Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  VanderMeer, Jeff. 2012. “Caitlín R. Kiernan on Weird Fiction.” Weird Fiction Review, March 12. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/interview-caitlin-r-kiernan-on-weird-fiction.

  An Interview with Caitlín R. Kiernan

  October 2016

  In this interview Kiernan talks about her experiences as an author whose career was born at the dawn of the Internet age, and who has therefore had a front-row seat to, and a personal stake in, the dramatic changes that have rocked the publishing field since then. She also talks about some of her primary literary influences—specifically, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter, and Harlan Ellison—and she discusses how her lifelong interests in religion, psychology, and the weird and paranormal have fueled her fiction. She also offers a rich list of recommended horror reading, even as she explains why she has consistently rejected the label of “horror author” for herself.

  Matt Cardin: Your career as a published author was launched at a highly significant cultural inflection point, right at the beginning of the Internet era and the end of the twentieth century. Here in the second decade of the twenty-first century, what are some of the significant transformations in the literary environment that strike you as particularly momentous, whether on the publishing end or the purely literary end (as in, evolutionary changes in what’s written or how it is written)? Especially when it comes to horror fiction, dark fantasy, and the like, how have things changed? Specifically, how have they changed for you?

  Caitlín R. Kiernan: I’m really not the person to ask about how technology has changed publishing on a wide scale. I have too little contact with the wider world of publishing to be able to answer that question. Generally speaking, I choose not to have that sort of contact. But it’s true that the emergence of the Internet at the beginning of my career had an enormous impact on the way things played out for me. I was online beginning in 1994, networking and promoting my writing, and in October 1995 I became one of the very first authors with a website, which I designed and built myself and shared with Billy Martin (aka “Poppy Z. Brite”). By 2001, I had a daily blog, which, fifteen years later, I’m still keeping, and it has been a very important promotional tool. In 2005, I started Sirenia Digest, which has been enormously important to my staying afloat financially, has given me a fantastic venue for my short fiction, and never would have worked as a print publication. In 2011, I used Kickstarter to raise $4,000 to fund a book trailer to support The Drowning Girl. And now I’m using Patreon to keep the bills paid while I write my next novel. So, yes, significant and momentous stuff.

  I have a pretty classic love-hate relationship with the Internet, with computers in general, with the way they’ve changed the world and the way they’ve changed writing. I pine for fountain pens and manual typewriters, but since 1992—when I was twenty-eight years old—I’ve composed almost every word I’ve written on Apple computers. Indeed, the way I write, the evolution of my style, my voice, is largely facilitated by MS Word, and also the way I’m obsessed with sentence-level prose and getting a story or novel perfect in the first draft—I couldn’t do that, not really, on a typewriter. This is the sort of thing I’m loathe to admit, but it’s true.

  MC: You have generally rejected the label of horror author even though you and your work have remained consistently associated with the field bearing that name. With the 1980s and 1990s horror publishing boom receding ever more fully and definitively in history’s rear view mirror, and with genre boundaries growing ever more porous, has your position on this changed at all? Or does it have little to do with the current state of publishing categories and genre outlines at any given moment?

  CRK: No, it hasn’t changed, not at all. If anything, I believe more firmly than ever that the issue of genre horror has very little relevance to my writing. The primary goal of my work as a writer has never been about instilling horror or writing scary stories, and I think that’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s actually familiar with my work. From the beginning, I saw that getting pegged as a horror writer would not only be inaccurate, but it would be extremely limiting. I got pegged as a horror writer, regardless. I know that’s how most people think of me. Never mind all the science fiction and fantasy and noir and what have you that I’ve published—my first two short fiction sales were SF—I still got pegged as a horror writer, and it happened largely because my publishers needed a way to market me and because readers are very open to the categories that publishers create to sell them things. But to try and accurately characterize the bulk of what I’ve written as “horror,” as if I’m setting about to elicit above all else this one emotion, that’s nonsense. If you have to have a shoebox, you can call my fiction dark, or weird, or you can use Robert Aickman’s suitably vague “strange stories,” but I’m not a horror writer. To me, that conjures up images of foil-embossed, blood-spattered paperbacks and slasher films and jump scares, and that’s just not what I’ve ever been about. I’m working, and I have always worked—and I certainly hope this is true—with a much broader spectrum of human emotion and experience than fear and the evocation of horror.

  MC: Your literary influences have included, among others, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison—towering figures, all. What have you found especially powerful, memorable, and moving about these authors?

  CRK: I don’t know if I can put my finger on some commonality that unites the authors who have been the greatest influence on my own work. They’re a very diverse bunch. Shirley Jackson, she helped me learn how to write about insanity and longing and loss and the treachery of social mores. Angela Carter opened up fairy tales for me, and she’s one of the writers who taught me how to approach sex and informed the feminist aspects of my writing. Lovecraft nurtured my fascination with deep time and the insignificance of humanity on a cosmic scale—as did the existentialist philosophers, the modernist authors, and a great number of science writers. Very early on, when I was just a kid, Ray Bradbury ignited my fascination with language. I was immediately in awe of his magic with words, and I think it really was like seeing a magician and becoming obsessed with figuring out how the tricks are done and wanting to go them all one better. And Harlan Ellison, when I discovered him it was pretty much a wrecking ball to my small-town Southern sensibilities, someone who shows up with a book like Deathbird Stories or a tale like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and says, hey kid, forget everything you thought you knew about writing, because—look at what I can do. That happened to me again in college with James Joyce and with the magical realists. For me, it really has been a matter of standing on the shoulders of giants. Without these people I might still have become a writer, but whatever I’d have done in the absence of their influences would have looked nothing at all like what I’m doing now, what I’ve done over the past quarter century.

  MC: Before becoming a writer, you had a career as a scientist. You have also been deeply interested in and influenced by the likes of Carl Jung and Charles Fort. Some might sense a tension here. How do you make sense of the connections among these things, centered in your own self and authorial sensibility? And is there perhaps something in this linkage of hard science, depth psychology, and the paranormal or supernatural that provides an especially fertile ground for growing, and appreciating, and understanding, works of fiction centered in horror, darkness, dreams, nightmares, and the fantastic?

  CRK: I come from a background rife with superstition and religion. I was raised, by turns, a Catholic and a Methodist, in a Southern Appalachian environment where ghosts were real and demons were real and where hanging a dead snake in a tree would make it rain. Also, I grew up in the seventies, a decade obsessed with everything from reincarnation to Atlantis to Bigfoot to claims that ancient aliens had built the pyramids. And I was crazy about that stuff when I was young. I was raised in an environment that was, very often, hostile to science, especially to evolutionary biology and paleontology and historical geology, and I spent years learning
that I had to figure out for myself what was true. Part of that was losing my faith in Christianity and learning, mostly on my own, critical thought and the scientific method. I had a junior high school earth science teacher who was a Pentecostal minister and wouldn’t teach the parts of the textbook that he disagreed with, which was most of it. But, I think that no matter how much I have moved away from or outgrown those primitive, childish ways of seeing the world, those paradigms helped shape me. On some level, all that stuff is still there. I still get a thrill when I read claims of the paranormal, and I still feel awe at the sight of a church steeple. In fact, I think that much of what I’ve written has arisen from the frisson created by the conflict between the beliefs of my childhood and the way that I see the world as an adult. I don’t think anyone can have been deeply religious and ever be free of those emotions and fears that religion has evolved to satisfy, ever be shed of what are, essentially, religious reactions to the world around them.

  As for Jung—and also Joseph Campbell, James Frazer, and Bruno Bettelheim—they helped me understand the fundamental connections between myth and the way that the human mind works, which is, for me, like the Rosetta Stone or a source code for understanding all fantastic fiction, including science fiction and dark fiction. All writers should study human psychology and anthropology, just as surely as they should study the work of other authors—and especially if you want to understand primal emotions like fear, awe, terror, dread, and so forth. I found Jung’s approach especially useful in grappling with the slippery mess that is the human psyche. Dreams figure very prominently in my fiction, and, in part, that’s because Jung and Freud taught me that dreams cut the crap and get to the heart of the matter. They’re the way we tell ourselves the truths our conscious minds are trying to avoid. Which is, of course, the object of dark and weird fiction, to entice us to look at things we’d rather not.

  MC: In addition to the authors already named, what are some additional authors and works that you would recommend to those who are looking to explore the horror wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important and profound both for this genre and for literature as a whole, and why?

  CRK: I’d start with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Nothing more important or more amazing has been published since House of Leaves was published sixteen years ago. Also, if you can find the early novels of Kathe Koja—The Cipher (1991), Skin (1993), Strange Angels (1994)—beautiful and brilliant and sadly out of print. Same for T. E .D. Klein’s The Ceremonies (1984) and Dark Gods (1985), brilliant and sadly out of print. Almost everything by Ramsey Campbell, but especially The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and Ancient Images (1989). Thomas Ligotti, obviously. Peter Straub, obviously, particularly Ghost Story (1979). Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984), Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), and Clive Barker’s short fiction. More recently, I’ll point to Jeff VanderMeer, everything from City of Saints and Madmen (2004) to The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014). He’s not a “horror writer,” either, but he’s doing a lot of the same things I’m doing, and often doing it better. Same for Michael Cisco, who’s published a series of embarrassingly brilliant, surreal novels, beginning with The Divinity Student (1999). Gemma Files (Experimental Film, 2015) and Livia Llewellyn (Furnace, 2016), those are two names devotees of macabre fiction should be watching.

  KING, STEPHEN (1947–)

  Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror fiction. The most popular and influential horror author of the twentieth century, he has sold upwards of 350 million books and ranks high on the list of best-selling authors of all time, regardless of genre. King is the winner of numerous prizes, including multiple Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2003 he was awarded the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, a decision that was met with both applause and derision from the critical establishment. While he is predominantly considered a horror author, King’s work frequently crosses generic boundaries, including traces of science fiction, fantasy, the thriller, and the Western, as well as several nonfiction reflections on genre and the writer’s craft.

  King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He has spent most of his life in Maine and has set the great majority of his books there. He wrote avidly from a young age and sold his first story to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. This story, “The Glass Elevator,” is collected, along with much unpublished material, juvenilia, and errata, in the University of Maine Library.

  King’s career as a novelist began with the publication of Carrie in 1974. This short novel focuses on the suffering of the titular character at the hands of her high school peers and maniacally religious mother. A particularly traumatic episode at the beginning of the novel heralds the emergence of Carrie’s latent telekinetic abilities. Another grand act of adolescent cruelty prompts Carrie to release the full extent of her powers, bringing an apocalyptic end to the school and town that have tormented her. Carrie is noteworthy for the prominence and range of its female voices. The bulk of the novel is seen through a female gaze, belonging to either Carrie, her mother, or Carrie’s popular but benevolent high school classmate Susan Snell. King has been criticized throughout his career for his inability to write women, so it is interesting to note that he entered the published market with such a distinctly female-centric novel. In Carrie, men are largely peripheral and are shown to be almost entirely baffled by or actively hostile to the women in their lives. King’s own inexperience in writing women nearly resulted in his discarding Carrie after only a few chapters. His wife, Tabitha, rescued the pages from the trash and encouraged him to continue. He did, and the paperback rights for the novel were bought for $400,000.

  Carrie was followed by ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977), both of which are now regarded as key texts in the birth of contemporary horror fiction. ’Salem’s Lot established the recurrent King conceit of great evil being visited upon a small New England town, while The Shining has attained “classic” status. It is King’s fourth novel, however, that best expresses the scale of his early ambition.

  The Stand (1978) is often considered King’s magnum opus, and fans frequently credit it as their favorite among his novels. A sprawling, postapocalyptic fantasy, The Stand allows King the space to elaborate on the character building and textured back story that are hallmarks of his work. The genre-melding impulse is already evident, with the science fiction of a pandemic flu apocalypse giving way to supernatural fantasy in the novel’s second half. The Stand is a big book in both length and theme, and it is key to the 1980s vogue for expansive horror-fantasy “epics,” such as Robert McCammon’s Swan Song (1987) and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld (1987). Its influence is also evident in such recent epics as Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) and Joe Hill’s The Fireman (2016).

  The Stand introduces the recurrent antagonist Randall Flagg, who is an embodiment of unspecified evil, and who appears in a number of King novels, including The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), Hearts in Atlantis (1999), and the eight-volume Dark Tower series (1982–2004). Often going by other names (but usually with the initials R. F.), Flagg is part of King’s multiverse. This intertextual network centers on the eponymous “Dark Tower,” a construct that links the various worlds presented in King’s fiction. Some novels are more obviously included within this shared universe. The Talisman (1984), It (1986), Insomnia (1994), and Hearts in Atlantis are closely related to the world of The Dark Tower and its mythology. Flagg is not the only recurrent character; Father Donald Callahan reappears in the latter books of The Dark Tower, having been presumed dead at the end of ’Salem’s Lot, while other minor connections link much of King’s oeuvre.

  This connective mythology illustrates King’s debt to the work of the iconic early twentieth-century American horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, King’s multiverse alludes to trans-dimensional entities, largely organized under the leadership of the pan-dimensional antagonist “The Crimson King.” Ran
dall Flagg is one such being, as is Pennywise the Clown, the antagonist of It, who, in a fashion typical of Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial monstrosities, predates humankind’s appearance on earth, and whose true physical form cannot be perceived by human cognition.

  The general influence of Lovecraft is clearly evident in such things, but King has also dabbled more directly in the Lovecraftian world in short fiction such as “Jerusalem’s Lot” (1978), “Crouch End” (1980), and “N” (2008). In Danse Macabre, King’s nonfiction treatise on the history of horror, he describes his discovery of his father’s collection of Lovecraftian pulps as “my first encounter with serious fantasy-horror” (King 1981, 102). Throughout the book he reiterates the tremendous impact that Lovecraft has had on twentieth-century horror, including his own.

  However, King’s style would seem to fit uneasily with Lovecraft’s extravagant cosmic themes. King’s fiction is concerned with the banal and the prosaic: the mundane conversations and petty angst of modern American small-town life. It is this realist backdrop that accentuates the inevitable supernatural disruption in his novels and stories. He cites the direct influence of nonhorror authors such as Frank Norris, but his most obvious antecedents are Richard Matheson and Shirley Jackson, both of whom worked in horror. King has repeatedly credited Matheson as the author who most influenced his own writing, while Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) has a substantial presence in King’s early work. The rain of stones that falls upon Carrie White’s house is lifted almost wholly from an episode in Jackson’s novel, while Hill House itself is the bedrock for the recurrent King motif of “the bad place.” The Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, as well as numerous other examples, are versions of “the bad place,” where the residue of past evils exerts its potency upon the present. Other essential themes in King’s fiction are memory, sexual abuse, and the strength (and evils) of community; each appears in some guise across the breadth of his work.