Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Meyrink, Gustav.

  Further Reading

  Barnett, David. 2014. “Meyrink’s Golem: Where Fact and Fiction Collide.” The Guardian, January 30. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jan/30/the-golem-gustav-meyrink-books.

  Irwin, Robert. 1985. “Gustav Meyrink and His Golem.” In The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, 1995, translated by Mike Mitchell, 15–20. Monroe, OR: Dedalus.

  “GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE”

  Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People” was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1955 and then in O’Connor’s collection of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). It stands among the most anthologized tales that she ever wrote, alongside “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The story is highly representative of O’Connor’s dark humor as well as the Southern Gothic style: it features grotesque characters from the rural South with physical deformities and moral failings who bring about their downfall through their own stubbornness.

  Mrs. Hopewell is a well-off widow who runs a farm in rural Georgia with the help of her tenants, Mrs. Freeman and her two daughters, whom she believes are “good country people.” They contrast heavily with Mrs. Hopewell’s own daughter, a thirty-two-year-old spinster called Joy who lost a leg in a gunshot accident. Joy came back to live on the farm after earning a PhD in philosophy but failing to make it in academia because of her physical deformity. As a consequence, she is bitter and condescending to the country people’s lack of philosophical insight.

  One day, a Bible salesman named Manley Pointer shows up at the farm. He shows interest in Joy and invites her on a date. Overnight, Joy pictures herself seducing the young man to mock his country ways and his faith. During the picnic, Pointer convinces Joy to go in a barn loft and to take off her prosthetic leg. He confesses that he pretends to be an innocent Bible seller in order to steal prosthetic limbs. He then runs away with the leg, leaving Joy to go back to her mother, humbled and limbless.

  The story, labeled by O’Connor as a “low joke” (O’Connor 1969, 98), follows the narrative pattern of the trickster being tricked. Priding herself on her philosophical knowledge and atheism, Joy devises a scheme to expose the bigotry of country folks, but her intellectual arrogance and contempt for the material world are exposed when Pointer seduces her and steals her prosthetic leg. Joy turns out to be greatly attached to her fake limb, and the loss of it shatters her image of a detached and independent intellectual. She has to admit that her physical impairment makes her reliant on her mother and the Freeman women, whether she likes it or not.

  Joy is one of O’Connor’s most grotesque creations. Her moral failings and physical handicap make her amusing and horrifying to the reader. There is humor in her condescending attitude, as it becomes clear to the reader that she is a caricature of an intellectual, but there is something deeply unsettling in the sexual farce Pointer plays on her. His fetish for the leg as well as the pleasure he takes in humiliating Joy contradicts the idea that country people are inherently “good” and gives the story a dark turn. “Good country people” can be as cruel as anyone, and the fault lies both in Joy’s cynical attitude toward them as well as in her mother’s blindness to their potential evil, as the latter insists, until the end of the story, that they are indeed good.

  Elsa Charléty

  See also: Body Horror; The Grotesque; O’Connor, Flannery.

  Further Reading

  Di Renzo, Anthony. 1995. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

  Kirk, Connie Ann. 2008. Critical Companion to Flannery O’Connor. New York: Infobase.

  O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. New York: Macmillan.

  GOTHIC HERO/VILLAIN

  The Gothic hero/villain is a type of male character, especially found in Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century, who appears to have the qualities of both good and evil. Contrary to a traditional romance hero, represented as a dutiful, sensitive, and pious gentleman, the Gothic hero/villain is dark, brooding, and sometimes cruel or abusive, but also capable of displaying strong, passionate feelings. The aura of mystery that surrounds him makes him both attractive and repulsive to the Gothic heroine who usually falls under his influence, and his moral ambiguity makes it difficult for the reader to place a definite judgment on him.

  Examples of Gothic Hero/Villains

  •Manfred in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)

  •Vathek in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)

  •Montoni in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

  •Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)

  •Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)

  •Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819)

  •Melmoth in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

  •Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)

  •Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

  •Lestat in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles (1976–)

  Matt Cardin

  Heroes with moral ambiguities can be found all through the history of literature, from the protagonist Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey to Elizabethan theater (Hamlet, Macbeth, Faust), but the hero/villain of nineteenth-century Gothic literature finds his origin in the real-life figure of the English poet Lord Byron. As the author of narrative poems such as Don Juan (1823) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), Lord Byron is both the creator and the inspiration for this character whom Lord Macauley described as a “proud, moody, cynical man, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart” (Christiansen 1989, 201). Byron’s tumultuous life, made of scandalous affairs and excess, bore so many echoes of the male characters found in his poetry that this type of hero would be called “Byronic.”

  The Gothic hero/villain is a flawed but passionate figure who challenges the ideas of his time. He conforms to neither morals nor religion, and is a believer in the ideologies of the Enlightenment, mainly those of freedom and knowledge. However, the relentless pursuit of his ideals often leads him to extremes as he indulges in abuse, excess, or self-destruction. The Gothic hero/villain embodies the darker side of romanticism, as he constantly questions and defies authority by destructive means.

  Even though this male character is defined by his ambiguity, three main types of Gothic hero/villain can be identified: the satanic, the Promethean, and the Caliban hero/villain. The satanic hero/villain, much like the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, possesses a brilliant mind and a power of persuasion over weaker individuals. He manipulates people around him with subtle words and action, and seduces them, regardless of their gender. The magnetic aura that surrounds him makes him a dangerously attractive character, often to the detriment of the good hero. Examples include John Polidori’s Ruthven (in “The Vampyre”), the original vampire of English literature, who was modeled directly on Byron; Ann Radcliffe’s Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); and Bram Stoker’s titular vampire in Dracula (1897).

  Recalling Prometheus, the ancient Greek deity who defied the gods by giving fire to humankind, the Promethean hero/villain transgresses the essential laws of nature in pursuit of a greater good. He acts not out of love, but out of passion for science and knowledge. He is ready to cross all boundaries for the advancement of humanity, even the sacred one between life and death. Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous tragic protagonist and “mad scientist” from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is a telling example, since the book’s full title is Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.

  The Caliban hero/villain is a raw force of nature. Like Shakespeare’s creature in The Tempest, the Caliban hero/villain has failed to be fully subjugated to modern civilization. He is brutal, impulsive, and cruel to humans and animals alike. His feelings are strong and unconditi
onal, and his love is as intense as it is destructive. The best example of this type is Heathcliff, the dark and haunted lover of Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

  Twentieth-century incarnations of the Gothic hero/villain tend to be stripped of their Gothic component while keeping the complex moral ambiguity of the character. Crime fiction and psychological thrillers often resort to this type of character. Both genres owe much to the figure of the Gothic hero/villain for achieving some of their most characteristic effects, as he is useful for heightening tension and allowing for major plot twists. The figure of the private detective, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (an obsessive-compulsive maniac addicted to morphine) and Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (grumpy alcoholic loners emblematic of noir fiction), embody this hero/villain of a new genre. Other modern examples may include the mysterious phantom from The Phantom of the Opera (1910), the sociopathic antihero Alex in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), the masked anarchist freedom fighter V. in Allan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1988); and Dexter, the vigilante serial killer from the HBO series of the same name.

  Elsa Charléty

  See also: The Brontë Sisters; Byronic Hero; The Castle of Otranto; Dracula; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Phantom of the Opera; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Vampires; “The Vampyre.”

  Further Reading

  Behr, Kate E. 2002. The Representation of Men in the English Gothic Novel, 1762–1820. Vol. 69. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

  Christiansen, Rupert. 1989. Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age, 1780–1830. London: Random House UK.

  Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Marshall, Bridget M. 2000. “The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 6, no. 2: 161–172.

  Morrison, Robert, and Chris Baldick. 1997. Introduction to The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. 2004. The Gothic. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.

  GRABIŃSKI, STEFAN (1887–1936)

  Stefan Grabiński was a Polish writer of what he termed “psychofantasy” or “metafantasy,” tales of the dark fantastic that explore the inner realm of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical concerns. He enjoyed a brief period of critical and popular acclaim early in his career, but his renown waned and he died impoverished and forgotten. However, after World War II interest in his work was rekindled, and his reputation has grown.

  Grabiński was born on February 26, 1887, in Kamionka Strumiłowa, a small town in the eastern provinces of Poland, now part of the Ukraine. He had a quiet and comfortable childhood, though marred by ill health; he inherited a genetic form of tuberculosis from his father, which, starting in his bones and later spreading to his lungs, was to cause him suffering his whole life. After Grabiński’s father’s death, the family moved to Lwów, capital of Polish Galicia, where Grabiński studied Polish and classical literature. After graduating, he began working as a teacher of Polish, mostly in local schools. He would remain a provincial teacher the rest of his life, a job he found frustrating, as he felt it sapped his creative energy. He was, though, by all accounts, a good teacher.

  As a child, encouraged by his mother, who was a great lover of books, Grabiński would read while laid up on his sickbed. It is likely Grabiński’s sickness, a constant reminder of his mortality, and his introspective personality led him to dark fantasy and to an interest in the esoteric. In his own writing he took influences from Edgar Allan Poe and writers of the Polish Decadent and avant-garde movements. He was also inspired by classical thinkers, such as Heraclitus and Plato, and contemporary philosophers, particularly Henri Bergson and Maurice Maeterlinck. And he was intensely spiritual throughout his life, a pantheist who read the Christian mystics, Eastern religious texts such as the Indian Vedas, and works of theosophy and demonology.

  In 1906, supported by his mother, Grabiński began writing. In 1909, he self-published a collection of stories under a pseudonym. This book did not find an audience, but his second volume of tales, On the Hill of Roses (1918), published some time later, after the upheaval of World War I, had a more encouraging critical reception. In 1919 The Motion Demon followed, a compilation of fantastical railway stories written for magazines and newspapers. It was a very popular collection, partly due to the interest in rail travel of the time, and was well regarded by critics. Karol Irzykowski, a leading writer of the Polish avant-garde, called it a perfect example of its genre and hailed Grabiński as the “Polish Poe.” Grabiński’s take on the railways is mystical, based on an esoteric theory of motion. He merged Bergson’s theory of élan vital—the idea that evolution can be explained by an internal vital impetus that drives organisms to develop—with scientific theories of motion from Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

  The Motion Demon sold well enough that it was expanded and reprinted in 1922. It was followed by further collections: Pilgrim’s Madness (1920), A Mystery Tale (1922), and Book of Fire (1922). The latter, like The Motion Demon, had a unified theme.

  In his stories, Grabiński is modern and does not turn to the past, to the rich folklore of Poland. But he was also an opponent of mechanization; he had a sense that the modern world was a place where humankind’s original sense of self and of harmony with nature was being erased by machines, materialism, and bureaucracy. In his work, and in particular his railway tales, demonic forces are fused with modern machines.

  Grabiński had a close relationship with his mother and lived with her for most of his life. Though he was married in 1917, the relationship did not last, ending in 1921 when his wife left him, taking their two daughters with her. These things may have affected his attitudes toward women: in his fiction they are often sweet, pliant, and voluptuously monstrous at the same time. Many of his stories, such as “In Sarah’s House,” “The Black Hamlet,” and “Passion,” deal with the destructive power of lust. Grabiński’s focus on the erotic can also be explained by his interest in in the human mind, psychoanalysis, and madness—he relished writing the lunatics in his fiction, for they shared his maverick perspective.

  In the essay “Wyznania” (“Confessions,” 1926), Grabiński writes, “Wonder and fear—these are my guiding motives” (Lipinski 2014, 7). And he was as much a writer of ecstasy as he was of horror, balancing and mixing the two emotions in his stories.

  The heights of Grabiński’s early tales were never regained, and the fame and material comfort they bought faded quickly. He tried his hand at novels and dramas, but they lacked the tautness and economy that made his short fiction catch fire and were too dependent on obscure occult iconography and terminology.

  During this time, Grabiński’s deteriorating health increasingly kept him housebound. He became bitter. In 1929, his tuberculosis spread to his lungs, with hemorrhaging. His financial situation also grew increasingly precarious. Still he continued to work, and in 1936 he published a novel, Itongo Island. It received bad reviews, and it was to be his last book.

  Grabiński died on November 12, 1936. On his deathbed, he complained bitterly about having been misunderstood and forgotten in his native land. But interest in his work was revitalized in Poland in the late 1940s, and he was later championed by Stanisław Lem, the great Polish science fiction writer, who edited a collection of Grabiński’s work and his influence has grown since. Several Polish films have been based on his work, and in the English-speaking world, thanks largely to the pioneering translations of Miroslaw Lipinski, begun in the 1980s, Grabiński’s work has found favor among writers and readers of weird fiction. In Poland, the Year of Grabiński was held in 2012, with scholarly works and symposia dedicated to the writer.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: The Dark Domain.

  Further Reading

  Lipinski, Miroslaw
. 2012. The Stefan Grabiński Website. January 9. http://www.stefangrabinski.org.

  Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2014. Introduction to The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabińksi, 7–11. New York: NoHo Press.

  Mills, Adam. 2012. “Interview: Translator Miroslaw Lipinski on Stefan Grabiński.” Weird Fiction Review, July 10. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/07/interview-translator-miroslaw-lipinski-on-stefan-grabinski.

  GRANT, CHARLES L. (1942–2006)

  Charles Lewis Grant was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor/anthologist who specialized in dark fantasy and what he called “quiet horror,” a term that became associated with his name and eventually came to define his work in the minds of his many admiring readers. He was born in 1942 in New Jersey, and he spent most of his life as a resident of the northwestern part of the state.

  Grant’s first novel, The Shadow of Alpha (1976), was a work of science fiction. He published a number of books in that genre before the end of the 1970s, switching to horror when the market for science fiction weakened. His first work of horror was a werewolf novel titled The Curse (1977). Grant would subsequently publish a total of eighty-five novels in myriad genres under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, many of which had their origins in bodies of water; thus, the pen names Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Timothy Boggs, and Simon Lake. He penned dozens of short stories that were later collected in six books. He also edited twenty-five anthologies, among them twelve volumes of one of the enormously influential horror anthology series Shadows (1978–1991). As an editor, he worked with some of the biggest names in the genre, and he also gave many fledgling writers their start.

  He was known as a master and champion of quiet, subtle horror, as opposed to the more visceral and gaudy horror pioneered by Clive Barker in his Books of Blood and by the other so-called “splatterpunks” who rose to prominence in the late 1980s. While appreciating the effects those authors created, Grant preferred to suggest the horrific rather than render it explicitly. His great influence on the field is indicated by an insightful comment from author David Morrell in Douglas Winter’s book of interviews, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (1985): “Stephen King and Peter Straub are like the luxury liners of the horror field. They’re always visible on the horizon when you look over these deep, dark waters. But Charlie Grant—he’s the unseen power, like the great white shark, just below the surface” (Winter 1985, 109). Besides creating a vivid mental image, the quote is notable for the accurate portrayal of Grant acting as a secret master of the genre, subtly exerting profound influence on all those in his orbit. Grant led by example, publishing the best prose he could craft, and by educating the rest of his colleagues through the numerous anthologies he edited, announcing by their inclusion in these volumes that certain writers had “arrived” and that these stories were worthy of readers’ attention.