Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Hugo’s authorial career was divided into several phases by the fallout from mid-nineteenth-century French political events. His Republican sympathies led to his taking an active part in the 1848 Revolution against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and he accepted a post in the new government. However, when the elected president, Louis-Napoléon, staged the coup d’état in 1851 that transformed the Republic into the Second Empire, Hugo was exiled; he refused to accept the offer of amnesty made some years later, and he did not return to France until the emperor was forced to abdicate in 1870. Hugo completed the second major phase of his literary work while residing on the Isle of Jersey; the third, begun after his return to France, was ended by a disabling stroke that he suffered in 1878.

  Hugo was sixteen years old when he initially wrote his novel Bug-Jargal, about the friendship between a French military officer and the eponymous African prince during the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that led to Haitian Revolution, but he revised the text before publishing it in 1826. It features a dwarfish obi (a sorcerer or witch-doctor) and includes a fanciful account of the syncretic process that created the religion later known as voodoo. Much of Hugo’s subsequent prose fiction, including Han d’Islande (1823; translated as Hans of Iceland), features a similar mixture of melodrama and political polemic, embodying an odd fascination with human deformity that would now be considered politically incorrect. The supernatural plays no explicit role in Hugo’s fiction, where the horrors are always naturalistic. Le Dernier jour d’un condamé à mort (1829; translated as The Last Day of a Condemned Man) obtained him a reputation as a pillar of what Charles Nodier dubbed the “frenetic school” of French horror fiction (Hughes 2013, 107), while emphasizing the seriousness of his crusading purpose.

  Hugo’s most famous novels, Notre-Dame de Paris—1482 and Les Misérables, retain an element of the frenetic but operate on a larger scale with far greater artistry. The former, especially in its characterization of the lustful cleric Claude Frollo and his remarkable protégé Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer, provided a significant archetype for the writers of popular newspaper serials who laid the foundations of modern popular fiction in the 1840s and 1850s; its imagery is prolifically echoed in the works of Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval. The novel likewise influenced popular film, with The Hunchback of Notre Dame receiving several memorable cinematic treatments, including, especially, the silent 1923 version starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and the lavish 1939 Hollywood production starring Charles Laughton.

  Hugo’s superbly flamboyant melodrama L’Homme qui rit (1869; translated as The Man Who Laughs) recounts the bizarre adventures of Gwynplaine, the last victim of a child-mutilating comprachicos (or “child-buyer,” a term coined by Hugo to refer to those who, according to folkloric accounts, mutilated children in order to make them sellable as exotic specimens) before and after he comes into his legitimate inheritance as an English peer, having been saved from an early death by the vagabond philosopher Ursus and his pet wolf Homo. Gwynplaine’s particular mutilation—the cutting of his mouth into a perpetual grin—has been memorably portrayed in a number of films, most notably the 1928 American silent film The Man Who Laughs, directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni and starring Conrad Veidt. Hugo’s reach into the fantastic and speculative realms of international popular culture was further extended when Veidt’s portrayal of Gwynplaine later contributed to the inspiration behind Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker, “another mutilated, grinning character who defies the established order and demonstrates its weakness” (Heldenfels 2015, 98).

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Féval, Paul; The Grotesque; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.

  Further Reading

  Brombert, Victor. 1984. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Heldenfels, Richard D. 2015. “More Than the Hood Was Red.” In The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, edited by Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner, 94–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

  Houston, John Porter. 1974. Victor Hugo. Boston: Twayne.

  Hughes, William. 2013. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Lanham, MD; Toronto, Canada; and Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press.

  HUYSMANS, J. K. (1848–1907)

  Charles Marie Georges Huysmans was a nineteenth-century French author who wrote under the name Joris-Karl (J. K.) Huysmans, and whose Decadent and Symbolist writings were an important influence on horror fiction. His fierce blend of the antihuman, the antisocial, and the antirational, coupled with a hypnotic prose style that combines realist precision with strange flights of fancy, inspired not merely H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, but also Clark Ashton Smith, Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite, and others. Huysmans’s fiction contains little supernaturalism, but is punctuated by compelling intervals of the horrible.

  Huysmans’s career had three phases. In the first phase (1874–1884), he worked as a naturalist under the influence of Émile Zola. This effort enabled Huysmans to develop an astonishing mastery of description that he put to use subsequently when describing the bizarre, the repulsive, and the ineffable. In the second phase (1884–1891), which is of most relevance here, his novels embodied the concept of “supernatural realism,” where narrative precision is occasionally pushed into the realm of the eccentric when something hideous is described. In the final phase (1895–1907), Huysmans recounted his religious conversion.

  Huysmans influenced horror fiction, first, with his sensibility. He seems to find something of the sublime in things that would normally evoke disgust. Second, Huysmans discarded linear plot development for a series of loosely connected set-pieces or tableaux. Instead of incidents, he made language itself—that is, the mood or atmosphere of the narrative—the central feature of his work.

  The influential À Rebours (variously translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884) is the primary example of Decadent literature, in which the artificial is seen as superior to the natural world. The jaded des Esseintes secludes himself in the countryside and attempts to amuse himself with, among other things, grotesque flowers and plants, strange literature and art, and a “mouth organ” that dispenses “inner symphonies” of liqueurs. Some of the narrator’s flights of fancy, such as his wild imaginings regarding Gustave Moreau’s painting L’Apparition (1874), shade into the realm of horror.

  In En Rade (variously translated as Becalmed, A Haven, or Stranded, 1887), Jacques Marles takes refuge from his Parisian creditors in a remote, run-down château. He finds the countryside disturbing, the local peasants offensive, and the house potentially haunted. Interspersed with the narrative are three dream sequences that include some of the most excitingly weird prose Huysmans wrote.

  In Là-Bas (Down There or The Damned, 1891), the novelist Durtal undertakes biographical research on fourteenth-century satanist and child-murderer Gilles de Rais, and discovers that occult rites are still being practiced in Paris. Huysmans’s vivid description of a Black Mass is as hideous as anything in modern horror fiction.

  Steven J. Mariconda

  See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Brite, Poppy Z.; The Haunted House or Castle; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Smith, Clark Ashton; The Sublime; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition.

  Further Reading

  Antosh, Ruth B. 1986. Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

  Baldick, Robert. 1955. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Cevasco, George A. 1980. J.-K. Huysmans: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.

  Ridge, George Ross. 1968. Joris-Karl Huysmans. New York: Twayne.

  I

  I AM LEGEND

  A dystopic vampire novel from 1954, I Am Legend is one of writer Richard Matheson’s best-known works. The plot concerns the fate of
the last remaining human on earth, Robert Neville, who is a survivor of a war-driven plague that has turned the rest of humanity into monstrous versions of themselves with symptoms resembling vampirism. Neville, who has lost his entire family, is desperate to find a cure for the pandemic, to which he alone is immune.

  Frightened and lonely, he barricades himself in his house, which becomes a symbol for the last vestiges of society as it was before the catastrophe. Groups of vampires try to overwhelm him every night, led by Ben Cortman, his neighbor. Eventually, in his daily forays to find food and supplies (the plague victims cannot go out in the daytime), he stumbles upon a woman, Ruth, who appears to be uninfected. After a time, he learns that she is a spy sent by the others to gather data, and that she was slowly able to overcome the aspect of the illness that prevented her from traveling in the daylight, thus enabling her to masquerade as a human.

  After a warning to leave or he will be killed, Neville is injured mortally in another skirmish with the nocturnal army of vampires. As he is dying, Neville realizes that he is simply a memory waiting to happen, the residue of an older time. In the new society that will live after him, he will be remembered as a legend. He hastens his own end by committing suicide rather than dying from his wounds or facing execution at the hands of his adversaries.

  The relationship between I Am Legend and its multiple cinematic adaptations is more than a little ironic. The first direct adaptation, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, retained the novel’s identification of the reanimated dead as vampires. The second, 1971’s The Omega Man, changed this to nocturnal albino mutants. Then 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, which was largely inspired by Matheson’s novel, recast the novel’s vampires as shambling, flesh-eating ghouls and created the modern image and idea of the zombie. Four decades later, in 2007, another cinematic adaptation of I Am Legend appeared, this one titled directly after the book—but the word “vampire” is never mentioned in it, and the monsters are now presented as murderous mutants that are, effectively, zombies.

  Matt Cardin

  With this important novel—which appears to expand on similar ideas from the masterful 1951 novella Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller Jr.—Matheson firmly established himself as a force in American horror literature and a major influence on subsequent writers in the genre (including Stephen King, who has cited Matheson, and particularly I Am Legend, as a chief influence on his own writing). Rife with symbolism and infused with a rich thematic subtext—the new consuming the old and effecting change (revolution); groupthink as an infectious and toxic technique to blunt individualism; the dangers of technology run amok; the crushing hell of existential nothingness—the book is still a benchmark in the field, and it holds up well more than six decades after its first publication. Transcending the vampire myth, it has been a chief inspiration for the postapocalyptic zombie and disease tropes so prevalent in the postmodern era, especially in film and comics—beginning with the first film adaptation of the book, The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price and penned by Matheson himself under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson (a name he reserved for works he contributed to, but which were altered beyond his comfort level as a creator). There have also been two additional versions, The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith. The book’s profound impact on popular culture is also visible in the precipitous rise and eventual dominance of zombies in horror entertainment; I Am Legend was a prime catalyst for George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead (1968), the movie that introduced the now-iconic zombie of pop culture.

  In 2011 the Horror Writers Association gave the novel a special one-time Bram Stoker Award for Best Vampire Novel of the Century.

  Jason V Brock

  See also: Vampires; Zombies; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond.

  Further Reading

  Clasen, Mathias. 2010. “Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.” Philosophy and Literature 34, no. 2: 313–328.

  Ketchum, Jack. 2009. “On I Am Legend.” In The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson, edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, 57–61. New York: Citadel Press Books.

  Miller, Walter M., Jr. 1951. “Dark Benediction.” Fantastic Adventures 13, no. 9 (September). Chicago: Ziff-Davis.

  Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

  “I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM”

  First published in 1967, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a bleak, postapocalyptic story that takes place more than a century after a nuclear war between the United States, Russia, and China. The nuclear holocaust is initiated when one of the three nations’ supercomputers becomes sentient. The self-named AM, frustrated by its disembodiment, kills every human being in the world except for five individuals, whom it has psychologically and physically altered and kept alive to torture.

  The story is told from the perspective of the youngest among them, Ted, an unreliable narrator who suffers from paranoia, but who considers himself to be the only unaffected individual in the group. The other four characters include Benny, a former scientist who has been transformed into a near-mindless, ape-like figure with grotesquely enlarged sexual organs; Gorrister, formerly a principled intellectual who is now apathetic and in a constant state of languor; Nimdok, so named by AM and the oldest of the group, who suggests that they go on a quest for a cache of canned food; and Ellen, the sole woman and African American among them, whom AM has altered to be sexually insatiable. The story follows these characters on their journey to find sustenance, all the while being tortured in various ways by AM. The supercomputer (or A.I., as it would be more commonly called today), starves them only to later provide a menu of increasingly disgusting foodstuff, which the protagonists have no choice but to consume. As well, AM creates bizarre creatures that hunt them, tortures them with sounds, blinds Benny, and continuously plays on their collective angst. After an arduous journey the group finally reaches the stash of canned foods, but realize they have no way of opening the cans. The entire expedition, it seems, has been a ruse crafted by AM, a seed of false hope planted as another means of torment. At this point Ted, realizing that killing his fellows is the only way to save them from their predicament, attacks and kills Benny and Gorrister. Ellen, reaching the same conclusion, kills Nimdok and is in turn killed by Ted. AM, furious at what has occurred, alters Ted into a blob of flesh, trapping his consciousness forever in an unresponsive and helpless physical and mental prison.

  The events that motivate “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” read like a checklist of cultural anxieties especially prevalent at the time the story was published: cold war paranoia, fear of nuclear destruction, and distrust of technology, especially the increasingly widespread use of computers in industry. These concerns and others are displayed in full force in the story and are given additional weight by Ellison’s unabashed narrative voice that revels in the extremity of the author’s terrible vision.

  A well-received video game based on the story and with input from Ellison was published in 1995. In 2009 the story was selected for inclusion in the Library of America’s two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales, representing the best in American fantastic and horror fiction that has been published from the eighteenth century to the present.

  Javier A. Martinez

  See also: Ellison, Harlan; Unreliable Narrator; “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.

  Further Reading


  Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena: Salem Press.

  Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

  IN A GLASS DARKLY

  One of the most lauded and studied works by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), the collection of short fictions In a Glass Darkly represents the height of its author’s subtle power in penning terror and suspense alongside keen insights into the human mind and conscience. Collected in three volumes in 1872, the year before Le Fanu’s death, In a Glass Darkly includes five previously published tales now presented together as case studies from the personal papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician and practitioner of metaphysical medicine.

  Comprising the first volume of In a Glass Darkly, the three tales “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle” exhibit a specific similarity in that they each recount the story of an esteemed professional (a reverend, a naval officer, and a judge, respectively) who becomes haunted by a presence that no one else can see. Le Fanu plays skillfully with the uncanny, providing some evidence for the reality of these supernatural entities while also including more than a suggestion that these men are—more naturally—haunted by their own flaws, the entities they see being only psychological manifestations of moral failings or selfish compulsion.

  The latter interpretation is further supported by the theme of the fourth tale, The Room in the Dragon Volant, a masterful nod to the earliest staples of the Gothic genre—an adventurous mystery of romance and evil intent. While part of the mystery involves a room known to have been the place of mysterious disappearances, the narrative is one of the “supernatural explained.” The mysterious room is a setting only of mere human deceits, but deceits that nearly cost the protagonist his life as he becomes ensnared in a confidence scheme to steal his fortune and is nearly buried alive. As in the previous stories, Le Fanu suggests that this mystery is also a moral tale exposing the weaknesses of romantic, idealistic, and selfish thinking when such supersedes proper restraint.