Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Among Moore’s many influences, none has been more important to his horror-focused work than H. P. Lovecraft, and Moore has contributed much to the resurgence of interest that Lovecraft’s work experienced in the twenty-first century. Moore wrote many overtly Lovecraftian stories in the 1990s, some of which are now lost, but some of which are assembled in the collection Yuggoth Cultures (2003). He contributed a story titled “The Courtyard” to D. M. Mitchell’s collection The Starry Wisdom (1994), subsequently using it as the basis for his horror comic limited series Neonomicon (2010–2011, illustrated by Jacen Burrows). Most recently, Moore has continued to draw extensively on Lovecraft’s life and writings for the limited series Providence (2015–2016, also with Burrows).

  Sean Moreland

  See also: Dick, Philip K.; Gaiman, Neil; Lovecraft, H. P.

  Further Reading

  Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

  Green, Matthew J. A. 2013. Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

  Parkin, Lance. 2013. Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore. London: Arum Press.

  MORRELL, DAVID (1943–)

  David Morrell is an American novelist who is perhaps best known for creating the character of John Rambo in his 1972 novel First Blood. He has also made contributions to the horror genre. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, Morrell immigrated to the United States in 1966 to attend Penn State University. While there, he was mentored by the science fiction writer Philip Klass, a.k.a. William Tenn. Under Klass’s tutelage, Morrell followed the author’s advice to exploit his own fears. Inspired by what he labeled “a waking nightmare,” in which he was pursued through a forest by an unseen stalker, Morrell crafted his famous debut, First Blood, a seminal novel in the action/adventure/thriller genre.

  Since 1972, Morrell has published numerous other novels and novelizations, among them Last Reveille (1977), Testament (1975), Blood Oath (1982), and the best-selling suspense novels The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), The Fraternity of the Stone (1985), The League of Night and Fog (1987), The Fifth Profession (1990), and The Covenant of the Flame (1991). Other works include the fantasy The Hundred Year Christmas (1983) and thrillers Assumed Identity (1993), Desperate Measures (1994), Extreme Denial (1996), Double Image (1998), Burnt Sienna (2000), The Protector (2003), Creepers (2005), Scavenger (2009), The Spy Who Came for Christmas (2008), The Shimmer (2009), The Naked Edge (2010), Murder as a Fine Art (2013), and Inspector of the Dead (2015). Fireflies, a touching fictional memoir of the death from cancer of his fifteen-year-old son Matthew, was published in 1988. Since 2007, Morrell has also scripted several stories for Marvel Comics, featuring such classic heroes as Captain America, Spider-Man, and Wolverine.

  Although he often explores the horrific in his novels (set pieces and themes in many of his books, especially First Blood, Testament, and Creepers, provide telling examples), only The Totem (1979) and Long Lost (2002) can be counted as pure works of horror. Inspired by Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, The Totem had two incarnations, both effective explorations of the zombie/werewolf/vampire and small town horror themes. Published in 1979, the first, slighter version earned a glowing entry in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988); a “complete and unaltered” version was published by Donald M. Grant in 1994. Long Lost is a horror novel/ghost story that was never really recognized as such. Although Morrell leads with classic revenge and chase motifs, his narrative also includes metaphorical monsters, tombs, and even a haunted house.

  Morrell has written some of the most effective short horror of the last several decades. His shorter work has appeared in many major horror anthologies, including the Whispers, Shadows, Night Visions, and Masters of Darkness series. A number of these shorter works are showcased in Black Evening (1994) and Nightscape (2004). Black Evening contains stories written from 1972 through 1992, featuring the Bram Stoker Award–winning novellas “The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves” and “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity.” Nightscape includes many of Morrell’s stories written since 1992. The major difference between the two collections is that the majority of the stories in Black Evening deal with the supernatural, whereas those appearing in Nightscape tend to be more realistic, treating themes of obsession, determination, and individual identity.

  Hank Wagner

  See also: King, Stephen; Vampires; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  “David Morrell.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Holt, Erika. 2014. “Author Spotlight: David Morrell.” Nightmare 26 (November). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-david-morrell.

  MORRISON, TONI (1931–)

  Toni Morrison is one of the most recognized and influential American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in her work, her concern with presenting the African American experience coexists with elements of the supernatural. In interviews, she has emphasized the importance of the relationship between the language of haunting and her explorations of race, gender, memory, and the past.

  She was born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, George and Ramah, were migrants from Southern states. She studied the classics and humanities at Howard University (BA) and Cornell (MA). Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She has since published ten additional novels. A shortened list of her numerous awards and accolades includes the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the 1993 Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), and the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

  Morrison has influenced numerous writers, students, and readers. While she was writing her first novel, she worked at Random House, where she edited manuscripts by African American writers such as Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, and Toni Cade Bambara. She taught at Howard University, Texas Southern, Yale, and is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.

  Many critics note the influence of William Faulkner’s Southern Gothic on Morrison’s fiction and have suggested possible influences from magical realist writers. While Morrison has acknowledged these precursors, she emphasizes that her work is grounded in African American culture, history, and literary tradition. In her turn, she has influenced writers such as, to name a few, Gloria Naylor, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich to use fiction (often with a supernatural component) to bring attention to elided histories of women and ethnic groups.

  She is best known for her masterwork, Beloved (1987), an unflinching gaze at the horrors of slavery through a ghost story. In her collection of lectures Playing in the Dark (1992), she describes the marginalized and ghostly position of African American characters in American literature by white writers. In her fiction, characters, and sometimes narrators, speak from beyond the grave; living characters who are oppressed and marginalized become liminal presences; and specters appear in the return of the repressed to haunt individuals who have forgotten or are avoiding a traumatic past. Several of Morrison’s novels include ghosts of the past, in particular Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), and Home (2012). Her play Desdemona (2011) gives Shakespeare’s character a voice from the space between life and death as she tries to understand the trajectory of her life and her relationships by engaging issues of race and gender not present in Othello.

  Morrison remains active in the literary and academic communities. Her papers are archived at Princeton University Library.

  Melanie R. Anderson

  See also: Beloved; Faulkner, William.

  Further Reading

  Denard, Carolyn C., ed. 2008. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

  Taylor-Guthrie, Danille K., ed. 1994. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

  MORROW, W. C. (1854–1932)

  William Chambers Morrow was an American writer who wrote horror and science fiction that was popular in it
s day and has been compared at times to that of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and other classic American horror writers. In 2009 the Library of America chose to include Morrow’s 1889 story “His Unconquerable Enemy” in its two-volume retrospective anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, effectively canonizing it.

  Born in 1854 (although his birthdate was variously given), and raised and educated in Alabama, Morrow moved to California in 1879 and began writing for the San Francisco Argonaut, attracting favorable attention from Ambrose Bierce, among others, before joining the staff of William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His reputation as a horror writer exists largely because of The Ape, the Idiot & Other People (1897), a collection of fourteen stories including “His Unconquerable Enemy.” Other notable stories include “The Monster Maker” (first published as “The Surgeon’s Experiment” in 1887), “Over an Absinthe Bottle” (first published as “The Pale Dice-Thrower” in 1893), and “An Original Revenge.” The first, a work of proto–science fiction, describes a young man, determined to conclude his life, who pays a surgeon $5,000 to kill him; the surgeon has other plans, and these culminate in the discovery of a brainless apelike monster: money can make monsters out of men. The latter two are fantastic: the first is heavily ironic, involving the chance meeting of a starving man and a bank robber, and a game of dice that seems to go well for the former but has a conclusion that owes much to Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” while the latter involves a haunting carried out as revenge.

  “His Unconquerable Enemy”: Revenge Horrific

  “His Unconquerable Enemy” was first published in The Argonaut in 1889 as “The Rajah’s Nemesis” and has been anthologized many times since, making it Morrow’s best-known tale. The story is set in India and describes events in the earlier life of the narrator, an unnamed American doctor serving in the court of a local rajah. One of the rajah’s servants is Neranya, whose temper leads him to stab a dwarf and who is sentenced to have his arm amputated. The narrator must clean up the messy amputation, but the insanely angry Neranya attempts vengeance on his master and thus has his other arm amputated. When the rajah’s only son is found dead, Neranya is implicated and sentenced to be tortured, then killed, but after the doctor pleads for Neranya to have a quick death, the rajah changes his mind and has the doctor amputate Neranya’s legs. Thereafter, the rajah keeps the limbless man in an aerial cage in his palace, in a room in which he often sleeps. One night the doctor watches Neranya wriggle his way out of the cage, whose rails are a foot taller than he, land on the sleeping rajah, and, as his dying act, bite the man to death.

  Though contemporary readers encountering “His Unconquerable Enemy” for the first time are likely to be annoyed at its cultural clichés—the rajah, for example, possesses a “sense of cruelty purely Oriental” (Morrow 2015, 95)—as well as bothered by the extremely unethical behavior of its narrator, the situations described by Morrow remain vital and increasingly horrific. Furthermore and very ironically, while the rajah’s progressive maimings of Neranya are horrible, they are also his undoing: had the rajah not been merciful but followed through with his original plan, his lineage would remain intact, as would his life.

  Richard Bleiler

  Source: Morrow, W. C. [1889] 2015. “His Unconquerable Enemy.” In In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe: Classic Tales of Terror 1816 to 1914, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 95–104. New York: Pegasus Books.

  In his later books, Morrow largely abandoned overtly horrific narratives, but A Man: His Mark (1900), though ostensibly a romance, contains scenes of accident and medical situations that will make a modern reader cringe and shudder. Morrow was a clever writer, unafraid to experiment and explore the ideas inherent in certain situations, and it is to be regretted that he ultimately found the writing of romances to be more lucrative than the writing of horrors.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Mad Scientist; Monsters.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 2004. “W. C. Morrow: Horror in San Francisco.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 13–17. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2005. “Morrow, W[illiam] C[hambers].” In Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Morrow, W. C. 2000. The Monster Maker and Other Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz. Seattle, WA: Midnight House.

  Moskowitz, Sam. 1992. “W. C. Morrow: Forgotten Master of Horror—First Phase.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 127–173. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

  “MR. ARCULARIS”

  “Mr. Arcularis” is a short story by the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, novelist, and short story writer Conrad Aiken. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1931 and later collected in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken in 1960. It was also chosen by the Library of America to appear in its two-volume retrospective anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny (2009), a semi-official mark of canonization that recognizes the story as a significant work of American literature in the vein of the fantastic.

  Mr. Arcularis—his last name references an arc, and his first name is never given—is sent on a voyage to England following a serious operation, the ship leaving from Boston. It is June, but the weather is unseasonably cold, and he simply cannot get warm. One of his regular dinner companions is Miss Clarice Dean, a lovely young woman with whom he begins a gentle flirtation. He is disturbed to learn that the ship is also transporting a coffin containing a corpse, for such is a bad omen for a voyage, but more disturbing is his recently developed habit of sleepwalking. He shares this news with Miss Dean, along with the disturbing dream that accompanied it, and after another episode sees the ship’s doctor for a bromide. The sleepwalking episodes begin to culminate with him awakening near the coffin with his memories slipping, and though he becomes more intimate with Miss Dean, he is perpetually cold. The operation has failed, and Mr. Arcularis has died on the operating table.

  In his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, Mark Schorer states that Aiken “moves from the mundane into the mysterious, into hysteria, horror, hallucination, phobia, compulsion, dream, death, and, more often than not, back again into the mundane” (Aiken 1960, viii). Such is a reasonable assessment of the moods of “Mr. Arcularis,” for the story is an unsettling combination of explicit detail and dreamlike development. At the same time, despite Aiken’s literary skills, “Mr. Arcularis” cannot escape being pigeonholed: it is one of the works akin to Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a dying mind attempts to create a narrative that provides an explanation for its passing. Once the conclusion is reached and the surprise revealed, everything falls into place. Its elements become clearer, but it does not transcend its literary inspiration.

  Aiken later adapted “Mr. Arcularis” as a play that was first produced in 1949. It was published in 1957 by Harvard University Press as Mr. Arcularis: A Play. The play proved popular as material for mid-twentieth-century television: it was produced as an episode of the CBS television drama anthology series Studio One in Hollywood in 1956. Other American television productions followed in 1959 (for ITV Play of the Week) and 1961 (for Great Ghost Tales). A made-for-television movie adaptation of the story aired in West Germany in 1967.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Dreams and Nightmares; “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.”

  Further Reading

  Aiken, Conrad. 1960. The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing.

  Pope, John A. 1957. “Conrad Aiken Revivifies ‘Mr. Arcularis.” Harvard Crimson. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1957/3/1/conrad-aiken-revivifies-mr-arcularis-pin. Originally published in The Harvard Crimson, March 1, 1957.

  Spivey, Ted R. 1997. “Fictional Descent into Hell.” In Time’s Stop in Sava
nnah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey, 91–105. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

  Tabachnick, Stephen E. 1974. “The Great Circle Voyage of Conrad Aiken’s Mr. Arcularis.” American Literature (January): 590–607.

  MUMMIES

  A mummy is a corpse of an animal or human preserved either intentionally or unintentionally by exposure to chemicals or extreme temperature and/or humidity. In its role as a character in horror literature, the mummy, like the vampire or zombie, is a revenant, a human being who returns from the dead. All revenants inspire fear as they represent a rupture of the natural and supernatural orders. Like the vampire and the zombie, the mummy also represents an assault on the normal rational world by an unexplained force that must be believed in, studied, and then destroyed before it destroys the modern rational world, usually represented by archaeologists, handsome young men, and beautiful women. The mummy is both ancient and foreign, and its appearance raises concerns about the power of the past, the power of the other, and the fear of incursion of the other.

  Although mummification has occurred in China, Europe, and Central and South America, mummies in both fact and fiction are most often associated with Egypt, where mummification was practiced as early as 3400 BCE. Contrary to popular belief, mummification was not a process for royalty only; rather, it was used by most classes of society. Animals, especially pets, were also mummified in ancient Egypt.

  Interest in mummies can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. In Europe during the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500 CE), popular belief held that mummified bodies had healing properties, and a brisk trade in medicinal mummified ashes developed. Modern interest in mummies followed Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. He included a large number of scientists and scholars with his forces, and they in turn studied and made popular throughout Europe ancient Egyptian art and artifacts. The result has been termed “Egyptomania,” an enthusiasm for all things Egyptian that swept Europe and the United States throughout the nineteenth century.