Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  The narrator’s inability to rationalize the manifestations of the invisible creature leads him to concoct a plan to trap it in his house with iron shutters in order to burn it alive. Yet, in his frantic efforts to rid himself of Le Horla, he forgets to inform his servants of his plan, and they are killed in the process. The story concludes grimly with the narrator, who is trapped in an existential nightmare in which he believes the horrid being is still alive, choosing to commit suicide.

  In 1892, only five years after the publication of “Le Horla,” Maupassant would himself attempt suicide, thereby paving the way for critics to speculate on the relationship between the story and the author’s life. Regardless of biographical relevance, “Le Horla” remains a striking monument to the weird’s capacity to unsettle and horrify both philosophically and psychologically, and it has had a profound influence on subsequent horror literature, including Lovecraft’s classic story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). It has been adapted as, and/or has exerted an influence on, multiple movies and radio and television program, including a loose adaptation as the 1963 American horror film Diary of a Madman, starring Vincent Price.

  Sean Matharoo

  See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; Frame Story; Maupassant, Guy de; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Fitz, Brewster E. 1972. “The Use of Mirrors and Mirror Analogues in Maupassant’s Le Horla.” The French Review 45 (5): 954–963.

  Goulet, Andrea. 2013. “Neurosyphilitcs and Madmen: The French Fin-de-siècle Fictions of Huysmans, Lermina, and Maupassant.” In Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, edited by Stanley Finger, François Boller, and Anne Stiles, 73–91. Amsterdam and Oxford: Elsevier.

  Showers, Brian J. 2010. “The Horla.” In Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, edited by S. T. Joshi, 146–148. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

  THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

  The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of four novels by Arthur Conan Doyle that feature fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his loyal friend Dr. John Watson. Serialized in The Strand magazine from 1901 to 1902, it was the first Sherlock Holmes story to be published since 1893, when Doyle memorably killed off his hero in The Final Problem. However, due to immense public pressure to write more Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle produced The Hound of the Baskervilles, set sometime before Holmes’s fateful battle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

  Like the majority of Sherlock Holmes stories, the story is told by Dr. Watson’s narrative, but also in the epistolary format using letters and old manuscripts. Regarded as a little old-fashioned by the advent of the twentieth century, when modernism was on the rise, this format is nevertheless used to great effect by Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles as the mystery is gradually explained. Though typically classed as a detective story, the novel features many tropes common to Gothic literature, for example, the Gothic mansion of Baskerville Hall and the windswept moors. But unlike many Gothic and horror stories, there is a rational explanation for all of the strange events that occur.

  The mystery in The Hound of the Baskervilles is a complex one, with a multitude of characters, multiple plot strands, and many false clues. Due to its length, Doyle was able to develop a much more intricate story than in the short fiction he had published previously. The mystery focuses on the ill-fated Baskerville family, who are apparently haunted by a demonic hellhound. Holmes does not believe in hellhounds, of course, and he and Watson set out to solve a puzzle with a very human (and canine) evil at its center.

  The scene late in The Hound of the Baskervilles when the title creature is finally revealed remains as thrilling today as it was to Arthur Conan Doyle’s readers in 1901–1902. Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade (a detective from Scotland Yard, and an old acquaintance of Holmes’s) are out on a fog-shrouded moor at night when they first hear the hound, followed by its appearance:

  There was a thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank. The cloud was within fifty yards of where we lay, and we glared at it, all three, uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it. I was at Holmes’s elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog. (Doyle 1902, 251–252)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. February 1902. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The Strand Magazine. Volume XXIII.

  Like the contradictory character of Holmes himself, The Hound of the Baskervilles combines the outrageous with the reassuringly rational. Doyle uses many sensational elements in his novel, such as diabolical criminals, ghostly seeming hounds, and manhunts across the moors, but always reduces the apparently uncanny to something explicable.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles was a huge success, and it led to Doyle’s reviving Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House, with the detective dramatically revealing he had faked his own death. The novel has been adapted for both the cinema and the television screen on numerous occasions. It has even lent its name to a statistical observation known as “the Baskerville effect,” the effect being that mortality due to heart attacks is increased by psychological stress. It continues to be one of the best-known and most popular Sherlock Holmes stories. It has also earned a place in the horror canon, a fact demonstrated by Christopher Frayling’s choice to include it along with three other iconic works of horror literature—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—in his 1996 BBC series Nightmare: The Birth of Horror and its accompanying book, in which he details the background, origin, and impact of each work.

  Carys Crossen

  See also: Ancestral Curse.

  Further Reading

  Frank, Lawrence. 2003. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Frayling, Christopher. 1996. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, 162–214. London: BBC Books.

  Kestner, Joseph A. 2010. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Farnham: Ashgate.

  Priestman, Martin, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

  The House Next Door is a 1978 novel by Anne Rivers Siddons. While at its core The House Next Door is a haunted house story, it could also be considered the anti–haunted house story. After all, the haunted house in question is not even built when the novel opens, and no ghosts actually come into the storyline, even though horrific things happen to anyone who moves into the home.

  The novel is told from the perspective of Colquitt Kennedy, a Caucasian housewife living an ideal life in suburban Atlanta with her husband, Walter. Their domestic bliss is interrupted, however, when architect Kim Dougherty (whose orphan status and red hair makes him a prime candidate to be the source of the novel’s evil) builds his masterpiece next door. The novel is told in three parts, each detailing the three families who move in. Drawing heavily on hau
nted houses such as Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the titular house next door to the Kennedys appears to have been created with horror inside its bones; the structure itself houses some kind of evil that brings about the downfall of its inhabitants. Unlike her predecessors, Siddons forgoes the traditional Gothic mansion in favor of a contemporary home, with a sleek and modern design. The home itself isn’t menacing; rather, the true horror comes from witnessing the effects of the new structure on the families who live there—and, by proximity, the Kennedys, who stand as witness. By removing the traditional elements of a horror story, Siddons is able to highlight the real horror that plagues humanity: war, loss, broken relationships, damaged trust.

  In his book on the nature of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King devotes an extended section to The House Next Door, comparing it both to the haunted house tradition of Shirley Jackson and to the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner. Even though Siddons strips away the traditional architecture of the haunted house, King claims that she still holds on to the heart of the horrific, in that carefully constructed social norms have been broken down to the point that they are irreparable. The Kennedys are forever changed; in the end, they cannot return to their former suburban lives.

  In 2006, Siddons’s novel was adapted into a made-for-television movie for Lifetime, with Lara Flynn Boyle playing the character of Col Kennedy, Colin Ferguson as her husband (named Walker for the film), and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as the architect Kim. The film did not receive good reviews.

  Lisa Kröger

  See also: Burnt Offerings; Faulkner, William; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House, Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.

  Further Reading

  Bailey, Dale. 1999. “Middle-Class Nightmares: Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door.” In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

  Eggener, Keith. 2013. “When Buildings Kill: Sentient Houses in Fiction and Film.” Places Journal, October. https://placesjournal.org/article/when-buildings-kill.

  King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

  HOUSE OF LEAVES

  House of Leaves is an experimental horror novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski. It was originally published on Danielewski’s website and circulated in the early years of Internet “viral” culture. Since its publication in print form in 2000, it has become a touchstone of postmodern writing and a referent for almost all subsequent experimental horror fiction.

  House of Leaves is a difficult text to synopsize. It is comprised of a series of concentric but interlinked narratives. At the center of the novel, both structurally and thematically, is the house on Ash Tree Lane belonging to photographer Will Navidson and his young family. Navidson discovers a profound spatial paradox when a hallway appears in his home, leading down into a labyrinth that vastly exceeds the dimensions of the house. He puts his visual skills to good use in a recorded exploration of the impossible space and its malign influence on his family. The novel’s textual appearance mirrors the physical labyrinth at the heart of the story. Danielewski uses color, typography, layout, and elaborate citation to present a textual composition that is dizzying and difficult to navigate.

  Navidson’s video is the subject of House of Leaves’ bifurcated, competing narratives. The majority of the text is devoted to a pseudo-academic analysis of Navidson’s film, written by the reclusive, blind Zampanò. His analysis, “The Navidson Report,” is an in-depth deconstruction that parodies academic discourse while illustrating the uncanny, frightening properties of Navidson’s home. It is full of footnotes and citations, some of which reference authentic sources, while others are entirely fictitious.

  Just as Zampanò reflects upon Navidson’s film, his analysis is in turn the subject of the next layer of the text: a stream-of-consciousness account by Los Angeles drop-out Johnny Truant. Johnny is the involuntary recipient of Zampanò’s study after he finds it in the dead man’s apartment. He appoints himself an unofficial editor of “The Navidson Report” and relates his own experience in the marginalia and footnotes to that text. As well as a commentary on the report, however, his narrative reveals the sinister consequence of reading Zampanò’s work. He becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced that he is being pursued by an entity that may or may not reside in Navidson’s labyrinth. The implication, of course, is that the same fate may befall the reader in turn. As Johnny explains: “focus on these words and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you” (26).

  The horrors in House of Leaves are many and varied and exist at every level of the text: Johnny’s paranoia, Zampanò’s lonely death, the destruction of the Navidsons’ domestic space, and the death of their friends in the labyrinth. At the heart of the novel, however, is the notion of fallible truth: the idea that reality itself is unstable. This is foregrounded in various ways. The most shocking occurs late in the novel when Navidson finds himself alone and lost in the labyrinth reading a book by the light of a burning page. The book, of course, is revealed to be House of Leaves. Thus the text becomes as impossible a space as the labyrinth itself, and any perspective on what is “real” (within the context of the fiction) is entirely lost.

  Danielewski’s novel has been influential in the development of a critically aware, self-reflexive, media-savvy breed of horror fiction. Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) both follow in House of Leaves’ wake as horror fictions focused on the uncanny properties of media and mediation, and both have been termed successors to Danielewski’s novel. Its influence may also be discerned in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Bram Stoker Award–winning novel The Drowning Girl (2012). Danielewski has himself returned to the elaborate experimental form in the first two volumes of an intended twenty-seven-volume novel, The Familiar. It remains to be seen, however, whether any novel will equal the marriage of self-conscious commentary, innovative technique, and existential horror presented in House of Leaves.

  Neil McRobert

  See also: The Drowning Girl; Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; New Weird; The Uncanny; Unreliable Narrator; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Horror Criticism; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror.

  Further Reading

  Belletto, Steven. 2009. “Rescuing Interpretation with Mark Danielewski: The Genre of Scholarship in House of Leaves.” Genre Forms of Discourse and Culture 42, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter): 99–117.

  Danielewski, Mark Z. 2015. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. New York: Pantheon.

  McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. 2003. “Haunted House: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Critique 44/2: 99–135.

  Pessl, Marisha. 2013. Night Film. New York: Random House.

  Pressman, Jessica. 2006. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1: 107–28.

  Tremblay, Paul. 2015. A Head Full of Ghosts. New York: William Morrow.

  Watkiss, Joanne. 2012. Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

  THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

  Published in 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second major romance, The House of the Seven Gables, competes with his first, The Scarlet Letter (1850), for pride of place amidst his oeuvre. Its influence as both a Gothic romance and a work of literature in general has been immense.

  The titular gabled House, modeled after one in Salem, is set in a nameless New England town and built on land seized by one Col. Pyncheon via a false accusation of warlockery against Matthew M
aule, who, as he was being hanged for witchcraft, laid a bloody curse on the Pyncheons. The primary action occurs in the mid-nineteenth century as Hepzibah Pyncheon, a destitute aristocrat, opens a shop and takes a boarder in the gabled house. The boarder, Holgrave, is a daguerreotypist (early photographer) and mesmerist (hypnotist), smitten with Hepzibah’s newly arrived cousin, Phoebe. Hepzibah’s paroled brother Clifford returns unhinged by prison after another cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, probably framed Clifford for Jaffrey’s uncle’s death from Maule’s curse or a hereditary Pyncheon condition. The “curse” kills Jaffrey, which allows the Pyncheon siblings to inherit his estate and escape the house, and permits Holgrave, a Maule descendant, to become engaged to Phoebe.

  The romance has had four cinematic adaptations. The two most interesting star Vincent Price. Twice-Told Tales (1963) adapts “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and House in three segments. Made while Price was in the midst of his ten-film cycle of (loose) Poe adaptations (1960–1969), the segment highlights the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s less subtle “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) on House as well as other sensational elements of Poe’s and Hawthorne’s supernatural fiction as walls and Col. Pyncheon’s portrait bleed, Phoebe cum Alice is buried alive, Hannah cum Hepzibah is a witch, Price as Gerald cum Jaffrey is a maniacal killer, and the house collapses. Universal’s The House of the Seven Gables (1940) hews closer to the romance but rearranges Pyncheon family structure and assigns a lengthy murder trial to Price as Clifford. Ironically, given Hawthorne’s racism and lack of support for abolition, Holgrave becomes an abolitionist jailed alongside Clifford, and Jaffrey swindles a gullible deacon into embezzling abolitionist funds into the slave trade.