maurier, born in London in 1907, was one of the greatest Britis
h female writers of Gothic horror in the twentieth century. She upset romantic fictions with her novel Rebecca (1938), exposing the damage of flawed romantic narratives that imprison and constrain women’s opportunities and worldviews. Her father was the famous actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier, her grandfather was writer George du Maurier (who wrote Trilby, 1894), and her sister Angela was also a writer.

  Du Maurier’s first published fiction, The Loving Spirit (1931), is a ghost story, informed by the supernatural. Early reception of her work, including Cornwall-based Jamaica Inn (1936, turned into a BBC1 TV series in 2014) and Frenchman’s Creek (1941), misunderstood it as middlebrow genre writing. Among du Maurier’s short stories and novelettes are “The Birds” (1952; filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963), The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (1952), Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1953), The Birds and Other Stories (1963), and “Don’t Look Now” (1971), which was memorably filmed by Nicholas Roeg in 1973. The time-slip novel The House on the Strand (1969), also set in Cornwall, presents a tale in which mind-altering drugs transport the protagonist Dick back to medieval times, where life is meaningful, if violent.

  “The Birds”: Social Commentary and Avian

  Eco-Horror

  First published in Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 fiction collection The Apple Tree, “The Birds” is an influential story in the subgenre that has come to be known as eco-horror, and its status in cultural memory has been greatly enhanced by the fact of its film adaptation by director Alfred Hitchcock.

  Set in coastal Cornwall, where du Maurier lived (in Fowey), “The Birds” focuses on a community that is shockingly attacked by flocks of everyday garden birds and seabirds, threatening civic order and causing unease. The story’s historical setting is just after the Second World War, and the coastal attack recalls Britain’s fear of invasion from the sea and the sky. Invasion and body horror are intermixed with creature horror, since the birds go for eyes, overwhelming children and adults. The main character, a farmhand, tries to protect his family by boarding up windows and hiding inside, but the birds break in. Their insistent, incessant attack is a reminder of the futility and helplessness of people when nature or war take over. The protective power of family men is also undermined, and this is a theme that du Maurier explored elsewhere, as in her story “Don’t Look Now” (1952).

  In 1963 The Apple Tree was reprinted as The Birds and Other Stories, and simultaneously Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds, starring Tippi Hedren, which moves the events to the United States. The film holds an iconic place in Hollywood history. In 2009 Irish playwright Conor McPherson adapted “The Birds” for the stage at Dublin’s Gate Theatre.

  Gina Wisker

  In Rebecca, a dark, Gothic anti-romance that was du Maurier’s most popular novel, the young second wife of the dashing Maximilian de Winter moves in with him at his country house, Manderley, and is there dominated by his sinister and imperious housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The novel eventually reveals Maxim as the murderer of his beautiful, sexually independent first wife, Rebecca, who haunts (without actually being a ghost) both the nameless second wife—who narrates the novel—and Manderley, which serves as an index of the decadence of a partying generation that failed to see approaching war. The novel is recognized as exploring confinement, conformity, and containment of sexual rebellion and social rebellion in women. Rebecca was written and published in 1938, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reportedly carried a copy in his briefcase when trying to ensure peace prior to World War II.

  Rebecca revitalized women’s Gothic horror writing, introducing studies of domestic tensions and crimes, doppelgängers, and hauntings without a ghost, and influencing countless writers, including Ruth Rendell, Stephen King, and Angela Carter. Du Maurier’s short stories, for their part, such as “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now,” undercut the myth of the strong father figure’s ability to cope with human and natural forces. In “The Birds,” a father cannot protect his family from the invasion of the family home by garden and sea birds. In “Don’t Look Now,” another father, seeking his dead daughter, is murdered by a masquerading dwarf—he, too, has failed in his role as solver of mysteries and bringer of order.

  Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik revived critical interest in du Maurier in the 1990s, and a number of Cornwall-based conferences followed. Du Maurier’s life and work have often been explored, and Margaret Forster focused on her work in various papers discussing and debating her lesbianism. Daphne du Maurier was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1969.

  Gina Wisker

  See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Trilby.

  Further Reading

  Du Maurier, Daphne. 1938. Rebecca. London: Victor Gollancz.

  Du Maurier, Daphne. 1971. “Don’t Look Now.” In Not After Midnight. London: Victor Gollancz.

  Flanagan, Padraic. 2014. “Daphne du Maurier: Literary Genius Hated by the Critics?” The Telegraph, April 14. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10765991/Daphne-du-Maurier-literary-genius-hated-by-the-critics.html.

  Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 1998. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

  Wisker, Gina. 2003. “Dangerous Borders: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shaking the Foundations of the Romance of Privilege, Partying and Place.” Journal of Gender Studies 12, no. 2: 83–97.

  DUE, TANANARIVE (1966–)

  Tananarive Due is an American journalist and author best known for her supernatural thriller series about a secret colony of Ethiopian immortals, the Life Brothers, whose blood has the ability to heal: My Soul to Keep (1997), The Living Blood (2001), Blood Colony (2008), and My Soul to Take (2011). In addition to her “African Immortals” books and many other horror fictions, Due has also written mystery, historical, and nonfiction works. She worked as a journalist for the Miami Herald before turning to a full-time writing career.

  Due’s short fiction is frequently anthologized and she has won several literary awards, including a 2002 American Book Award for The Living Blood. Her first novel, The Between (1995), was nominated by the Horror Writers Association for a Bram Stoker award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, and My Soul to Keep was also nominated for a Stoker award. Her novella “Ghost Summer” (2008) received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her collection of short stories Ghost Summer won a 2016 British Fantasy Award. Her novels The Good House (2004) and Joplin’s Ghost (2005) are also supernatural narratives. Writing with her husband Steven Barnes, Due has also published the apocalyptic zombie novels Devil’s Wake (2012) and Domino Falls (2013), continuing a history of fruitful collaborations with other authors. The husband and wife writing team have also created a short film, Danger Word, based on a short story set in the same universe as Devil’s Wake and Domino Falls. My Soul to Keep is also being adapted to film.

  Born January 5, 1966, in Tallahassee, Florida, Due is the daughter of renowned civil rights activists. Her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was jailed for forty-nine days in 1960 for refusing to pay a fine for sitting in at a Woolworth’s counter, and, with Tananarive, co-wrote the civil rights memoir Freedom in the Family (2003). Due’s fiction is characterized by a strong antiracist sensibility, standing out in the speculative fiction genres for placing the struggles and perspectives of black protagonists at the center of her stories. Often her protagonists grapple, not only with supernatural issues, but with the racism and multiple injustices of their societies. Her mystery novel In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Story (2008; written with Blair Underwood and Steven Barnes) received the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award.

  As a black author working in genres overwhelmingly dominated by whites, Due is often compared to other black speculative fiction writers, including Steven Barnes, Octavia E. Butler, and Samuel Delany. In an interview with prominent horror editor Paula Guran, Due noted the slipperiness of applying such categories as horror to nonwhite communities: “the black community draws on so m
any belief systems that they take the supernatural for granted. I also find that a lot of black readers are willing to share their stories of prophetic dreams or ghost sightings, and to them, that isn’t horror or dark fantasy, it’s true life” (Guran 1997). In a separate interview with Publishers Weekly, Due observed that she wanted to find her own voice as a black writer rather than attempting to be another Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, and that writing horror fiction gave her a “prism” through which to confront her fears (Dziemianowicz 2001, 81).

  Critics have remarked upon the preoccupation with the ethics of using power underlying the plot conflicts in Due’s works (Mohanraj 2002). For example, in The Living Blood, Jessica Wolde, who receives the titular blood gift from her Immortal husband, Dawit, must struggle with the ethics of dispensing her healing blood to diseased and suffering patients from her clinic in Botswana. Her daughter Fana, who received the blood in utero, gains even greater power than the men in the colony but must resist the temptation of the “Bee Lady” to give in to her anger and pain, and use her power to hurt those around her.

  Aalya Ahmad

  See also: Ancestral Curse; Bram Stoker Award; Butler, Octavia E.; Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Ghost Stories; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Occult Fiction.

  Further Reading

  Due, Tananarive. 2001. The Living Blood. New York: Pocket Books.

  Due, Tananarive, and Dianne Glave. 2004. “‘My Characters Are Teaching Me to Be Strong’: An Interview with Tananarive Due.” African American Review 38, no. 4: 695–705.

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2001. “PW Talks to Tananarive Due.” Publishers Weekly, March 19: 81.

  Guran, Paula. 1997. “Tananarive Due: Unique Name for a New Dark Star.” Dark Echo. http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/archives/due.html. Originally published in Omni Online.