Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Fonseca, Tony. 2007. “The Psychic.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 409–439. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Hendrix, Grady. 2013. “The Terrible Occult Detectives.” Tor.com, December 18. http://www.tor.com/2013/12/18/haunted-holidays-the-terrible-occult-detectives.

  Jones, Stephen, ed. 1998. Dark Detectives: Adventures of the Supernatural Sleuths. Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer.

  Valentine, Mark, ed. 2009. The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.

  O’CONNOR, FLANNERY (1925–1964)

  A noted practitioner of Southern Gothic and Southern grotesque, Mary Flannery O’Connor merged Christian demonic horror, violence, absurdity, and revelation in her harsh narrative landscapes. Her works are rife with elements of horror fiction; as Jon Lance Bacon notes, “she made extensive, strategic use of motifs from the horror genre” (Bacon 2010, 89). Indeed, some reviewers have classified O’Connor’s tales as “the very best of horror literature,” even if her fiction does not fit neatly into a standard definition (Pelfrey 1995, 5). Magistrale and Morrison’s edition on contemporary American horror fiction even places O’Connor as a formative figure of the genre.

  O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. She died prematurely of complications related to lupus on August 3, 1964. For a decade before her death, O’Connor lived as a veritable cripple on her mother’s farm, Andalusia. Her illness gave her a unique worldview, which deeply affected her fiction: a literary vision of horrors distinctly Southern and grotesque. O’Connor had diverse influences from the surrealist satire and grotesquerie of the Russian author Nikolai Gogol (e.g., “Diary of a Madman”), to the dark comedy of The Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Her style was shaped by the theological philosophy of scholars like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). O’Connor is heavily anthologized, from Norton Editions of American Literature to editor David Hartwell’s classic horror anthology The Dark Descent, and she has impacted the writing of everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Anne Rice.

  During her lifetime, O’Connor produced two novels and two story collections, receiving numerous awards and accolades. While earning an MFA in creative writing at Iowa State University, O’Connor published her first short story, “The Geranium” (1946). It made her an instant literary success. But O’Connor produced the bulk of her work at Andalusia, where she moved in 1951 after being diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus.

  O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood (1952), attracted national attention, mixed reviews, and a spectrum of critical reactions. Some reviewers derisively compared Wise Blood—with its violence and sadism—to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. O’Connor’s novel captures the absurd, grotesque, and antireligious exploits of a destructive and murderous World War II veteran named Hazel Motes. Motes is a prodigal prophet figure who lines his shoes with glass shards and wraps his chest with barbed wire as a form of self-mortification.

  After Wise Blood, O’Connor published her first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). Early critics unleashed a barrage of tongue-in-cheek associations between her writing and popular fiction with a horrific edge. A reviewer for Time magazine, for example, allied her work with the “sardonic brutality” of “the early Graham Greene” (“Such Nice People” 1955, 114). Within this collection, several stories stand out as signature examples of her craft. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is her best-known work. It is punctuated by O’Connor’s strategic use of moral horror. The character “the Grandmother” faces her “moral and emotional limits,” as is typical of horror literature (Botting 1998, 130). Another heavily anthologized short story from this collection is “Good Country People.” The piece is full of distorted dichotomies that lapse into grotesquerie through hyperbole, caricature, and absurdism. Hartwell suggests this story relies on “a non-supernatural strain of American psychological horror” (Hartwell 1987, 576). Likewise, “The Artificial Nigger” capitalizes on what Louis D. Rubin Jr. calls the “profound terror” of being lost and “confronted with the unknown” (Rubin 1958, 36). Less often anthologized due to the offensive nature of its title, this short story uses imagery of Dante’s inferno to project modernity as hell, a horrible labyrinthine purgatory of concrete and demonic corruption. The labyrinth, as Botting points out, is a common motif of horror. It generates the fear of entrapment and the dread of impending doom lurking around any corner. For O’Connor, the monsters hiding in the maze are people.

  O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, came out in 1960 to a flurry of controversy catalyzed by its portrayal of murder, arson, kidnapping, and homosexual rape. The title originates in Matthew 11:12: “the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” Again O’Connor uses verbal, physical, and symbolic violence in tandem with human deformities to produce horror filled with immorality in which characters are shocked and bedeviled. The protagonist is a fated prophet named Francis Tarwater who resists his destiny with revolting and often inhuman actions. The devil assaults him. He then sets a conflagration and submits to his vocation. Tarwater resembles the character “Reverend” Powell, who is the homicidal and fraudulent religious man in Davis Gruber’s classic 1953 horror-thriller Night of the Hunter. The Misfit of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a similar permutation of this figure. Hank Wagner analyzes the Misfit as an icon of the genre, the serial killer (Wagner 2007, 483). O’Connor’s prophets exemplify this archetype, recast within her own spiritual and moral vision.

  Submitted to her editor in the final months of her life, O’Connor’s last anthology of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), depicts moments of rage and redemption, violent derangements, alienation, and the wildly grotesque. This collection is darker in tenor and more spiritual.

  During her career, O’Connor was the recipient of three O. Henry Awards and myriad other distinctions. Her form of grotesque comes out of a tradition of Southern humor that has evolved and twisted its aesthetic mode into nightmarish visions of reality, associated with comedic horror. She is linked to foundational Southern Gothic writers such as Faulkner and Carson McCullers through her use of violence and realism. Many horror writers consider O’Connor an influence on their fiction. Contemporary horror, thriller, and Southern Gothic writer Joe R. Lansdale credits O’Connor among his literary influences. The nightmares of O’Connor impact Joyce Carol Oates, as in her anthology Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, and Stephen King, reflected in his musings on horror in Danse Macabre. Even Cormac McCarthy alludes to her influence in his infrequent interviews.

  O’Connor succumbed to kidney failure at Baldwin County Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, on August 3, 1964. Among her posthumous publications, Manners and Mysteries (1969) contains O’Connor’s selected essays and lectures. They are now an important part of scholarship on the grotesque in American literature. Recent biographies such as Brad Gooch’s Flannery (2009) and Jean Cash’s Flannery O’Connor (2002) link her personal context to her artistic output. Posthumous honors include a National Book Award, an O. Henry Award for her story “Revelation,” induction into the American Poet’s Corner in 2014, a National Endowment, and several international conferences that focus on O’Connor’s dark, nuanced writing and its literary impact.

  Naomi Simone Borwein

  See also: Gogol, Nikolai; “Good Country People”; The Grotesque; Lansdale, Joe R.; Psychological Horror; Oates, Joyce Carol.

  Further Reading

  Bacon, Jon Lance. 2010. “Gory Stories: O’Connor and American Horror.” In Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace, edited by Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo, 89–112. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

  Botting, Fred. 1998. “Horror.” In The Handbook of Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 123–131. London: Macmillan.

  Hartwell, David G, ed. 1987. “Flanner
y O’Connor.” In The Dark Descent, 576–590. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.

  Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison, eds. 1996. “Introduction.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, 1–7. Columbia: University of South Carolina.

  Pelfrey, David. 1995. “Spooky Stories.” Santa Fe Reporter, October 25–31: 5.

  Rubin, Louis D., Jr. 1958. “Flannery O’Connor: A Note on Literary Fashions.” Critique II: 11–18.

  “Such Nice People.” 1955. Time, June 6: 114.

  Wagner, Hank. 2007. “The Serial Killer.” In Icons of Horror and Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi, 473–506. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

  THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

  The American speculative fiction writer Ray Bradbury wrote a significant amount of horror fiction throughout his career, particularly early on. The October Country (1955) is a revised version of his first book, Dark Carnival (1947), and has become one of the classics of the field. Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, characterized Dark Carnival as “the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction” (King 2010, 346), alluding to the classic James Joyce collection.

  While not all of the entries collected in The October Country are supernatural or horror, the book as a whole offers a treasure trove of eerie stories. The main themes, as in much of Bradbury’s fiction, are childhood and death. “Jack-in-the-Box,” for example, is about a boy raised by his fearful, psychotic mother in total isolation from the outside world. He thinks their house is the entire world, bounded only by endless forest. When she dies, he ventures out, and he thinks this is death. Death is also denied in the almost-comic “There Was an Old Woman.” Aunt Tildy refuses to believe she is dead, even when the undertakers come for her body, and as a ghost she goes to the morgue and gets it back. An overtly horrific story is “The Small Assassin,” in which a mother becomes convinced that her infant is out to kill her. It succeeds.

  Other stories mix horror with macabre humor. “Skeleton” is about a man obsessed with the idea that there is a ghastly skeleton inside his body. He manages to remove it and go on as a blob-creature. In “The Man Upstairs” a boy discovers that the lodger his mother has taken in is a vampire. He kills and dissects the vampire, bringing strange organs, one by one, into the kitchen for Mom to identify. In “The Wind” an explorer discovers that the world’s winds are alive and are determined to keep their secret. In “The Scythe” a Dustbowl refugee of the 1930s finds a deserted farm and a field of wheat, and begins to harvest. He soon discovers that he has become Death and is reaping lives, including those of his own family. Perhaps the strongest of the new stories in The October Country (not appearing in Dark Carnival) is “The Next in Line,” a powerful meditation on the inevitability of death, inspired by the mummies in catacombs that Bradbury saw on a trip to Mexico.

  The two stories that have probably most intrigued many younger readers are about the “weird” Elliot family. “Homecoming” concerns the one “normal” boy in a family of ghouls, vampires, and other monsters. He longs to be like them, but he does not have fangs or magical powers. In “Uncle Einar,” the apparent problem posed by a bat-winged relative is solved when a boy is able to tie a string around him and fly him like a kite.

  Bradbury’s stories were revolutionary when they first began to appear in Weird Tales in the early 1940s, as they were entirely modern in their technique and told in spare prose that bordered on poetry. Bradbury had spent time reading not just pulp fiction but Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and other representatives of the high modern tradition, and the fusion of these influences with fantastic subject matter made for a unique effect, as vividly illustrated in the stories that were collected in Dark Carnival and then its altered incarnation as The October Country.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Arkham House; Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Simon & Schuster.

  Mogen, David. 1986. “Weird Tales: The Landscape of October Country.” In Ray Bradbury. Twayne’s United Authors Series 504. Boston: Twayne.

  Pierce, Hazel. 1980. “Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition.” In Ray Bradbury, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, 186–194. New York: Taplinger.

  Schweitzer, Darrell, 1988. “Tales of Childhood and the Grave: Ray Bradbury’s Horror Fiction.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 29–42. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  OLIVER, REGGIE (1952–)

  Reggie Oliver is an English writer, dramatist, actor, theater director, illustrator, and the biographer of his aunt, Stella Gibbons (author of Cold Comfort Farm). He is the author of stage plays, essays, a regular review column for Mark Valentine’s journal Wormwoodiana, more than 100 stories, novellas, and vignettes, The Dracula Papers: The Scholar’s Tale (2011, the first volume in a projected tetralogy), the spiritual thriller and comedy of manners Virtue in Danger (2013), and what he describes as “a sort of children’s book,” The Hauntings at Tankerton Park (2016), for which he provided all sixty illustrations. His work has been much anthologized, and it has been gathered into seven collections: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini & Other Strange Stories (2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler & Other Strange Stories (2005), Masques of Satan (2007), Madder Mysteries (2009), Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories (2011, winner of Children of the Night Award), Flowers of the Sea (2013), and Holidays from Hell (2017)]. It has also appeared in three volumes of representative selections alongside previously uncollected work: Dramas from the Depths (2010), Shadow Plays (2012), and The Sea of Blood (2015).

  Like Ramsey Campbell, Oliver is unashamed of being perceived as a horror writer, though he takes issue with the common misconception that narrows the field “to mean a lot of blood and sordid sex, and physical torment” (Slatter 2015); therefore, he prefers the term J. R. R. Tolkien’s colleague Charles Williams used to describe his novels: spiritual shockers. In the “Introductory” to Masques of Satan, he states that his stories are “not divertissements . . . I have become convinced that to write ghost stories of lasting merit it is necessary to believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. . . . The protagonists of the supernatural tale at its best need to be playing for the highest stakes conceivable. . . . I write what I write, because it is the best way of saying what I want to say about what matters to me most” (Oliver 2007, x).

  In other hands, this prescription might lead to a spate of predictable tracts masquerading as fiction in which a dichotomous morality invariably leads to the villain receiving his just deserts and the innocent emerging wiser but relatively unscathed. The worldview in Oliver’s fiction, reflecting the slippery slopes that lead people to act against their own best interests and the clashes life poses between individuality and egoism, belief and obsession, aspiration and achievement, love and need, professionalism and callousness, comes closest to that of Euripides, in whom the human response to a dilemma dictates whether the outcome is tragic, grotesque, or merely humbling. Oliver evinces a remarkable degree of compassion toward all but the most predatory of his characters, contrasting their delusions against the reality that threatens to overwhelm them, and revealing that all actions, and many thoughts, have consequences.

  On occasion, the vindictive (“Blood Bill,” 2005) and the zealot (“Mr. Poo-Poo,” 2007) become capable of making their delusion the prevailing, destructive vision in one of Oliver’s tales; in other cases, such as “The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini” (2003), a vision invoked willingly opens vistas of abysmal and utterly hopeless terror that no amount of time or effort can erase. One of his stories about dementia (“Flowers of the Sea,” 2011) carries this phenomenon to an unforgettably poignant level that is simultaneously terrifying and heartbreaking.

  Throughout his work, a person’s character is often the only decisive factor leading to the safe(r) course when a decision is necessary. Sometimes life offers the opportunity to make the correct choice between alt
ernatives (“The Road from Damascus,” 2007), but it is filled just as often with damned if you do/damned if you don’t situations whose implications might not be perceived until long afterward (“Love at First Sight,” 2016).

  In all of this, Oliver’s command of atmosphere, characterization, and incisive dialogue are critical. He has acclaimed atmosphere as “the supreme ingredient” in crafting fiction, “evoking a mood that will bring about in the reader a sense of wonder, unease and deep reflection about the underlying nature of the universe” (Schettin 2013). Through this he often evokes a dread that strikes deeper than the threat of mere physical harm. Allied to this is the actor’s knack for capturing a person’s character through his or her use of language, and the ability to make each word of dialogue count, ironically or ominously, toward the denouement. His use of language also instills many of the stories with a vein of sly humor—“Mr. Poo-Poo,” “Mmm-Delicious” (2007), “Mrs. Midnight” (2009)—which serves to sharpen the edge of unease.

  Also on the subject of language, none excel and few equal the ventriloquial ease with which he captures the tone, cadence, and vocabulary of periods ranging from the present decade through the past, in stories set in the decadent underbelly of the Weimar Republic (“Singing Blood,” 2011), a late Victorian courtroom (“Miss Marchant’s Cause,” 2003), the home and psyche of the mad nineteenth-century artist Richard Dadd (“A Child’s Problem,” 2011), the Restoration stage (“The Constant Rake,” 2005), the ecclesiastical courts of sixteenth-century Italy (“The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini”), and many more, including many stories revolving around stage productions, several stories reexamining the antiquarian underpinnings of M. R. James’s ghost stories, and that grim tour de force “The Lord of the Fleas” (2012), which writer D. F. Lewis has aptly described as an “eighteenth century quilt of documents” (Lewis 2013).