Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Horror fiction that dwells more on physical threats and direct emotional consequences would not be considered numinous. Numinous horror fiction may involve physical or direct threats and pay considerable attention to character, but in general the numinous horror tale is philosophical and will often downplay physical or personal aspects of a supernatural menace in order to emphasize the danger posed to an idea of the world itself. Such stories depend less on sympathy with characters in jeopardy and more on encouragement of the reader to question his or her reality. For this reason, a numinous story will often be unsensational, set in familiar places, and involve ordinary people; the supernatural intrusion will be subtle and uncertain, and the points of view of the various characters will become correspondingly more important. However, a story like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw would not likely be considered numinous, for the considerable doubt thrown on the sanity of the governess in that story undermines the supernatural reality of the ghosts in that tale.

  One significant example of a numinous story is “Cecilia de Noel,” published by English writer Mary Elizabeth Hawker in 1891. This story is composed of a number of different narratives from different narrators, who all relate tales touching on a haunting. Numinous uncertainty, more than terror, is the overall effect of the story. Another, later example is the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “And When the Sky Was Opened,” in which the main characters, a group of test pilots who have by chance stumbled across some mysterious threshold during an experimental flight in a new kind of aircraft, are edited out of existence; apparently, the cosmos wishes to preserve its secrets. This episode was based on a 1953 short story by Richard Matheson titled “Disappearing Act.”

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; Samuels, Mark; The Sublime; “The Willows.”

  Further Reading

  Geary, Robert F. 1992. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edward Mellon Press.

  Varnado, S. L. 1987. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

  O

  OATES, JOYCE CAROL (1938–)

  The American author Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most celebrated mainstream writers to be associated with the field of horror literature. A significant portion of her vast literary output has been cast in the Gothic mold, has deployed themes of the grotesque and uncanny, or has been self-consciously modeled on previous work in the genre.

  Oates has openly acknowledged her debts to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft; indeed, she has written movingly about how their fiction, with its focus on “the interior of the soul,” links personal fears and anxieties with nightmares of cosmic dread (Oates 1996). More broadly, Oates has articulated, in a 1998 essay on “The Aesthetics of Fear,” a vision of horror literature as a cathartic mode, which, by evoking “an artful simulation” of an emotion that is “crude, inchoate, nerve-driven and ungovernable,” prepares readers to confront real-world terrors when they arise (Oates 1998, 176). Oates sees the experience of terror as central to American literature in particular, as her superb anthology American Gothic Tales (1996), which traces a lineage from Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King and Thomas Ligotti, makes clear.

  Oates’s engagement with horror was evidenced in her early collection Night-Side (1977), which gathers eighteen stories—including the title tale, an evocative exploration of occult research—that treat themes of haunting, dark obsession, and morbid diablerie (sorcery aided by the devil). Many subsequent story collections—such as Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011), and The Doll Master and Other Tales of Terror (2016)—have been organized around similar topics. A number of works explicitly harken back to classics in the field: “The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” (in Haunted), for example, is a retelling of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) from the perspective of the ghosts, while “Death-Cup” (in Corn Maiden) cleverly invokes Poe’s ambiguous doppelgänger story, “William Wilson” (1839). These allusions function not as mere pastiches but rather as energetic reimaginings, in which Oates unpacks the subtexts of the originals with subtlety and a shrewd eye for psychological nuance. Oates’s short fiction has been celebrated within the field: “Fossil-Figures,” a tale of macabre vengeance, won a World Fantasy Award in 2011, while the collection in which it appeared, Corn Maiden, won a Bram Stoker Award.

  Oates’s novels have flirted with Gothic elements from the very start of her career. Perhaps her most abiding theme—of thwarted, enslaving, or embittered love—has always cast a Gothic shadow: novels such as With Shuddering Fall (1964), Wonderland (1971), and Do with Me What You Will (1973) feature characters driven literally mad with unrequited passion. Her 1996 short novel First Love: A Gothic Tale turns an unsparingly brutal story of sexual abuse into a rich meditation on themes of vampirism and demonic possession (these themes are metaphorical, not literal, however). Similarly, Beasts (2003) analyzes the masochistic impulse that drives obsessive love, twisting desire into grotesque fantasies of abasement and devourment. Oates’s fascination for tales of love gone wrong has led her to write several narratives of serial killers whose transgressive desires emerge out of sexual loneliness and a perverse yearning for human connection. For example, her Stoker Award–winning novel Zombie (1995), inspired by the grisly career of Jeffrey Dahmer, features a murderer who attempts to create a slavish companion whose love cannot be retracted or revoked. Oates first essayed this controversial topic in her widely anthologized 1966 story of sorcerous seduction, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

  Oates’s most overt engagements with the horror genre can be found in her so-called “Gothic Saga,” which includes Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), My Heart Laid Bare (1998), and The Accursed (2013). Historical tales that self-consciously echo past masters of the field, as well as evoking and updating archaic forms, such as the sensation novel (which flourished in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s), these are rich and deeply rewarding works that weave occult elements—hauntings, psychic powers, ancestral curses—into a densely observed fabric of everyday life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the earliest installments in the series, though coinciding with the boom in horror publishing during the 1980s, did not enjoy a wide crossover audience, the more recent books have been warmly embraced within the field, with Stephen King calling The Accursed “hypnotic” in a New York Times review (King 2013).

  Since the 1990s, Oates herself has cultivated intimate connections with the horror genre and has endeavored to build bridges between it and the larger literary marketplace. Indeed, she is probably the most distinguished ambassador for horror in the hallowed halls of mainstream publishing, issuing polemical manifestos for the centrality of terror to the modern imagination, and defending Lovecraft against his detractors as an author with an authentically spiritual and tragic sensibility. Though now in her sixth decade of writing, Oates shows no signs of slowing down; if anything, her Gothic preoccupations continue to provide a vital compulsion to her work.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Ancestral Curse; Bram Stoker Award; Dreams and Nightmares; The Grotesque; The Haunted House or Castle; Psychological Horror; World Fantasy Award; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Colognes-Brooks, Gavin. 2014. “The Strange Case of Joyce Carol Oates.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow, 303–314. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

  Egan, James. 1990. “Romance of a Darksome Type: Versions of the Fantastic in the Novels of Joyce Carol Oates.” Studies in Weird Fiction 7 (Spring): 12–21.

  King, Stephen. 2013. “Bride of Hades: ‘The Accursed’ by Joyce Carol Oates.” New York Times, March 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/the-accursed-by-joyce-carol-oates.html?_r=0.

  Milazzo, Lee. 1989. Conversatio
ns with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

  Oates, Joyce Carol. 1996. “The King of Weird.” New York Review of Books, October 31. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/10/31/the-king-of-weird.

  Oates, Joyce Carol. 1998. “The Aesthetics of Fear.” Salmagundi 120 (Fall): 176–185.

  O’BRIEN, FITZ-JAMES (1828–1862)

  Born Michael O’Brien in County Cork, Ireland, he changed his name to Fitz-James upon emigration from London to New York in 1852. In New York, as a regular contributor of fiction, poetry, and humor to U.S. periodicals, he helped form a literary circle at Pfaff’s beer cellar with fellow Edgar Allan Poe admirers like his probable lover T. B. Aldrich and Fitz Hugh “Hashish Eater” Ludlow. He provides an early landmark for Irish American, supernatural, queer, and science fictions. Literary critics often bemoan his untimely death as a Union officer in the U.S. Civil War and unrealized potential for more tales or longer Hawthorne-esque romances.

  O’Brien’s first collection of poetry and tales, along with friends’ reminiscences, was published in 1881. Despite the New York literati’s fond post–Civil War recollections of O’Brien’s machismo, dandyism, extravagance, and geniality, a second volume never found a publisher. Editor and anthologist Jessica Salmonson suggests this was the result of homophobia and O’Brien’s probable bisexuality. Salmonson’s 1988 two-volume edition divides O’Brien’s supernatural tales between light fantasies and the macabre. The early 1850s fantasies were largely uncollected. Several have dream or Orientalist topics, such as O’Brien’s first published tale, “An Arabian Night-Mare” (1851), in the magazine of Charles Dickens, another O’Brien idol, and “The Dragon-Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu” (1856). O’Brien’s poetry and fantasies are forgotten. His macabre tales of the late 1850s like “The Golden Ingot” (1858), “What Was It?” (1859), and “The Wondersmith” (1859) endure. Weird Tales chose to reprint many of these in the 1920s and 1930s.

  The frantic narrator of “The Diamond Lens” (1858) communes with the spirit of Anton von Leeuwenhoek on microscope construction, steals a rose-diamond for a lens from a caricatured French Jew (who stole it from an enslaved Brazilian), and obsesses over a woman his new microscope reveals in a water drop. The tale remained well regarded. Science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories reprinted it twice. Another disturbed narrator presents “The Lost Room” (1858). He reflects on mnemonic associations of his boardinghouse room’s treasured objects (remembering a piano performance evoking H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”). The narrator is dispossessed of his room by the house’s caricatured Congolese waiter and a ghoulish dinner party recalling Poe’s “King Pest” (1835). The grotesque racial caricatures accompanying the tales’ sense of the weird proves a barrier for contemporary interest.

  “What Was It?”: An Invisible Assault

  O’Brien wrote “What Was It? A Mystery” (1859) while homeless and living with his probable lover, writer T. B. Aldrich. It was initially published alongside a translation of Théophile Gautier.

  In a New York boardinghouse, opium-tranced Dr. Hammond and Harry Escott rhapsodize over Orientalist phantasmagorias and supernatural art. An invisible humanoid ghoul assaults Escott in bed, and the opium smokers study the possible cannibal for weeks before it starves. The tale is anthologized across several genres, but many reprints omit the concluding byline and editor’s note about the display of a plaster cast of the ghoul.

  Escott also narrates O’Brien’s ghost tale “The Pot of Tulips” (1855). The scientific, systematic nature of Escott’s paranormal investigations may make him fiction’s first occult detective (before J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Hesselius) and fiction’s second recurring detective (after Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and before Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Harper’s detective Furbush). “What Was It?,” in one of many metatextual instances, suggests “Tulips” was written in-story by Escott, which may account for Escott’s happy, rich marriage in “Tulips” versus his being a doomed addict-renter in the later tale. “What Was It?” alludes to occult or grotesque art from Shakespeare, Jacques Callot, C. B. Brown, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Tony Johannot, Catherine Crowe, and Gustave Doré. O’Brien’s works often feature grotesque racial caricatures, here a drunken black butler.

  “What Was It?” is O’Brien’s best remembered tale for its erudite steeping in prior supernatural art and wide influence. It informs invisibility in the fiction of Guy de Maupassant (“The Horla”), Ambrose Bierce (“The Damned Thing”), and H. P. Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour out of Space”). The enigmatic descriptions of the captured ghoul raise questions about Victorian notions of science and public display, monstrosity, enslavement, queer desire, and invisible economic relations.

  Bob Hodges

  Despite years of sparse recognition for “the Celtic Poe,” critics increasingly see him and fellow Harper’s contributor and Poe disciple H. P. Spofford as key late U.S. Romantics and a bridge in U.S. short fiction between antebellum Nathaniel Hawthorne and Poe and postbellum Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce.

  Bob Hodges

  See also: Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Burdine, W. H. 2015. “‘What Was It?’: The Immaterial Self & Nineteenth-Century American Panic.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 61, no. 3: 441–473.

  Franklin, H. Bruce, ed. 1995. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

  “The Golden Ingot.” 1952. Tales of Tomorrow television series. May 9, 1952. Horror Habit. Edited by Jolie Bergman. 2016. http://horrorhabit.blogspot.com/p/watch-it-now-tales-of-tomorrow-1959-1960.html.

  Salmonson, Jessica. 1988. Introductions to The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday.

  Taylor, Matthew. 2013. “Ghost-Humanism; or, Specters of Materialism.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2: 416–422.

  Whitley, Edward, and Rob Weidman, eds. 2016. The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art & Literature by the Bohemians of Antebellum NY. Lehigh University. http://lehigh.edu/pfaffs.

  OCCULT DETECTIVES

  The occult or psychic detective is a character who specializes in identifying and dealing with paranormal phenomena and their causes. Such characters as Arthur Machen’s Mr. Dyson, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius in “Green Tea” (1869), and Bram Stoker’s Dr. Abraham van Helsing in Dracula (1897), often cited as the earliest examples, are prototypes but are neither professional investigators nor series characters. Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly has the conceit of being taken from Hesselius’s files, but he appears in just one story.

  The earliest series character to combine the supernatural and detective genres is Flaxman Low (1898–1899), created by Hesketh and Kate Pritchard. He is a professional ghost-hunter called in to investigate hauntings as Sherlock Holmes is to investigate crimes.

  The first such character to become well known was John Silence, created by Algernon Blackwood. The collection John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) was a best-seller. Silence, like Low, investigated occult phenomena employing logic and his broad knowledge of the paranormal.

  Thomas Carnacki (1910–1912), created by William Hope Hodgson, a professional ghost-hunter like Low, used instead a scientific, or pseudoscientific, approach to deal with hauntings that were of Hodgson’s own imaginative devising, such as “Saiitii” and “Aeiirii” phenomena. Carnacki stories are still being written today by various authors.

  Many other similar characters have followed through the decades. Moris Klaw (1913–1920), created by Sax Rohmer (known for his Fu Manchu stories), was different in that he solved mundane crimes using psychic means. He slept on a special pillow and used his dreams to provide the clues.

  The more typical Jules de Grandin was featured in a long series of stories by Seabury Quinn that ran in Weird Tales magazine from 1925 to 1951. It was the most popular series ever to run in the
magazine. De Grandin solved a variety of crimes, sometimes purely supernatural, and sometimes, as in the Carnacki stories, of a more science fictional nature.

  The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1926) by occultist author Dion Fortune concerned the exploits of another doctor specializing in the paranormal. Taverner was supposed to have been modeled on a real doctor, and the stories are supposed to be composites of actual case histories.

  Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow series (1970–1989) combined the form with the Chthulhu Mythos.

  Occult investigators have also appeared on television. Two Carnacki stories were televised respectively in 1953 and 1971. The original character Carl Kolchak, a reporter who investigates outré phenomena, appeared in two television movies and the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), which inspired The X Files (1993–2000).

  The occult detective is still present in fiction, but has shifted from the Sherlock Holmes model toward a more hard-boiled detective model. Examples are Jim Butcher’s novels about detective-wizard Harry Dresden (2000–) and Mike Carey’s novels about freelance exorcist Felix Castor (2007–).

  Lee Weinstein

  See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Dracula; “Green Tea”; Hodgson, William Hope; In a Glass Darkly; John Silence: Physician Extraordinary; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Quinn, Seabury; Rohmer, Sax.

  Further Reading