Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Built over an Unquiet Grave

  In this paragraph from the opening pages of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne lays the groundwork for the curse and the haunting that serve as the novel’s main focus. He also establishes the brooding and gloomy tone that will dominate throughout, as well as the narrator’s habit of referring to local gossip in framing perceptions of people and events:

  After the reputed wizard’s death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon’s grasp. When it was understood, however, that the colonel intended to erect a family mansion—spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity—over the spot first covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity, throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they nevertheless hinted that he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule’s crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly-plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and melancholy house. (Hawthorne 1851, 13)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1851. The House of the Seven Gables. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.

  H. P. Lovecraft admired House the most among Hawthorne’s works but frankly assessed that Hawthorne’s singular style, unlike Poe’s, had inspired few inheritors. That assessment has its truth, but subsequent history allows nuance. A vicious, variegated New England horror tradition succeeded without imitating Hawthorne, including occasional works by Edith Wharton, Lovecraft himself, and Shirley Jackson. Moreover, the cursed aristocratic inheritance exerts tremendous influence on high achievements of twentieth-century New World Gothic: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

  Bob Hodges

  See also: Ancestral Curse; Beloved; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; The Haunted House or Castle; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Jackson, Shirley; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Wharton, Edith; Witches and Witchcraft; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition.

  Further Reading

  Bailey, Dale. 1999. “The Sentient House and the Ghostly Tradition: The Legacy of Poe and Hawthorne.” In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, 15–24. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

  The House of the Seven Gables. 2010. DVD. Dir. Joe May. 1940. Universal City: Universal.

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

  Martin, Terence. 1983. “The House of the Seven Gables.” In Nathaniel Hawthorne, revised edition. Twayne’s United Authors Series 75. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

  Siebers, Tobin. 1983. “Hawthorne’s Appeal and Romanticism.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, 100–117. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.

  Twice-Told Tales. 2005. DVD. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1963. Beverly Hills: MGM Midnite Movies.

  THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

  The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1908, is a portmanteau novel (one consisting of multiple different parts) in which four narrative episodes and two brief connecting passages, allegedly contained in a manuscript, are presented within a frame narrative, prefaced by an introduction and a poem. Two of the episodes describe the haunting of a house in Ireland by creatures from a nearby pit; one of the others is a vision in which a replica of the house is surrounded by a fabulous landscape inhabited by loathsome monsters, and the last a cosmic vision in which the dreaming narrator witnesses the end of the world and visits the binary star at the center of the universe, which is also an allegory of human life and death.

  Although it represented a decisive break from the sea stories that were Hodgson’s principal stock in trade as he tried to make a living as a professional writer, the novel transports the metaphysical schema outlined in several of those stories, with its attendant psychological fascinations, into a broader visionary area in order to display them more elaborately. The enigmatic house is symbolic of the troubled mind of its inhabitant; the pit on whose brink it is precariously situated is the well of his unconscious. The main visionary sequence is both an attempt to place human existence in the frame of space and time established as true by contemporary science and an attempt to develop a metaphysical framework that might make that placement meaningful, subjectively if not objectively.

  The idea of a marginal region incompletely separating our world from another plays a significant role in almost all of Hodgson’s fiction, where breaches in the barrier and irruptions from the world beyond are invariably seen as baleful; significantly, they are usually characterized as animalistic even when frankly supernatural; his “phantoms” always have a carnal repulsiveness about them, often porcine, as in this instance. That aspect of Hodgson’s work is distinctive, at least in the intensity of his preoccupation with it.

  The fact that the novel is a patchwork of pieces that were presumably written separately makes its narrative flow awkward and detracts from its overall coherency, but the resulting disorder is by no means inappropriate to the nature of the exercise, and is amply compensated in terms of its imaginative ambition and graphic imagery. As in Hodgson’s The Night Land, to which it is closely related in terms of its underlying endeavor, its clumsiness is part and parcel of its ambition, a consequence of its reach exceeding its grasp. For that reason, The House of the Borderland has exerted a long-lasting fascination over many devoted admirers and remains a key work in the history of imaginative fiction that defies easy classification. Its influence on subsequent writers of horror and fantasy fiction, including major figures such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, has been profound. In 2001 a graphic novel adaptation of the novel was published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics.

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Dreams and Nightmares; The Haunted House or Castle; Hodgson, William Hope; The Night Land; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  HOWARD, ROBERT E. (1906–1936)

  Robert E. Howard, who was born and lived most of his life in rural Texas, was a prolific American writer for pulp fiction magazines. Although he wrote for a wide variety of fiction markets, including adventure and sports publications, he is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian and the fantasy subgen
re of sword-and-sorcery. He was a titan of the pulp era in American popular fiction, and his work crossed over in many significant ways with dark fantasy and horror.

  “Pigeons from Hell”: Atmospheric Southern Gothic Horror

  “Pigeons from Hell” was first published in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales. One of Howard’s best-known tales of horror, it is set in an unspecified rural locale in the American South where two young men, Griswell and John Branner, stop overnight at an abandoned mansion. During the night Griswell awakens from sleep to see Branner ascend the stairs as though in a trance and then return as a walking corpse, his head split with a hatchet which he is bearing to kill Branner. Griswell flees the house in terror and runs into Buckner, the local sheriff, who accompanies him back to the house. From Buckner and Jacob, a black voodoo man living nearby, Griswell learns that the house is the ruins of the Blassenville plantation, which fell into decline after the American Civil War. Local legend has it that the pigeons that flock to the house are the souls of the Blassenvilles, let out of hell at sunset. Celia Blassenville, the last of the family, was notorious for abusing her slave, Joan, and it is believed that Joan went through an occult ritual to become a zuvembie (a type of immortal monster) to avenge herself on Celia. When Branner and Buckner decide to stay the night, they discover the truth about the zuvembie who murdered John Branner.

  “Pigeons from Hell” is an atmospheric Southern Gothic story, one of several that Howard based on the regional folklore of his native Texas. Perhaps its most impressive aspect is its successful use of its rich setting to generate an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread from what amounts to a kind of mixed kettle of horror tropes. It was memorably adapted as an episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller television series in 1961 and has been adapted several times in comic book form.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  Howard made his first professional fiction sale in 1925 to Weird Tales, the magazine that would become his best market. The April, 1926 issue carried his “Wolfshead,” a werewolf tale whose muscular style and historical setting anticipated his approach in much of his heroic fantasy fiction. Other sales to Weird Tales included the witchcraft tale “Sea Curse” (1928), the ghost story “Man on the Ground” (1933), and the Native American–themed “Old Garfield’s Heart” (1933). Several of Howard’s most highly regarded works of horror were published posthumously, among them “Black Canaan” (1936) and “Pigeons from Hell” (May, 1938). Both of these stories are Southern Gothic tales steeped in the folklore of Howard’s native American South: they bristle dramatically with racial tensions between blacks and whites, and they are memorable for horrors rendered in Howard’s trademark visceral style. “The Dead Remember,” a tale of vengeance from beyond the grave published in the August 15, 1936 issue of Argosy, is another notable regional horror tale.

  Howard began corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft in 1930, and he contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of cosmic horror fiction inspired by Lovecraft’s stories. As Marc Cerasini and Charles Hoffman have noted, most of Howard’s mythos tales—including “The Children of the Night” (1931), “The Thing on the Roof” (1932), “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (1936), and “Dig Me No Grave” (1937)—do not represent his best work, since his attempts to evoke the futility of human endeavor that distinguishes Lovecraft’s fiction forced him to suppress the heroics characteristic of his best fiction. An exception is “The Black Stone” (1931), an effective Lovecraftian horror story about a contemporary traveler in Hungary who is privy to a vivid dream vision of an ancient rite of sacrifice to a monstrous entity. This story introduced the mad poet Justin Geoffrey and the book of occult lore, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults), both referenced afterward in stories by Lovecraft and other contributors to the mythos.

  Many tales featuring Howard’s serial heroes are punctuated with incidents of horror and the supernatural. “Worms of the Earth” (1932), featuring Pict warrior Bran Mak Morn, is one of several stories in which Howard developed the theme of a bestial prehistoric race, driven underground, that later gave rise to folk legends of the little people. In “Red Shadows” (1928), “The Moon of Skulls” (1930), “The Walking Dead” (1930), and “Wings in the Night” (1932), Howard’s puritan swordsman Solomon Kane becomes enmeshed in sorcerous intrigues in Africa. In many of Howard’s tales of Conan, incidents of physical horror and the supernatural provide challenges to the masculine prowess of the hero.

  Howard committed suicide in June 1936 as his dying mother lay in a coma. The 1996 film The Whole Wide World depicts the romantic and intellectual relationship between Howard (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) and Novalyne Price (played by Renée Zellweger), as based on Price’s memoirs of her time with Howard.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950.

  Further Reading

  Bleiler, Everett F. 1985. “Robert E. Howard: 1906–1936.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s.

  Cerasini, Marc A., and Charles Hoffman. 1987. Robert E. Howard: Starmont Reader’s Guide 35. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  HUBBARD, L. RON (1911–1986)

  Lafayette Ronald Hubbard is best known as the founder of Scientology, a controversial religious system advocating the acquisition of knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through a course of study and training. Hubbard is also known as a prolific author of science fiction, having produced more than 250 short stories and novels. Nineteen of his books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. He began his authorial career writing science fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories for such pulp magazines as Thrilling Adventures and Astounding Science Fiction in the 1930s, and he continued to publish in those genres through the 1950s, a period that has been called the “Golden Age” of pulp fiction, during which time he achieved a considerable reputation, especially as a science fiction writer. Some of his work also touched on themes of horror, especially of the psychological variety.

  Return to the Stars (1954) and Battlefield Earth (1982), both traditional science fiction narratives, are Hubbard’s best-known novels. Two other works, Typewriter in the Sky (1940) and Fear (1940), explore questions of identity and perception within the framework of the horror narrative.

  Typewriter in the Sky, first published as a two-part serial, uses the conventions of a time-travel narrative to explore the growing fear of the loss of identity and self-awareness. The hero, Mike de Wolf, receives an electric shock and is thrown back to the sixteenth century, where he has high adventures in the Caribbean. He becomes aware that during his adventures he can hear the keys of a typewriter, and he begins to question his existence, wondering whether he is human or simply a character in someone else’s novel.

  Even more disquieting is Fear. Ethnologist James Lowrey returns from an expedition to Central America to discover that he is being fired from his college for denying the existence of a spiritual world. During the course of the novel, Lowrey, suffering from the effects of malaria, blacks out for four hours and then begins to experience visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations. As he searches for his lost hours, demons and devils speak to him, offering godlike powers of perception and/or horrible death. He slowly loses his connections to reality, and in the end of the novel Lowrey discovers or imagines that he has killed his wife and best friend with an axe. Fear is widely considered a masterful description of a descent into madness and is recognized as a significant example of psychological horror.

  In much of his fiction Hubbard develops themes related to Scientology, depicting establishment systems and beliefs, such as the banking system, the law, and especially psychiatry and psychology, as oppressive structures blocking the development of self-awareness and the acquisition of the means to develop human potential. In The Typewriter in the Sky and especially Fear, he dramatizes the internal
horror of psychological deterioration and the inability of rational systems to provide help. Although the prominence of Scientology in popular consciousness has mostly eclipsed the memory of Hubbard’s career as a novelist, several of his novels, including these two, still stand as significant works of speculative fiction with connections to the literary horror tradition.

  Jim Holte

  See also: Devils and Demons; Fear; Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Adrian, Jack. 1996. “L. Ron Hubbard: Overview.” St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. New York: St. James Press.

  Hubbard, L. Ron. 1950. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. New York: Hermitage House.

  Hubbard, L. Ron. 1977. Fear & Typewriter in the Sky. New York: Popular Library.

  Miller, Russell. 1988. Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard. New York: Holt.

  Stableford, Brian. 1979. “Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol. 2, edited by Frank N. Magill, 761–65. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

  HUGO, VICTOR (1802–1885)

  Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and playwright who is regarded as one of France’s greatest writers. He became the effective figurehead of the French Romantic movement (which dominated French literature in the first half of the nineteenth century) following the premiere of his play Hernani in February 1830. The French consider him one of their greatest poets, but internationally his fame rests more on his novels, especially Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), the latter of which is better known to English-speaking readers as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.