Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1998. “Robert R(ick) McCammon.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 398–399. Detroit. MI: St. James Press.

  Staggs, Sam. 1991. “PW Interviews: Robert R. McCammon.” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 34 (August 2): 54–55.

  Wiater, Stanley. 1990. “Robert R. McCammon.” In Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror, 145–153. New York: Avon.

  MCDOWELL, MICHAEL (1950–1999)

  Michael McEachern McDowell was an American screenwriter and novelist from Enterprise, Alabama. He is best known as the author of Blackwater, a six-part Southern Gothic serial novel, and for his work as a screenwriter, including two original scripts for Tim Burton and a Stephen King adaptation. King himself, in a much-quoted comment, once described McDowell as “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today” (Winter 1985, 177).

  McDowell held degrees from Harvard (summa cum laude) and a PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis, where his 1978 dissertation was titled American Attitudes toward Death, 1825–1865. While attempting six novels that failed to sell, he supported himself by working as a teacher, a theater critic, and a secretary at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  After seeing a trailer for The Omen while attending a showing of Barry Lyndon, he was inspired to work on a horror script of his own. He novelized his script as an exercise, resulting in his debut, The Amulet, published in 1979. He continued in the Southern Gothic vein for several subsequent novels, including Cold Moon over Babylon (1980), The Elementals (1981), and Blackwater (1983), which was published in six monthly installments. Michael E. Stamm has noted that in his Southern Gothic novels, McDowell was “noticeably influenced” by Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Southern novelist (Stamm 1988, 51).

  Roughly half of McDowell’s approximately thirty novels, most published as paperback originals, appeared under his own name, while others were credited to various pseudonyms, including Mike McCray, Preston Macadam, and a pair of pen names used for his collaborations with Dennis Schuetz: Nathan Aldyne (four gay detective novels) and Axel Young. In addition to his horror novels, he wrote several historical novels, a trilogy of crime books, and a novelization for the movie Clue.

  In the mid-1980s, McDowell received a phone call from the producers of the American anthology horror television series Tales from the Darkside inquiring after the rights to a story that was actually written by Michael P-Kube McDowell. He used the opportunity to send them a script and started writing for anthology television series, including Amazing Stories, Monsters, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as for two television specials. His feature film script of Beetlejuice (1988; based on a story co-written with Larry Wilson) followed, as well as scripts for High Spirits (1988), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), The Nightmare before Christmas (1993), and Thinner (1996), based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.

  Following his discovery that he was HIV-positive in 1994, McDowell spent the last years of his life teaching classes on screenwriting at Boston and Tufts University. At the time of his death, he was working on treatments of a Beetlejuice sequel and a new version of The Nutcracker. After his death in 1999 from AIDS-related illness in Boston, Tabitha King, a personal friend, agreed to complete his final novel, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.

  McDowell’s “Death Collection” of bizarre curios, some of which date to the sixteenth century, including pictures of women modeling burial gowns, spirit photographs, funeral cards, hair wreaths, morticians’ supplies, crime scene photos, hanging and accident photos, and an infant-sized casket, is archived at North­western University.

  Bev Vincent

  See also: Dark Fantasy; King, Stephen; Welty, Eudora.

  Further Reading

  Cagle, Ryan. 2016. Cold Moon over McDowell: The Life and Works of Michael McDowell. Accessed August 11, 2016. http://coldmoonovermcdowell.blogspot.com.

  Stamm, Michael E. 1988. “Michael McDowell and the Haunted South.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 51–62. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

  Wiater, Stanley. 1988. “Horror in Print: Michael McDowell.” Fangoria 40: 54–56.

  Winter, Douglas E. 1982. “From Harvard to Horror” (interview with Michael McDowell). Fantasy Newsletter 5, no. 11 (December): 23–28.

  Winter, Douglas E. 1985. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books.

  MCGRATH, PATRICK (1950–)

  Now predominantly residing in New York, the British novelist Patrick McGrath is a writer of some standing in the field of Anglo-American letters and Gothic literature. Since his debut novel The Grotesque (1989), he has penned several critically acclaimed fictions that stage and interrogate the complexities of madness, obsession, psychiatry, and familial relationships. A number of McGrath’s novels have been read through critical lenses that are associated with Gothic studies, yet perhaps only a handful of his works—such as Spider (1990), his short story “The Smell” (1991), and his 2000 novel Martha Peake—are consistently Gothicized in their imagery, iconography, or narration. One of McGrath’s most exquisite skills as a writer lies in the tendency of his crafted prose to transform sustained and slow-burning terror into moments of devastating horror or revelation. His greatest influences are from the Gothic tradition, Edgar Allan Poe in particular, but he is also an avid reader of the haunting tales of Joseph Conrad, the passionate love affairs of D. H. Lawrence, and the aesthetically intense prose of John Hawkes.

  A landmark critical study, Sue Zlosnik’s monograph Patrick McGrath (2011), makes the standout scholarly case for considering him as primarily a writer of modern Gothic fiction. For instance, Zlosnik suggests that even McGrath’s Asylum (1996), the narrative style of which is influenced by Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 modernist novel The Good Soldier, explores fundamentally Gothic concerns and themes; the book’s “narrative voice resists a Gothic tone,” but its “concerns are undeniably Gothic” as its thematics are “shaped around a powerful symbolic structure relating to boundaries” (Zlosnik 2011, 75). Indeed, Asylum is concerned thematically with the causes, limits, and contours of madness, betrayal, institutionalism, and sexual possession. Its setting in 1959 is particularly telling. The institutional practices critiqued in Asylum draw from Victorian principles of psychiatry that were soon to be revolutionized through the transformative legislation of the Mental Health Act in the United Kingdom. Of keen interest to those academics and scholars who work on the intersections between medical practices and literature, McGrath’s father—Dr. Pat McGrath Sr.—was the last medical superintendent of Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum (as it was then known), and McGrath the writer spent a good portion of his youth growing-up in a house just outside of the asylum’s grounds. The influence that these years have upon his writing is pronounced, and his fiction has been described as neuro-Gothic because of its fusion of Gothic atmosphere with medical matters.

  McGrath’s modern novels continue to impress critics, and posterity may judge his collection of three stories, Ghost Town (2005), as one of the most nuanced and moving meditations upon post-9/11 New York. The work of this millennial McGrath is more recognizably American, and in recent years he has continued to gain a global, transnational readership. For instance, his Gothic novel Martha Peake won Italy’s Premio Flaiano Prize. Both Trauma (2008) and Constance (2013), his two most recent novels as of late 2016, produce devastating conclusions and revelations. McGrath’s intensity as a writer is undiminished.

  Reflecting a renewed interest in his writing, McGrath, in collaboration with the University of Stirling in Scotland, has created an archive of his professional materials, one that includes books of automatic writing, several drafts of his novels, early promotional materials, adapted screenplays—including for David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002)—and a complete set of first editions of his works. The archive’s opening in January 2016 was marked by an international symposium that both
celebrated McGrath’s work and was a testament to scholars’ continuing fascination with his neuro-Gothic writings.

  Matt Foley

  See also: The Grotesque.

  Further Reading

  McGrath, Patrick. 1997. “John Hawkes’ An Irish Eye.” BOMB Magazine 61 (Fall). http://bombmagazine.org/article/5188/john-hawkes-an-irish-eye.

  McGrath, Patrick. 2012. “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor.” The Economist, September/October. https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor.

  McRobert, Neil. 2011. “Patrick McGrath Interviewed by Neil McRobert.” The Gothic Imagination at University of Stirling, July 13. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/patrick-mcgrath-interviewed-by-neil-mcrobert.

  Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

  MELMOTH THE WANDERER

  In works of literary history, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820) is often said to mark the end of the high Gothic as a genre. Its author, Charles Robert Maturin, was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a writer of novels and plays. Melmoth is one of the most macabre and bizarre of all Gothic novels from the period, with frequent grotesque scenes and a very complex narrative structure.

  Maturin struggled for money and, in his preface to Melmoth, claims to have resorted regretfully to the Gothic romance in an attempt to find popularity with the public at a time when the Gothic was seeing a late resurgence. But given the exuberance and relish with which Melmoth is written, it seems likely Maturin was being disingenuous. In truth, he had an affinity for the Gothic and had been writing in the vein for some years. Impoverished though he was, it is doubtful that he would ever have considered compromising his vision to meet the public taste; he wished to outdo in extremity the Gothic tales of earlier writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.

  Melmoth has a complex structure consisting of nested narratives. Through manuscript and eyewitness accounts that are tortuous and labyrinthine, the novel unfolds the story of the eponymous Wanderer’s Satanic bargain. Melmoth has pledged his soul to Satan in return for unnatural longevity, and he can only save himself if he is able to find someone willing to take his place. He attempts to corrupt those in great mortal suffering, but ultimately fails to do so. As allegory the novel is opaque and confused, but this only increases its imaginative power.

  Sebastian Melmoth the Wanderer

  After being released in 1897 from two years of imprisonment for “gross indecency,” Oscar Wilde, Victor Maturin’s grand-nephew, exiled himself to France and took the name “Sebastian Melmoth,” after the third-century Saint Sebastian and the title character in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. He explained this choice of surname and commented on Maturin’s novel in a letter to Louis Wilkinson:

  “A fantastic name,” he had called it in an earlier letter, “but I shall explain it to you some day.”

  “You asked me,” he wrote later, “about ‘Melmoth.’ Of course I have not changed my name: in Paris I am as well known as in London: it wd. be childish.

  “But to prevent postmen having fits—I sometimes have my letters inscribed with the name of a curious novel by my grand-uncle, Maturin: a novel that was part of the romantic revival of the early century—and though imperfect—a pioneer—: it is still read in France and Germany: Bentley republished it some years ago. I laugh at it, but it thrilled Europe—and is still played as a play in modern Spain.” (Wilkinson 1914, 138)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Wilkinson, Louis. 1914. “Oscar Wilde: Some Hitherto Unpublished Letters of the Last Phase.” In The Forum, vol. 51, 130–139. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley.

  In Melmoth, Maturin brings together the poetics of Gothic extremity and the comic and skeptical tradition of Enlightenment satire. The effect of this is to make of the Gothic a critical mode. Melmoth is not a novel that, as most works of the high Gothic period do, confirms the status quo, but is instead one that mockingly and perversely questions it.

  In light of this, it is ironic that most contemporary reviews of the novel were critical of Maturin’s use of what they viewed as a worn-out Gothic mode. They also criticized the novel’s perceived excesses, particularly as these were felt inappropriate given Maturin’s role as a clergyman. One reviewer, John Wilson Crocker, in the Quarterly Review of January 1821, even went so far as to accuse Maturin of nonsense, lack of veracity, blasphemy, brutality, and “dark, cold-blooded, pedantic obscenity” (Crocker 1821, 311). At the same time, many critics were led to acknowledge, however grudgingly, Maturin’s eloquence and skill. The reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine of November 1820, after rebuking Maturin for “copying the worst faults of his predecessors and contemporaries, in the commonest works of fictitious writing,” claimed that “Maturin is gifted with a genius as fervently powerful as it is distinctly original” and called him “one of the most genuine masters of the dark romance” (Anonymous 1820, 161, 168).

  In England Melmoth fell into obscurity after Maturin’s death in poverty in 1824. There were some attempts to revive his reputation in Ireland during the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1890s that the novel was reprinted, along with a memoir of Maturin for which Oscar Wilde and his mother, who was Maturin’s niece by marriage, provided some biographical insights. Later, when Wilde left Reading Gaol to head to Paris to die, he took on the name “Sebastian Melmoth” in melancholy tribute to his great-uncle’s creation.

  But in France, where Maturin’s play Bertram (1816) had been a popular success in translation, Melmoth had a much more sympathetic reception. The novel was translated into French in 1821 and was hailed as a classic of the Romantic sublime. Honoré de Balzac praised it as one of the most important works of the Romantic Gothic, and even wrote a satire based on its central conceit. The poet Charles Baudelaire saw Maturin not as a Romantic, but as a modern whose work demonstrated the demonic perversity of modernity. The strange poetic novel The Songs of Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, contains clear allusions to Melmoth. And André Breton, founder of Surrealism, thought it the greatest of all Gothic novels. The reputation of this odd and initially overlooked novel has only continued to rise since.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Gothic Hero/Villain; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror); Surrealism.

  Further Reading

  Anon. 1820. “Review of Melmoth the Wanderer.” Blackwood’s Magazine VIII: 160–168. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030603925;view=1up;seq=9.

  Crocker, John Wilson. 1821. “Melmoth, the Wanderer, by the Author of Bertram.” Quarterly Review XXIV: 303–311.

  Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin, vii–xxix. London: Penguin.

  METCALFE, JOHN (1891–1965)

  William John Metcalfe was an English writer who is best known for his macabre and supernatural horror stories. His best stories often present puzzles whose only solutions lead to additional puzzles accompanied by greater narrative unease.

  His father, William Charles Metcalfe, was a successful writer of sea stories who imbued his son with a love of the sea. John Metcalfe matriculated at the University of London and received a degree in philosophy, taught in Paris, worked as a schoolmaster in London, and moved to the United States in 1928 to work as a barge captain in New York while writing. His early one-act play T’Strike (1921) uses English regional dialect to good effect to discuss the sociopolitical issues of his day, but although several stories in his first collection, The Smoking Leg, and Other Stories (1925) likewise use dialect, explicit discussions of politics are largely eschewed as Metcalfe concentrates on the horrors that can erupt from bizarre situations as well as exploring potentially horrific issues involving confusions of space and time. The titular story, first published in 1925, involves a cursed ruby implanted in a sailor’s leg; it smokes and emits flames and causes ships to sink, but removing it is not an easy affair. “The Bad L
ands” (1920) details two men’s conviction that a remote house in the dunes and the surrounding countryside are the epitome of concentrated evil, though others see it as merely an old farmhouse; and “The Double Admiral,” generally considered one of Metcalfe’s best tales, takes another two men, one an admiral, on a journey to see a puzzling island in the distance, but they ultimately encounter themselves, and one of the admirals dies, to be replaced by the other, his doppelgänger.

  Poorly chosen relationships and personality issues that resolve themselves horrifically are the subject of Arm’s-Length (1930), which contains no overt supernaturalism, but Judas, and Other Stories (1931) again offers superior supernatural horrors: “Mortmain,” set in the same areas as “The Double Admiral,” concerns a haunting, with ghostly ships and horrible carrion moths. Religion plays a role in “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania,” in which Mr. Meldrum gradually and inexplicably becomes the Egyptian deity Thoth, and religious faith is depicted in “Time-Fuse,” in which an elderly believer in spiritualism handles hot coals until her faith is destroyed, at which point she perishes horribly. “Funeral March of a Marionette” has grown dated and contains no supernatural horrors, but the central conceit—boys substitute a body for the effigy of Guy Fawkes—remains grotesquely effective. The titular boy in Brenner’s Boy (1932) may not have been a guest in Winter’s house, for his father insists that the boy is sick and never left home, but Winter’s wife and friends saw something, even if he does not appear in photographs.

  Following the Second World War, Metcalfe was unable to find an English publisher for his third collection of horrific stories, and he submitted them to August Derleth’s Arkham House, but Derleth chose to publish only the longest, The Feasting Dead (1954). It is the story of a haunting, in which Colonel Hapgood’s son Denis, for a while a guest in France, becomes oddly connected with Raoul Privache, perhaps a gardener or a servant, who follows him upon his return to England. The development, which involves psychic vampirism, possession, and utterly reprehensible human behavior, is horrible and disturbing. Additional horrific stories by Metcalfe exist in collections, but there is no comprehensive collection of Metcalfe’s work readily available.