Horror Literature through History
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Film Adaptations of The Jewel of Seven Stars
1970
“The Curse of the Mummy”—The final episode of the popular British television anthology series Mystery and Imagination.
1971
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb—The last entry in the popular series of mummy movies from Britain’s Hammer Films that had started in 1959 with The Mummy.
1980
The Awakening—A big-budget production starring Charlton Heston, intended as a “serious” mummy film but emerging as a critical and commercial flop.
1998
Bram Stoker’s The Mummy—A garish, low-budget production that was hastily made and released to cash in on the imminent reboot of Universal Studios’ classic mummy series with 1999’s big-budget The Mummy.
Matt Cardin
While The Jewel of Seven Stars superficially resembles Egyptological romances such as Conan Doyle’s “Lot no. 249” (1892), or Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), it is nonetheless an unusually thoughtful work. Tera’s resurrection is rendered through the language of science rather than occultism, and science is implicitly tested by the uncanny. “Powers—Old and New,” the cancelled chapter, likewise contemplates the existence of rival gods, thereby engendering a cosmological debate that the stridently Protestant author might well have deemed inappropriate for a second, popular edition. The Egyptological content of the novel is, incidentally, systematic and relatively accurate, being derived largely from the writings of the British Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. Notable film adaptations include Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), which was the last entry in the Hammer Films mummy series, and The Awakening (1980), a big-budget (and slow, and ponderous, and critically reviled) production starring Charlton Heston.
William Hughes
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Mummies; Stoker, Bram; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950.
Further Reading
Bridges, Meilee D. 2008. “Tales from the Crypt: Bram Stoker and the Curse of the Egyptian Mummy.” Victorians Institute Journal 36, 137–165.
Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. New York: Palgrave.
Stoker, Bram. [1903] 1996. The Jewel of Seven Stars. Annotated and edited by Clive Leatherdale. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, UK: Desert Island Books.
JOHN SILENCE: PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINARY
John Silence: Physician Extraordinary by Algernon Blackwood was one of the earliest and most influential books in the development of the occult detective genre. It was published in 1908 as a collection of five original stories. The character of Silence followed in the footsteps of Bram Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius, and Heskith Pritchard’s Flaxman Low.
The stories were originally intended by Blackwood to be independent examinations of different occult topics, but the publisher, Eveleigh Nash, requested him to tie them together with a single character. Because Silence was added secondarily, he sometimes has only a nominal role. The publisher excluded a sixth story, “A Victim of Higher Space,” from the collection because he felt it was weaker than the others, but it was published in The Occult Review for December 1914 and has been added to recent reprints of the collection. It is far shorter than the others and lacks their mood and atmosphere.
The Psychic Doctor
In the opening paragraphs of the first John Silence story, “A Psychical Invasion,” Blackwood paints a picture of the eponymous detective that is at once endearing and mysterious. After describing Silence as independently wealthy and inclined toward philanthropy—to the point of accepting only “unremunerative cases”—Blackwood begins to establish the doctor’s mysterious credentials:
But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the “Psychic Doctor.”
In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,—for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,—but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments. (Blackwood 1909, 3–4)
Matt Cardin
Source: Blackwood, Algernon. 1909. John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. Boston: John W. Luce & Company.
Silence is an independently wealthy physician who only takes on cases that personally interest him, such as a haunting that causes a writer to lose his sense of humor in “A Psychical Invasion.” As in “Green Tea” by Le Fanu, it involves a patient made vulnerable to a haunting by ingesting a drug. It was inspired by a haunted house Blackwood knew of in Putney. Other cases involve a fire elemental from ancient Egypt in “Nemesis of Fire,” inspired by the home of an Egyptologist he knew, and a case of lycanthropy in “Camp of the Dog,” set on a Swedish island where he had once camped with a group. Silence makes only nominal appearances in “Ancient Sorceries,” in which he passively listens to a patient’s tale of witchcraft and cats in a remote French village, and in “Secret Worship,” in which he appears at the end to save someone from the spectral replay of a devil-worshipping cult in a southern German village.
The individual stories reflect Blackwood’s interests both as an occultist and as an outdoorsman. A member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an important occult and metaphysical organization at the turn of the twentieth century that numbered several prominent authors among its members, he believed in the supernatural and understood and treated his subject matter seriously. He also had a lifelong love of nature, which shows in his writings. The first five Silence stories were all set in locations Blackwood had visited, and they display his strength at creating atmosphere, a strength that also informed other, later works such as “The Wendigo” and “The Willows.”
The book was heavily promoted on its release, and its popularity established Blackwood’s name and reputation as a writer. It also paved the way for such later characters and series as William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, and on television, Kolchak the Night Stalker and The X-Files.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Carmilla; The Devil Rides Out; Dracula; “Green Tea”; Hodgson, William Hope; Occult Detectives; Quinn, Seabury; “The Willows.”
Further Reading
Ashley, Mike. 2001. Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Carroll & Graf.
Blackwood, Algernon. 1997. The Complete John Silence Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Fonseca, Tony. 2007. “The Psychic.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 409–439. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Joshi, S. T. 1990. “Algernon Blackwood: The Expansion of Consciousness.” In The Weird Tale, 87–132. Austin: University of Texas Press.
JOSHI, S. T. (1958–)
Sunand Tryambak Joshi is a leading American scholar, critic, and editor of horror fiction, in particular of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Joshi was born in India and immigrated to the United States in 1963. Considered to be the greatest living authority on the genre, Joshi has written multiple critical surveys, published many collections of horror fiction both classic and contemporary, and edited multiple academic journals.
The first phase of Joshi’s career was devoted to researching and explicating Lovecraft’s work:
he made comprehensive and landmark contributions in textual editing, literary criticism, biography, and bibliography. The capstone of this work was the authoritative two-volume biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), for which he won the World Fantasy Award, and the publication of three volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction under the prestigious Penguin imprint beginning in 1999.
Joshi’s work is characterized not merely by critical acumen but also by diligence and thoroughness. He seems not merely to study but to envelop an author—researching and consulting all primary and secondary sources, reading the entire body of the author’s work, and understanding the author’s intellectual milieu. He often seeks to apprehend how an author’s worldview is reflected in his or her fiction.
After writing several collections of comprehensive essay-reviews on the main writers in the genre, Joshi produced the only truly comprehensive survey of horror fiction yet published. In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), Joshi evaluates both the famous and the obscure, from antiquity to the present, in 800 pages over two volumes. He concludes that the vast majority of horror fiction, like the vast majority of any genre fiction, is junk. Along the way Joshi does find a few gems amid the dross, and boosts such lesser lights as L. P. Hartley and Charles Beaumont. He also singles out a more thoughtful stream of contemporary authors—Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Thomas Ligotti—as contributors of effective work with significant depth and artistic finish. Some reviews of the book contended Joshi, who is an expert polemicist like his favorite, H. L. Mencken, was overly harsh in his criticisms, particularly of modern authors.
Joshi has edited numerous collections of horror fiction, many as editor of Dover Publications’ supernatural fiction line. He has been the editor of many literary journals devoted to horror, most recently The Lovecraft Annual: New Scholarship on H. P. Lovecraft (2007–present) and Studies in the Fantastic (2008–present). He continues to resurrect neglected horror tales and elevate individual authors and the genre as a whole.
Steven J. Mariconda
See also: Aickman, Robert; Beaumont, Charles; Campbell, Ramsey; Hartley, L. P.; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Klein, T. E. D.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; World Fantasy Award; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Criticism; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 2014. 200 Books by S. T. Joshi: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2012. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2016. S. T. Joshi’s Web Site. Accessed July 4, 2016. http://stjoshi.org.
JOYCE, GRAHAM (1954–2014)
Graham William Joyce was a British author of speculative fiction that combined elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His novels and short stories relied upon an ambiguous perspective in which he allowed readers to decide for themselves whether something truly supernatural was taking place or the seemingly supernatural events were just manifestations of a character’s mental breakdown, angst, delusion, hysteria, or alcohol- or drug-induced hallucination. Joyce was of the opinion that there was little difference between what his characters believed and what was real.
The son of a coal miner, Joyce grew up in Keresley, an English coal-mining town near Coventry that was destroyed during the Blitz in World War II. His grandmother—the seventh child of a seventh child, fictionalized in Joyce’s The Facts of Life (2002), and the inspiration for Old Liz in his novel Dark Sister (1992)—had visions and uttered accurate prophecies laden with classic or modernized symbols. Joyce claimed that he also had uncanny experiences that inspired him when writing his novels.
After working at an odd assemblage of jobs during his twenties and early thirties, he turned from poetry (for which he won awards) to fiction. His first novel attracted some attention but was never published. In 1988, he married, quit his job with the National Association of Youth Clubs, and moved to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Crete, an experience that he fictionalized in The House of Lost Dreams (1993). During this year abroad, he completed Dreamside, which was published in England in 1991.
He believed stories require a strong sense of place because environment demands a certain response from readers. His novels alternated between being set in the English midlands, a region he felt was not represented in fiction very often, and exotic locales such as Jerusalem, Rome, Greece, and the south of France. Smoking Poppy (2001), about an electrician who travels to Thailand to rescue his daughter, is written with a thick regional accent.
His books were critically acclaimed in the United Kingdom, where he won four British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award for best novel between 1993 and 2003, but his work was initially deemed too British for American audiences. Eventually he found a publisher in the United States, where Requiem, his fourth novel, was chosen as his American debut in 1996. His novels explored such varied topics as lucid dreaming, spiritualism, mysticism, witchcraft, guilt’s power to twist the psyche, coming of age, the corrupting power of secrets in families, the perception of reality, demons—both personal and literal—ghosts, and fairies.
He was awarded a PhD from Nottingham Trent University, where he taught creative writing from 1996 onward. He published fourteen novels, four books for young adults, a nonfiction football memoir, and more than two dozen short stories. His short fiction appears in three collections, the last of which, 25 Years in the Word Mines, brought together the best of his previously published stories and appeared around the time of his death from cancer in 2014.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dark Fantasy; Devils and Demons; Dreams and Nightmares; Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; Witches and Witchcraft; World Fantasy Award; Part One, Horror through History, Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural.
Further Reading
“Ghost Writing” (interview with Graham Joyce). 2009. Locus 62, no. 4 (April): 6–7, 60–61.
“Graham Joyce.” 2014. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Joyce, Graham 1954–.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. 2nd ed. vol. 1. Edited by Richard Bleiler, 503–508. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003.
K
KAFKA, FRANZ (1883–1924)
Franz Kafka was a Czech author of fantastic literature and one of the most important modernist writers of the early twentieth century. During his brief lifetime (Kafka died from complications of tuberculosis at the age of forty), he published only a few dozen stories, but these include classics such as “A Report to an Academy” (1917), about a captured ape who learns to imitate human behavior, and “In the Penal Colony” (1919), in which an elaborate torture device that inscribes the body with a record of its crimes is used for public executions. These tales established two of Kafka’s abiding themes: the mutability of identity and the cruel power of fate—themes that come together powerfully in the greatest of his tales, “The Metamorphosis” (1915).
Gregor Samsa’s Metamorphosis
The opening lines of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” are among the most famous in all of world literature. Like the rest of the story, they are strange, unsettling, and utterly unforgettable. For sensitive readers, they act as a kind of chute, channel, or doorway that ushers them for a time into the unfortunate life space of Gregor Samsa, whose existence, like his bodily form, is unaccountably transformed one morning into an absurd and surreal nightmare:
When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect. He was lying on his back—which was hard
, like a carapace—and when he raised his head a little he saw his curved brown belly, segmented by rigid arches atop which the blanket, already slipping, was just barely managing to cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared to the rest of him, waved helplessly before his eyes.
“What in the world has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper human room, if admittedly rather too small, lay peacefully between the four familiar walls.
Matt Cardin
Source: Kafka, Franz. [1915] 2016. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. Edited by Mark M. Anderson. Norton Critical Editions. New York and London: Norton.
This novella chronicles the pathetic experience of Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into “some sort of monstrous insect” (Kafka 2016, 3). The transformation is narrated matter-of-factly, and no explanation is offered save for allegorical ones: Samsa, a meek man who has submerged his identity in routines of drudgery geared to support his lazy and ungrateful family, goes from being a metaphorical to a literal insect. At first horrified and repelled by his new appearance, his family gradually accommodate themselves to the change, and Gregor, locked in his room, alternates between bouts of morose self-pity and tentative explorations of his new insectile identity. Like Gogol’s absurdist fictions of bizarre transformation, “The Metamorphosis” sustains a tone at once humorous and menacing, sharply satirizing the social mores of the lower middle class while capturing the claustrophobic environment of the Samsa household as it degenerates into a nest of lurking secrets and festering resentments.