by Matt Cardin
Gina Wisker
See also: The Woman in Black.
Further Reading
Briggs, Julia. 2012. “The Ghost Story.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 176–185. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hill, Susan. 1983. The Woman in Black. London: Vintage.
Hill, Susan. 1992. The Mist in the Mirror. London: Sinclair Stevenson.
Hofer, Ernest H. 1993. “Enclosed Structures, Disclosed Lives: The Fictions of Susan Hill.” In Contemporary British Women Writers, Narrative Strategies, edited by Robert E. Hosmer Jr., 128–150. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Jackson, Rosemary. 1982. “Cold Enclosures: The Fiction of Susan Hill.” In Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley, 81–103. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.
Quema, Anne. 2006. “Family and Symbolic Violence in The Mist in the Mirror.” Gothic Studies 8, no. 2: 114–135.
THE HISTORIAN
The Historian is the 2005 debut novel by Elizabeth Johnson Kostova (1964–). It involves characters in three different decades attempting to discover the truth behind the legends surrounding the ruthless fifteenth-century Romanian leader Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the historical figure who may have served at least in part as an inspiration for Bram Stoker when he created the character of Dracula.
In the earliest of three interwoven threads, historian Professor Bartholomew Rossi searches for Dracula in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. In 1952, one of Rossi’s doctoral students, known only as Paul, tries to discover what happened to Rossi after he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Finally, in 1972, the student’s unnamed daughter searches for her father. As they travel the European continent, each scours libraries for hidden clues about where Tepes was buried. The three historians come to believe that Tepes really was a vampire and that he survives to this day. Except for the 1972 storyline, the novel is told through discovered letters, some many pages long, mirroring the epistolic style (i.e., told in the form of letters) of Dracula.
The unnamed narrator learns that she is a direct descendant of Dracula. When the vampire finally enters the story, he is unable to live up to the legend. He admires modern developments—the atomic bomb and the Cold War, for example—but he seems interested in little more than cataloging his vast library. He waxes poetic about the purity of evil, but is not very threatening and is apparently dispatched by a silver bullet to the heart.
Kostova was inspired by stories her father told her as a child while they lived in Slovenia and traveled throughout Europe. She researched and wrote the novel over a ten-year period, in part while teaching at various universities. In search of creative mentoring, she entered the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where the as-yet-incomplete manuscript won the Hopwood Award in 2004.
The book drew immediate interest from publishers and made headlines because of the $2 million advance paid for it at auction, as well as a similar payment from Sony for the film rights. Due to its reliance on solving puzzles and uncovering ancient conspiracies, Little, Brown and Company marketed the novel by comparing it to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, despite the fact that The Historian is much slower paced than the Brown thriller.
The Historian was the first debut novel to land at number one on the New York Times best-seller list during its first week and is still the fastest-selling debut novel in U.S. history. Reviews, however, were decidedly mixed, in part due to the lack of variation in voice among the various narrators. The movie adaptation has never been produced.
The Historian ends in a manner that invites a sequel—either Dracula is still alive or one of his minions has taken his place—but Kostova has stated that she has no intentions of continuing the story, preferring to leave it for her readers to speculate about what happens next.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dracula; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; Psychological Horror; Vampires.
Further Reading
“Elizabeth Kostova.” 2010. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
“Interview: Elizabeth Kostova Discusses Her First Novel, ‘The Historian.’” 2005. Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR, June 26.
Sanow, Anne. 2005. “Vivifying the Undead.” Publishers Weekly 11 (April): 32.
HODGSON, WILLIAM HOPE (1877–1918)
William Hope Hodgson was a British author known for his science fiction-based horror fiction. He was born in Essex in 1877, the second of twelve children of an Anglican priest. At fourteen he left school and joined the Merchant Marines, first as a cabin boy and later as a first mate, a deeply traumatic experience that was to inform his writing. While at sea he took up photography and also body-building. He died in 1918.
After quitting the sea, Hodgson wrote and sold articles about physical culture and life at sea. Self-taught, he soon began writing fiction. His short horror stories and novels do not feature standard supernatural elements such as ghosts or vampires, but monstrous life forms, sometimes evolved here on earth, and sometimes invading from other planes of existence.
Hodgson’s recurrent themes include horror at sea, most often the Sargasso Sea, and people besieged by monsters. His earliest published horror story, “A Tropical Horror” (1907), is typical, involving sailors barricading themselves against a huge, dangerous, but unknown sea creature. His two best short stories are “The Voice in the Night” (1907; adapted for the television series Suspicion in 1958) and “The Derelict” (1912). The former concerns a couple marooned on an island covered with a strange gray fungus, and the latter is about an abandoned ship that hosts a horrifying new form of life.
His first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), is about shipwreck survivors who encounter trees that absorb people and a ship besieged by tentacled humanoid creatures. In The House on the Borderland (1908) a man experiences involuntary visionary trips beyond the solar system and into the remote future. The Ghost Pirates (1909) is set aboard a ship that is attacked and eventually overtaken by other-dimensional beings. The Night Land (1912) is a visionary tale of the remote future that is at once horror, science fiction, and romance. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1910) is a collection about an occult detective who investigates hauntings caused by quasi-scientific phenomena.
Hodgson’s fiction anticipates that of H. P. Lovecraft, who independently created a similar approach to horror. But the Lovecraftian universe is harsh and apathetic, whereas Hodgson’s balances good and malign forces. Hodgson’s stories also often include overly sentimental romantic elements. He was notable for being able to create and sustain a mood of horror, even at novel length. He is primarily remembered for The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, “The Voice in the Night,” “The Derelict,” and the Carnacki stories, which are still being written today by other authors who expand on Hodgson’s original concept.
His writings were critically well received at the time but nearly forgotten until their rediscovery in the 1940s. He died in Ypres, Belgium, in 1918, a casualty of World War I.
Lee Weinstein
See also: The House on the Borderland; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Night Land; Occult Detectives.
Further Reading
Berruti, Massimo, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford, eds. 2014. William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland: Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.
Bruce, Samuel W. 1997. “William Hope Hodgson.” In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 121–131. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 178. Detroit: Gale.
Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.
Joshi, S. T. 2012. “William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds.” In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century, 445–451. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing
.
The Night Land: The Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://nightland.website.
Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
Weinstein, Lee. 1980. “The First Literary Copernicus.” Nyctalops 15 (January). https://leestein2003.wordpress.com/the-first-literary-copernicus.
HOFFMANN, E. T. A. (1776–1822)
Ernest Theodore Wilhelm (Amadeus) Hoffmann was a German writer, artist, composer, lawyer, and theater manager. He was one of the most important figures in the cultural movement known as romanticism, and a highly influential writer in both European and American literature.
Hoffmann was born in the city of Königsberg, which at that time was in Germany; Königsberg is now part of Russia and has been renamed Kaliningrad. He trained initially for a career in the law and practiced as a lawyer. However, his interest in art was both deep and wide; he wrote novels, short stories, and poetry; he painted and created illustrations; and he also both performed and composed music. His passion for Mozart’s music was so great that he began replacing one of his middle names, “Wilhelm,” with “Amadeus,” which was also Mozart’s middle name. Hoffmann even composed an opera, “Undine,” which was based on a fantastic 1811 novella by his friend Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, who assisted him with the lyrics.
His first short story was published in 1809, and his first collection, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Stories in the Style of Callot), appeared in 1814. Much of this collection was devoted to writings about music; however, it also included an important early tale, “The Golden Pot: A Fairytale of Modern Times.” In this story, the somewhat awkward hero, Anselmus, falls in love with Serpentina, the daughter of a salamander escaped from Atlantis. The story presents a more light-hearted and bizarre side of Gothicism than many of his later tales, and resorts to the unusual tactic of bringing the narrator directly into the story in order to finish it. Crossing the boundaries between the real and the unreal would prove to be a constant theme running through Hoffmann’s work.
His first novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir) appeared in 1815 and proved to be a far darker story than “The Golden Pot.” The influence of The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, on The Devil’s Elixir is obvious. In this novel, the figure of the double, or “doppelgänger,” plays an important role, and Hoffmann’s subsequent writing was full of secondary characters who seemed to reflect the main characters.
In 1817, what is today arguably Hoffmann’s most famous work, “The Sand-man,” was published in his collection Nachtstücke (Night Pieces). It is the story of a young man named Nathanael who, as a boy, may have witnessed the death of his father during an alchemical experiment. His father was not alone at the time, but in the company of the mysterious and terrifying Coppelius, a man the young Nathanael suspects might be the actual Sand-man. In German folklore, the Sand-man is an evil spirit who steals the eyes of children. As a young man, Nathanael encounters an Italian eyeglass-maker named Coppola, who seems to be Coppelius in disguise, and falls in love with his beautiful, shy daughter Olimpia. When Nathanael realizes that Olimpia is actually an “automaton,” a machine built by Coppola, he goes mad. The theme of reality and unreality runs through “The Sand-man,” which is a sustained meditation on the reliability of vision, of experience, as a way of understanding reality. Sigmund Freud, the most important figure in modern psychotherapy, wrote extensively on “The Sand-man” in his 1919 psychological treatise, The Uncanny.
Hoffmann’s next collection, Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), published in 1819, included the now-classic tale “Nutcracker and Mouse-King,” which inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker.” Other well-known stories from this collection include “The Mines of Falun,” “Councillor Krespel,” and “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” which is considered by many to be the first story of the detective genre. While much of Hoffmann’s fiction would not appear in English until the 1850s, it is generally believed that Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by “Mademoiselle de Scuderi” to write his own important early detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
In general, Hoffmann’s style is important for the way he combines the psychological and the supernatural. While he recycles certain Gothic images, settings, and situations, drawing from Gothic sources such as Matthew Lewis and, particularly, the short fiction of Horace Walpole, Hoffmann is original in the way he handles Gothic material. By reexamining the Gothic from a fresh point of view, which was formed by the developments in German philosophical thinking about the nature of the mind and its relationship to experience, Hoffmann was able to bring a new dimension into Gothic fiction. His delirium and grotesqueness are not just exciting Gothic effects; they give him a way to question humanity’s grasp on reality itself. Time and again, Hoffmann’s characters are swept up in the tumult of their own desires and become unable to tell what is dream and what is not; but they are not fools—their problem is only a more acute form of a problem faced by all human beings. Hoffmann deliberately withholds whatever information would be necessary to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the experiences of his narrators are not supernatural. Understanding this tendency helps to explain the importance of delusional personas, figures like Coppelius, who act as a focus for the delusion of the main character. These personas are often depicted as malevolent beings who are aware of the role they play and seek to carry it out as if it were a mission.
Hoffmann’s influence is extensive. Major authors both in and out of the horror genre reflect the results of reading Hoffmann, including not only Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United States, but Russian authors such Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens and George MacDonald in England, and Charles Baudelaire in France. H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann” has a decidedly Hoffmann-like quality, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s character, Dr. Hesselius—a scholar of supernatural events and a forerunner of Bram Stoker’s Dr. Van Helsing—bears a resemblance to some of Hoffmann’s characters as well. The composer Jacques Offenbach wrote an opera entitled Tales of Hoffmann, which was adapted for film in 1951. In later days, animators such as the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer seem to have derived some inspiration from Hoffmann, who was fond of depicting inanimate objects coming to life and moving of their own accord.
Michael Cisco
See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Gogol, Nikolai; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; “The Music of Erich Zann”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; “The Sand-man”; The Uncanny; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Duroche, Leonard L. 1988. “Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1776–1822.” In Writers for Children: Critical Studies of Major Authors Since the Seventeenth Century, edited by Jane M. Bingham, 283–288. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–162. New York: Penguin.
Willis, Martin T. 1994. “Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen.” Extrapolation 35, no. 3: 186–200.
“THE HORLA”
The influential short story “Le Horla” (The Horla) by the French writer Guy de Maupassant is a salient example of French weird fiction, praised by H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). A stark tale about the metaphysics of invisibility that takes the form of a confession to a physician, it was published under the title “Lettre d’un fou” (Letter from a Madman) in Gil Blas, a popular Parisian magazine, in February 1885 under the pen name of “Maufrigneuse.” Maupassant then published (also in Gil Blas) the first version of “Le Horla” in October 1886, with the tale now featuring a framing device legitimating the narrator’s sanity—and thereby
inviting the reader into a macabre world that casts light on the limitations of the natural sciences when confronting the impossible. The final version of the story was published as “Le Horla” (1887) in Le Horla, a collection of Maupassant’s short stories edited by Paul Ollendorff.
In the final version, Maupassant cuts out the frame narrative, instead organizing the story as a chronological series of journal entries told entirely from a first-person perspective and expressed in a lucid prose style. The narrator’s protracted reflections on nonhumans and the strange occurrences to which he bears witness, however, veer uncontrollably into metaphysical abstraction and Schopenhauerian (in the style of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer) pessimism, thereby engendering affective dread and despair. The story describes the arrival on earth of an invisible entity from beyond the veil of human knowledge, an arrival that implies for its narrator the obliteration of the human species by extradimensional beings. The narrator’s commitments to reason and faith collapse when confronting the titular “Horla,” thus opening onto a vision of an incomprehensible cosmos. The tale illustrates weird fiction’s penchant for speculating on realities that horrify readers before returning them to mundane reality with a more complex understanding of their embeddedness in cosmic immensities.
