Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  A possible inspiration for this turn to outright horror is the real-life murder of Palahniuk’s father in 1999. Palahniuk was asked to contribute to the legal discussion regarding whether the murderer should receive the death sentence. Critics have seen his horror trilogy as an attempt to deal with his responsibility in deciding the fate of another human being.

  Though Palahniuk has gone on to write prolifically, releasing a novel per year since 2007, he has yet to match the potency of his horror trilogy. The first two installments of another trilogy, Damned (2011) and Doomed (2013), are horror-inflected, but they prioritize satire over any darker intent. However, a return to the world of Fight Club in a graphic novel sequel (2015–2016), does suggest that Palahniuk’s violent, nihilistic sensibility may make a startling reappearance in future work.

  Neil McRobert

  See also: Body Horror; Frame Story; King, Stephen; Jackson, Shirley.

  Further Reading

  Kuhn, Cynthia, and Lance Rubin, eds. 2009. Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem. New York: Routledge.

  Palahniuk, Chuck. 2004. Non Fiction. London: Vintage.

  Sartain, Jeffrey, ed. 2009. Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.

  PENNY DREADFUL

  Penny dreadful is a name that was bestowed on penny newspapers filled with tales of adventure and horror that were published in England in the 1830s and 1840s. They were also referred to as “penny bloods” in reference to their blood-and-thunder style of storytelling. In the decades since, the term penny dreadful has become a catch-all phrase denoting publications with sensational or exploitative content.

  Penny dreadfuls were made possible through the new machine manufacture of paper in the early nineteenth century and the invention of the rotary steam printing press, both of which allowed publishers to mass-produce printed publications relatively inexpensively. They were printed as pamphlets with dense, multicolumn text, usually adorned with a lurid cover engraving, and sold primarily to working-class readers as cheap entertainment. Penny dreadfuls were the successors to the Gothic bluebooks, or “shilling shockers,” themselves the successors to the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their contents were often redolent of both. Some featured self-contained stories, but most offered serial installments of longer works meant to entice readers to buy succeeding weekly or bi-weekly installments. By their nature the serial stories were written to run as long as they were popular with readers, meaning that their plots were often very loosely constructed, and they were often padded with chapters of history not essential to the story, unresolved subplots, and repetitive short lines of dialogue.

  The best-known penny dreadfuls include James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire (serialized in 220 chapters between 1845 and 1847), G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846–1847), and Rymer’s The String of Pearls (possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Peckett Prest), which is the best-known version of the story of Sweeney Todd, “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” who murdered his patrons and gave their remains to his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, to be baked into meat pies for public consumption. A number of penny dreadfuls were the work of serial writers, hence their slapdash execution: The Mysteries of London was a four-series story about the seedy underbelly of street life in London begun in 1844 by G. W. M. Reynolds and finished several years later by Thomas Miller and Edward L. Blanchard.

  Not all penny dreadfuls featured horror themes. The Newgate Calendar—a monthly account of imprisonments and executions in England’s Newgate Prison, first published in book form in 1774—provided fodder for the penny papers, as did The Terrific Register (1825), an anthology of exotic atrocities and gruesome crimes from around the world. Dick Turpin, the infamous highwayman executed in 1739, was the hero of a number of penny dreadfuls, among them Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, which ran for 254 installments between 1867 and 1868. Spring-Heeled Jack, a leaping bandit reputed to have preyed upon women in London in the 1830s (and whose exploits were later conflated with those of Jack the Ripper), was the main character in several penny dreadfuls. Pirates, outlaws, freebooters, revolutionaries, robbers, and cowboys all put in appearances in the penny dreadfuls, as did folk heroes such as Robin Hood and celebrities from real life, including Buffalo Bill. Some of the more popular penny dreadfuls were plagiarized from the work of Charles Dickens and other celebrity writers of the era.

  W. M. Clarke, Edward Lloyd, and others founded their publishing empires on the strength of their penny dreadful sales. By the 1850s, public disapproval of the content of penny dreadfuls and its impact on the sensibilities of young readers contributed to the conversion of penny papers to more genteel publications for young boys, among them The Boy’s Own Paper, Boys of England, and The Young Gentleman’s Journal. These papers were forerunners of the nickel weeklies and dime novels published at the end of the nineteenth century, which in turn paved the way for the pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the twentieth century.

  In May 2014 the Showtime cable television channel premiered Penny Dreadful, a horror series set in Victorian England with a mash-up plot featuring characters from classic nineteenth-century horror fiction, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Dracula; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Pulp Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Angelo, Michael. 1977. Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors. London: Jupiter Books.

  Haining, Peter, ed. 1976. The Penny Dreadful. London: Gollancz.

  THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

  The Phantom of the Opera began as a French Gothic novel published in 1910 by the prolific journalist and mystery-adventure novelist Gaston Leroux (1868–1927). Building on Leroux’s knowledge of the real Paris Opera, begun in the 1860s under architect Charles Garnier, and fictionalizing several of that era’s headlines to provide a news-like authenticity (including the actual fall of a chandelier into the Opera audience in 1896), the novel focuses on a musician-composer-architect-builder calling himself “Erik,” supposedly one of the Opera’s original designers.

  Erik sequesters himself deep in the lower cellars underneath the Opera—indeed, on the shores of the underground lake (which actually exists because swampland had to be drained before the Opera could be built)—and hides himself there, while often trying to affect what happens in the world above. He is ashamed of the skull-face he bears from birth, over which has grown only thin and parchment-yellow skin, a visage suggested to Leroux by danse macabre paintings descended from medieval times and rarely used as the phantom’s real visage in most adaptations.

  The action of the novel commences after Erik witnesses a girl from the country, Christine Daae, join the opera chorus. After hearing her sing, he becomes her unseen voice teacher (and Freudian father-figure) from behind her dressing-room’s walls and falls in love with her (regarding her at times as a replacement for his mother, since Freud’s concepts were taking hold by 1910). Soon, though, Christine’s improvement starts making her a rival for major roles with the Opera’s diva, Carlotta—whom the phantom chases off the stage by cutting down the chandelier—and she welcomes visits from her childhood sweetheart, the Vicomte Raoul de Chigny, a patron of the Opera delighted to find his former love after many years.

  To get closer to Christine, Erik disguises himself—except that he uses his actual skull-face—as the figure of “Red Death” (from an 1845 story by Poe) at the Opera’s gala masked ball, a real annual event from the 1870s to the present. Alarmed by his pupil drifting from him, he captures her and takes her to his underground lair, where he woos her by rehearsing Verdi’s Otello with her while wearing a black mask—addi
ng racial, even miscegenistic overtones not present in any later adaptation—until she abruptly unmasks him and recoils at beholding Death incarnate.

  Leroux’s novel became a popular subject for stage and screen adaptations soon after its publication. Some of the more significant English-language movie adaptations are as follows.

  1925

  The Phantom of the Opera (Universal Studios), starring Lon Chaney Sr. Chaney was the most significant horror movie actor of the silent period, and Leroux himself was involved in negotiating with Universal to get this adaptation made. The scene in which the heroine unmasks Chaney’s truly horrifying-looking Phantom is among the most memorable in early cinema.

  1943

  The Phantom of the Opera (Universal Studios), starring Claude Raines. A remake of the 1925 version, this version made strong use of Technicolor and sumptuous set design and costuming to generate a general air of operatic spectacle.

  1962

  The Phantom of the Opera (Hammer Films), starring Herbert Lom. Hammer made this one in partnership with Universal, right on the heels of Hammer’s massive success in rebooting and reimagining the classic Universal Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy horror series. Their Phantom film fell short of these others but still produced a few memorable moments.

  1974

  Phantom of the Paradise (20th Century Fox), starring Paul Williams. Directed by Brian De Palma, this cult movie mixes Leroux’s original Phantom plot with elements of Faust and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray to produce a fairly delirious result. It received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for its music.

  1989

  The Phantom of the Opera (21st Century Film Corporation), starring Robert Englund. This gory adaptation is mainly notable for featuring Englund, best known for playing the character of Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, in the title role.

  2004

  The Phantom of the Opera (Warner Bros. Pictures), starring Gerard Butler. Joel Schumacher directed this big-budget cinematic adaptation of the popular stage musical adaptation by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  Matt Cardin

  Meanwhile, Raoul joins forces with a Persian detective (who has chased Erik to Paris from the Middle East, where he used to do magic and construct torture chambers for a shah) and climbs down a labyrinth of dark passages toward the cellars to rescue Christine. There they face exotic Oriental obstacles that Erik now puts in their way, a symptom of the racist Orientalism that was quite common at the Paris Opera—and in Europe generally—at the time of the novel.

  This story conflates many mythical, literary, and contemporary sources, starting with several Greek myths about Death and the Maiden, the best known of which is Pluto and Persephone (in which the god of the underworld kidnaps the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest). It also carries forward several features from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the notorious French scandal of the 1890s known as the Dreyfus Affair, on which Leroux reported and in which a Jewish officer in Paris was falsely charged with espionage and returned from imprisonment for a retrial as emaciated as a skeleton.

  Leroux’s novel lost popularity after 1912 until the author himself negotiated the adaptation of it as a silent film released by Universal in 1925 and starring Lon Chaney, the premier star of silent horror pictures. That version, though it changed the novel significantly, set a standard for many that have come after it on the stage, film, and television. The most successful of these has been the stage-musical version by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Richard Stilgoe, which debuted in London in 1986 and then on Broadway during the 1987–1988 season. Since then, it has become the longest-running play in Broadway history, augmented by many touring companies and a film version that have carried it around the world.

  Jerrold E. Hogle

  See also: Body Horror; Dracula; Gothic Hero/Villain; Hugo, Victor; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Stoker, Bram.

  Further Reading

  Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and Its Progeny. New York: Palgrave.

  Perry, George, and Jane Rice 1987. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. New York: Henry Holt.

  Wolf, Leonard, ed. and trans. 1996. The Essential Phantom of the Opera, Including the Complete Novel by Gaston Leroux. New York: Plume/Penguin.

  “THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW”

  Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” was originally published in Quartette, the Christmas Annual of the Civil and Military Gazette for 1885, and later collected in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales (1888). It was Kipling’s first supernatural story, and on one level, it is a traditional ghost story, the tale of a wrongdoer haunted and done in by those he wronged. In the judgment of Kipling scholar Louis Cornell, “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” but more than that, the story is actual superior to those two because of its deployment of traditional Gothic elements in a recognizable contemporary setting.

  The story is presented as the deathbed narrative of Theobald Jack Pansay, an Englishman resident in Simla, India. While en route from Gravesend to Bombay, Pansay had an affair with Agnes Keith-Wessington, the wife of an officer, destroying her marriage. Although Pansay attempted to break off his relations, she followed him to Simla, over the course of the next year repeatedly letting him know from her ’rickshaw that she was there for him. A thoroughgoing cad, Pansay disregarded her and pursued others, becoming engaged to Kitty Mannering. Mrs. Keith-Wessington dies, but to his horror, Pansay finds himself haunted by her as well as her four liveried servants and the ’rickshaw from which she used to speak to him, although there is incontrovertible evidence that all (including the servants) are dead and that the ’rickshaw has been destroyed. Nobody else can see the ghosts, but Pansay’s behavior attracts attention among the English colonials. The local doctor, Heathlegh, attempts to treat Pansay for hallucinations, but the ’rickshaw is present when the treatment concludes, and when the history of his treatment of Mrs. Keith-Wessington emerges, Pansay finds his engagement concluded. Pansay realizes that his days in India are numbered, and though he cannot understand why he must face punishment in this world rather than the next, he has conversations with Mrs. Wessington and accepts his fate before dying.

  Certainly Pansay deserves what happens to him, for he is as unpleasant a character as Kipling ever created. Adding depth to the story is the depiction of the world of the English colonials residing in India: theirs is a closed society in which a transgression leads inevitably to ostracism. At the same time, Heathlegh’s solution offers readers a different perspective, one that is rational and rejects the supernatural: that Pansay merely suffered from a mental problem, in which the haunting is a manifestation of his conscience. Finally, there is the pathos of Mrs. Keith-Wessington: hers is not a vengeful ghost, merely one who wants the love that has been denied to her when she was alive, and in attempting to get her due, she emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic specter.

  In his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), Kipling said “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” was one of the first things that he wrote under the clear influence of his “Personal Daemon,” a creative force that he experienced as being external to him, and that he described as guiding him in his authorial career.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; “They.”

  Further Reading

  Cornell, Louis L. 1966. Kipling in India. New York: Macmillan.

  Dillingham, William B. 2005. Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  PHANTOMS

  The prolific American writer Dean Koontz has published numerous types of novels and has disputed being identified as a horror fiction writer. Though elements of horror do frequently appear in his stories, he is more correctly i
dentified as a novelist of thrillers. He states in an afterword to a 2001 paperback reprint of his 1983 novel Phantoms, “Writing Phantoms was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life,” because this novel (which has sold more than 60 million copies worldwide) “earned for me the label of ‘horror writer,’ which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed” (Koontz 2001, 432).

  Nevertheless, Phantoms is generally regarded as a first-rate horror story, perhaps one of the finest in the genre. It narrates the story of two sisters—Lisa and Jenny Paige—who travel to Jenny’s hometown of Snowfield, California, there to find the ski resort town to be entirely deserted. Jenny is a physician and Lisa is her fourteen-year-old sister. When they arrive at Jenny’s home, they discover the corpse of Jenny’s housekeeper lying on the floor, looking as if “she died in the middle of a scream” (15). Investigating the town, they discover more hideous corpses, some of them mutilated in sadistic fashion. They are able to contact the county authorities in Santa Mira, Sheriff Bryce Hammond and Lt. Talbert Whitman, who arrive in Snowfield to lead the investigation there. The most important clue they discover is the name “Timothy Flyte” written by one of the victims. Flyte, it appears, is a destitute British academic who once published a book entitled The Ancient Enemy, which recounts the mysterious mass disappearances of communities and populations through history.