Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Of particular importance in Grant’s own body of work is his fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station. Although many writers have explored the subject of small town horror—including, notably, Shirley Jackson in “The Lottery” (1948), Thomas Tryon in Harvest Home (1973), and Stephen King in ’Salem’s Lot (1975)—few have done it as well, or as long, or in as many and varied ways, as Grant. Starting with The Hour of the Oxrun Dead in 1979, he went on to write a total of eight novels and a series of four collections of novellas set in the secluded Connecticut hamlet, concluding in 1995 with the collection The Black Carousel. As a set, the Oxrun books represent a grand, wildly successful experiment in horror, as Grant effectively explores dread and disquiet in many forms, whether it be the threat of harm from satanic cults; classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, or mummies; the pain of loneliness; or the confusion and despair caused by mental illness. Individually, many of these stories are classics of the genre, expertly evoking fear, terror, and horror, and providing readers with fleeting, disturbing, and memorable glimpses of what lurks in the shadows.

  Grant won many awards over the course of his career, including two Nebulas plus multiple World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild awards. Late in his career he was honored with awards for lifetime achievement from the Horror Writers Association, the World Horror Convention, the British Fantasy Society, and the International Horror Guild. His profound influence on the horror genre is also evidenced by two tribute collections. The first, Quietly Now (2004), edited by Kealan Patrick Burke, presents tributes to Grant by various writers and critics in the field. The second, Scream Quietly (2011), edited by Stephen Jones, presents the best of Grant’s short fiction.

  Grant suffered from declining health in his later years. He was residing in Newton, New Jersey, with his second wife, the speculative fiction writer and editor Kathryn Ptacek, when he died of a heart attack on September 15, 2006.

  Hank Wagner

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; International Horror Guild Award; Vampires; Werewolves; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Mcdonald, T. Liam. 2003. “Grant, Charles L. 1942–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, 391–402. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Neilson, Keith. 1983. “The Subtle Terrors of Charles L. Grant.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Volume 3, edited by Frank N. Magill, 1191–1195. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Charles L. Grant.” In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of Supernatural Horror, 47–57. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

  Winter, Douglas E. 1985. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books.

  “THE GREAT GOD PAN”

  “The Great God Pan” is a classic horror novella by the Welsh author Arthur Machen. It caused something of a sensation when it was published, and it has become one of the central texts in the history of weird fiction in the English language.

  The novella’s first section, “The Experiment,” was originally published as “The Great God Pan” in the short-lived Whirlwind in 1890, which styled itself a “lively and eccentric newspaper” and whose contributors included Stéphane Mallarmé, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Walter Sickert. Machen expanded this original iteration into its final form for publication in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894), one of John Lane’s “Keynotes,” a book series associated with the literary Decadent movement of the 1890s.

  Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s conceit in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Machen was convinced that a similarly “scientific” plot device was necessary for the modern reader to accept an unusual narrative, where traditional supernatural horror tropes would no longer be convincing. Thus the opening section of “The Great God Pan” relates a scientific (or rather, pseudoscientific) experiment on the brain of a young girl by Dr. Raymond, intended to give her access to other realms of perception.

  In Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Dr. Raymond’s explanation of what it means to “see the god Pan” lays out a philosophical viewpoint that resonates with weird horror fiction’s central concern, and that stands as a quintessential articulation of it:

  Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these “chases in Arras, dreams in a career,” beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan. (Machen 1894, 3)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Machen, Arthur. 1894. The Great God Pan. London: John Lane, Vigo St.

  The ensuing narrative is fragmented, offering different perspectives on the events precipitated by the experiment, provoking the reader into active construction and interpretation of the central plotline. During her ordeal, the girl encounters what is (perhaps only euphemistically) described as the Greek deity Pan, rendering her both insane and mysteriously pregnant. The resulting child, Helen Vaughan, is shunned by the rural Welsh community in which she grows up and where she is the subject of disturbing rumors. As an adult, Vaughan moves through London society leaving in her wake insanity and a series of suicides. She is eventually tracked down by two men, Villiers and Clarke, who have learned something of her history and become convinced of how dangerous she is. They confront Vaughan and coerce her into killing herself. The final paragraphs describe Vaughan’s preternatural “dissolution,” through a reverse evolutionary process, into protoplasmic material.

  “The Great God Pan” received largely negative reviews upon publication for its gruesome subject matter as well as its association with controversial new literary freedoms. Its theme of pagan resurgence destabilizing bourgeois metropolitan society resonated with fin-de-siècle (literally “end of the century,” a phrase used at the close of the nineteenth century to define what was perceived as a significant cultural and historical moment) anxieties provoked by the erosion of old religious certainties. Although the climactic physical dissolution of Vaughan has been regularly discussed in the context of the fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration (biological, cultural, and racial), it is likely Machen was as much influenced by his formidable knowledge of medieval alchemy as he was by specific contemporary discourse.

  The story has occasionally been criticized as misogynistic and cited as evidence that Machen had a morbid fear of human sexuality. Recent critics who have advanced this view include S. T. Joshi in his Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012/2014), China Miéville in his essay “Weird Fiction” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009), and Andrew Smith in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2012) (although Smith also notes that “the silence of the central female character”—which has been the focus of claims of the story’s misogyny—also contributes to the story’s overall narrative effect, since it increases “the mystery and terror at the heart of the story, linked to a predatory female sexuality” by maintaining the mysterious ineffability of what it means to glimpse “the Great God Pan”; see Smith 2012, 225). However, when considered within the wider context of Machen’s life and work, the notion that he had a particular animus against women, or that he was squeamish about sex, seems unconvincing. Indeed, the renowned literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has used Machen as an example to demo
nstrate his concern that “too direct application” of psychoanalysis to literature can result in both misrepresentation of the author and simple reiteration of “initial presuppositions” regarding the text (Todorov 1975, 152–153).

  Indicative of the impact of “The Great God Pan” is the fact that it was almost immediately parodied, in Arthur Sykes’s “The Great Pan-Demon” and Arthur Compton-Rickett’s “A Yellow Creeper.” However, it was also a commercial success and established Machen’s reputation as a writer of weird horror in the Stevenson mold. Vernon Lee’s “Dionea” (from Hauntings, 1890) is an interesting comparison, although Lee uses an epistolary form to relate her similar tale of a destabilizing pagan influence channeled through an amoral female character never directly represented. Machen’s presentation of his story as a puzzle of different testimonies from a variety of sources anticipates the similar structure used by Bram Stoker in Dracula, and its influence in this respect can be clearly seen in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” also uses a near-identical central conceit of a child born of congress between a human and a supernatural entity. Stephen King has stated that Machen’s novella is “one of the best horror stories ever written. . . . Maybe the best in the English language,” and M. John Harrison’s 1988 story “The Great God Pan” is so titled in explicit homage.

  James Machin

  See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; The Ceremonies; “The Dunwich Horror”; Machen, Arthur; “The Novel of the Black Seal.”

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

  Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Luckhurst, Roger, ed. 2005. Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Miéville, China. 2009. “Weird Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–515. London: Routledge.

  Smith, Andrew. 2012. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard and Robert Scholes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

  “GREEN TEA”

  One of the most frequently anthologized of supernatural stories, “Green Tea,” by the Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), first appeared in the journal All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), in 1869. It was subsequently incorporated in Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872. The “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to “Green Tea” are integral to the narrative and should be read in conjunction with the main body of the tale.

  “Green Tea” shows the influence of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg on Le Fanu’s thought and work. The story takes one of Swedenborg’s basic ideas—that of the opening of the “inner eye,” the faculty of spiritual sight—and gives it a supernatural horrific slant. The text itself essentially explains this, as it presents, at one point, several excerpts from one of Swedenborg’s books, as read by the character of Hesselius:

  I lighted upon a complete set of Swedenborg’s “Arcana Celestia,” in the original Latin, a very fine folio set, bound in the natty livery which theology affects, pure vellum, namely, gold letters, and carmine edges. There were paper markers in several of these volumes, I raised and placed them, one after the other, upon the table, and opening where these papers were placed, I read in the solemn Latin phraseology, a series of sentences indicated by a penciled line at the margin. Of these I copy here a few, translating them into English.

  “When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.”

  . . . “If evil spirits could perceive that they were associated with man, and yet that they were spirits separate from him, and if they could flow into the things of his body, they would attempt by a thousand means to destroy him; for they hate man with a deadly hatred.” (Le Fanu 1994, 14–15)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. [1872] 1886. “Green Tea.” In a Glass Darkly. London: Richard Bentley & Son.

  The “Prologue” is written by an anonymous English editor responsible for disseminating the clinical and philosophical work of the deceased German physician Martin Hesselius. The narrative of “Green Tea”—and, by implication, the four stories that follow it in In a Glass Darkly—have been selected by the editor not for their clinical insight but rather for the amusement they might bring to a general reader. That amusement is implicitly somewhat sardonic, for the story that follows is one of medical mismanagement and purblind dogmatism. The date of the narrative is not given, but the events of “Green Tea” appear to take place in London and southern England during the earlier years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Hesselius encounters the Reverend Mr. Jennings, an Episcopalian clergyman, at a London gathering. Realizing that there is something amiss with the cleric, he visits him at his London residence and learns that the scholarly gentleman is subject to a recurrent and distressing hallucination. Jennings has, for some time, been subject to periodic visitations by a malevolent monkey, visible only to him, which at first merely stalked him silently but which latterly has begun to speak, to utter blasphemies that interrupt the sermons he delivers in his rural parish, and to encourage him to take his own life.

  Hesselius counsels Jennings that the monkey is a delusion brought about by the clergyman’s excessive consumption of green tea as a stimulant to support his nocturnal researches into paganism, and promises to return to him should the monkey again manifest itself to the cleric’s sight. He neglects, however, to leave an address at which he might be contacted, and when the monkey returns, angry at Jennings having consulted a physician, the apparition goads his victim into suicide. Hesselius’s “Conclusion,” subtitled “A Word for Those Who Suffer,” is a consummate exercise in deflecting the blame from the irresponsibility of the physician onto the hereditary disposition of the unfortunate patient.

  “Green Tea” is a significant narrative for a number of reasons. First, it is very much implicated in the popular medicine of its day, and the notion that Jennings’s vision might be affected by the innocuous beverage he has consumed parallels Ebenezer Scrooge’s interpretation of why he sees the ghost of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Second, it is a narrative that, like Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), is heavily influenced by the writings of the visionary philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Third, as a self-contained and disturbing short work it typifies, despite the absence of a conventional human specter, the genre of the ghost story, a tradition that is associated with, but distinct from, the Gothic novel.

  William Hughes

  See also: In a Glass Darkly; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Occult Detectives.

  Further Reading

  Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Hughes, William. 2005. “The Origins and Implications of J. S. Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea.’“ Irish Studies Review 13, no. 1: 45–54.

  Sullivan, Jack. 1981. “‘Green Tea’: The Archetypal Ghost Story.” In Literature of the Occult, edited by Peter B. Messent, 117–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Wegley, Mark. 2001. “Unknown Fear: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Literary Fantastic.” Philological Review 27.2 (Fall): 59–77. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, vol. 84, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, 2006, Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale.

  THE GROTESQUE

  The grotesque in h
orror literature is conventionally defined by representations of human excess, the abnormal, the repulsive, the ugly, and the nightmarishly or ludicrously fantastic. Rather than being the shock that horror elicits, or the dread and imminent sense of fear that terror connotes, the grotesque is rooted in physicality and the visual. It is a physical manifestation of horror and terror that is created by deviation, dichotomy, and excess. The grotesque and horror are inextricably connected. How “the elusive nature of the grotesque” (Barasch 1968, v) is defined in relation to horror has been debated by scholars and critics from the seventeenth century into the present.

  The term “grotesque” has undergone redefinition since it was first used during the Italian Renaissance to describe unearthed Roman frescos at Domus Aurea as “grottesca” from grottos or caves. As an aesthetic mode applied to visual mediums, the “grottesche” implied the fantastic imaginings of Roman artists (in the era of Vitruvius). The frescos were seen to depict chimeric images of decadence and absurdity made more sepulchral and ethereal by their discovery in grottos. Early literary usage of the term appears in the sixteenth century with Montaigne, who linked the grotesque to monstrosity and experimentation.