by Matt Cardin
Assisted by the Biological Investigations Unit of the American military, the group discovers that the “Ancient Enemy” is a massive creature able to shape parts of itself into any form or “phantom” that it desires. Growing in mass and size with each killing, this intelligent amoeba-like creature kills many of the investigators, including Flyte himself, who is brought to Snowfield at the creature’s insistence in order to write its biography. A scientific solution is eventually discovered that defeats the monster via a bacteria solution that consumes its amorphous petroleum-like cell structure. A thought-provoking subplot also appears in the story about Fletcher Kale, a sociopath, who becomes a type of apostle of the Ancient Enemy, which presents itself to him as the Devil. The novel concludes with the possibility of Kale being infected by the Ancient Enemy before its destruction, thus leaving a dark, open-ended resolution to the story.
In an essay comparing and contrasting the central evil in Phantoms with that in two of Koontz’s other novels, Whispers and Darkfall, Michael A. Morrison characterizes Phantoms as “the monster tale as police procedural” and notes that it focuses crucially on the mindset of the human protagonists as they confront something beyond their ken: “They are men and women of reason: systematic, scientific, rational. And much of Phantoms examines the responses of such people to the presence of an unknown” (Morrison 1998, 128–129). D. W. Taylor points out that the novel also engages not just its protagonists but its readers in a confrontation with this presence, and even turns this back upon the reader themselves: “[B]y the end of Phantoms, the hoary concept of a predestined evil from Hell has been turned upon the reader like a mirror, who suddenly finds himself staring rather uncomfortably into his own inexplicable, evil image” (Taylor 1998, 108).
Phantoms was released as a film in 1998, directed by Joe Chappelle and starring Peter O’Toole. Koontz wrote the screenplay based on his novel.
Gary Hoppenstand
See also: Koontz, Dean.
Further Reading
Koontz, Dean. [1983] 2001. Phantoms. New York: Berkley.
Lehti, Steven J. 1997. “Dean R. Koontz’s Phantoms.” Cinefantasique 29, no. 4/5 (October): 16–21.
Morrison, Michael A. 1998. “The Three Faces of Evil: The Monsters of Whispers, Phantoms, and Darkfall.” In Discovering Dean Koontz: Essays on America’s Bestselling Writer of Suspense and Horror Fiction, edited by Bill Munster, 120–143. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Taylor, D. W. 1998. “Mainstream Horror in Whispers and Phantoms.” In Discovering Dean Koontz: Essays on America’s Bestselling Writer of Suspense and Horror Fiction, edited by Bill Munster, 97–111. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
“PICKMAN’S MODEL”
“Pickman’s Model” is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft that was first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It is among Lovecraft’s most reprinted stories and it has been adapted numerous times for extraliterary media, notably by screenwriter Alvin Sapinsley for the December 1, 1971, episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
Set in Boston, the story is a narrated as a monologue in the first person by a man named Thurber to his friend Eliot. Thurber refuses to travel with his friend via the city’s subway system and by way of explanation he recounts his relationship with Richard Upton Pickman, a recently disappeared artist of the macabre who is shunned by the artistic establishment. It’s less the horrific subject matter of Pickman’s work—which frequently features dog-faced ghouls feeding—than its graphic realism that so distresses the art world.
Thurber relates how his admiration of Pickman’s work compelled him to accept the artist’s invitation one evening to visit his studio in Boston’s North End, where Pickman points out that many of the houses are connected by a network of subterranean tunnels that date to the earliest years of New England’s settling. Thurber is disturbed by several of Pickman’s recent canvases hanging in the studio, including the painting “Subway Accident,” which depicts the ghoul creatures emerging from train tunnels to attack a crowd on a platform, and “The Lesson,” which appears to feature elder ghouls teaching a young human changeling how to feed on a corpse. When sounds are heard in the nearby room where the house’s boarded-up tunnel entrance is located, Pickman investigates, fires several shots, and then returns to hastily conclude his meeting with Thurber. In his excitement, Thurber accidentally snatches a photo affixed to a corner of one of Pickman’s works in progress. When he looks at it later, expecting to see an image that Pickman is using for background detail, he discovers the truth about why Pickman’s painted monsters appear so realistic.
Lovecraft’s description of Pickman’s paintings demonstrates the power of written fiction to generate effects that would be difficult to capture with literal visual representations, for Pickman’s paintings of ghouls, which Lovecraft describes as “beyond the power of words to classify,” are obviously meant to exude a kind of primal horror that would be difficult, if not impossible, for an actual painting to achieve.
There’s no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify.
. . . The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground—for Pickman’s morbid art was preëminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations—well, don’t ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding—I won’t say on what. They were sometimes shewn in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey—or rather, their treasure-trove. And what damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shewn leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas shewed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs. (Lovecraft 2013, 93)
Matt Cardin
Source: Lovecraft, H. P. 2013. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. New York: Penguin.
Although not regarded as one of Lovecraft’s tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, “Pickman’s Model” can be appreciated in the same context as one of his efforts to depict an otherworldly race of beings that exists parallel to the human race, and largely unseen. References in the story suggest that the race of ghouls dates back at least to the Salem witch trials and the earliest years of New England history. Lovecraft lards the story with historic and geographic details that depict the ghoul culture as inextricable from the culture of those on whom they feed: the blue-blood stock of New England. The story has inspired a number of homages by other writers, including Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below” (1939) and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Daughter of Hounds (2006) and “Pickman’s Other Model (1929).”
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Arkham House; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Anderson, James. 2002. “Pickman’s Model: H. P. Lovecraft’s Model of Terror.” In A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Scott Connors, 195–205. Holicong, PA: Wildside.
Lovecraft, Howard P. [1927] 1999. “Pickman’s Model.” In More Annotated Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon. New York: Dell.
Sederholm, Carl. 2006. “What Screams Are Made of: Representing Cosmic Fear in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 4 (Winter): 335–349.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, a supernatural tale of moral degeneration and hidden guilt. It began as a story told to his friends, but Philadelphia publisher J. M
. Stoddart, on a visit to London, requested him to write it out for his magazine. It was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine for July 1890, where its thinly veiled homoeroticism stirred up controversy. Wilde extensively revised it before its book publication in 1891, toning down the homoeroticism and adding six chapters and a preface with the French Aestheticist argument that books are neither moral nor immoral but exist for their own sake.
Youthful Dorian Gray meets the hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton as he sits for a portrait. During the sitting Dorian wishes aloud to remain young while the portrait ages. He soon discovers his wish has been magically granted, but that it also reflects his evil deeds. Wotton gives him a yellow book, which helps to entice him into a corrupt, hedonistic lifestyle. The portrait, his symbolic conscience, gradually changes, reflecting his moral descent. Ashamed, he locks it in an unused upstairs room. Finally, he destroys the hated portrait with a knife, destroying himself in the process.
The book bears many similarities to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both involve moral decay, the separation of the good and evil aspects of human nature, and the self-destruction of the protagonist. Hyde’s activities and Dorian’s are largely left to the imagination.
Other major influences on it were Wilde’s mother’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress by J. W. Meinhold with its double portrait of the good and evil versions of Sidonia; and Melmoth the Wanderer by Wilde’s great-uncle, Charles Maturin, which has a hidden painting of a character who bargained with the devil to live 150 years. Other possible influences are Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and “William Wilson.” The name Dorian alludes to the ancient Greek Dorian tribe, noted for homosexuality in their military. Dorian’s character is partially based on Wilde himself and on his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The enticing yellow book is presumably the French Decadent novel A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans.
Critics attacked the magazine version, calling it immoral, unclean, and poisonous. It was used as evidence by the prosecution when Wilde was later tried for indecency. The book version received slightly less vehement criticism. An uncensored, annotated edition was published by Belknap Press in 2011.
The story has been adapted to ballet and opera and has been filmed many times between 1918 and 2009. Albert Lewin’s version (1945), the most notable, won Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as a retro Hugo. To this day, it is often said of youthful-appearing people that they “must have a portrait hidden in the attic.”
Lee Weinstein
See also: Huysmans, J. K.; Melmoth the Wanderer; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Further Reading
Beckson, Karl E. 1998. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press.
Belford, Barbara. 2000. Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. New York: Random House.
Gomel, Elana. 2004. “Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author.” Narrative 12, no. 1: 74–92.
Wilde, Oscar. [1890] 2011. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
POE, EDGAR ALLAN (1809–1849)
Edgar Allan Poe did not invent Gothic fiction, or supernatural fiction, or horror fiction, but he was certainly a significant heir of Gothic tradition, which he fashioned to his own purposes, thus refreshing literary Gothicism. Horror is indeed a signal feature in much of his work, but it is not horror for mere horror’s sake. Critics taxed him for creating too much “German” (for which, read “Gothic” or “horror”) substance, notably in his fiction. In the “Preface” to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), his first collection of his tales, most of which had been originally published in magazines or newspapers, he stated: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul,” adding that he composed those tales with that principle uppermost in mind (Poe 1984, 129). That this principle is evident in many of his poems, tales, and, certainly, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Poe’s only completed novel, is unmistakable.
Poe’s biography is often thought to be sensational. Actually, his life was not extraordinary. He was no legendary drunkard as malicious gossip portrayed him; no drug addict, contrary to another misconception; and no debaucher—of young women, black cats, or ravens. If author Poe was pursued by any demon, that demon was poverty. His literary income for twenty-plus years’ authorship was roughly ten thousand dollars, poverty level even in his day. Far too often, Poe’s personal life has been presented as the basis for his creative writings, but that interpretation is also inaccurate.
“The Black Cat”: A Sophisticated Rendering
of Madness
First published in 1843, this popular story draws on the legend that cats, black cats in particular, understand human circumstances. The cat in Poe’s tale, accidentally walled up alive, howls when its master, who has murdered his wife and wants to conceal her body behind a wall in the cellar, unwittingly disturbs the wall, thus prompting the cat’s reaction, which leads to the opening of the wall, thus revealing the wife’s decomposing corpse.
The cat’s owner is a typical Poe first-person narrator who relates horrifying circumstances in what seems like a wholly rational manner. He has perpetrated a violent crime and is tortured by guilt, to the point where he reveals what he has done. The tale is rife with gory details of the narrator’s physical abuse and murder of cats, but the reader may well wonder whether the image of a hanged cat that appears to the overwrought man’s senses is a genuine image or a delusion of the murderer’s imagination.
“The Black Cat” is one of Poe’s excellent Gothic tales, which may be read with equal validity as a straight horror story or a sophisticated rendering of human emotion driven to madness, as readers from Poe’s day to the present have recognized. Moreover, the role of the wife offers tantalizing ambiguities, notably, whether she is an innocent or, given the bond between her and the black cat, a witch, with the cat her familiar. Particulars connected with the narrator’s supposed murders of the first cat and his wife furnish horror via violence, as well as providing the narrator’s hallucinations about pain and death. These scenarios foreshadow his execution by hanging, which is associated with the horrors of strangling or the violence of the neck being broken.
Benjamin F. Fisher
Born January 19, 1809, as Edgar Poe, to actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, he was the second of their three children. His siblings were William Henry Leonard Poe (1807–1831), usually known as Henry, and Rosalie Poe (1810–1874), adopted by the Mackenzies of Richmond, Virginia, so typically known as Rosalie Mackenzie Poe. David Poe Jr. deserted his family in 1811, and no documentary evidence has been discovered that details the rest of his life. Elizabeth died from tuberculosis later that year. Edgar became the foster child of John and Frances Allan, a childless couple of Richmond, so he came to sign his name as Edgar A. Poe, as if Allan were genuinely part of his name. John Allan, an immigrant from Scotland and a successful businessman, was a no-nonsense guardian. Frances Valentine Allan was far more sympathetic to their ward.
Edgar’s early life with the Allans was fairly pleasant. He received a good education in English and American schools. He then attended the University of Virginia (February–December 1826), but Allan’s scant financial support led to Poe’s accumulating high gambling debts and his withdrawal, despite his academic credibility. Poe quarreled with Allan, went to Boston, where he enlisted in the Army as “Edgar A. Perry,” and published his first book, Tamerlane and other Poems “by a Bostonian” (1827). Poe’s ambitions for authorship displeased the more practical-minded Allan.
Poe desired to be a poet akin to Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and other British Romantic poets. He published two more slim books of verse, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems (1831). He had also enrolled at West Point Military Academy, but tired of the regimen, got himself court martialed, and went to Baltimore, where he lived with his widowed, invalid grandmother, Elizabeth C
. Poe, her daughter, Maria Poe Clemm, and Mrs. Clemm’s daughter, Virginia, and Henry Poe (who died in August 1831). Henry, too, had literary ambitions, but his endeavors in authorship have sometimes been confused with Edgar’s, given the practices of authorial anonymity then prevalent.
Poe’s poems reveal undeniable links to Gothicism, for example, in the fearful or emotionally unsettled speakers in Tamerlane, “The Lake. To—,” or “Spirits of the Dead,” among early pieces, where weird, claustrophobic settings increase psychological unease. More intense psychological fears enhance later poems, for example, “The Raven” (1845), “The Conqueror Worm” (1843), and “Ulalume” (1847). The speakers are prey to anxieties, which seem mysterious, but which in “The Raven” prove to be grief for Lenore, who, in delightful ambiguity, may be literally dead or representative of a feminism “dead,” that is, absent from the speaker’s life. Likewise, Ulalume is no longer part of the speaker’s normal life, but memories of her haunt him, much as a more literal ghost might torment its victim.
Poe’s poems reveal his abilities to achieve exquisite mingling of sound with sense. Implications of scene and emotion closing in to overwhelm the speaker with claustrophobic, destructive feelings in “The Lake. To—,” for example, are plausibly combined. The lyrical effects in “The Raven,” “The Conqueror Worm,” or “Ulalume” create a “music” that coalesces deftly with the decreasing rationality of the speaker, who ultimately succumbs to hypnotic effects of rhythms couching negative influences or what he imagines are negative influences.
Poe’s early years in Baltimore, 1831–1833, still remain shadowy. Realizing, perhaps, that he was unlikely to achieve financial security from publishing verse, he began to write short stories or, as he preferred, “tales,” emulating popular Gothic tales in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and like periodicals. Poe entered five tales in a contest sponsored in late 1831 by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier; none won the prize, but all were published, unsigned, during 1832. In another prize competition for the best poem and the best tale, sponsored in 1833 by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Poe’s tale “MS. Found in a Bottle” and his poem “The Coliseum” were chosen first in each category. The judges, though, didn’t want to award both prizes to a single author, so the poetry prize went to John Hill Hewitt. He was connected with the Visiter, so Poe took umbrage.
