by Matt Cardin
Richard Bleiler
See also: Arkham House; Derleth, August.
Further Reading
Dalby, Richard. 1985. “John Metcalfe.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 597–602. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2005. “Metcalfe, [William] John.” In Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi, 802–803. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Metcalfe, John. 1998. Nightmare Jack and Other Stories, edited by Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, Canada: Ash-Tree Press.
Wilson, Neil. 2000. Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820–1950. Boston Spa and London: British Library.
MEYRINK, GUSTAV (1868–1932)
Born Gustav Meyer, the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink is best known for his supernatural fiction, most especially his novel The Golem (1914; first published in German as Der Golem). Other noteworthy works include Das gruene Gesicht (The Green Face) 1916), Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night) (1917), and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (The Angel of the West Window) (1927).
Meyrink’s supernatural fiction is permeated by philosophical uncertainty about religious faith. According to Meyrink, when he was twenty-four his suicide attempt was interrupted by the sudden appearance beneath his door of a pamphlet about the afterlife. He attributed to this incident the beginning of his intense interest in the occult; from that age on, he was an avid student of Western hermetic traditions and Eastern religions. He co-founded a financial company in 1889, and in 1902 he was arrested on charges that he was committing fraud by spiritualistic means. Thereafter, Meyrink was compelled to publish fiction and translations in order to make ends meet.
In general, Meyrink’s fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place. Ordinary events are treated as only superficial indications of a more profound spiritual reality that is incomprehensible to unenlightened human beings. Very often, the narrator’s experiences form not so much a coherent narrative with a clear plotline as a gathering of seemingly unrelated events that, when scanned for occult significance, reveal telling coincidences and similarities. So the reader of Meyrink’s fiction undergoes a vicarious initiation into deeper mysteries, whose reality lies beyond the confines of the story or novel. In 2012 a high-profile collection of esoteric and spiritual literature, the Ritman Library in Amsterdam, also known as the Bibliotecha Philosophica Hermetica, held an exhibition devoted to Meyrink and his works.
Michael Cisco
See also: The Golem; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Occult Fiction.
Further Reading
Irwin, Robert. 1995. “Gustav Meyrink and His Golem.” In The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Mike Mitchell, 15–20. Monroe, OR: Dedalus.
Mitchell, Mike. 2008. Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink. UK: Dedalus.
van den Berg, Erik. 2012. “Profile: Gustav Meyrink.” Ritman Library/Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, December 17. http://www.ritmanlibrary.com/2012/12/chotverdori-aschubliv.
MIÉVILLE, CHINA (1972–)
China Miéville is an award-winning British writer whose work combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, and horror. Miéville studied social anthropology at Cambridge and earned a PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. A Marxist, Miéville brings a critique of contemporary capitalism into most of his work. A prolific as well as successful writer, Miéville has produced ten novels, two novellas, three short story collections, three comic books, one illustrated children’s book, and three works of nonfiction.
Miéville sets his work in imaginary and often bleak or dystopic places. Three novels, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004), form the Bas-Lag Series and explore the imagined city of New Crobuzon, where magic and technology mix in a futuristic steampunk universe (steampunk being the popular science fiction subgenre that imagines an alternate history and/or future and/or postapocalyptic world where technological evolution has been centered in nineteenth-century industrial steam-powered technology instead of electrical and digital technology). Un Lun Dun (2008) is a young adult novel. Embassytown (2011) is a science fiction novel set on a different planet, and describes the interactions of human colonists and intelligent aliens. Miéville continued to explore imagined places in The City & The City (2009), where two cities share the same physical space, but citizens of each city are not permitted to acknowledge the existence of the other. Miéville sets a crime narrative in this world of denial and rejection that serves as a metaphor of contemporary urban life. He continued to mix narrative styles and genres in his later novels: Kraken (2010) is a mystery novel in which a preserved body of a giant squid disappears from the London Museum of Natural History, and members of the Church of Kraken Almighty, who believe that the giant squid is God, are suspected. In Railsea (2012), a young adult novel based, very loosely, on Moby Dick, the captain and crew of an undersea train hunt a gigantic mole.
Miéville calls his writing “weird fiction,” a genre of the fantastic that deliberately juxtaposes itself with the traditional high fantasy of such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis by focusing on disruptions of reality and a sense of strangeness and surrealism. He is also associated with the “new weird” movement, in which the boundaries of fantasy, science fiction, and horror are blurred in stories characterized by urban settings, body horror, subversive social criticism, and a metaphysical and/or existential sense of strangeness and unease. His manipulation of genres and creation of dark futures make him one of the most significant writers working in genre fiction today.
Miéville has received numerous awards for his work. Perdido Street Station won the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy awards. The Scar won the 2003 British Fantasy and Locus awards. Iron Council won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards. Un Lun Dun won the 2008 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. The City & The City won the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. Miéville has been a guest of honor at numerous conventions and conferences, including Eastercon (the annual convention of the British Science Fiction Association) and the Society for the Fantastic in the Arts conference. In 2015 he became a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature.
Jim Holte
See also: New Weird; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Gordon, Joan. 2003. “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville.” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3: 355–373. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm.
“Gothic Politics: A Discussion with China Miéville.” 2008. Gothic Studies 10, no. 1: 61–70.
Williams, Mark. 2010. “Weird of Globalization: Esemplastic Power in the Short Fiction of China Miéville.” Irish Journal of Gothic Studies 8 (June 14). https://irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/ijghsissue8.pdf.
THE MIND PARASITES
Often discussed as a work of science fiction, Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) strays from a stereotypical understanding of vampires as haematophagic (blood eating), but is very much a vampire story of stolen human autonomy, of psycho-emotive parasitism. Part of the vanguard of modern American vampire fiction, it sits alongside generic dominants such as the suburban mass infection in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and the solipsistic self-reflection in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976).
The central protagonist, archaeologist Professor Gilbert Austin, discovers that, in parallel with the growth of modern industrialism since the late eighteenth century, humans have been cultivated as food for Mind Parasites, “alien intelligences, whose aim is either to destroy the human race or enslave it” (Wilson 2005, 113). These intelligences are variously referred to as “energy vampires” (52), “vampire bats of the soul” (71), “Great Old Ones” (36), and “Tsathogguans” (8) (these last two overtly influenced by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos). The Mind Parasites has a horror pedigree born from a challenge to write a Lovecraftian tale issued by August Derleth
, publisher and anthologist of Lovecraft’s works.
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) was not just a novelist who sometimes wrote science fiction verging into horror, but a controversial intellectual and authorial dynamo whose ideas and books about a multitude of subjects, from the occult and paranormal to crime, philosophy, psychology, sexuality, history, and more, earned him an enthusiastic following even as it exiled him for most of his career from conventionally respectable intellectual and literary society. In both The Mind Parasites and another novel, The Philosopher’s Stone (1969), he borrowed from and responded to the literary and philosophical world of H. P. Lovecraft to lay out some of his own ideas on the nature of consciousness and the enemies to humanity’s full flourishing that may lie within people’s very psyches.
Matt Cardin
Prior to The Mind Parasites, Wilson wrote about the effects of social dislocation through discussion of literary, artistic, and cultural figures ranging from Dostoyevsky to Van Gogh and Albert Camus in The Outsider (1956), first in a series of seven nonfiction texts that, over the subsequent decade, demonstrated a New Existentialist philosophical curiosity that fed into his fiction. This reflection upon disarticulation is, in The Mind Parasites, intensified by an exploitation of contemporary pre–moon landing unknowns surrounding space travel and alien antagonists, which caught popular imagination in the 1950s and 1960s.
The manipulation of humanity by unknown aliens positions horror in The Mind Parasites as holistic: what affects mind affects body, and what affects one affects all, within a narrative informed by the ideas of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl (who established the field of phenomenology, focused on investigating the first-person viewpoint of conscious experience), and also the idea of the collective unconscious as elaborated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Wilson thematically ranges across philosophy, psychology, academia, politics, and drug use, and yet his use of the human mind as a tangible space wherein terrible beasts dwell follows a straightforward overcoming-the-monster plot arc. These vampires channel humans toward a state of malleable pessimism: those who lack “the mental discipline to resist” (54) are a source of energy; those who challenge are destroyed. Unwilling to relinquish parasitic control, these aliens mount increasingly vicious attacks on the inner space of Austin and his fellow intellectual fighters, until their ultimate defeat. Wilson enhances this generic pastiche with Lovecraftian prose in which Austin apologizes for lacking erudition and resorting to conventional linguistic tropes employed in horror fiction, such as mental instability, slavery, grotesquerie, and glimpsed shadowy figures, in a bid to impress upon readers the concept that horror comes from a lack of foundation or meaning.
Jillian Wingfield
See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; I Am Legend; Interview with the Vampire; Vampires.
Further Reading
Lachman, Gary. 2016. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. New York: Tarcher.
Tredell, Nicolas. 1982. “Arrows to the Farther Shore: The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone.” The Novels of Colin Wilson, 97–116. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble.
Wilson, Colin. [1967] 2005. The Mind Parasites. Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish.
MISERY
Misery is a horror/thriller novel by the American novelist Stephen King. Published in 1987, it was the first winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. Often considered King’s most autobiographical work, the novel centers on issues of authorship and the struggle for creative autonomy.
Misery is focused on two characters: the best-selling author Paul Sheldon and his obsessive fan Annie Wilkes. At the novel’s opening, Paul has recently completed the final volume in a series of Gothic romances that has made his name, but that he regards as a barrier to creative fulfillment. Having killed off his heroine, Misery Chastaine, Paul sets off on a celebratory cross-country drive in inclement weather. He is carrying the only extant copy of his manuscript. Along the way he crashes his car and is rescued by Annie, who, upon his waking, professes herself his “number-one fan.” Her ministrations, which initially seem benign, if odd, soon turn sinister once Annie reads Paul’s manuscript. She is enraged at Misery’s death and embarks on a regime of physical and psychological torture in order to coerce Paul into resurrecting her beloved character. The bulk of the novel concerns Paul’s attempts to survive Annie’s brutality while struggling with his own authorial anxieties.
Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her portrayal of Annie in Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of the novel. The film has become famous for the “hobbling” scene, in which Annie breaks Paul’s ankles with a sledgehammer. Despite the scene’s notoriety, it is actually toned down from the original, in which Annie amputates Paul’s foot with an axe. In recent years Misery has been adapted for the theater by William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay for the film). In 2012 the play moved to Broadway, where the role of Paul was played by Bruce Willis.
Paul and Annie’s conflict is a microcosmic representation of the writing industry, where success breeds creative constraint and demanding fans reject deviation from type. Numerous critics have, therefore, associated the character of Paul with his creator. In the 1980s King was at the peak of his popularity as a horror writer. But in 1984 he had published The Eyes of the Dragon, a whimsical fantasy that stepped well outside of his usual fictional range. His fans’ hostile response to this novel is seen by some as the genesis for Misery, in which the physical entrapment within Annie’s cabin is a literal enactment of the confinement within genre boundaries that both Paul Sheldon and Stephen King experienced.
Together with The Dark Half (1989) and “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (1990), Misery forms a metafictional “trilogy” focusing on “writers and writing and that strange no-man’s land between what’s real and what’s make believe” (King 1990, 237). Despite his returning repeatedly to the figure of the writer in more recent years, Misery remains King’s most potent and sophisticated reflection on the craft.
Neil McRobert
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Frame Story; King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Berkenkamp, Lauri. 1992. “Reading, Writing and Interpreting: Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, 203–211. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
King, Stephen. 1990. Four Past Midnight. New York: Viking.
Magistrale, Anthony. 1989. “Art versus Madness in Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, 271–278. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
McRobert, Neil. 2013. “Figuring the Author in Modern Gothic Writing.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 297–308. New York: Routledge.
THE MONK
The Monk: A Romance largely shaped the course of the Gothic tradition in both the 1790s and subsequent decades, entering into conversation with its contemporaries and initiating new literary conversations. It is still considered to be one of the most shocking and graphic Gothic works. Written by the nineteen-year-old Matthew Gregory Lewis (known throughout his life as “Monk” Lewis), who claimed to have written it in ten weeks, it was published in five editions during his life, the first published anonymously in 1796. The second, published later in the same year, proudly bore his name and position as a member of Parliament (MP). Despite its popularity, it caused scandal for its graphic violence and sexual content, as well as its commentary on religion. Subsequent editions attempted to address these controversies, the fourth featuring the most evidence of self-censorship and, as a result, being the least interesting to scholars. All critical editions are based on the first edition.
The novel revolves around the young monk, Ambrosio, whose life of seclusion and asceticism fails to protect him from his own desires, incited when his faithful nov
ice reveals him/herself to be a woman in disguise, Matilda. When she saves his life, he not only allows her to stay but to seduce him and guide him into a satanic pact to gain access to a more pure and innocent woman, Antonia. This constitutes the main plot but, like most Gothic novels of the period, it features several side plots. The second, and almost equally prominent, introduces Agnes, the sister of Antonia’s suitor, Lorenzo, and a nun within Ambrosio’s sister convent, who has been promised to religion by her family. When Ambrosio catches her with a note from her lover, Raymond (Lorenzo’s best friend), he discovers that she is pregnant and hands her over to the prioress, Mother St. Ursula, who punishes her by faking her death and entombing her alive within the catacombs.
Ambrosio’s fate at the end of The Monk is fully as “extreme” as the rest of Lewis’s novel, and serves as an appropriate capstone for a book brimming with garish extremes of wanton sin and horror. This involves a memorable appearance by Lucifer in Ambrosio’s prison cell:
A blaze of lightning flashed through the Cell; and in the next moment, borne upon sulphurous whirl-winds, Lucifer stood before him a second time. But He came not, as when at Matilda’s summons He borrowed the Seraph’s form to deceive Ambrosio. He appeared in all that ugliness, which since his fall from heaven had been his portion: His blasted limbs still bore marks of the Almighty’s thunder: A swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form: His hands and feet were armed with long Talons: Fury glared in his eyes, which might have struck the bravest heart with terror. (Lewis 1845, 124)
