Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Potocki claimed that The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was principally inspired by Ann Radcliffe’s seminal works in the Gothic genre. However, Potocki’s mind seems to have been too mercurial to follow Radcliffe’s template in any ordinary or straightforward fashion. Instead, he presents the reader with a dizzyingly complicated arrangement of tales within tales, all themselves bookended with an overriding frame story. The resulting Russian-doll structure results in characters being introduced within a story, who then relate a further story, in which yet another character begins relating his or her own story, and so on. The reader quickly becomes hopelessly yet joyously lost in the maze-like palimpsest of narratives.

  At the outset of the novel, the ostensible romantic hero, Alphonse Van Worden, a soldier lost in the wild Andalusian countryside, is apparently seduced by two Muslim sisters before waking to find himself lying beside the gyrating corpses of two executed bandits. Realizing he has been tricked by their malevolent spirits, he flees, but then finds himself similarly ensnared in another of their illusions. Potocki reboots the narrative several times in this manner, disorienting not only Van Worden, but also the reader, who struggles to keep up with the constant elision of reality and fantasy. This destabilizing effect is maintained throughout the novel, which is by turns ludic and terrifying, erotic and grotesque, but usually maintains a distinctly sardonic undercurrent. Populating the novel are demons, bandits, knights, kabbalists, princesses, scholars, soldiers, and inquisitors. The Wandering Jew stalks its pages, appearing in several stories as well as relating his own.

  The tortured (and often torturous) hazing and repeated disorientation of Van Worden, and some of the other protagonists, in the face of horrors and wonders of consistently unresolved ontological status (including hallucinations, dreams, antagonistic human manipulation and misdirection, and the genuinely supernatural) goes somewhat beyond Radcliffe’s rather more straightforward “explained supernatural.” Thematically The Manuscript Found in Saragossa explicitly engages with the Occidental encounter with the Orient, where Spain, with its imbrication of Christian and Islamic cultures, represents a sort of liminal imaginative space between these two mutually fascinated and suspicious cultures. It has been suggested that the novel’s complexity is the result of it being arranged according to an occult schema, possibly relating to the tarot deck. However, Potocki’s frequent articulation of rationalist, enlightenment discourse within the novel and the often satirical tone of his treatment of, for example, the Spanish inquisition and kabbalism, at least complicates the notion of the author as a committed occultist.

  Admirers of the novel include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino, the latter of whom regarded Potocki’s work as an anticipation of Poe and used an excerpt to open his posthumously published 1998 anthology of nineteenth-century Fantastic Tales. The 1965 Polish film adaptation The Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Has, is much admired by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. It successfully captures the quicksilver, expansive spirit of this unique novel, albeit in a necessarily truncated form.

  James Machin

  See also: Frame Story; Radcliffe, Ann; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Calvino, Italo. 2001. Fantastic Tales. London: Penguin.

  Lachman, Gary. 2000. “The Mystical Count.” Fortean Times 140 (November). http://web.archive.org/web/20020811153132/http://forteantimes.com/articles/140_potocki.shtml.

  Maclean, Ian. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. London: Penguin.

  MARTIN, GEORGE R. R. (1948–)

  George R. R. Martin is best known to contemporary audiences as the author of the ongoing fantasy series of novels Song of Ice and Fire and the massively popular television show Game of Thrones based on the same. He began his professional career in 1971 as a writer of science fiction short stories, but he quickly established himself as an author of great flexibility, moving seemingly without effort between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and with great understanding of how these genres differ from, overlap with, and complement each other. Aside from the five novels in his Song of Ice and Fire series (with more projected at the time of this writing), Martin has authored or co-authored six novels and edited or co-edited nearly three dozen science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies. His work has won him both critical acclaim and (mostly) commercial success, including four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

  Fevre Dream (1982) is Martin’s sole pure horror novel. An intensely readable and marvelously realized story of vampires and their human pawns and partners traversing the Mississippi River on ornate steamboats, the novel owes as much to its horror trappings as it does to the American historical novel. The Armageddon Rag, a thriller with supernatural underpinnings that seem forced at best, was published the following year. In his introduction to Martin’s short story retrospective Dreamsongs Volume I, Gardner Dozois points to the commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag as the reason Martin abandoned the horror genre to focus on scripting and producing for television, including the relaunch of a new Twilight Zone (1985–1987) series and the more successful Beauty and the Beast (1987–1990). To that point Martin’s published horror in short form included “Meathouse Man” (1976), Sandkings (1979), and “Nightflyers” (1980/1981). But Martin never completely left the horror field, and he continued to produce stories of high quality, such as “The Monkey Treatment” (1983), “The Pear-Shaped Man” (1987), and Skin Trade (1988).

  Martin’s horror fiction is distinguished by his ability to effectively blend genres together to achieve a maximum of narrative effect. “Meathouse Man,” for example, relates through a mix of pre-cyberpunk imagery and body horror the story of a disaffected young male who is both sexually and socially frustrated, while “Nightflyers” reconceives the traditional haunted house story aboard a spaceship. Sand­kings, too, belongs to this category of story. More traditional, yet no less powerful, stories like “The Pear-Shaped Man, wherein a female artist becomes obsessed with the odd loner who lives in the basement of her apartment complex, and “The Monkey Treatment,” in which an obese man seeks a new treatment for his eating disorder and discovers that the cure is far worse than the ailment, demonstrate Martin’s mastery of genre convention. The graphic novella Skin Trade shows the influence of splatterpunk, but remains distinctly Martin-ish in its telling of urban werewolves who are hunted by something far worse, and whose lead character, a middle-aged and out-of-shape reporter cum werewolf, undermines popular genre clichés.

  As of this writing, George R. R. Martin’s energies seem focused on completing Song of Ice and Fire and on further developing the Game of Thrones franchise, and one can hardly fault him given its enormous commercial success. While elements of horror can be found throughout the cycle—the Night King and his White Walkers, for example—it seems readers will have to wait for a more focused example of the horror fiction that Martin has proven so capable of producing.

  Javier A. Martinez

  See also: Body Horror; Sandkings; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  “Author George R. R. Martin ‘Playing for Keeps.’” 2011. Weekend All Things Considered. NPR, July 17. http://info.nhpr.org/author-george-rr-martin-playing-keeps.

  “George R. R. Martin.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Levy, Michael. 1996. “George R. R. Martin: Dreamer of Fantastic Worlds.” Publishers Weekly, 243: 70–71.

  McMullen, E. C., Jr. 2003. “George R. R. Martin.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 667–672. New York: Thomson/Gale.

  “THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH”

  Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” was first published in the May 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine under the title “The Masque of the Red Death: A Fantasy.” Allegorical in nature, the story is at once a deft rendering in Gothic horror fiction and
a specimen of Poe’s comic art in the short story. Fearing what they view as a contagion, Prince Prospero and his followers seclude themselves in his palace, imagining that they can thus escape blood and time, twin strongholds in life. The tale dramatizes their folly, concluding with death’s overtaking the group in the form of a masked reveler who turns out not to be masked at all, but the actual personification of the plague they had feared. Poe’s use of the term “masque” derives in part from an early form of English drama in which each performer represented a psychological or moral state, and although the characters in Poe’s tale are revelers, they periodically register unease, betraying an awareness that they sense a futility in trying to control human realities of the body and of time, symbolized by the “Red Death,” designating blood, and a striking clock, designating time’s not standing still.

  The chambers in Prospero’s weird palace are decorated with colors that some readers think represent the stages in life from youth to old age. The red and black chamber, with its dual colors representing life and death, reveals that no delusion of the revelers will allow escape from reality. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), from which in part Poe’s tale derives, the Prospero character must return to real life from his paradise island, and even there an unsettling reality intrudes in the person of Caliban. In “Masque” no such reprieve is offered: all the would-be escapees from life’s realities die, showing the futility of their endeavor.

  Reading “Masque” is in part analogous to viewing the inside of a human head, with the characters in the tale representing the delusions of those who try to evade blood, time, and death—life’s absolutes. Some also perceive comic undercurrents in the tale, particularly with “Masque” being viewed as a comic takeoff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837 and 1842), which Poe reviewed, there implying that Hawthorne had plagiarized from him.

  The story was adapted, rather loosely, by screenwriters Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell for an installment in director Roger Corman’s popular series of Edgar Allan Poe movies starring Vincent Price. Although the movie takes great liberties with Poe’s story and also incorporates aspects of another Poe story, “Hop-Frog” (1849), it is an enjoyable production that remains somewhat true to the spirit of “The Masque of the Red Death.” It was remade in 1989, with Corman producing and Larry Brand directing.

  Benjamin F. Fisher

  See also: Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Poe, Edgar Allan; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Shakespearean Horrors.

  In Poe’s story, the masked revelers are appalled, and Prospero is enraged, when someone appears among them who has had the audacity to dress as if afflicted by the Red Death, with his face and clothes sprinkled with blood. However, the story’s apocalyptic climax reveals that this is not, in fact, a costume. The revelers are seized with awe as the figure makes its way through the colored rooms. Prospero makes pursuit. And then:

  He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

  And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. (Poe 1984, 490)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 4. New York: Frank F. Lovell Book Co., Publishers. 14–15.

  Further Reading

  Fisher, Benjamin F. 2002. “Poe and the Gothic Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 72–91. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  Regan, Robert. 1983. “Hawthorne’s ‘Plagiary’; Poe’s Duplicity.” In The Naiad Voice: Essays on Poe’s Satiric Hoaxing, edited by Dennis W. Eddings, 73–87. Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press. Originally published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1970, 25: 281–298.

  Roppolo, Joseph. 1963. “Meaning and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’” Tulane Studies in English 13: 59–69.

  MATHESON, RICHARD (1926–2013)

  Richard Burton Matheson was an American author of horror and science fiction whose work helped to shape the speculative fiction genres in the twentieth century. In the view of many critics and readers, Matheson captured the postmodern angst and existential predicaments that came to dominate the common person in the mid-to-late twentieth century better than his peers. Much of this was due to his anxieties and execution, where the hallmarks of his oeuvre included the intrusion of the extraordinary into daily life, a strong feeling (especially in his earlier output) of mistrust, and an all-inclusive desire to recognize the spiritual side of humankind (mostly in later works). Couple these characteristics with his footprint in mass media by way of an impressive career in film and television—in addition to his output in short fiction, novels, and song lyrics—and his import becomes clear upon even a cursory examination of his output.

  He was born February 20, 1926, in Allendale, New Jersey, and was of Norwegian descent. Early on he found comfort in writing as a way to deal with the harsh realities of his alcoholic family life. After an honorable discharge from the Army during World War II, he obtained a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He wrote his first novels while submitting to short story and pulp markets; a breakthrough happened with the publication of his dystopian vampire work, I Am Legend (1954).

  Matheson’s follow-up book was another masterwork—The Shrinking Man (1956). In this novel, bleak notions about science, spiritualism, and humanity’s place in the universe—themes that Matheson would revisit in later works—bubbled up, with astonishing results. Making his way to Los Angeles, he was given the chance (at his insistence as a gambit to establish himself in film) to adapt the book into script format (The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), thus demonstrating an additional ability: working in another medium. He was ahead of his peers in this respect, with the notable exception of his remarkable friend Charles Beaumont (The Intruder, 1959), and it was then that he and Beaumont were tapped by Rod Serling, by way of The Martian Chronicles (1950) author Ray Bradbury’s intervention, to write for The Twilight Zone. During this time, he was part of a collective of creators and friends—known later as “The Southern California Writer’s Group,” but internally simply referred to as “The Group”—which included not only Matheson and Beaumont, but also William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run, 1967), George Clayton Johnson (Ocean’s 11, 1959), John Tomerlin (Challenge the Wind, 1967), and by extension Bradbury, Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1959), and many others. By now, Matheson—in addition to being a successful novelist and writer for the screen—had also become a devoted husband and father.

  “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”: Monster on the Wing

  Published in 1961, Matheson’s short horror story “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” has become recognized as a classic. The basic plot is widely known in popular culture: On a nighttime passenger flight, a man named Arthur Jeffrey Wilson, who has a history of mental disturbance, believes he sees a man (or monster) outside the cabin inflicting damage to the wing of the airplane. When he alerts the other passengers, he is dismissed as either mistaken or having a mental breakdown. In the story’s climax, Wilson attempts to kill the man by shooting out th
e window, nearly causing a catastrophe. The story ends with the damaged plane on the ground and Wilson being carted away on a stretcher by people who think he was trying to commit suicide.

  Both the story and Matheson’s eventual self-adapted episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963, starring William Shatner as Wilson, were groundbreaking. The unconventional themes—an everyman protagonist fragmented by paranoia, dovetailing with the use of the unreliable narrator technique; modern technology (air travel) as a menace; the focus on mental illness and its aftermath from a social lens—would eventually become hallmarks of Matheson’s very personal approach to the modern horror story, and many of these treatments subsequently came into common usage. The story itself, especially in its Twilight Zone incarnation, has become iconic, to the point where parodies of it have appeared on everything from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live.

  “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was given another adaptation in 1983 as the fourth and final segment in the Twilight Zone anthology movie, with John Lithgow replacing Shatner as the protagonist. Once again, Matheson adapted the script from his own story, this time removing the mental illness angle and making the protagonist (now named John Valentine) suffer instead from a morbid fear of flying.

  Jason V Brock

  Later, director Roger Corman would demonstrate similar vision as Serling by employing both Beaumont and Matheson to write his Poe series of films—House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and others. To this end, Matheson’s personal demons—paranoia, fear of insanity, dread of unintended scientific repercussions, the dangers of modernity—began to be addressed directly in his output. As his career accelerated, he turned away from short fiction to write more for film and television. Though working frequently for the likes of directors such as Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, 1966–1971) and a young Steven Spielberg (Duel, 1971), he continued to produce novels. Several of his standout books center on the ideas and thematic possibilities of the importance of the magical and the transcendent power of love. His output began to touch on themes and concepts that his friends’ work did not.