Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Kipling, Rudyard. 1889. Plain Tales from the Hills. New York: John W. Lovell Company.

  Kipling, Rudyard. 1891. Life’s Handicap. London: Macmillan.

  Kipling, Rudyard. 1893. Many Inventions. London: Macmillan.

  Kipling, Rudyard. 2008. Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy. New York: Pegasus Books.

  Mallett, Phillip. 2003. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Ricketts, Harry. 2000. Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf.

  KIRK, RUSSELL (1918–1994)

  Best known in his lifetime as one of the chief voices of American political conservatism, Russell Amos Kirk was also the author of superb ghost stories, many with strong religious elements, which Kirk himself described as exercises in “moral imagination.” While he is often compared to M. R. James, he probably has more in common with the British fantasists and Christian writers C. S. Lewis or Charles Williams. Kirk’s conservatism is part and parcel of his fondness for the supernatural. He was as resistant to change as H. P. Lovecraft; it is no surprise that one of his books is entitled Enemies of Permanent Things.

  Kirk, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, took his religion seriously. Indeed, his most famous story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” (1976; a winner of the World Fantasy Award) is explicable only in Catholic terms. The time slip, which enables the hobo protagonist to free himself of his earthly purgatory by performing a redemptive act in the past, is a miracle of divine grace.

  In a sequel, “The Watchers at the Strait Gate” (1980), the hobo’s ghost returns to help a priest into the hereafter. Typically, Kirk’s ghost characters continue to play an active role after death. Something similar happens in “Saviourgate” (1976), in which the ghost of a man killed battling a spook in “Sorworth Place” turns up in a phantom street in the British city of York.

  Kirk, born in Michigan, spent most of his life there, but he also had strong ties to northern Britain; he studied at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland after World War II, and he frequently used Scottish settings. Otherwise, his stories tend to be set in bleak, backwater districts in rural Michigan, which often contain nasty forces that are best left alone, as in “Behind the Stumps” (1950), where an obnoxious census-taker comes to a bad end through his persistence. Of course dangerous survivals are to be discovered in Scotland too, as the burglar protagonist of “Balgrummo’s Hell” (1967) discovers when he tries to steal valuable paintings from a decaying manor in which a man has been suspended in a timeless hell for fifty years.

  Kirk’s first novel, The Old House of Fear (1961), partakes of Gothic conventions that date all the way back to Ann Radcliffe, but as in Radcliffe’s novels, the seeming-supernatural is explained away, even if the sense of terror remains. Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979) combines threads from his other fiction and shares many of the characters. It features Manfred Arcane, world traveler and adventurer, plus two ghosts and others arrayed against an evil cult in a castle in Scotland. This time the magic, sorcery, and glimpses of the twilit hereafter are quite real.

  Kirk wrote a total of twenty-two ghost stories over a long career. He excelled in eerie details and shadowy settings, but his main interest was to depict good and evil in conflict in a dark world of the spirit.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding”; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural.

  Further Reading

  Birzer, Bradley J. 2015. Russell Kirk: American Conservative. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

  Herron, Don. 1985. “Russell Kirk: Ghost Master of Mecosta.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction 1, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

  Person, James E., Jr. 1999. Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind. Lanham, MD: Madison Books.

  KLEIN, T. E. D. (1947–)

  Theodore Eibon Donald “Ted” Klein is an American writer and editor who came to prominence during the horror fiction boom of the 1970s and 1980s. His work has been praised for its extension of the themes and approaches of classic horror fiction, in particular the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, into the modern horror tale of the late twentieth century.

  Klein had published several short stories in the early 1970s when, in 1972, his tale “The Events at Poroth Farm” appeared in an issue of the small press magazine From Beyond the Dark Gateway. It is the story of Jeremy Freirs, a young academic who has removed himself to a remote farm in New Jersey to study the classic Gothic fiction that he will be teaching that fall, and who gradually becomes aware that he is under siege by horrors that his immersion in those works has invoked. The novella is richly atmospheric and memorable for its grounding of horrors with a cosmic scope in the mundane reality of its rural setting. In 1984 Klein used it as the foundation for his novel The Ceremonies, in which Jeremy’s experiences are revealed to be part of a greater scheme being engineered by a cosmic entity named the Old One to bring about the destruction of the world. S. T. Joshi, in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writer, called the novel “a conscious adaptation of Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’” that provided “a kind of elaboration or clarification of the hints that Machen left perhaps too vague” (Joshi 1988, 330). The Ceremonies was awarded the British Fantasy Award for best novel in 1985.

  Klein’s first short-fiction collection, Dark Gods (1986), featured four novellas similar in their concerns and ambitions to “The Events at Poroth Farm.” “Petey” (1979) is a semi-satirical tale in which guests indulging in banal small talk at a house party in Connecticut are unaware of the imminent threat posed to them by a monstrous creature raised as a pet by the house’s former owner. “Black Man with a Horn,” whose narrator is modeled on H. P. Lovecraft’s friend and colleague Frank Belknap Long, is a Cthulhu Mythos tale about a writer who has lived in the shadow of a more famous writer friend only to discover that he is doomed to suffer a horrific fate typical of those experienced by victims in his friend’s horror fiction. In “Children of the Kingdom,” an ancient race of eldritch beings that supposedly died out eons ago emerges to menace the residents of New York City during the chaos of the city’s blackout of 1977. The protagonist of “Nadelman’s God” is a man who is horrified to discover that a nihilistic poem invoking a malignant god that he wrote in his disillusioned youth is being used as a blueprint by a zealous fan to create a monstrous servant for that god. The story won the World Fantasy Award in 1986.

  In 1981 Klein was tapped to serve as editor of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, a position he held until 1985. During his tenure with the magazine, Klein published the work of many writers whose careers are synonymous with the post–Stephen King horror boom. Klein himself wrote a series of pseudonymous columns for the magazine under the title “Dr. Van Helsing’s Handy Guide to Ghost Stories,” and his work as an editor informed his nonfiction guide for writing horror fiction, Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit (1988). Klein edited the true crime magazine CrimeBeat between 1991 and 1993. In 1993 he also wrote the screenplay for Dario Argento’s film Trauma. Klein’s second collection, Reassuring Tales (2006), brought together most of his previously uncollected short stories. His second novel, the urban horror story Nighttown, was announced shortly after the publication of The Ceremonies but has yet to be published.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: The Ceremonies; Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Gods; Lovecraftian Horror; Machen, Arthur; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 1988. “T(heodore) E(ibon) D(onald) Klein.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 329–330. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. “T. E. D. Klein: Urban Horror.” In The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Hor
ror Fiction, 95–114. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Mariconda, Stephen J. 1986. “The Hints and Portents of T. E. D. Klein.” Studies in Weird Fiction 1 (Summer): 19–28.

  Price, Robert M. “T. E. D. Klein.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 68–85. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  Winter, Douglas E. 1985. “T. E. D. Klein.” In Faces of Fear, 122–135. New York: Berkley.

  KNEALE, NIGEL (1922–2006)

  Nigel Kneale was the professional name used by Thomas Nigel Kneale, a British writer of fantasy and science fiction. He is best known for his work in television and movies, especially for the four films featuring his scientist Bernard Quatermass.

  Kneale’s first book and sole collection of short fiction, Tomato Cain (1949), collected twenty-nine stories, several of which veer into horror and the macabre. The book’s most reprinted story, “The Pond,” concerns an eccentric who stuffs and dresses frogs for fantasy dioramas, and the just deserts served him on his last visit to the nearby pond. Three stories feature ghosts: “Minuke,” about a destructive poltergeist; “Peg,” about a fourteen-year-old ghost killed during the London Blitz who pines for contact with the living; and “The Patter of Little Feet,” in which a man is haunted by the ghost of the child his dead wife wanted but could never have. “Jeremy in the Wind” and “Oh Mirror, Mirror” both are dramatic monologues, the one spoken by a scarecrow-toting serial killer, and the other by a domineering aunt who persuades her niece to believe that she is repulsively ugly. “Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty” is a modern retelling of a classic fairy tale, while “The Tarroo-Ushtey” and “The Calculation of M’Bambwe” are contemporary folktales that hinge on the clash of science and superstition, a common theme in Kneale’s work.

  The streamlined prose and tightly focused scenarios of Kneale’s short fiction anticipate his work as a screenwriter. His television play The Quatermass Experiment (1953) introduced the eponymous series scientist, a foe of bureaucrats and politicians who is sensitive to Earth’s vulnerability to hostile invasion in the nascent space age. The three Quatermass television plays, written for the BBC—The Quatermass Experiment (a.k.a. The Creeping Unknown), Quatermass II (a.k.a. Enemy from Space), and Quatermass and the Pit (a.k.a. Five Million Years to Earth)—were later adapted as feature films, as was the novel Quatermass (a.k.a. The Quatermass Conclusion). All explored the horrific implications of their alien invasion theme, the most compelling being Quatermass and the Pit, in which it is revealed that an alien race influenced human evolution millions of years ago and encoded our species with divisive aggressions that continue to express themselves in contemporary times.

  Kneale also adapted George Orwell’s 1984 and Susan Hill’s ghost novel The Woman in Black as television plays in 1954 and 1989, respectively. His television play The Creature (1955) was filmed by Hammer Studios as The Abominable Snowman (1957) from his screenplay. Hammer also filmed his adaptation of Norah Lofts’s novel The Devil’s Own (1960) as The Witches (1966). His other memorable adaptations include the television play The Stone Tape (1972) and the screenplays for First Men in the Moon (with Jan Read, 1964), Look Back in Anger (1958), and The Entertainer, the latter two both adapted from plays by John Osborne and filmed by Tony Richardson. Kneale was awarded the Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for Lifetime Achievement in 2001, and the Karl Edward Wagner Award of the British Fantasy Society in 2005.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; The Woman in Black; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.

  Further Reading

  Murray, Andy. 2006. Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. Manchester, UK: Headpress.

  Rolinson, Dave, and Karen Devlin. 2008. “A New Wilderness: Memory and Language in the Television Science Fiction of Nigel Kneale.” Science Fiction Film and Television 1, no. 1 (Spring): 45–65.

  Westfahl, Gary. 1998. “Kneale, (Thomas) Nigel.” In St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

  KOJA, KATHE (1960–)

  Kathe Koja is an American writer, playwright, director, and producer known for her highly original, intense stream-of-consciousness prose and memorably grotesque horror fiction, often set in grimy urban postindustrial landscapes and imbued with a punk/Goth subcultural sensibility. She has been associated with the “splatterpunk” school of horror fiction, and also with the New Weird.

  Koja was born in Detroit, Michigan, and lives there to this day with her husband Rick Lieder, an illustrator whose work has been featured on many of her print and e-book covers. The Cipher (1991), Koja’s first novel, whose first edition featured a cover by Marshall Arisman, launched the Dell Abyss contemporary horror line in February 1991 and won that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. It also won a Locus Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for Philip K. Dick and Nebula awards, while Koja’s third novel, Skin (1993), was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

  Koja’s début novel narrates the story of Nicholas and Nakota, mired in an unhappy relationship, who discover a strange hole that grotesquely transforms everything that enters it, including human flesh. This was followed by Bad Brains (1992), Skin, Strange Angels (1994), and Kink (1996), all featuring tormented artistic outsiders who get pulled into bizarre and often harmful relationships with themselves and each other. Koja also compiled sixteen of her short stories in Extremities (1998), which had previously been published in magazines and collections such as Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dark Voices, Omni, and A Whisper of Blood. She has also collaborated with science fiction author Barry Malzberg on a number of short fictions. In the early 2000s she produced several fictions for young adults, including Straydog (2002), Buddha Boy (2003), The Blue Mirror (2004), Talk (2005), Going Under (2006), Kissing the Bee (2007), and Headlong (2008). She has also published a trilogy—Under the Poppy (2010), The Mercury Waltz (2014), The Bastards’ Paradise (2015)—and a novel about Christopher Marlowe. In addition to her authorial work, she founded the immersive ensemble nerve, along with Loudermilk Productions, to create and perform works of her own devising as well as private commissions.

  Koja’s extraordinary, sensuous style has repeatedly been described as a distinctive “voice” and, as Paula Guran remarks, can only be presented accurately by providing a sample (Guran 1998). Here, for example, is a passage from Skin, in which welder Tess Bajac first encounters the avant-garde performance artist troupe for which she will eventually create kinetic sculptures, including dancer Bibi Bloss, who becomes Tess’s lover:

  Sandrine changing the tape and now the music began, a spare rhythm, simple drum beat slow but somehow unsettling, a moment’s close listening to discern why: deliberately uneven, it ran ¾ then skipped, a stuttering but no pattern even in that. Bibi in front, the others scattered triangular around her, all four heads down, arms hanging bonelessly loose. Tess saw a muscle moving in Bibi’s thigh, was she consciously keeping time and how could she, there was no time to keep. And a keening, for a startled moment she thought it was coming from the tape but no, it was them, all three of the women in the same painful note, only Paul silent and then it was Bibi moving forward, still keening, still bent and now crouching, half her body frozen like a stroke patient, like a corpse, the other women swaying silent on their feet, arms like wind-cracked branches and Paul crablike, mouth open in Kabuki grimace as he crept sideways to Bibi, still in her terrible stasis, still keening like the warning of disaster unavoidable and then as Paul’s outstretched arm reached the barest periphery of her skin, the flat landscape of her belly, she struck him, not in pantomime, not with an actor’s false violence but truly hit him hard, Tess wincing instinctively at the dull meaty sound. (Koja 1993, 23)

  Koja’s work is notable for its exploration of love and obsession, as well as pain and loss in relationships, often with strongly feminist themes of women becoming especially powerful due
to their suffering or monstrosity. In her story “The Neglected Garden” (1991), for example, Anne, who is being dumped by her former lover Richard, refuses to leave their house, impales herself with wire tethering her to the backyard fence, and begins an appalling transformation into a creature with flowers sprouting around her and in her mouth, and spiderwebs in her ear, even as she is somehow rotting, yet “lush with growth” (Koja 1998, 18). Richard’s increasingly abusive attempts to get rid of her finally culminate in his spraying her with pesticide, which only transforms her further into a terrifying monster with blackened eyes, lips, and snake-like tongue, which chases after him with a smile. In another funhouse mirror of family and relationship, “Teratisms,” first published in A Whisper of Blood (1991), Koja presents incestuous siblings Randle and Mitch, burdened with the care of monstrous younger brother Alex, who seems to be constantly covered in gore and who vomits out baby fingers in a fast-food restaurant.

  Aalya Ahmad

  See also: Body Horror; Bram Stoker Award; The Grotesque; New Weird; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

  Further Reading

  Arnzen, Michael A. 1995. “Behold the Funhole: Post-Structuralist Theory and Kathe Koja’s The Ciper.” Paradoxa 1, no. 3: 342–351.

  Guran, Paula. 1998. “Kathe Koja: Transcendence and Transformation.” Omni Online, January. http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/archives/koja.html.

  Hantke, Steffen. 1995. “Deconstructing Horror: Commodities in the Fiction of Jonathan Carroll and Kathe Koja.” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 3: 41–57.

  Hantke, Steffen. 2003. “Kathe Koja.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 541–550. New York: Thomson/Gale.

  Koja, Kathe. 1993. Skin. New York: Dell Abyss.

  Koja, Kathe. 1998. Extremities: Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.