Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Machen’s final—arguably underrated—novel The Green Round is usually dismissed as demonstrative of an aging writer’s failing powers. It is composed in the same journalistic, anecdotal style that distinguishes much of his later fiction and is off-putting to some commentators. The story ostensibly relates the convalescence of Hillyer, a reclusive scholar who at the age of fifty-five has developed a nervous condition, in the picturesque Welsh seaside town of Porth. He is baffled when the other residents at the hotel at which he resides turn against him, and rumors spread of his complicity in a local murder, based on his alleged association with a small, evil-looking dwarf. Hillyer returns to London plagued by poltergeist-like disruptions, and the novel’s potent atmosphere of disorienting paranoia intensifies. Although this is an accurate enough sketch in terms of plot fundamentals, it is perhaps misleading since in its execution Machen often interrupts the narrative with essayistic digressions on a range of matters including alchemy, religion, the nature of reality, and sanity and insanity.

  Written, like The Green Round, when Machen was in his seventies, “N” was the only original contribution to The Cosy Room and Other Stories. This short story is a distillation of many ideas he had previously explored, but they are perhaps more perfectly expressed in this tale than in any other. Once again, the narrative is presented indirectly, anecdotally; it is an assembly of first-, second- and third-hand testimony regarding a recurring vision experienced by disparate visitors to a certain region of Stoke Newington in London. It is left up to the reader to piece together these strange fragments, tantalizing pieces of an unsolvable puzzle.

  Apart from the works of specific horror interest mentioned above, Machen left a considerable wider legacy of both fiction and nonfiction, and three volumes of memoirs. Throughout the six- or seven-decade span of his writing career, Machen revisited certain tropes with something approaching monomania, although he steadily refined his treatment of the same material, moving generally away from horror toward something far more ambiguous and oblique. Ultimately, his central preoccupation was with what he considered to be the eternal mystery at the heart of all things. Despite his brief flirtation with the fin-de-siècle occult scene, and contrary to an erroneous assertion in his Times obituary of a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, Machen remained a lifelong high church Anglican. Machen’s profound religiosity informed much of his fiction, especially its visionary aspects and his insistence on the existence of a numinous “reality” inaccessible to human consciousness, but indistinctly refracted through symbol and ritual. He regretted that in his early horror fiction of the 1890s he only managed to render this mystery as something evil, rather than awe-inspiring.

  Although much of his later life was marked by periods of impoverishment and financial uncertainty, his dotage was eased considerably by the securement of a civil list pension, petitioned for by a number of other writers including George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Walter de la Mare. His eightieth birthday celebration was attended by, among other notables, W. W. Jacobs and Algernon Blackwood.

  James Machin

  See also: Blackwood, Algernon; The Ceremonies; du Maurier, Daphne; “The Great God Pan”; Lovecraft, H. P.; “The Novel of the Black Seal”; The Numinous; Samuels, Mark; “The White People.”

  Further Reading

  Arizuno, Lee. 2012. “Leave the Capitol: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen.” The Quietus, October 31. http://thequietus.com/articles/08758-leave-the-capitol-the-weird-tales-of-arthur-machen.

  Gawsworth, John. 2013. The Life of Arthur Machen. Leyburn: Tartarus.

  Goldstone, Adrian, and Wesley Sweetser. 1965. A Bibliography of Arthur Machen. Austin: University of Texas.

  Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Reynolds, Aidan, and William Charlton. 1988. Arthur Machen. Oxford: Caermaen.

  Valentine, Mark. 1995. Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Works. Bridgend: Seren.

  Wells, H. G. 1896. Review of “The Three Impostors” by Arthur Machen. Saturday Review 81, no. 2098 (January 11): 48–49. In The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, vol. LXXXI. London.

  “MACKINTOSH WILLY”

  Written in 1977, British author Ramsey Campbell’s short story “Mackintosh Willy” first appeared in Charles L. Grant’s anthology Shadows 2 in 1979, before publication in the collections Dark Companions (1982), Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987), and Alone with the Horrors (1993). It won a World Fantasy Award in 1980, has been translated into multiple languages, and is one of the author’s most anthologized works.

  The shambling, mumbling drunk dubbed Mackintosh Willy presents a vague threat to the neighborhood children, but most simply shun him when not teasing each other about the local bogeyman—most, if not all, because someone hated the tramp enough to destroy his eyes as he lay dead in a park shelter. As the years go by, something with a metallic glint to its eyes forms in the shadows of that shelter, increasing in strength and malevolence as it draws its prey to a reckoning.

  If the trash-strewn park shelter beside a pool was far from welcoming, its walls not only defaced by graffiti but offering little protection from the rain, its occupancy by a belligerent drunkard made it a place shunned by children and subject to dares by adolescents, even after the derelict’s death. Years afterward, the same fear that drove someone to screw bottle caps into the corpse’s eyes continued to lend its aura to his former residence, imbuing it with sonic, visual, and tactile evidence of his vengeful, waiting presence.

  Throughout the story, a fluid and constant tension blurs the lines between innocence and guilt, reality and imagination, which Campbell deftly channels through the eyes of a narrator suffering through the petty rituals that circumscribe how those growing through childhood into adolescence allow themselves to deal with fear, friendship, loyalty, responsibility, and the attractions of the opposite sex. He builds the narrow “loophole for a natural explanation” recommended by M. R. James (James 2001, 486) directly into the uncertainty and wariness of ridicule natural to children interacting with each other and adults. Thus, the words of strange import overheard in and around the shelter might be fragments of sounds from the radio, the fair, or other outside forces; that heavy sodden body might have been rubbish after all; and it could have been the wind that drove those glittering bottle caps forward like glaring eyes. Meanwhile, the doomed friend has no choice but to face his nemesis, driven not only by misdirection from the ghost, but the goading and embarrassment visited upon him by his friends.

  Imagination and guilt play out simultaneously during a necking scene within the shelter, when the narrator takes delight in his girlfriend’s sudden fear of the place by indulging his own dread, leading to a statement—“I was eager to let my imagination flourish, for it was better than reading a ghost story”—which casts light on a passage at the beginning: “One has to call one’s fears something, if only to gain the illusion of control. Still, sometimes I wonder how much of his monstrousness we created. Wondering helps me not to ponder my responsibility for what happened” (Campbell 1982, 233, 224). The protagonist certainly did not create the ghost, as the graphically violent graffiti and the increasingly shallow, limping tracks in the drying concrete leading from the shelter had appeared prior to this scene; but it is possible he believes himself responsible for assisting in its further incarnation, given his girlfriend’s escalating terror within and the widening of Willy’s activity outside the shelter afterward.

  Some of the elements in the story reveal Campbell to be cognizant of the tradition in which he was working, while reshaping it to fit his own concerns. The pair of gleaming bottle caps illuminating Willy’s eyes are reminiscent of the “two small circular reflections, as it seemed to me of a reddish light” that signal the first appearance of the demonic monkey in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” ([1869] 200
2, 77). Similarly, the blurred voice that sounds as if it is emerging through interference on the radio is not dissimilar to “those soft husky mutterings one hears between items on the radio” in H. R. Wakefield’s “Old Man’s Beard” ([1929] 1996, 14), and the final image of the protagonist fearing to cover his eyes for fear of straying into the pool echoes the peril of the child running toward the river in terror of the ghosts in Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge” (1928). In Campbell these occur in a recognizable location in his native Liverpool and are surrounded by a network of finely graded premonitions and disclosures, which strengthens the reality of the gritty urban setting and characters while infusing the whole with a creeping sense of unease. Campbell manages this through dialogue that is precise, yet natural and prose that, to quote from his story “The Trick” (1976), shows him “relishing each separate word” (1982, 153) while never calling attention away from the tale itself.

  Jim Rockhill

  See also: Campbell, Ramsey; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Wakefield, H. R.; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Campbell, Ramsey. 1982. Dark Companions. Glasgow: Fontana.

  Campbell, Ramsey, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. 1995. The Core of Ramsey Campbell: A Bibliography and Reader’s Guide. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

  James, M. R. [1924] 2001. “Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. In A Pleasing Terror, 486–490. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

  Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. [1869] 2002. “Green Tea.” In The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861–70, 65–88. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.

  Sullivan, Jack. 1982. “No Light Ahead.” Whispers 4, no. 3/4: 34–41.

  Wakefield, H. R. [1929] 1996. “Old Man’s Beard.” In Old Man’s Beard, 3–20. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.

  MAD SCIENTIST

  The figure of the “mad scientist” is one of the most recognizable archetypes in horror literature and film, highlighting a connection between specialized knowledge and sinister acts of godlike creation and Promethean arrogance. While the legendary Faust and other medieval alchemists are the likely historical sources of this icon, its modern incarnation owes everything to the figure of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s celebrated 1818 Gothic novel. Frankenstein established the basic lineaments of the mad scientist, which subsequent texts would deploy and develop: a Promethean artificer whose intellectual ambitions scorn traditional morality and challenge the prerogatives of God himself. In mad scientist narratives, science fiction shades into horror: Victor’s bold commitment to unfettered experimentation makes him capable of both wondrous accomplishment—the creation of an artificial person endowed with superhuman strength and intelligence—and blinkered amorality.

  During the nineteenth century, most major writers of fantastic literature essayed some version of this myth. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), a secretive botanist turns his own child into a kind of poisonous plant; in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a mild-mannered chemist invents a potion that unleashes his demonic id (the monstrous, rapacious underside of the psyche as characterized in Freudian psychology); in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the eponymous vivisector (that is, someone who performs surgical experiments on living animals) creates a race of twisted human-animal hybrids. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wells’s novel points up the ethical limitations of experimental science: Moreau’s brilliance can mold a beast into a human semblance, but it cannot endow the result with virtue or a functioning conscience—thus suggesting a fundamental ambivalence regarding the processes and products of scientific inquiry.

  During the twentieth century, the figure of the mad scientist flourished in the pulp magazines, in stories such as H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922), an overt echo of Frankenstein in which the title character revivifies a corpse, and Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), wherein a crazed inventor accelerates evolution with catastrophic results. The archetype found its most enduring representation, however, in the cinema, especially in the many adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein that followed in the wake of James Whale’s 1931 classic. These stories bequeathed to contemporary popular culture an enduring myth of science as an epochal threat to humanity and a source of moral corruption. In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), mad science even leads to the extermination of the human race in a global spasm of thermonuclear violence.

  The mad scientist has now become something of a cliché in the genre, parodied and pastiched in scores of stories, films, comic books, and video games. The most culturally visible mad scientist of recent years is probably Sir John Hammond, creator of the out-of-control dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park film series (1993–2015), yet another avatar of Frankenstein.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Shelley, Mary; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wells, H. G.

  Further Reading

  Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Haynes, Roslynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  Kirby, David A. 2011. Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Skal, David J. 1998. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. New York: Norton.

  MALPERTUIS

  Malpertuis is a novel by Belgian writer Jean Ray (1887–1964), first published in French in 1943. The first English translation appeared in 1998. Malpertuis is an example of a latter-day Gothic romance, employing frame narratives (i.e., stories within stories), set in and around a sinister old house filled with dark secrets, and centered on a doomed love affair. These story elements are employed without any regard for conventional realism, creating a dreamlike narrative that resembles the works of Hoffmann or Horace Walpole’s short stories.

  Jean-Jacques Grandsire is the young protagonist of the main story. According to the terms of a will left behind by a mysterious ancestor, Quentin Cassave, it is necessary for Grandsire to take up residence in Cassave’s ancient mansion, named Malpertuis, in order to claim his inheritance. The mansion is home to a number of other beneficiaries and retainers as well, including a beautiful woman named Euryale. The house has an otherworldly atmosphere, and the others who live there are, for the most part, highly eccentric or even mad. One man, Lampernisse, is preoccupied with ensuring that the lights never go out. There are three sisters, a servant who can spit fire, and a beautiful young man with an enchanting singing voice, among others.

  In time, Grandsire will determine the truth—that Quentin Cassave retrieved what remained of the gods and mythological figures of ancient Greece and brought them back to Belgium with him. They live cooped up in Malptertuis, disguised as more or less ordinary people. Lampernisse is Prometheus. The three sisters, including one with whom Grandsire has a brief affair, are the Furies. The old man named Eisengott is Zeus himself, and hence able to retain a greater degree of independence from Malpertuis. Grandsire’s unknown mother may have been a supernatural being as well. Euryale is the only character to appear under her true name; a sister of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, she never looks directly at Grandsire.

  The other dimensions of the story recount Cassave’s discovery and capture of the gods on an island in the Mediterranean. In general, characters are able to tell only part of their stories before the novel switches to a new narrator or writer, so that the reader seems to piece together the overall story from fragmentary evidence.

  The novel touches on many of Ray’s favorite themes, including the reenchantment of urban settings and the subversion of bou
rgeois ideas of reality, the operation in human life of impersonal destiny, secret identities, and the parallels between hermetic magic and art. Like much of Ray’s other work, Malpertuis favors the grotesque over the terrible. Ray’s preference for the bizarre reflects an ambiguity in desire, which is at once frightened by and attracted to what is out of the ordinary. The figure of the Gorgon, altered here in that it is being seen by her, rather than seeing her, that turns one to stone, might be taken to reflect Ray’s idea of the supernatural best.

  Belgian director Harry Kuemel created a Flemish-language film adaptation of the novel, also called Malpertuis, in 1971. The film stars Orson Welles as Cassave, called “Cassavius” in the film. The novel was adapted for film by Jean Ferry, a French screenwriter who worked with internationally respected directors including Henri-Georges Clouzot and Louis Malle.

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Frame Story; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Ray, Jean; Walpole; Horace.

  Further Reading

  Monteiro, António. 2011. “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray.” Weird Fiction Review, November 21. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/ghosts-fear-and-parallel-worlds-the-supernatural-fiction-of-jean-ray.

  Thompson, David. 2002. “Auteur of Darkness.” Sight & Sound 12, no. 8: 16–18.

  THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA

  Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815), a Polish nobleman, lived an itinerant life combining adventure and scholarship before he committed suicide by (according to some accounts) shooting himself in the head with a silver bullet. The publication history of his one surviving novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, is a complex one. The original French manuscript is incomplete and some of the text has only survived in its translation into Potocki’s native Polish. It is possible that Potocki began work on it in the 1790s and only completed it in the year of his death, although various extracts had already been published in Russia and France before then. After the first complete Polish translation was made in 1847, the novel eventually saw print in French in 1989, before Penguin published Ian Maclean’s English translation in 1995.