by Matt Cardin
Stylistically, a general lack of nostalgia (at least in his short work; a few of his novels have touched upon this emotion at length), yet cautious optimism and hope that there is more to the plight of humans, is another one of the things that separates Matheson’s writing from his contemporaries in the genres he explored: Western, horror, science fiction, mainstream literary, and forays into nonfiction. In spite of Matheson’s relatively modest literary output—he was never a consistent “best seller” or excessively prolific—he was nonetheless unusually important, even in his peer cohort. The reason for this most likely stems from Matheson’s treatment of his personal concerns, which, at their core, strike at the root of human failing, technophobia, and anomie in ways that none of his colleagues ever managed, including his eminent, aforementioned equals, such as Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, and even the esteemed Ray Bradbury. Surrounded by family, Matheson passed away peacefully in his home on June 23, 2013.
Jason V Brock
See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Nolan, William F.; Vampires.
Further Reading
Brock, Jason V. 2014. Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2002. “The Matheson Zone.” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 24 (June 17): 31–35. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20020617/28779-the-matheson-zone.html.
Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Wiater, Stanley, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, eds. 2009. The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. New York: Citadel Press Books.
MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1782–1824)
Charles Robert Maturin was a writer of Gothic novels and plays, most famously Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). A Protestant clergyman, he was born and lived most of his life in Dublin. He was an eccentric, a dandy, and a charismatic preacher.
Maturin was born in Dublin on September 25, 1782, into a line of Protestant clergymen, descendants of Huguenots who fled France to escape Catholic persecution. As a young man Maturin attended Trinity College. He then took religious orders and, following his ordination, became a curate in Dublin. He lived with his parents, and in 1803 married singer and society beauty Henrietta Kingsbury.
Maturin began to write out of his own interest and self-published his first books. Not wishing to harm his chances of advancement in the priesthood, Maturin wrote his first three novels under a pseudonym. They were not well received, but they attracted the notice of Sir Walter Scott, and Maturin and he struck up a correspondence. Scott was very supportive of Maturin’s career and recommended his work to Lord Byron, who admired it.
A combination of factors—his Calvinism, the fact that he had offended a bishop, concern over the impiety of his fiction—meant Maturin was barred from clerical advancement. As he had to support his parents as well as his family, and his wages as a curate were small, he was forced to take on other jobs.
Then, in 1816, Maturin’s tragic play, Bertram, was an unexpected success on the London stage. Maturin was suddenly famous, and the play earned him about £1,000, a sum that enabled him to give up the teaching he was doing on top of his priestly duties and devote more time to writing. Despite its popularity, Bertram was critically decried in Britain, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge blasting it in his Biographia Literaria (1817), describing the opening of its fourth act “as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind” (Coleridge 2014, 398). However—and seemingly unsuspected by Maturin—internationally the play was not just popularly successful but critically acclaimed. It was performed in America, translated into French, used as the basis for operas in both France and Italy, and praised by the likes of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Further plays failed, however, so Maturin turned back to novel writing and, in 1820, published the work for which he is best known, Melmoth the Wanderer. Two other novels followed, but none of the three (Melmoth included) sold well or received many positive notices at the time.
Scott often, in his letters to Maturin, advised the Irishman to tone down his productions and introduce greater realism. Much about Maturin’s aesthetic sense can be deduced from looking at the differences between his and Scott’s approaches to writing as a career. Scott was developing a new tradition, a sober, plausible, and modern “historical romance,” a mode designed to appeal to contemporary readers. Maturin’s aim, by contrast, was to radicalize, to make more lurid and disturbing, the Gothic romance. Maturin was the archetype of the contrary horror writer who, out of step with public taste and frustrated by critical responses to his or her work, pushes more and more against the boundaries of decency. He aimed in his work at the intense, the sublime, the violent, the grotesque, and the comic, interweaving these moods to disconcerting effect.
Maturin died in penury and obscurity on October 20, 1824. In the 1890s, his literary reputation in Britain was revived, and Melmoth, which was translated into French in 1821, had a major influence on the Decadent and Surrealist movements.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Byron, Lord; Frame Story; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. [1817] 2014. Biographia Literaria. Edited by Adam Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin, vii–xxix. London: Penguin.
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE (1850–1893)
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a French naturalist writer known for his virtuosic short stories, written between 1875 and 1891, including the remarkable “Le Horla” (1887), an early example of weird fiction that H. P. Lovecraft, in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), claims is “perhaps without a peer in its particular department” (Lovecraft 2012, 52). Indeed, Maupassant’s horror tales, which often consist of hallucinatory encounters with the numinous that decenter the self as a privileged site for differentiating between the real and the unreal, have had an immeasurable impact on writers of weird fiction and cosmic horror similarly interested in subverting the rational.
A student of Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant is perhaps best known for the rollicking “Boule de suif” (Ball of Fat, 1880), published in Emile Zola’s Soirées de Médan (Evenings at Médan), which brought him success as an author, and for the conte cruel (cynical tale of cruelty) “La Parure” (The Necklace, 1884), whose “twist” ending plays a cautionary role. Both stories explore French life in the nineteenth century with a spirit of playful mischievousness. Yet, as indicated by Arnold Kellett in the introduction to The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1989), there exists a “dark side” to the author’s oeuvre, including some thirty tales that investigate the sometimes quiet, sometimes cosmic horrors of the weird and the unknown. Most of these stories are collected in Kellett’s volume, which is the best introduction to Maupassant’s horror fiction, where the reader can observe the ways in which Maupassant was inspired by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism, the nineteenth-century French pioneer of neurology Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures on hypnotism, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Gothic stories, and the French writer Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre works.
Maupassant’s horror tales, such as “Lui?” (tr. as The Terror; 1883), “La Nuit” (tr. as The Nightmare, 1887), and “Qui sait?” (Who Knows? 1890), straddle the line between the supernatural and realism, thereby allowing horror and terror to coexist in an atmosphere of uneasiness, often culminating in the narrator experiencing hallucinations, obsessions, and madness. Maupassant was fond of the frame story, frequently characterizing his narrators as persons of credible sanity whose encounters with the outré (the strange and unusual)—including d
oppelgängers, animate objects, and the undead—and whose subsequent devolutions into states of frenzy are rendered both believable and disturbing. Maupassant, who fought in the Franco-Prussian War, was equally interested in the notion of inhumanity, and he explored the horrors of war with a somber lucidity in stories such as “La Folle” (The Mad Woman, 1882), “Deux amis” (Two Friends, 1883), and “Le Père Milon” (Father Milon, 1883).
Maupassant lived a life of debauchery and, in his twenties, contracted syphilis, leading to the gradual dissolution of his physical and mental health. In 1892 he made a botched attempt at suicide and spent the remaining year of his life in an asylum, where he died at the young age of forty-two.
Sean Matharoo
See also: Doubles, Dopplegängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; “The Horla”; The Numinous; Psychological Horror; Terror versus Horror.
Further Reading
Álvaro, L. C. 2005. “Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant’s Fantastical Short Stories—a Neurological Approach.” Journal of the History of Neurosciences 14 (2): 100–115.
Lerner, Michael G. 1975. Maupassant. New York: George Braziller.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Marvin, Frederic R. 1915. “Maupassant and Poe.” In ‘A Hideous Bit of Morbidity’: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 148–152. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
MCCAMMON, ROBERT R. (1952–)
Robert Rick McCammon is an American writer of horror and historical crime fiction who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s as a writer of best-selling paperback original novels. His work is distinguished by its optimistic portrayals of characters who draw on their greatest virtues as human beings to triumph over challenges, both supernatural and otherwise.
McCammon took a degree in journalism from the University of Alabama and was writing advertising copy for newspapers in Birmingham when his first novel, Baal, was published in 1978. The story of a child born of a rape committed by a demonic being who eventually grows into an antichrist-like figure with powers that threaten the world, it was the first of several novels in which McCammon tackled themes common in the then burgeoning horror market. Bethany’s Sin (1980), which garnered comparisons to Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973), is a small-town horror novel in which a family discovers that the Connecticut town they have recently moved to is home to a fertility cult possessed by the spirits of bloodthirsty Amazons unleashed during an archaeological excavation. The Night Boat (1980) was somewhat ahead of the horror genre’s early twenty-first-century zombie craze with its account of a Nazi U-boat crew cursed by a voodoo priest to immortal existence as flesh-eating zombies. They Thirst (1981) proved to be McCammon’s breakout novel: set in Los Angeles where an apocalyptic vampire invasion is gradually unfolding, its large cast of characters and epic scale showed him attempting more ambitious plots.
Mine: Mind of a Human Monster
A suspense thriller published by Pocket Books in 1990, Mine marked a career turning point for McCammon, who up to then had been known primarily for writing supernatural horror. The two principal characters are Mary Terrell, a.k.a. Mary Terror, a former member of the Storm Front Brigade (a radical offshoot of the Weather Underground), and Laura Clayborne, an Atlanta suburbanite who is about to give birth to her first child. Since a shootout with the police in 1972 that resulted in the capture and disbanding of the Storm Front—and that caused her to lose her own unborn child—Mary has kept a low profile, living hand-to-mouth and frequently moving to hide her whereabouts. When she meets Laura, her long-simmering obsession with having a child boils over. Masquerading as a nurse, she steals Laura’s infant son, David, and flees in the hope that, if she can track down Jack Gardiner (a.k.a. Lord Jack), the Storm Front’s former leader, they will be able to reunite the brigade’s surviving members.
Mine is a powerful character study in which McCammon compares and contrasts his two main characters. The psychotic Mary is frightening in the intensity of her desire to live in a past that the world has moved on from and in her pathological obsession to have a child. Although her actions represent a break with sanity, she is not completely unsympathetic, especially when she begins to show a sensitive, maternal side under David’s influence. Although Laura seems to be living a life that is the complete opposite of Mary’s—aloof, privileged, tradition-bound—the kidnapping of her child sets her on a more determined course of action as she pursues Mary across the country, becoming more ruthless and obsessive herself. Mine received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 1990.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
McCammon’s next two novels were published as hardcovers. In Mystery Walk (1983), the struggle between human good and supernatural evil that serves as the foundation for many of his stories plays out in the relationship between two young men gifted with supernatural powers, one of whom uses his to heal the afflicted while the other uses his to further the campaign of his father, an evangelical Christian zealot. The premise of McCammon’s Southern Gothic novel Usher’s Passing (1984) is that the doomed family in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a historically real American family that has made its fortune as arms merchants. Rix Usher, a contemporary descendant, repudiates his family’s legacy, but finds that family obligations and his personal destiny as inheritor of a family business founded on a legacy of horrors are nearly impossible to escape.
Swan Song (1987) was another paperback original and the first of McCammon’s novels to make the New York Times best-seller list. It is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has devastated the planet and left the survivors, some of whom are endowed with supernatural powers, to reestablish civilization and resist the ironically named “Friend,” a shape-shifting monster trying to divide humanity against itself. McCammon’s next novel, Stinger (1988), has been likened to a science fiction B-movie with its account of a small Texas town whose feuding residents pull together to assist a benign extraterrestrial who is fleeing the titular intergalactic bounty hunter. Stinger anticipates McCammon’s The Border (2015), in which people from different, and often diametrically opposed, walks of life band together to assist a young man with an otherworldly pedigree who is the only possible salvation for an earth being decimated by opposing extraterrestrial armies that use it as their battleground. McCammon followed Stinger with The Wolf’s Hour (1989), which gives a novel twist to the traditional werewolf theme: Michael Gallatin, the novel’s werewolf, is a hero who fights for the Allied forces against the Nazis in World War II. Gallatin also serves as the protagonist in a handful of stories collected as The Hunter from the Woods (2015) and can be viewed as a prototype for Trevor Lawson, the benevolent vampire gunslinger in McCammon’s period novels I Travel By Night (2013) and Last Train from Perdition (2016), both set in the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
McCammon shifted to writing nonsupernatural suspense fiction with Mine (1990), a novel about the dark side of America’s counterculture in the 1960s, in which a former member of a radical underground front kidnaps the child of a privileged upper middle-class mother, setting off a cross-country chase that virtually radicalizes the mother in her determination to retrieve her child. Boy’s Life (1991) is a Bradburyesque evocation of its main character’s childhood in a small Southern town, one in which youthful imagination colors recollections of even the most dramatic events, infusing them with a fantastical quality. Like Swan Song and Mine, the novel won the Bram Stoker Award given by the Horror Writers Association for best novel. Gone South (1992) is yet another nonsupernatural novel concerning a fugitive on the run from bounty hunters whose pursuit through the Louisiana bayous bring him into contact with grotesques redolent of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor.
Ten years separate the publication of Gone South and Speaks the Nightbird (2002), during which Mc
Cammon, who was in disagreement with editors on the new direction he was taking in his work, unofficially retired from writing. Speaks the Nightbird is the first novel in a series that now includes The Queen of Bedlam (2007), Mister Slaughter (2010), The Providence Rider (2012), The River of Souls (2014), and Freedom of the Mask (2016), featuring Matthew Corbett, a “problem solver” (i.e., private detective) in prerevolutionary America whose adventures often verge on the macabre and occasionally suggest the supernatural through the superstitions and folk beliefs of their period characters. In this second act of his career, McCammon has alternated novels in his nonsupernatural series with supernatural fiction, including The Five (2011), in which a rock band’s stalking by an assassin proves to be supernaturally motivated. McCammon is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Blue World (1989), several of whose stories have been adapted for television, including “Nightcrawlers,” about a Vietnam veteran who brings the war home with him in the form of horrors that manifest from his dreams.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Bram Stoker Award; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Splatterpunk; Vampires; Werewolves; Zombies.
Further Reading
Bleiler, Richard, and Hunter Goatley. 2003. “Robert R. McCammon.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 705–712. New York: Scribner’s.
