Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Dark Fantasy; Vampires; Weird Tales; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Cowperthwaite, David. 1993. Tanith Lee, Mistress of Delirium. Liverpool, UK: British Fantasy Society.

  Haut, Mavis. 2001. The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Moran, Maureen F. 2002. “Tanith Lee.” British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers since 1960, edited by Darren Harris-Fain. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 261. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  “Tanith Lee Obituary.” 2015. The Guardian, June 1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/tanith-lee.

  LEE, VERNON (1856–1935)

  Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of Violet Paget. Born in France to expatriate parents, she was the half-sister of Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a career invalid whom she nursed for a long time until he decided to get up and get married. A pioneer of the British aesthetic movement (ca. 1850–1910), she is mostly remembered today for her supernatural stories. She never married and was widely reputed to be a lesbian, although she never confirmed or denied it; at any rate, she was able to insert into her literary accounts of sexual passion a kind of objectivity that construed erotic attraction as a dangerous fever, and evaluated its effects with a cutting sarcasm.

  The novella A Phantom Lover (1886), reprinted in the landmark collection Hauntings (1890) as “Oke of Okehurst,” describes the tragic unwinding of a family curse rooted in ancestral adultery. Two of the other items in the collection, the femme fatale stories “Amour Dure” and “Dionea,” gradually release the repression exerted by their quasi-academic style to put on lurid displays of seductive power. “A Wicked Voice” is not quite a femme fatale story, because its alluring phantom is a castrato male rather than a female; calmer in consequence than its companions, it aspires—not without a telling ambiguity—to a higher degree of aesthetic purity.

  The longest story in Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1907), “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” originally appeared in John Lane’s Yellow Book and exhibits a studied ironic Decadence befitting that notorious periodical. As in other works based on the same anecdote from Philostratus’s highly fanciful Life of Apollonius of Tyana, including John Keats’s “Lamia” and Théophile Gautier’s “Clarimonde,” the reality principle intrudes upon the protagonist’s fascination by a lamia (a demonic vampiric-type monster). The other supernatural tales in the volume are polished decorative fantasies contrasting sharply with the intense tales in Hauntings, but with their cynicism and license they can be seen as falling into the tradition of contes cruels (tales of brutality and cynicism).

  For Maurice: Five Unlikely Tales (1927) assembled five more fanciful tales, including “Winthrop’s Adventure” (first published 1874 as “A Culture-Ghost”) and “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers” (1889), the most unrepentantly feverish of all Lee’s sexual fantasies, featuring a quixotic Don Juan. “Marsyas in Flanders” (1900) features a pagan idol mistaken for a Christian image, whose true nature cannot be suppressed by adoption. Lee’s other supernatural fiction includes one item with a significant element of horror, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” (1890), a tale of ineptly repressed sexuality.

  Lee did not see her supernatural stories as important elements of her literary endeavor, and never wrote anything of that kind as substantial as Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s lurid historical novel The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903). In spite of a marked tendency to neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion), she maintained her literary productivity far better than her half-brother, and her work always retains a methodical efficiency.

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.

  Further Reading

  Colby, Vinetta. 2003. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

  Gunn, Peter. 1964. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935. London: Oxford University Press.

  Pulham, Patricia. 2008. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate.

  Stableford, Brian. 2001. “Haunted by the Pagan Past: An Introduction to Vernon Lee.” infinity plus, December. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/introduces/lee.htm.

  “THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”

  Published originally in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), a pseudonymous collection of Washington Irving’s first short prose pieces (including “Rip Van Winkle”), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of Irving’s best-known works of Gothic horror. Notable particularly for its reproduction of traditional Dutch settler customs and local ghost fables, the narrative was inspired by the young Irving’s familiarity with the real town of Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York.

  While much of Irving’s tale recounts in listless fashion the dreamlike qualities of life in Sleepy Hollow and the somewhat mundane rituals of the local schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, Irving’s strength as a writer of Gothic horror lies in his ability to intermittently lull the reader into comfort with his dreamy narrative style before quickly heightening suspense, marshaling local superstitions and stories of the now-famous headless horseman to tauten the atmosphere within the text.

  Irving’s story trades largely in the superstitions of old housewives’ tales, and, in large part, “Sleepy Hollow” details the despairing effects a fearful imagination run wild has upon the individual. Indeed, this is a story about the irrationality of fear itself. The world of Sleepy Hollow is one in which old superstitions become in the minds of the locals fearful beliefs, and where people frequently report strange visions and ghostly encounters. It is with a fearful, ritualized pride, too, that the locals of Sleepy Hollow recount their shared fears and would-be myths of the headless horseman in particular. Fear and the collective cultural response to it is at the heart of “Sleepy Hollow.”

  Moreover, Irving’s tale is quite explicit in linking this fear to America’s historical past, and to the fervor for advancement and the migration of peoples away from the old colonies that characterized early modern America. Irving neatly suggests that America’s ghost stories are tied to the old Dutch settlements precisely because the ghosts of the past (fears of the old world itself) are immobile, static reminders of early American frontier fears, against which the rationale of later modern America is defined.

  Above all, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” presents a philosophical debate between illogical superstition and rational enlightenment thinking. Irving is mocking of Ichabod Crane, whom he describes as one of the “pioneers of the mind” (Irving 1994, 34), yet who is nevertheless a firm believer in the marvelous and the fantastic. In spite of his learnedness, Ichabod is of “small shrewdness and simple credulity” (Irving 1994, 39), and when his love rival, Brom Bones, dresses up as the fabled headless horseman, carrying a carved pumpkin for a head to scare off Ichabod, the credulous Ichabod is so overcome by his own illogical fears that he leaves town.

  Irving’s tale is a vindication of the values of rational thinking. That Ichabod actually believes his pursuer to be a Hessian solider who has literally lost his head in battle is an indictment of his own simple credulity. The real horror at the center of this story is the fear of losing one’s head—not literally, but figuratively, like Ichabod—and the idea that irrational superstition should ever win over the values of logic and rationality—a distinctly American fear.

  The story of “Sleepy Hollow” continues to appeal to popular culture and was brought to life in Tim Burton’s 1999 film adaptation starring Johnny Depp (in which the ambiguity of Brom’s deception of Ichabod in Irving’s tale is made overt). More recently, the television network Fox adapted the story into a supernatural serial thriller that has generated a new wave of interest in Irving as a Gothic writer and continues to draw many more fans to his work.

  Ian Kinane

  See also: Irving, Washington.

  Further Reading

  Aderman, Ralph M., ed. 1990. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston: G. K. Hall.

 
; Anderson, Donald. 2003. “Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Explicator 61, no. 4: 207–210.

  Burstein, Andrew. 2007. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books.

  Irving, Washington. [1820] 1994. Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories. London: Puffin.

  Jones, Brian Jay. 2008. Washington Irving: An American Original. New York: Arcade.

  Smith, Greg. 2001. “Supernatural Ambiguity and Possibility in Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’” Midwest Quarterly 42, no. 2: 174–182.

  LEIBER, FRITZ (1910–1992)

  Fritz Leiber, born in 1910 in Chicago, was one of the most multifariously talented writers of popular fantastic literature who ever lived, widely celebrated—along with Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury—as a pioneer of the modern horror genre in the United States. Over a sixty-year career, Leiber not only produced science fiction classics such as The Big Time (1958), but also pioneered the genre of sword-and-sorcery, with his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series. His best science fiction drew themes and tones from horror literature, with the 1943 novel Gather, Darkness! imagining a theocratic (religiously governed) dystopia where technoscience is disguised as sorcery, while the 1950 short story “Coming Attraction” depicts a desolate postapocalyptic future where sadomasochistic subcultures engage in startling acts of random violence, and the 1953 novel You’re All Alone explores the theme of claustrophobic entrapment in a paranoid technological mindscape. As evidence of his enormous versatility, Leiber is one of only three authors (the others being Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison) to have won lifetime achievement awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the World Fantasy Association, and the Horror Writers of America (now the Horror Writers Association) combined.

  Throughout his long career, Leiber proved remarkably adaptable to changing vogues within the field, being equally at home in John W. Campbell’s pulp magazine Astounding during its 1940s Golden Age as in Michael Moorcock’s avant-garde periodical New Worlds during the New Wave movement a quarter-century later. Yet the publication that gave him his most successful platform from which to launch a new breed of horror story was undoubtedly Campbell’s Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds), which debuted in 1939. Through its mere four years of existence, Unknown made an indelible mark on the genre, sweeping away a century of Gothic cobwebs and ushering in a skeptical, streamlined depiction of uncanny presences hovering on the margins of modern life. Arguably, Leiber was the most significant originator of this trend. He consistently managed to capture the potent blend of horror, science fiction, and urban noir for which Unknown came to be celebrated.

  “Smoke Ghost”: The Specter of Urban Malaise

  “Smoke Ghost,” originally published in the pulp magazine Unknown (a.k.a. Unknown Worlds) and subsequently widely anthologized, pioneered the tale of modern urban horror and updates a classic horror theme—the ghostly revenant—for a contemporary setting.

  As its title implies, “Smoke Ghost” recounts a ghastly haunting, but the eponymous specter is no conventional phantasm; rather, it is the veritable incarnation of big-city squalor and malaise. A grimy, shambling creature that spectrally incarnates the spirit of industrial civilization with its soot and pounding machinery, it stalks the protagonist relentlessly, first as a series of silhouettes glimpsed from his subway seat and high-rise office building, then as a demonic amalgam of all the psychological trials of urban life, and finally as a demonic idol demanding total subservience and devotion. Leiber’s smoke ghost is, in short, the embodiment of all of urban modernity’s compelling contradictions: its boundless creativity and entropic decay, its brutal dynamism and boring stasis, its exhilaration and despair. The protagonist, a representative urban everyman, is susceptible to its predatory wiles because it is, in essence, the embodiment of his own incipient dreads and smothered despairs.

  The tone of the story—paranoid, borderline hysterical, nervously alert to subtle hints and lurking portents—would exert an enormous influence on future chroniclers of urban anxiety and dread. Indeed, Leiber’s work during the 1940s, which located the uncanny not in the Gothic relics of the past but in modern sites and situations, made possible the explosion of urban horror that took place during the postwar period.

  Rob Latham

  Leiber’s best work for Unknown included the groundbreaking stories “Smoke Ghost” (1941) and Conjure Wife (1943), which updated, for a modern urban environment, classic ghost and witch stories, respectively. During the 1940s, Leiber published a series of similar efforts—in Unknown, Weird Tales, and elsewhere—that explored specifically contemporary forms of horror, usually in an urban milieu. In “The Hound” (1942), the werewolves of medieval folklore are replaced by a monster spawned by city-dwellers’ fears and insecurities, with the title creature’s animal sounds emerging from and merging with the noise of traffic and industry. Similarly, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) updates the conventions of the vampiric femme fatale for a world of modern consumerism. Leiber continued producing such tales of urban dread throughout his career, interspersed with a wide range of other work; his best horror stories can be found in such seminal collections as Night’s Black Agents (1947), Shadows with Eyes (1962), and Night Monsters (1969). In 1977, his novel Our Lady of Darkness, about occult presences in modern-day San Francisco, served as a fitting capstone for his rich and sophisticated contribution to the field.

  In 1984, the retrospective collection The Ghost Light gathered much of Leiber’s finest work, including the title story, an eerie novella of ambiguous spectral beings, and “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” (1965), a tale that drew on Leiber’s experiences as a Shakespearean actor. The book is capped by an autobiographical essay in which the author muses on his long life and career.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; Conjure Wife; Dark Fantasy; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Our Lady of Darkness; Pulp Horror; The Uncanny; Weird Tales; Witches and Witchcraft; World Fantasy Award; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Shakespearean Horrors.

  Further Reading

  Byfield, Bruce. 1991. Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

  Goho, James. 2014. “City of Darkness: The Beginnings of Modern Urban Horror.” In Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror, 181–204. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1988. “Poetry of Darkness: The Horror Fiction of Fritz Leiber.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, 18–29. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2008. Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  LEWIS, MATTHEW GREGORY (1775–1818)

  Matthew Gregory Lewis was commonly known by his contemporaries as Matthew “Monk” Lewis or simply “Monk” Lewis, a reference to his most infamous and influential novel, The Monk (1796). Lewis is best known for this scandalous first work, written when he was nineteen, during the short period he served as a member of Parliament (MP), and in part a response to Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the “explained supernatural.” Lewis’s deviation from this approach would characterize his work for the rest of his life. The Monk showcases supernatural events as truly supernatural and favors graphic depictions of violence and gore over less descriptive insinuations. His work falls into the category of horror, as defined by Radcliffe, opposed to her preferred use of terror. In his work, one can see the influence of the German schauerroman literature (or shudder-novel), as well as French Revolution violence and an unstable family life, all of which would establish the foundations of the Gothic tradition.

  Lewis’s first work was not his last, though it is the work for which most students of the Gothic recognize him. He was careful to avoid another scandal in further work, but his oeuvre never strayed far from the realm of horror. A prolific writer of poetry and drama, such as his most important play, The Castle Spectre (1797), he was also a talented translator, and many of h
is works walked the fine line between translation, adaptation, and imitation. His poetry tended toward Gothic themes, but what contemporaries praised most was his skill at writing verse, particularly his experimental form in such poems as “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine” (first published in The Monk), appropriately called “Alonzo meter.” Lewis influenced many canonical Romantic poets, mentoring Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even Lord Byron, who sought his advice on his own work. Lewis’s anthology of poetry, Tales of Wonder (1801), included works from several poets, Scott included, as well as his own translations, original poetry, and even a parody of one of his poems. The collection Tales of Terror, published shortly thereafter, was attributed to him by his nineteenth-century biographer, an error that has only recently been rectified. The author of this second collection remains unknown, but the text is widely understood to be a parody of (or tribute to) Tales of Wonder. Today’s scholars take particular interest in approaches to sexuality, gender, and race in all of Lewis’s works, as well as their unique and playful forms.

  In 1812, Lewis’s father Matthew—deputy secretary of war and a sugar plantation owner—died, leaving the writer his Jamaican property and its slaves, a charge that Lewis approached with seriousness and anxiety. While his own politics were fairly inconsistent, Lewis expressed concern for his slaves and an interest in their freedom. His last work was one of his most remarkable: Journal of a West India Proprietor (written 1815–1818 and published 1834). Lewis died at sea from yellow fever on a return trip from Jamaica. “Monk” Lewis not only penned one of the most defining texts within one of the most defining periods of the Gothic tradition, but he worked within that tradition’s forms throughout his life, inspiring writers and audiences with his craft and the power of horror.

  Laura R. Kremmel