Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; Radcliffe, Ann; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Walpole, Horace.

  Further Reading

  Albright, Richard S. 2005. “No Time Like the Present: The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5, no. 1: 49–75.

  Russett, Margaret. 1998. “Narrative Enchantment in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” ELH 65, no. 1: 159–186.

  Schillace, Brandy Lain. “‘Temporary Failure of Mind’: Déjà vu and Epilepsy in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 2: 273–287.

  Whiting, Patrica. 1996. “Literal and Literary Representations of the Family in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 4: 485–501.

  N

  NEW WEIRD

  In 2003, speculative-fiction author M. John Harrison posted a question on his “Third Alternative” message board: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything? Is it even New?” (quoted in VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2008, 317). This prompted a formative discussion about the genre that some have come to refer to as the “New Weird.” Editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The New Weird (2008) provides the best entry point into this contested field, and includes such stories as K. J. Bishop’s “The Art of Dying” (1997), Brian Evenson’s “Watson’s Boy” (2000), China Miéville’s “Jack” (2005), Steph Swainston’s “The Ride of the Gabbleratchet” (2007), and Alistair Rennie’s “The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines” (2008).

  In the introduction to The New Weird, Jeff VanderMeer points to the mainstream success of Miéville’s genre-bending masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000) as the event that most clearly defined the emergence of the movement. Using the novel as a springboard, VanderMeer offers one definition of the New Weird, emphasizing gritty urban settings that distort genre conventions, an intellectual sensibility influenced by New Wave science fiction writers such as J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, a visceral corporeality (a focus on bodily reality) stemming from Clive Barker’s horror fiction from the 1980s, and an embrace of the weird that often refers to the existential politics of modern life in a subversive or transgressive mode.

  The New Weird, then, may be positioned in a genealogy of weird fiction that reaches back to Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic horror, the French Surrealists’ attacks on consensus reality, the cosmic dread of the Lovecraft school, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast saga (1946–1959), and then moves through Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series (1950–1984), Harrison’s Viriconium books (1971–1985), the splatterpunk of Barker and Poppy Z. Brite, and the metaphysical horror of Thomas Ligotti and Kathe Koja. In the 1990s, magazines such as Andy Cox’s The Third Alternative and Ann VanderMeer’s The Silver Web played a significant role in publishing New Weird fiction. Other examples of the New Weird include Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (1995), Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001), Bishop’s The Etched City (2003), and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008). More recently and in the context of visual media, the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective (2014) television series, David Robert Mitchell’s pastiche film It Follows (2014), and Robert Eggers’s supernatural film The Witch (2015) have brought New Weird sensibilities into the cultural mainstream.

  However, like slipstream fiction and interstitial writing (writing that falls on or between the boundaries of genres and forms), works associated with the New Weird embrace multiplicity in both form and content, and therefore challenge taxonomic categorization, leading many authors and critics, aware of the pressures of marketability, to question the validity of the term. Art-horror writer Laird Barron, for instance, instead affirms the persistence of the weird itself as a speculative mode that cuts across genres by disrupting natural laws, thereby giving rise to an atmospherics of unease.

  Sean Matharoo

  See also: Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Brite, Poppy Z.; Kafka, Franz; Koja, Kathe; Ligotti, Thomas; Link, Kelly; Lovecraftian Horror; Miéville, China; Surrealism; VanderMeer, Jeff.

  Further Reading

  Miéville, China. 2003. “Long Live the New Weird.” The Third Alternative 35: 3.

  Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. 2016. The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2008. The New Weird. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications.

  Walter, Damien G. 2008. “The New World of New Weird.” The Guardian, January 22. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jan/22/thenewworldofnewweird.

  NEWMAN, KIM (1959–)

  Kim James Newman is one of the most ingenious and media-literate authors of horror fiction to emerge during the 1980s. His earliest works were film novelizations and “sharecropper” novels set in the secondary worlds of gaming franchises, published under the pseudonym “Jack Yeovil,” along with critical studies such as the excellent survey of horror cinema, Nightmare Movies (1988; rev. ed. 2011). Newman’s knowledge of genre film, both classic and obscure, is nothing short of magisterial, and he continues to review movies for numerous venues, such as Video Watchdog.

  Newman’s wide-ranging erudition in twentieth-century popular culture deeply informed his first serious works of fiction. His debut novel under his own name, The Night Mayor (1989), is a potent fusion of noir, science fiction, and horror, in which characters are trapped in virtual-reality scenarios borrowed from Hollywood movies. Newman’s second novel, Bad Dreams (1990), is a delirious dark fantasy in which a demonic vampire attempts to ensnare a young woman in his self-made dreamscape, only to be foiled by her willful, ingenious resistance. Anno Dracula (1992), Newman’s first real breakthrough, is an alternate history in which the attempted undead invasion of England chronicled in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was actually a success, with the count marrying Queen Victoria and their vampiric progeny coming to dominate the twentieth century. The novel spawned a number of sequels, all prolific with allusions to vampire literature and film: The Bloody Red Baron (1995), Dracula Cha Cha Cha (1998), and Johnny Alucard (2013). Newman’s short fiction—gathered in such collections as The Original Dr. Shade, and Other Stories (1994) and Famous Monsters (1995)—has also engaged cleverly with the literary and cinematic history of horror.

  Newman’s favored form is the pastiche, involving the ironic recycling of familiar motifs and materials: his tales offer both the pleasure of recognition, as the densely textured layers of allusion register on the reader, and a sense of estrangement from the familiar genre patterns these allusions summon up. Newman’s basic impulse is not merely to borrow but to subvert: his allusions always bear a critical edge. Yet at the same time, they suggest a bond of complicity linking author and reader in an ironic nostalgia for the icons and plot structures he has so ruthlessly plundered and satirically redeployed. The joy of reading Anno Dracula, for example, lies not only in its shrewd exposure of the patriarchal and imperialist power dynamics of classic nineteenth-century vampire stories, but also in the sheer profusion of loving detail with which Newman evokes them, the sense he conveys that this popular material, while ideologically suspect, is irrepressibly imprinted on our memories and appetites. Perhaps due to his restless genre-switching and his uncanny talent for mimicry, Newman’s remarkable originality as an author has not been as widely recognized as it should be.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Dark Fantasy; New Weird; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Hills, Matt. 2003. “Counterfictions in the Work of Kim Newman: Rewriting Gothic SF as ‘Alternate-Story Stories.’” Science Fiction Studies 30 (30): 436–455.

  Latham, Rob. 2001. “VR Noir: Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 16: 95–122.

  Wilkinson, Gary. 2000. “Stepping through the Silver Screen: The Fiction of Kim Newman.” Vector 210 (March/April): 15–18.

  THE NIGHT LAND

  The Night Land is a visionary fantasy by William Hope H
odgson, first published in 1912. It constitutes a kind of allegorical summation of Hodgson’s metaphysical and moral ideas. Critical opinion of the work has always been sharply divided; its admirers regard it as an unparalleled masterpiece by virtue of its imaginative reach and the phantasmagorical elaboration of its imagery, while its detractors consider it to be almost unreadable because of its mock-archaic style.

  In the novel’s frame narrative—set in a past sufficiently remote to justify the use of an ornate narrative style—the death of the narrator’s beloved Mirdath stimulates visions of the remote future in his grief-stricken mind. In the world of those visions, the sun’s radiation is fading away, leaving the Earth unfit for human habitation. The people who believe themselves to be the last representatives of humankind live in a huge metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt, which is supplied with power by an Electric Circle that draws energy from the dwindling Earth-Current. As well as life support, the power in question supplies the necessary defense against various monsters and enigmatic observers, seemingly waiting to inherit the Earth.

  When a message is unexpectedly received from another precarious abode, whose sole surviving inhabitant, Naani, is a reincarnation of Mirdath, the narrator’s dream-self embarks upon an arduous odyssey across the phantasmagorical landscape of the dying Earth, hoping to rescue her. He reaches her, but their return journey is even more dangerous. Eventually, Naani is killed by emanations from the mysterious House of Silence, the dwelling of the giant Silent Ones, but she is miraculously resurrected by the Earth-Current in order to secure the narrator a more fortunate end in his dream than he can possibly attain in life.

  Hodgson’s vision of the world’s end is derived from Lord William Thomson Kelvin’s theory that the sun’s radiation was produced by gravitational collapse and could not last for more than a few million years. Other fictional extrapolations of the theory had been produced, most notably H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but none had complicated the tragedy of the Earth’s demise with such a dramatic metamorphosis of life on its surface, explained in terms of the breakdown of dimensional barriers. No previous work had contrived to communicate such an acute sense of the utter insignificance of one species inhabiting one world in a vast, bleak, intrinsically malign and essentially incomprehensible cosmos—the sensibility that H. P. Lovecraft called “cosmic horror.” The artificiality of the novel’s prose attempts to support the cultivation of that aesthetic reaction by provoking a sense of alienation in the reader; the many descriptive terms rendered with an initial capital letter do not refer in a simple sense to aspects of the imaginary landscape, but emphasize its status as a metaphorical model of the human mind under the stress of grief and angst. The allegory is only partly decipherable, by necessity, deliberately leaving a dark margin of mystery.

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Frame Story; Hodgson, William Hope; The House on the Borderland.

  Further Reading

  Bell, Ian. 1986. “A Dream of Darkness: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land.” Studies in Weird Fiction 1 (Summer): 13–17.

  Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.

  Bruce, Samuel W. 1997. “William Hope Hodgson.” In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 121–131. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 178. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.

  Hodgens, Richard. 1981. “The Deep World of Hodgson’s Nightland.” Trumpet 12 (Summer): 14–18, 44.

  The Night Land: The Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://nightland.website.

  Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

  NIGHT SHIFT

  Night Shift is a collection of twenty stories by Stephen King, with an introduction by John D. Macdonald (who was one of King’s writer idols) published in 1978. It was King’s first short-fiction collection, and most of its contents had first been published in Cavalier and other men’s magazines. The book showcases the many different types of fiction King attempted up to that point: Lovecraftian horror in “Jerusalem’s Lot,” an epistolary narrative about an ancient evil that overruns a small Maine town in the nineteenth century; science fiction in “I Am the Doorway,” in which an astronaut returned from space discovers that his body is turning into a conduit to an alien dimension; suspense in “The Ledge,” about a man blackmailed into undertaking a death-defying act by the husband whose wife is the man’s lover; and even mainstream fiction in “The Woman in the Room,” in which a man secretly facilitates the death of his mother, a cancer victim.

  The majority of the book’s stories are examples of King’s trademark approach to horror, turning the ordinary and commonplace into objects of menace: laundry machinery is endowed with malevolent life in “The Mangler”; toy soldiers are magically animated as aggressive combatants in “Battleground”; rats infesting a decrepit mill grow to monstrous size in “Graveyard Shift”; a can of spoiled beer causes a grotesque transformation in the man who drinks it in “Gray Matter”; and childish fear of the boogeyman proves to be horrifyingly warranted in “The Boogeyman.” The stories are set for the most part in recognizable American towns, cast with everyday people who are products of their environments and peppered with recognizable references to contemporary popular culture and consumer culture that help to situate their horrors in the familiar. The vampire story “One for the Road” is a sidebar to King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Most of the book’s stories were later adapted as movies, notably “Trucks” as Maximum Overdrive (1986), which King himself directed; “Graveyard Shift” (film version 1990), and “Children of the Corn” (1984), the latter concerned with a cult of children in rural Nebraska who waylay unsuspecting travelers to sacrifice them to a monstrous entity that lives in the cornfields. The film version of Children of the Corn spawned a horror franchise that continues to this day.

  In his lengthy foreword to the book, King relates his “marketable obsession” (King 2011, xix) to write horror to the reader’s taste for horror fiction, noting that “great horror is almost always allegorical” in its depictions of death, and that “the horror tales live most naturally at that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious” (King 2011, xxxviii). In his opinion, the tale of horror fiction speaks to that commingling of interest and revulsion that compels us to contemplate what King refers to “the body under the sheet,” that is, the reality of death, especially one’s own. His observations anticipate those that would shape his book-length study of horror in popular culture, Danse Macabre (1981).

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: King, Stephen; Lovecraftian Horror; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Collings, Michael, and David Engbretson. 1985. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  Herron, Don. 1982. “Horror Springs in the Fiction of Stephen King.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 57–82. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller.

  King, Stephen. 2011. Night Shift. New York: Anchor Books.

  Reino, Joseph. 1988. “Night Shift: Harbinger of Bad News.” In Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary, 100–116. Boston: Twayne.

  NOLAN, WILLIAM F. (1928–)

  William Francis Nolan is an American science fiction, horror, and fantasy author. He is the creator, by his own estimation, of more than 2,000 pieces of fiction and nonfiction, and he has edited or co-edited roughly 26 anthologies in his nearly 60-year career. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and originally worked as an artist for Hallmark Cards and in the comic book industry before becoming a writer. Though married since 1970, he has been estranged from his wife for more than ten years. He is contin
ually working on new projects and is a frequent guest of honor at industry conventions and festivals, including the World Horror Convention, the World Fantasy Convention, and smaller regional events.

  In the 1950s, Nolan was an integral part of the writing ensemble known as “The Group,” which included many well-known genre writers such as Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, John Tomerlin, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson (with whom he co-wrote Logan’s Run in 1967), and others. Tomerlin, Beaumont, and Nolan were also avid auto racing fans and participated in local races themselves throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Nolan is considered a leading expert on Dashiell Hammett and pulps such as Black Mask and Western Story, and he is the world authority on the works of prolific scribe Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. In addition to writing biographies of both men, he has also written books on director John Huston, actor Steve McQueen, and racing legend Barney Oldfield. Also adept at poetry and screenwriting—with more than twenty produced scripts to his credit—he was co-writer, with Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame), of the screenplay for the classic 1976 horror film Burnt Offerings (based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Robert Marasco), as well as co-writer, with his friend Richard Matheson, of the classic American television movie Trilogy of Terror (1975), directed by Curtis. Curtis and Nolan teamed up on several other productions as well, including The Kansas City Massacre (1975), Turn of the Screw (1974), and The Norliss Tapes (1973).

  Though he has written in a variety of genres, Nolan’s main output is in horror and science fiction. His style has changed over the years, and what began as a tendency toward the lush flourishes of his mentor Ray Bradbury has evolved into a leaner approach more influenced by noir, hardboiled fiction, and Ernest Hemingway. Many of his works are populated by loners, or, conversely, young female (and even alien/nonhuman) protagonists and are frequently narrated in the first person. With respect to themes, Nolan often utilizes plot-driven narratives with sparse characterizations and descriptions; many of his works focus on the juxtaposition of the uncanny and the commonplace, life given to inanimate objects, or the violent reaction of everyday people to unexpected circumstances.