Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  “The Eyrie.” 1932. Weird Tales 20, no. 2 (August): 148–150, 271.

  Jackson, Robert Louis. 1993. Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  Newcombe, Josephine M. 1973. Leonid Andreyev. New York: Frederick Ungar.

  Zhenevsky, Vlad. 2013. “An Introduction to Leonid Andreyev.” Weird Fiction Review, October 30. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/10/an-introduction-to-leonid-andreyev.

  LE FANU, J. SHERIDAN (1814–1873)

  Few authors’ lives reflect the dark and mysterious image of the horror writer as strikingly as does the life of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu is most remembered for a number of supernatural short stories, most notably “Schalken the Painter” (1839), “Squire Toby’s Will” (1868), “Green Tea” (1869), and the influential vampire novella Carmilla (1872). He published fourteen novels that, while not in the horror genre, show the development of his talent for the subtle creation of dark and foreboding atmospheres. The most well received of these is Uncle Silas (1964). A prolific author working in multiple genres, Le Fanu had a successful career as newspaper publisher and editor that warrants some comparison to the careers of his two great contemporaries: Charles Dickens in England, and Edgar Allan Poe in America. Similarities to the latter in both life and fiction even led St. John Sweeney to dub Le Fanu “The Irish Poe” in The Journal of Irish Literature (Sweeney 1986). Like the work of both of these authors, Le Fanu’s short tales of horror and the uncanny remain today among the very first rank in the genre.

  A descendant of persecuted Huguenot emigrants, Le Fanu grew up as the son of a Protestant clergyman, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, who served as Dean of Emly in Abington, County Limerick, in southern Ireland throughout most of Joseph’s childhood. Thomas Le Fanu’s mother was the sister of the celebrated Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the Sheridan connection remains a source of pride throughout the Le Fanu family. Later in life, Joseph would acquire Brinsley Sheridan’s writing desk, upon which he would compose some of his own work.

  Unfortunately, Le Fanu came of age during a time of much religious and political strife between Catholics and Protestants. In his formative years, he witnessed protest violence and threats of violence brought about by religious and political power struggles, including perhaps the Limerick food riots of 1830. His brother William narrowly escaped stoning by a mob during the Tithe Wars of the early 1830s, an act of retribution against their father’s position in the Church of Ireland. Others in his family also barely escaped violent confrontations by Irish nationalists against those of the Protestant ascendancy.

  Le Fanu was nevertheless captivated throughout his childhood by the rich tradition of folk legends, superstitions, and supernatural tales spread throughout rural Ireland: tales of fairies, banshees, dearg-dues, and other restless spirits. Despite religious and political tensions, the Le Fanus were still well liked by many members of the parish whom they served well, and young Joseph found plenty of opportunities for listening to Irish legends and superstitions told firsthand by the local peasantry. From them he gained both a wealth of imaginative stories and an empathy for their plight. Both would later find expression in his writing and intrigue him throughout his life.

  Le Fanu gained acceptance at Trinity College in Dublin in 1832. Always a bookish boy, he had taken early to writing stories and enjoying his father’s large library and so was a proficient student despite some experience with an ineffectual childhood tutor who often took more interest in tying fishing lures than in teaching Joseph and his brother. Throughout their childhood, the Le Fanu children were educated at home and in a relaxed way that suited Joseph well, allowing him free time to be entertained by local legends and pore over his father’s collection of classics and obscure religious texts. He flourished at Trinity, becoming an active officer in the College Historical Society and a talented debater. He graduated with honors in 1837 and continued to study law until called to the bar in 1939, a career path he ultimately decided to abandon, much to the disappointment of his peers, who saw in his debate skills a promising barrister.

  Between 1838 and 1840, Le Fanu published a dozen short stories in the Dublin University Magazine, his first being “The Ghost and the Bonesetter” (1838), a tale set firmly in the Irish tradition in which Le Fanu treats an old superstition with both humor and the local color of legendary Irish yarns (complete with dialect). He demonstrated yet more promise in “Schalken the Painter” (1839), a tale of the fantastic in which supernatural portent is drawn thickly, leaving readers chilled and reeling with unanswered questions. That Le Fanu’s stories were accepted so readily by a publisher encouraged him to indulge his budding talent and set him onto a new path.

  By the time he was called to the bar, Le Fanu had instead flung himself into his passion for journalism, continuing to publish the short fictions that would later be collected and posthumously published as The Purcell Papers (1880). These initial stories are each presented as the manuscripts of a priest by the name of Father Francis Purcell. Le Fanu would later return to the presentation of the collected manuscript in his final collection, In a Glass Darkly (1872).

  In 1841, Le Fanu purchased a newspaper of his own, The Warder, and settled into the busy life of newspaper owner and editor. In 1844, at the age of thirty and established in a career, he married Susanna Bennett. They remained happily married for fourteen years during which Le Fanu published his first two novels, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847). They had four children together, two sons and two daughters. Susanna’s death in 1858 produced a profound sadness in Le Fanu, and he began to withdraw from public life shortly thereafter, entertaining fewer guests and engaging in a burst of prolific writing that produced twelve novels in ten years between 1863 and 1873, along with myriad short stories, articles, and lyrical ballads.

  Le Fanu’s copious literary output coincided with his purchase of the Dublin University Magazine in 1861, the same magazine that had published his first short stories. Over the next eight years, under Le Fanu’s supervision, the publication returned to its former prominence. The majority of his novels were serialized in the magazine, and he continued to publish short ghostly tales and mysteries in its pages.

  In 1864, midway through his tenure at the Dublin University Magazine, Le Fanu published what would become his most notable novel, Uncle Silas. While Uncle Silas does not venture into the supernatural, it does threaten unspeakable horrors and presents an unrelenting atmosphere of ominous foreboding and evil threat. Silas, the ill-reputed uncle of the orphaned Maud Ruthyn, cares for her at his estate, Bartram-Haugh. Upon his death, her father wills Maud the family fortune when she comes of age; however, a codicil stipulates that if she were to die before coming of age, the fortune would then go to Silas. As expected, Maud (and the reader) begins to understand that terrible menace awaits her at Bartram-Haugh. Le Fanu’s adept building of dark suspense throughout the novel also permeates his horror tales, including the earlier “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances on Aungier Street” (1853), and with further sophistication in Carmilla.

  Throughout this period, Le Fanu receded further into the shadows of Dublin. Le Fanu was known to “emerge like an apparition” at the local booksellers just at dusk to inquire “Any more ghost stories for me?” (Browne 1951, 27). Many anecdotes exist of Le Fanu’s late-night requests for books on both ghosts and demons. Fellow Dubliners began to refer to the self-isolating Le Fanu as “the Invisible Prince,” glimpsing him only at odd hours as he slipped quietly to and from his newspaper office. While remaining pleasant and welcoming to a tight circle of friends for some time, he became increasingly reclusive in later years, avoiding the public and at times even turning away his closest friends when they called at his home in Merrion Square.

  Le Fanu sold the Dublin University Magazine in 1868, but did not cease writing. His late works are some of his most memorable and are marked with disturbing themes of death, guilt, and the supernat
ural. They also bear an eerie similarity to his personal afflictions. At least part of Le Fanu’s reputation as the Invisible Prince stems from his acquired writing habits as, plagued by recurrent nightmares, he would often awake in the night and, propped up in bed, write by candlelight into the early hours of the morning. Five of his late tales, collected as In a Glass Darkly, introduce isolated and haunted characters whose torment stems as much from their own conscience or obsession as it does from supernatural presences. In stories like “Green Tea” (1869)—published in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round—one recognizes the aged Le Fanu in the character of Mr. Jennings, a scholar obsessed with the study of the Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and his visions of the spiritual dimension: the realms beyond death.

  Le Fanu’s own interest in the writings of Swedenborg (1688–1772) first appear in Uncle Silas and feature more prominently in “Green Tea,” in which the main character, the Reverend Mr. Jennings, experiences, to his horror, what happens when his “interior sight is opened” to a Swedenborgian spiritual realm. Jennings becomes tormented by a “spectral” monkey, a ghostly presence that will not leave him alone and seeks to drive him mad. For Jennings, the monkey may represent religious doubts, its form a symbol of the threat of Darwin’s scientific theory to religious thought throughout the 1860s. For Le Fanu, the spectral presence may indeed represent a more personal torment: his continued anxiety over the soul of his beloved Susanna. Her religious doubts and anxiety before her death caused Le Fanu enormous grief, and he worried whether she might have doubted her soul into hell.

  The last year before his death, Le Fanu completed what would become his most well-known and long-lasting work: the vampire tale Carmilla. In writing Carmilla, Le Fanu draws upon a few prior vampire tales, including John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) as well as traditional Romanian folklore. Unflinching homoeroticism pervades the narrative of a female vampire visiting her desires upon Laura, the young female protagonist. Bram Stoker owes a debt to Carmilla, from which he borrowed not only the shockingly sexualized image of the vampire in Dracula (1897) but also the image of the vampire hunter. Stoker’s Dr. Abraham von Helsing, with some alliteration, borrows heavily from Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius and Baron Vordenburg, Le Fanu’s paternal characters who are also students of both science and the paranormal. Next to Dracula, Carmilla still ranks as one of the most influential narratives in all of vampire fiction.

  Demonstrating his flair for the horror short story as early as 1838, Le Fanu developed his method and style of horror independently of Edgar Allan Poe, whose essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) is often credited with setting forth the modern short story (and horror story) methodology. Le Fanu’s inspirations sprang directly from his life: the violence and political turmoil of his childhood years, chilling Irish folklore and superstition, the pain and bereavement over the loss of his wife, his studies in Swedenborgian spiritualism, and his own recurring nightmare—as he once related to his doctor—of a huge and rotting mansion threatening to topple and crush him.

  Le Fanu died at his home in Merrion Square, Dublin on February 7, 1873, having published some of his most enduring work only months before. Upon finding him in his bed, his doctor is reported to have said, “I feared this—that house fell at last” (Browne 1951, 31). Le Fanu’s talent has been praised by authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Henry James, M. R. James, and Dorothy L. Sayers. His work has been a direct influence on some of the most prestigious Irish authors to follow him, including not only Bram Stoker, but also W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. His work, although highly esteemed and influential, has not been as prominently or widely recognized within the horror genre during the last century as may be warranted. More recently, though, it appears that this neglect is beginning to lift.

  Mark Wegley

  See also: Carmilla; Dracula; “Green Tea”; In a Glass Darkly; James, Henry; James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; “Schalken the Painter”; Spiritualism; Stoker, Bram; The Uncanny; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Browne, N. 1951. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Roy.

  Crawford, Gary William. 1995. J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Harris, Sally. 2003. “Spiritual Warnings: The Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” Victorians Institute Journal 31: 9–39.

  McCormack, W. J. 1980. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon.

  Melada, I. 1987. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne.

  Sweeney, J. 1986. “Sheridan Le Fanu: The Irish Poe.” Journal of Irish Literature 15: 3–32.

  Wegley, M. 2002. “Fear Unknowable: Le Fanu’s Contribution to the Literary Fantastic.” Paradoxa 17: 32–51.

  LEE, TANITH (1947–2015)

  Tanith Lee was a British author of fantasy, science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. She published more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories, a great number of which contain horror elements, however they are classified.

  The difficulty of categorizing Lee as an author is evident from the opening to her story “Death Dances,” published in Weird Tales in 1988. The story begins: “Death came to Idradrud at suns’ rise. She had appointments to keep.” The city of Idradrud sounds a little like India, but it is clearly the sort of imaginary city familiar from the genre of fantasy fiction. However, there are two suns in the sky, and it is unclear whether this means the story is set on another planet and may therefore have affinities with science fiction. The personification of death, for its part, locates the story in horror territory. Lee’s work always mixed genres and blurred boundaries.

  Her fiction is vivid and sensual, with a style that is sometimes almost like prose poetry, as if it were written for the sheer delight of language and imagery. For example, her story “The Werewolf” (1976) does nothing particularly original with the werewolf legend, but makes it fresh by the immersive intensity of Lee’s writing. Her short fiction often shows a preoccupation with symmetry and form, very much like poetry. In the above-cited “Death Dances,” Death enters the city and, in a series of short episodes, causes various people (including a harlot, a thief, and a priestess) to die and be reborn into one another’s lives, with ironic results. In her World Fantasy Award–winning story “Elle Est Trois, (La Mort)” (1983), which draws its structure from a French rhyme that translates as “She is three, Death,” three failures, a poet, an artist, and a composer, are visited by Death in three forms: seductress, thief, and slaughterer.

  Lee also sometimes deflated the overt fantastic element in her stories, as in her other World Fantasy Award winner, “The Gorgon” (1982), in which a man ignores all warnings and swims to a haunted Greek isle. The “gorgon” there may just be a deformed woman, and he feels a definite loss at the destruction of his expectation of the mythic and marvelous. The “gorgon” has figuratively, if not literally, turned him to stone. “La Vampiresse” (2000) tells of a fabulously glamorous woman, now a recluse, and of the fading of her beauty. She may or may not be a vampire. The reader is given the impression that this is a delusion, but one that is accepted with regret.

  Some of Lee’s novels addressed horror themes directly. Heart Beast (1992) is about an unstoppable werewolf-like creature. Lee’s Blood Opera sequence, consisting of three novels, was commissioned by the editor of the Dell Abyss horror line, so that it could be clearly placed, commercially, in the horror category. Dark Dance (1992), the first novel in the series, introduces Rachaela, a young woman with few prospects in life who turns in desperation to her long-lost relatives, the Scarabae, who are alleged vampires, although they are not actually blood-sucking wraiths. They are very long lived, surviving for centuries and maintaining the purity of their bloodline through multigenerational incest. Rachaela comes to share their hedonistic, mad, but claustrophobic existence, and achieves a sexual awakening in the
bed of Adamus, her own father and the leader of the clan. Pregnant by Adamus, she briefly escapes, but gives birth to Ruth. The relationship between mother and daughter is grim. Adamus now lusts for Ruth. Rachaela is of no more use or interest. Her purpose was merely to continue the nearly immortal Scarabae genes. At the end, Ruth “stakes” several of the family through the heart with knitting needles, burns down the family manor, and vanishes. Arguably, a story like this, about the selective breeding of long-lived people, could be classified as science fiction with its speculative genetics reminiscent of Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children (1958). However, if horror is not a plot element but an emotion that can be evoked by many different kinds of fiction, as the critic Douglas Winter has suggested, then Dark Dance is undeniably a horror novel, with its horror found in Rachaela’s slowly becoming everything she loathes and fears, that is, one of the Scarabae. In the sequel, Personal Darkness (1993), Rachaela sinks into despair, shut off from the world like most of the Scarabae, while Ruth becomes a serial killer and sexual avenger. Another of the terribly seductive Scarabae men attempts to tame Ruth, but she returns to killing and in the end must die. Meanwhile, Rachaela gives birth to a second daughter, Anna, who may be the reincarnation of Ruth. In the third volume, Darkness, I (1994), Anna meets the oldest of the Scarabae line, Cain, and becomes his lover. Anna by this point may have entirely reverted to the persona of the murderous Ruth.

  Upon Lee’s death from cancer in 2015, an obituary published in The Guardian provided just one of many recognitions of her significance to the field of speculative fiction: “Along with Jane Gaskell and Angela Carter, Tanith Lee was . . . one of the most influential revisionist and feminist voices in contemporary fantasy writing. Unlike them, she was principally published and known as a voice firmly rooted in the science-fiction, fantasy and horror world” (“Tanith Lee Obituary” 2015).