Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Jason V Brock

  See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bradbury, Ray; Matheson, Richard.

  Further Reading

  Brock, Jason V. 2014. Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

  Morton, Lisa. 2015. “Interview: William F. Nolan.” Nightmare 32 (May). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-william-f-nolan.

  Nolan, William F. 2013. Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Zicree, Marc Scott. 1992. The Twilight Zone Companion, 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press.

  NORTHANGER ABBEY

  Although it was the first of her novels completed for publication, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey was not published until 1818, a year after her death. Northanger Abbey is a parody of both a novel of manners and the Gothic novel, an eighteenth-century literary form made popular by such works as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). These and similar novels combined ruined medieval castles or abbeys as settings, supernatural or paranormal occurrences, dark and threatening men who were often aristocrats or religious figures, a threatened young woman, and overwrought emotions often accompanied by overwrought prose. Although formulaic, Gothic novels were wildly successful and established many of the conventions of later horror fiction and film.

  In Northanger Abbey Austen employs the conventions of the Gothic novel to subvert the genre. It begins with young Catherine Morland, an English teenager who is inordinately fond of reading Gothic novels, traveling to the city of Bath for a season of balls, tea in the Pump Room, and meeting eligible young gentlemen. There she is befriended by Isabella Thorpe, who shares her enthusiasm for Gothic fiction; Isabella’s brother John; Henry Tilney, the son of a general; and his sister Eleanor. At Bath she is attracted to Henry Tilney but isolated by the Thorpes, who think she is wealthier than she is and who plan for her to marry John, for whom she has little affection. Invited by the Tilneys to visit their estate at Northanger Abbey, Catherine is delighted by the anticipation of staying at a Gothic abbey, where she imagines all kinds of excitingly dreadful experiences await her. While at the Abbey she imagines it to be haunted, believes it contains secret rooms with ominous histories, and convinces herself that the general has murdered his wife. Mysteriously, General Tilney cuts short her visit and orders her to leave. All turns out well, however. Catherine learns of the Thorpes’ intentions, Henry Tilney proposes to her, and the general eventually consents to the marriage. Catherine, now older and wiser at age eighteen, realizes that life is not like a work of Gothic fiction as she prepares for her upcoming marriage.

  Northanger Abbey is both a parody of the Gothic novel and a commentary on its readers. Catherine Morland is naïve and gullible. She believes everyone she meets has her best interests at heart, and more significantly, because she has immersed herself in reading Gothic novels, she believes that real life is a delightfully dreadful adventure full of danger and the supernatural. She interprets every event at the Abbey in light of her reading, and of course she is always wrong. In Northanger Abbey Austen is also satirizing the novel of manners, a form focused on matters of social class and convention, for while Catherine is in Bath in the first half of the novel, she has no clue whatsoever what is going on around her and simply follows the advice of others. Successful marriage in Northanger Abbey is the consequence of pure chance.

  The novel has been adapted for stage and screen multiple times, including for PBS, the BBC, and the A&E Network. In 2014 a new version of the novel, written by best-selling crime writer Val McDermid and transforming it into a modern-day teen thriller (with the protagonist now called Cat Morland), was published as part of HarperCollins’s Austen Project, in which popular and critically respected modern-day writers were hired to rework Jane Austen’s six complete novels for modern audiences.

  Jim Holte

  See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Radcliffe, Ann; Walpole, Horace.

  Further Reading

  Ford, Susan Allen. 2012. “A Sweet Creature’s Horrid Novels: Gothic Reading in Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions: The Jane Austin Journal On-Line 3, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol33no1/ford.html.

  Gill, Linda. 2013. “Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Pennsylvania Literary Journal 5, no. 3: 36–57.

  Levine, George. 1975. “Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Abbey.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3: 335–350.

  Skinner, Karalyn. 2013. “‘Horrid’ Gothicism: Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Explicator 71, no. 3: 229–232.

  “THE NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL”

  Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” was originally published as one of the constituent tales of The Three Impostors (1895), a portmanteau work (that is, a work composed of multiple parts) consisting of several short stories connected by a frame story. In its title Machen invokes the (even then) antiquated French meaning of “novel,” implying “novelty” rather than a book-length text.

  The tale is presented as the alleged testimony of Miss Lally, an educated young woman fallen into poverty, who is rescued from starvation by employment as a governess to the children of Professor Gregg, an ethnologist. Relocating from London to Professor Gregg’s home on the edges of the remote Grey Hills in Wales, Lally is puzzled and terrified by a series of anomalous incidents. Discovering Gregg’s journal, she reads of his work investigating the “reality” behind Celtic fairy lore: the persistence of prehuman hominids lurking in the isolated countryside.

  In “The Novel of the Black Seal,” Machen advanced an idea that would exert a significant influence on H. P. Lovecraft (and, largely through him, on many other writers of horror and dark fantasy). He lays out the heart of the idea in what he frames as a document left by a professor who has recently disappeared after a series of strange events:

  I became convinced that much of the folk-lore of the world is but an exaggerated account of events that really happened, and I was especially drawn to consider the stories of the fairies, the good folk of the Celtic races. Here, I thought I could detect the fringe of embroidery and exaggeration, the fantastic guise, the little people dressed in green and gold sporting in the flowers, and I thought I saw a distinct analogy between the name given to this race (supposed to be imaginary) and the description of their appearance and manners. Just as our remote ancestors called the dreaded beings “fair” and “good” precisely because they dreaded them, so they had dressed them up in charming forms, knowing the truth to be the very reverse. Literature, too, had gone early to work, and had lent a powerful hand in the transformation, so that the playful elves of Shakespere are already far removed from the true original, and the real horror is disguised in a form of prankish mischief. But in the older tales, the stories that used to make men cross themselves as they sat around the burning logs, we tread a different stage. (Machen 1895, 105–106)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Machen, Arthur. 1895. The Three Impostors. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

  The story is partly informed by the Euhemerist theories of David MacRitchie (1851–1925), who argued that, through analysis of folk traditions, one could gain information about premodern peoples, including (he speculated) a race of “Turanian” pygmies. Machen used this central idea in two other magazine stories also published in 1895, “The Shining Pyramid” and “The Red Hand.” It was a theme he would return to repeatedly throughout his ensuing career, albeit in increasingly oblique ways, for example “Out of the Earth” (1915) and The Green Round (1933).

  “The Novel of the Black Seal” should also be seen in the wider context of the late-Victorian preoccupation with biological and cultural atavism (a focus on the supposed barbarity and awfulness of earlier and “lower” stages of evolution), an anxiety in part precipitated by the wider acceptance of Darwin’s
evolutionary theory and concerns about biological and cultural degeneration. Comparable stories from the era include Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” (1892) and John Buchan’s “No-Man’s Land” (1899), in which Buchan resituates Machen’s malevolent little people within his native Scotland. However, the peculiar potency of Machen’s use of this theme lies in his decision to keep his malignant prehuman entities “off screen,” their ensuing ambiguity provoking in the reader a sense of queasy uncertainty and dread.

  “The Novel of the Black Seal” is notable for the influence it had on Robert E. Howard and, particularly, H. P. Lovecraft. It is unlikely that many of Lovecraft’s most celebrated stories would exist in any recognizable form divested of the influence of “The Novel of the Black Seal,” specifically the notions of modern survival of ancient cults and prehuman intelligences, the dizzying contemplation of deep history, and the transient contingency of modernity (the idea that human civilization is not an inevitable or invulnerable phenomenon). Several stories by Howard, including “Worms of the Earth” and “The Little People,” are essentially reworkings of Machen’s central conceit, the latter story explicitly so.

  James Machin

  See also: “The Great God Pan”; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; “The White People.”

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Trotter, David. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Three Imposters, by Arthur Machen, xvii–xxxi. London: Everyman.

  NOVELS VERSUS SHORT FICTION

  Novels and short fiction are the two major literary forms in which Gothic literature and horror fiction can be found (although horror comics and Gothic and horror poetry form two important subgenres in their own right). Both allow fear, horror, and unease to be conveyed to the reader through the use of dramatic plot twists, supernatural elements, eerie landscapes, and uncanny atmospheres. The novel, in being a longer narrative form, makes for the development of complex narrative structures and in-depth explorations of psychological mechanisms, whereas the short story, in being a condensed form, plays on dramatic plot twists, drastic ellipsis, and elisions in order to shock or surprise the reader.

  Gothic literature consists mainly of novels and short stories, even though some instances of Gothic theater and poetry can be found in the works of Lord Byron (Manfred, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) or the graveyard poets (“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Night-Piece on Death”). In spite of the Gothic movement being born from the poetic tradition of dark romanticism, narrative prose was what made the genre highly popular in the late eighteenth century, as it allowed reaching out to a broader, more mainstream, and mostly feminine audience. Hundreds of Gothic novels were published over the period 1764–1820, fashioning what was known at the time as the “great Gothic craze” (Hansen 2010, 238).

  Early Gothic fictions were short novels or romances, a mass-market literary form that focuses on relationships and love interests. Authors such as Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew Lewis (The Monk, 1796) adopted this narrative format, as it was popular at the end of the eighteenth century. The publication of sentimental novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; or the New Héloïse (1761) had seen a rise in the popularity of romances and had given credibility to a literature that had otherwise been held in contempt.

  Gothic novels combined elements of sentimental novels with that of medieval folklore and dark romanticism: a complex love intrigue, mysterious threatening events, dilapidated castles, dark forests, supernatural creatures, and so on. The length of the novel allowed for many plot twists, and also movements and travels within the narrative, thus heightening its tension. As the genre picked up, short romances became full-fledged novels that focused on the development of characters and psychological drama. Examples of lengthy Gothic novels include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, 1860–1861; Bleak House, 1852–1853) Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891; Jude the Obscure, 1894–1895) or George Eliot (Middlemarch (1871–1872) also incorporated Gothic elements in their novels in spite of their more naturalist style.

  While Gothic novels thrived in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, the short form started gaining popularity, mostly in America, where the genre would see a revival in the mid-nineteenth century. Being strongly influenced by folklore and popular tales, Gothic fiction already had the quality of short fiction, and authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne would immediately exploit this feature of the genre. Influenced by German folk tales (such as those passed along by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm) as well as early American Gothic short novels (such as Wieland and Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown), both would bring the art of Gothic tales to its pinnacle with short stories such as Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832), and Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “Berenice” (1835). In the literary essay “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Poe praises the value of short fiction over lengthy writing, claiming that short fiction is better than novels in conveying shock, surprise, and fear to the reader since it can be enjoyed in “the limit of one single sitting” (Poe 2006, 525).

  Short fiction would then become a widely popular form for Gothic and horror fiction in America, especially in the subgenre of Southern Gothic fiction. Major figures of Southern Gothic literature, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Joyce Carol Oates, not only wrote many short stories but also defended their literary choice in claiming, much like Poe, that the writing of short stories is highly demanding creative art, particularly effective in creating uncanny, eerie narratives. As of today, collections of horror stories are published regularly in America and still manage to find the broad audience they were designed for in the first place.

  At the same time, horror fiction in novel-length form continues to be popular, with one of the legacies of the horror publishing “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s being the creation of a unique subtype of horror novel that, in the words of horror and science fiction anthologist David Hartwell, “constitutes an avant-garde and experimental literary form which attempts to translate the horrific effects previously thought to be the nearly exclusive domain of the short forms into newly conceived long forms that maintain the proper atmosphere and effects” (Hartwell 1987, 3). The interesting relationship and significant distinctions between short works and novel-length works of horror continue to play a significant role in the evolution of horror literature as a whole.

  Elsa Charléty

  See also: The Brontë Sisters; Faulkner, William; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hoffmann, E. T. A; Oates, Joyce Carol; O’Connor, Flannery; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary.

  Further Reading

  Hansen, Christopher, ed. 2010. Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

  Hartwell, David. 1987. The Dark Descent. New York: Tor.

  O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Robert Fitzgerald and Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Macmillan.

  Poe, Edgar Allan. 2006. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin.

  Potter, Franz. 2005. The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  THE NUMINOUS

  The numinous is not a genre, but an aspect of some horror fiction. The term “numinous,” which was coined by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto, generally
refers to the more spiritual or existential side of the supernatural encounter. While a supernatural entity may frighten a character by threatening him or her, the reason for this terror is clear. However, even when a supernatural entity is not threatening a character personally, the very existence of a supernatural being threatens a character’s idea of what reality is. This may be owing to an intolerantly rationalistic attitude, but, in horror fiction, the numinous does not depend exclusively on a clash with any materialistic prejudice to make itself felt. The numinous experience is disturbing simply because it shows the characters there is another form of existence, and that reality as it is commonly known is only a smaller part of a much larger, invisible whole.

  The numinous can be mystical. Noteworthy examples of the mystical numinous can be found in the writings of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. The numinous can also be more in keeping with scientific speculation, as was more often the case in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories of “cosmic horror.” Where Machen and Blackwood give the reader the impression that ancient spiritual mysteries continue to manifest themselves in modern reality, Lovecraft draws more on the boundlessness of relativistic space and time and on the limitations of human knowledge to create his numinous effects.

  In formulating the concept of the numinous, Otto was greatly influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in whose philosophy the linguistically distinct but thematically related idea of the noumenal plays an important role. Kant identified as noumenal those things that seem to lie just beyond the limits of possible human experience, things as they are “in themselves,” as distinct from human perception and knowledge of them. The noumenal, Kant argued, cannot be experienced, but it is possible to experience the limits of human experience. With this as a deep background to Otto’s concept, the numinous experience would then be the sense of almost experiencing what is just beyond the human, and so it is very close to the aesthetic idea of the sublime.