Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

  “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a short story written by American author Flannery O’Connor. First published in 1953, it is now the most read and recognized of O’Connor’s work due to its inclusion in numerous anthologies.

  It begins with the portrayal of a “comically vapid, ill-tempered, and self-centered” (Harris 1990) family from Georgia on a cross-country trip to Florida. The story shifts dramatically after a car accident, which results in the family meeting the Misfit and his homicidal gang. The Grandmother unintentionally identifies these escaped convicts, and this leads to the murder of the family.

  Critics often find the character of the Misfit to be a curiosity of contradictions. For example, he is full of Southern courtesy and politeness while also killing innocent people; he agonizes over faith while also admitting he is “doing all right” without prayer; and he feels he never deserves any punishment, but admits to several instances of wrong-doing. All of this contributes to his aptly named moniker.

  The story’s climax, a conversation between the Grandmother and the Misfit, circles around the subject of religion. It features the grandmother undergoing a spiritual epiphany while under intense duress, a common theme in O’Connor’s works.

  “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is often noted for its Southern Gothic themes, including its use of grotesque, realistic horror, outcasts, and nostalgia for an idealized South. In fact, O’Connor’s work is noted for helping to establish the genre of Southern Gothic itself.

  Chun H. Lee

  Source: Harris, Laurie Lanzen. 1990. “Overview: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’” In Characters in 20th-Century Literature. Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale.

  The grotesque as an element of horror literature became enmeshed with the Gothic mode through Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Walpole imbued grotesque horror with buffoonery and the sublime in the preface to his second edition. In the nineteenth century, Mary Shelley stitched the grotesque body to horror fiction in Frankenstein.

  Victor Hugo’s Preface de Cromwell (1827) popularized the use of the term. With Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and a century later H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), the concept of the grotesque moved toward the current idiom.

  Important recent scholars of the grotesque include Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Frances K. Barasch, Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, and Wolfgang Kayser. The latter’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1963) emphasizes the horror, estrangement, and demonic as central to its definition. Theories of the grotesque that rely on power structures, aberration, and horror are visible in Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and John Ruskin. Tzvetan Todorov examines the grotesque in relation to the fantastic, and Freud through the uncanny. In the nineteenth century, Ruskin’s study of the symbolic grotesque merges horror with the ludicrous, where the grotesque’s playful comic tendency threatens to descend into terror. He separates the noble from the barbarous grotesque, which is associated with terror and the horror genre. Mikhail Bakhtin’s text Rabelais and His World (1965) emphasizes the carnivalesque, realism, and structures within the grotesque. Significant contributions to the literature of the term include Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, Lovecraftian horror, the religious visions of Flannery O’Connor, the realistic aesthetics of Sherwood Anderson and Cormac McCarthy, the self-reflexive grotesque of Patrick McGrath, and others.

  Today the grotesque is still a complex and diffuse theme with little clear consensus. Often critics describe it as a structure in which estrangement and deviation are expressed. It is tied to paradoxical combinations of the ludicrous and the terrifying. Grotesque, as a literary term, has been connected variously with the uncanny, the sublime, and the absurd as it has transformed over time. Recent scholars such as Edwards and Graulund connect a global definition of the grotesque to these associated literary themes through reliance on multiple grotesques and sociocultural contexts, thus further obscuring a concise definition. Conversely, Shun-Liang Chao and Frances S. Connelly root the grotesque back within the physical or visual, where some combination of the ridiculous and horrific is always at play.

  Naomi Simone Borwein

  See also: Body Horror; Hugo, Victor; Koja, Kathe; McGrath, Patrick; O’Connor, Flannery; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; The Uncanny; Welty, Eudora.

  Further Reading

  Barasch, Frances K. 1968. “Introduction.” In A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, by Thomas Wright (1865), vii–ix. New York: Frederick Ungar.

  Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund. 2013. The Grotesque. London: Routledge.

  Kayser, Wolfgang. 1963. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  Nelson, Victoria. 2001. “Grotto, an Opening.” In The Secret Life of Puppets, 1–24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  H

  HAGGARD, H. RIDER (1856–1925)

  Like his close friend Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Rider Haggard was a quintessential literary spokesman for the British Empire, a devotee of the imperial ideology bringing order to the world and uplifting “uncivilized” peoples. He was of enormous cultural significance in his own day, inspiring a generation of young Englishmen to seek careers in the service of the empire. His main subjects were Africa, ancient Egypt, and the occult. His depictions of Africa in particular captured the imagination of the public. In this, he can be seen as a predecessor of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, although unlike Burroughs he had actually been to Africa in the imperial service and was describing peoples and landscapes he knew firsthand. His racial attitudes are of his time. He never sees black Africans as equals, but desires benevolent rule for them. He thought himself a friend of the Africans, and by Victorian standards, he was. He first achieved prominence with the African adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), written on a bet from his brother that he could not write a better book than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

  Haggard was something of a believer in the occult, or at least in supernatural destiny, and it is largely for this that his work is relevant to weird fiction. His most famous novel, She: A History of Adventure (1886), spawned an entire subgenre of imitations: the Lost Race novel, which invariably deals with the discovery of some isolated remnant of an ancient civilization, found in a remote place, replete with some wondrous phenomenon unknown to the rest of the world. In She the heroes reach a lost city in Africa where Ayesha, a 2,000-year-old white queen, rules over a tribe of “savages.” She is under a romantic curse, having killed her lover, Kallikrates, in ancient times, and is doomed to wait, undying, for his return. One of the explorers is the reincarnation of Kallikrates. When she tries to make him immortal and renew her own immortality, she steps into the flaming Pillar of Life, its effects are disastrously reversed, and she withers away.

  The novel was a smash bestseller, and there were sequels. Ayesha herself was reincarnated as the awesome femme-fatale/sorceress in countless subsequent fantasy novels. Indeed, part of the Lost Race formula all but requires that one of the European heroes becomes romantically entangled with a fabulously beautiful princess or temptress. The influence of She extended ever further when Edgar Rice Burroughs transported the entire scenario to another planet in A Princess of Mars in 1911.

  Haggard made a similar mistake in killing off the main character in his bestselling Allan Quatermain (1887), but then “discovered” several memoirs of earlier adventures, including the reincarnation story The Ancient Allan (1920), set in prehistoric times. Quatermain met Ayesha in She and Allan (1921).

  Supernaturalism in Haggard’s work otherwise varies widely. One of his rare short stories, “Only a Dream . . .” (1905), is horror. The ghost of a man’s dead wife haunts him on the eve of his second marriage. She leaves her skull behind. In the novella “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1913), a man lingers in a museum after closing time and witnesses a gathering of ancient Egyptian spirits retur
ning to their mummies. Eric Brighteyes (1890) is a surprisingly effective pastiche of a medieval Norse saga, with a vivid mix of heroism, dooms, and sorceries. A later novel of particular interest is Red Eve (1911), which begins as a costume romance set in fourteenth-century Europe, but becomes genuine weird fiction with the introduction of the character Murgh, a personification of the Black Death, who arrives in Venice on a corpse-laden ship. The hero develops a strange acquaintance with Death, and for a time he is spared. The 1903 novel Stella Fregellius involves a disastrous attempt to contact the dead by scientific means. There are many fantastic elements in most of Haggard’s African novels. Nada the Lily (1892) is an epic set among the Zulus, featuring omens, fate, a sky goddess, and a supernatural wolf pack. The Ghost Kings (1908), which Kipling helped plot, introduces the sorcerous Ghost People, who are linked to trees and die if their trees are destroyed. However dated Haggard’s ideas may sometimes seem, he remains an extremely entertaining writer, strong on both authentic detail and eerie atmosphere when the story requires it.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Kipling, Rudyard; She.

  Further Reading

  Cohen, Morton, 1960. H. Rider Haggard, His Life and Work. London: Macmillan.

  Katz, Wendy, 1987. H. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. “Rider Haggard among the Mummies.” In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, 185–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  HAINING, PETER (1940–2007)

  Peter Alexander Haining was a British journalist and publishing professional who wrote and compiled numerous nonfiction books on horror, fantasy, and mystery themes, including An Illustrated History of Witchcraft (1975), The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack (1977), The Mystery and Horrible Murders of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), and the illustrated The Art of Horror Stories (1976). He also compiled “scrapbooks” and miscellanies concerned with the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, and H. G. Wells, and collections of macabre fiction by John Buchan, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Bram Stoker.

  Haining is best known as a compiler of both general reprint anthologies, among them Beyond the Curtain of Dark (1966) and The Unspeakable People (1969), and thematically specific anthologies: The Ghouls (1971) featured horror stories that had been adapted as movies, and The Hollywood Nightmare (1970) stories were concerned with show business; The Fantastic Pulps (1976) and Weird Tales (1976) both drew from the rich legacy of twentieth-century pulp fiction magazines; and The Midnight People (1968) collected vampire stories. The themes of The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse (1988), Supernatural Sleuths (1986), Zombie: Stories of the Walking Dead (1985), and Werewolf: Horror Stories of the Man-Beast (1987) are self-evident. A number of Haining’s best anthologies combined scholarship with their fiction reprints, including The Penny Dreadful; or, Strange, Horrid and Sensational Tales (1976) and The Shilling Shockers: Stories of Terror from the Gothic Bluebooks (1978).

  Haining compiled a number of anthologies under the pseudonyms Ric Alexander, William Pattrick, and Richard Peyton, and he authored three novels. Although the reliability of his research and sources has been questioned by some scholars, his work as an anthologist helped to shape perceptions of the anthology as a vital medium for genre fiction. He was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2001.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Pulp Horror; Stoker, Bram; Weird Tales; Wells, H. G.; Wharton, Edith.

  Further Reading

  Haining, Peter, ed. 1972. Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States 1765–1840. New York: Taplinger.

  Haining, Peter, ed. 1976. The Penny Dreadful; Or, Strange, Horrid & Sensational Tales! London: Victor Gollancz.

  Haining, Peter. 1976. Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines. New York: A & W Visual Library.

  “Peter Haining.” 2007. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

  HAND, ELIZABETH (1957–)

  Elizabeth Hand is an American writer of dark fantasy, horror, and neo-noir. She is perhaps best known for her thrillers featuring Cass Neary, a hard-boiled photographer and reluctant crime fighter who has been compared to Liz Salander, the lead character in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Hand has lived in rural Maine in the United States since 1988, but she also spends a significant amount of time in London, England. She has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Waking the Moon (1994); the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bibliomancy (2002), her novel Illyria (2008), and “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” (2010); and the Shirley Jackson Award for the first Cass Neary novel, Generation Loss (2007), which is set in Maine.

  Her characters are generally troubled individuals living on the very rough edges of society, but they are also often highly creative: artists, musicians, photographers, and writers, whose interests give them access to the darker realms of modern life and culture. Hand began her career as a fantasy and science fiction writer not unlike the American feminist science fiction writer Sheri S. Tepper in style; her first novel, Winterlong (1990), and its sequels, Aestival Tide (1992) and Icarus Descending (1993), are set in an alternate, dystopian universe. However, it was with Waking the Moon, centering on a fictional university in a broadly realist Washington, D.C., that Hand gained critical recognition and began to engage with horror motifs such as ritual murder and Lovecraftian monstrosity. Waking the Moon, which revolves around gory sacrifices to a newly awakened Mother Goddess, is also particularly noteworthy for its subtle critique of 1990s neo-paganism and Wicca, a critique successfully balanced with a more pragmatic feminist message. This complex mix of feminism and images of genuinely frightening feminine evil is continued through the postapocalyptic Glimmering (1997, reissued in a new, updated edition in 2012), the historical fantasy Mortal Love (2004), and the haunted house novella Wylding Hall (2015).

  Hand’s work overall is heavily allusive, integrating song lyrics; references to real artists, writers, and photographers; and quotations from and echoes of the work of T. S. Eliot, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Straub, among many others.

  She published Hard Light in 2016, the third Cass Neary novel, even as she was working on the fourth thriller in the series, The Book of Lamps and Banners. In many respects, this marks a move away from horror as such, though as with much crime writing, Hand’s work repeatedly integrates gothic tropes. She also indicated that she was working on another novella and some short fiction, which may extend the ongoing centrality in her oeuvre of violence, personal demons, and the darker aspects of myth and fantasy.

  Dara Downey

  See also: Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; Jackson, Shirley; Shirley Jackson Awards; Straub, Peter; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Attebery, Brian. 2014. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  “Elizabeth Hand.” 2011. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.

  Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

  Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. 2009. A Short History of Fantasy. Faringdon: Middlesex University Press.

  Thirsty. 2016. “A Conversation with Novelist Elizabeth Hand.” Stay Thirsty Magazine, Spring. www.staythirstymedia.com/201604-092/html/201604-hand.html.

  Wein, Cherie. 2003. “Hand, Elizabeth 1957–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 1, edited by Richard Bleiler, 413–417. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  THE HANDS OF ORLAC

  The Hands of Orlac is an influential French 1920 horror novel written by Maurice Renard (1875–1938). Renard, who is today better known by French critics and readers than English or American ones, was a literary theorist as well as a writer who calle
d his work “le roman merveilleux-scientifique” (the scientific-marvelous novel), which he considered a new literary genre. Renard’s most successful novel, Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac), was published in 1920 and translated into English in 1929.

  Orlac is the story of a famous pianist, Stephen Orlac, who loses both his hands in a train accident and receives the hands of an executed murderer in a transplant operation. He begins to believe that he is being controlled by his newly transplanted hands, and he starts to experience violent urges. When he discovers that his father has been killed by the same knife that was used by the murderer, he begins to fear he may be the culprit. Struggling for the truth and his own sanity, he eventually discovers that he has been set up by a con man.

  The Hands of Orlac reflects Renard’s interest in the scientific developments of his time, including in the fields of psychology, biology, and surgery. It also reflects his interest in adapting science to tales of horror and the marvelous. In practicing this approach, Renard followed the lead of H. G. Wells, who employed the same structure in his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), which Renard acknowledged as an influence.

  Today The Hands of Orlac is best known as the source for director Robert Wiene’s silent 1924 German Expressionist film adaptation, starring Conrad Veidt as Orlac. German Expressionism was an extreme anti-realistic cinema style in which the external images of the film, such as unusual camera angles and lighting, as well as exaggerated acting and makeup, represent the internal states of the characters. Wiene’s film, now considered a classic, was a critical and financial success and has been remade several times, most successfully by director Karl Freund in 1934 as Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The film was also remade in 1960 in a version that starred Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee.