Horror Literature through History
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Another remarkable feature of de Grandin’s adventures is Quinn’s talent for creating tableaux described with such care that they live in the memory long afterward. They are too numerous to list here, but the girl enwrapped and enraptured by the deadly embrace of a titanic snake in “The Tenants of Broussac” (1926), the butchering of the shipwrecked survivors in “The Isle of Missing Ships” (1926), the mummy standing silently in the room of death with its lips and staff smeared with blood in “The Grinning Mummy” (1926), the flight from death by supernatural winds along the Himalayas in “The Devil’s Rosary” (1929), the ghost jeering through the nursery skylight in “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” (1943), Amelie awaiting her lover beside her lonely tomb in “Pledged to the Dead” (1937), the statue’s final appearance in the courtyard in “Stoneman’s Memorial” (1942), and the mummy tracking its prey by sound alone in “The Man in Crescent Terrace” (1946) are all worthy examples that give the lie to any notion that the de Grandin corpus, let alone Quinn’s work as a whole, is uniformly bland or carelessly written.
Jim Rockhill
See also: Mummies; Occult Detectives; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Hoppenstand, Gary. 2013. “Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin: The Supernatural Sleuth in Weird Tales.” In Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, 166–178. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. 1976. Selected Letters, Vol. V: 1934–1937. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
Quinn, Seabury. 1966. “By Way of Explanation.” In The Phantom Fighter. Sauk City, WI: Mycroft & Moran. Reprinted in The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 1 by Seabury Quinn, xxi. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.
Quinn, Seabury, Jr. 2001. “My Father and I.” In The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 2 by Seabury Quinn, v. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.
Ruber, Peter, and Joseph Wrzos. 2003. “Introduction.” In Night Creatures by Seabury Quinn, ix–xiii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.
Weinberg, Robert W. 2001. “My Life with Jules de Grandin.” In The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 1 by Seabury Quinn, ix–xi. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.
QUIROGA, HORACIO (1878–1937)
Horacio Quiroga was a Uruguayan author who pioneered a breed of magical realism that would flower in Latin American fiction in the late twentieth century. An avid reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was drawn to literature that explored humanity’s dark unconscious, a landscape that took form for him in the tropical rainforests of Argentina, where he briefly operated a failing plantation. His Jungle Tales (1918), crafted in imitation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), featured a magical world of human-animal communication, a realm of dreamy fantasy whose obverse, darker side were the stories gathered in Tales of Love, Madness, and Death (1917). Deeply indebted to Poe, these were strikingly brutal and hallucinatory explorations of psychic extremity and graphic physical horror. “The Feather Pillow,” for example, relates the tale of a vampiric parasite inhabiting the eponymous object, which slowly drains the life from a beautiful young woman, while “The Decapitated Chicken” is a conte cruel (a tale of cynicism and cruelty) in which a degenerate family is riven by an act of grisly violence.
This latter story was included, along with numerous others from the author’s brief but prolific career, in a retrospective volume of English translations, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (1976). Not included in this collection is the 1927 tale “The Vampire,” a pioneering work about the predatory nature of cinema and its seeming ability to revivify the dead, which has spawned a minor tradition of what might be called “celluloid horror” stories (as in, for example, the works gathered in David J. Schow’s 1988 anthology Silver Scream). The best compilation of Quiroga’s horror-inflected tales is the Spanish-language collection Cunetos de Horror, published in 2012 by Ediciones Traspiés in Grenada, Spain.
Quiroga’s two novels, History of a Troubled Love (1908) and Past Love (1929), while less overtly fantastic, explore themes of obsessive desire in a way that continued his fascination with morbid psychology, but it is his short fiction that has contributed most to the genre. Grim and pitiless, yet with a streak of macabre irony, his horror stories illuminate a world devoid of beauty and hope, yet whose denizens, driven by perverse obsessions, refuse to recognize that they are damned. Along with fellow modernist Kafka, he contributed to the development of an absurdist strain of modern horror fiction, counterpoised, in its matter-of-fact grotesquery, with the more extravagant cosmic horrors of the Lovecraft school. A haunted and sickly man, Quiroga committed suicide in 1937.
Rob Latham
See also: Body Horror; The Grotesque; de Maupassant, Guy; Kafka, Franz; Lovecraftian Horror; Poe, Edgar Allan; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Flores, Angel. 1955. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” Hispania 38 (2): 187–192.
Rueda, Jose A. B. 2004. “Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937).” In Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Darrell B. Lockhart, 158–163. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Wong-Rusell, Michael E. 1996. “Science and the Uncanny in the Fiction of Horacio Quiroga.” PhD Dissertation, Boston University.
R
RADCLIFFE, ANN (1764–1823)
The best paid novelist of the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe was a literary celebrity during her lifetime whose Gothic novels were incredibly popular with the British reading public. Born in 1764, the year the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was published, Radcliffe was a reclusive middle-class writer who published a series of Gothic novels at the end of the eighteenth century during the height of the genre’s popularity. Within an eight-year period, Radcliffe produced five Gothic novels, the last three of which proved incredibly successful in terms of commercial and aesthetic value; her works are The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). A historical romance, Gaston de Blondeville (1826), was published posthumously. Since her death in 1823, Radcliffe has continued to influence writers in the horror genre with many of them referencing her works within their own.
Radcliffe’s biography has long been a challenge for literary historians. Much of her early life is unknown and she lived a private life during her years as a respected writer. Unlike other popular authors of the period, like Horace Walpole, only a single letter of correspondence, discovered in 2014, to her mother-in-law survives. The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti even attempted to write a book-length biography of Radcliffe but was forced to abandon her plans when it became evident that the historical sources simply do not exist. Radcliffe’s place in the history of horror fiction, however, is an accepted fact despite the lack of biographical details. After Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic novel slowly but surely took hold on the British reading public’s imagination. By 1777, the second Gothic novel, The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, was published, each following year seeing the publication of more Gothic novels until the trend finally began to slow down in the early years of the nineteenth century. Radcliffe was among the many literate middle- and working-class individuals who saw fit to write in the form presented by Gothic fiction with her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne appearing in 1789 and A Sicilian Romance a year later. Neither novel is an outstanding work on its own, both owing much to the earlier works by Walpole and Reeve as they are more imitative than anything else. It was the publication of her third novel in 1791, The Romance of the Forest, that not only demonstrated her complex growth as a writer but her mastery of Gothic fiction and subsequently earned her the adoration of the reading public.
An Ann Radcliffe Chronology
1764
Ann Radcliffe is born—the same year the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, is publ
ished.
1789
Radcliffe publishes her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne.
1790
Radcliffe publishes A Sicilian Romance.
1791
Radcliffe publishes The Romance of the Forest.
1794
Radcliffe publishes The Mysteries of Udolpho. It will become one of the most influential and highly regarded examples of the Gothic novel.
1797
Radcliffe publishes The Italian.
1823
Radcliffe dies at the age of fifty-eight.
1826
Radcliffe’s historical romance Gaston de Blondeville is published. So is her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” containing her ideas on terror and horror in Gothic fiction, which will become enduringly relevant.
2014
Radcliffe’s sole surviving letter of correspondence, to her mother-in-law, is discovered.
Matt Cardin
Following the success of The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe was advanced £500, an unheard-of sum for a novelist at the time, for her next novel, which would subsequently become her magnum opus, The Mysteries of Udolpho. The immediate success of The Mysteries of Udolpho established Radcliffe as a household name among middle- and upper-class families, making her perhaps the most influential figure in Gothic fiction for decades. Two years after the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, a young member of Parliament named Matthew Lewis published his own Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), a work that seemingly countered many of the themes and motifs presented by Radcliffe’s brand of Gothic fiction. Radcliffe’s response to Lewis was her final novel published during her lifetime, The Italian, a work she was paid £800 for, that took issue with the more masculine style of Gothic fiction found in The Monk. After The Italian, Radcliffe quietly disappeared from public life and died in 1823 at the age of 58. In 1826, an essay by Radcliffe, entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” was posthumously published, in which she states her ideas on the function of terror and horror in Gothic fiction, a distinction that has continued to be relevant ever since.
Radcliffe’s contributions to Gothic fiction are immense. Many of her works, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, utilize major eighteenth-century philosophical ideas such as the sublime and sensibility that illustrate a strong intellectual complexity that is lacking in other Gothic texts of the period. Her focus on the picturesque and description add depth to a genre already dependent on aesthetics and the imagination. Her own brand of Gothic fiction, sometimes called female Gothic (in direct opposition to the male Gothic best represented by Lewis) or Radcliffean Gothic, tends to focus on a young female protagonist who is normally pursued by a man of power, the use of terror over horror, the explained supernatural (true supernatural occurrences do not exist in Radcliffean Gothic—what is perceived to be supernatural is always logically explained by the conclusion of the text), and an integration of the aforementioned eighteenth-century concepts like sensibility and the sublime.
Radcliffe had an immediate influence on Gothic fiction during her literary career, influencing many of her contemporaries, like Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom, and Regina Maria Roche, to fashion Radcliffean Gothic novels of their own. Later writers of the horror genre have been greatly influenced by her as well. For example, Edgar Allan Poe references Radcliffe and her work in several works of his own, most notably his “The Oval Portrait” (1842). Charlotte and Emily Brontë are among other nineteenth-century writers who are clearly inspired by Radcliffe, and the aforementioned Christina Rossetti found Radcliffe’s biography a topic worthy of study. Strong parallels with Radcliffe and modern writers like Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Susan Hill can also be found, once again demonstrating Radcliffe’s lasting legacy on the horror genre.
Joel T. Terranova
See also: The Brontë Sisters; The Castle of Otranto; Hill, Susan; Jackson, Shirley; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Poe, Edgar Allan; Rice, Anne; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Durant, David. 1982. “Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, no. 3: 519–530.
Michasiw, Kim Ian. 1994. “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6, no. 4: 327–346.
Norton, Rictor. 1999. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
Rogers, Deborah D. 1996. Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Townshend, Dale. 2014. Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism, and the Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
THE RATS
The Rats was the first novel by British horror writer James Herbert. It was published in the United Kingdom in 1974 by New English Library a few months before they also published Stephen King’s first book, Carrie. The novel tells the story of a horde of large, savage, mutant rats invading London’s docklands and killing people, an incursion investigated by a secondary school teacher named Harris. Herbert was inspired by a passage in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in which Dracula’s servant Renfield dreams of thousands of rats with red eyes. He was also inspired by his own impoverished upbringing in rat-infested slums in East London.
The Rats established the signature style and themes that would form the hallmark of Herbert’s future works: sparse and direct prose, explicit depictions of sex and violence, the vision of an empty metropolis, and a heavily political subtext. The book opens with the rats eating a former salesman who was drummed out of his job due to his homosexuality and is now drinking himself to death in abandoned buildings. As London is overrun, the disenfranchised—the homeless, the addicted, the poor, and the young—suffer at the rats’ hands (or paws) while the government does nothing. Herbert has both main political parties, Labour and Conservative, blaming each other for the living conditions of the poor that allowed the mutant rats to breed, and it is not Foskins, the pompous and ineffective undersecretary of state, who saves the day, but the ordinary, working-class Harris.
Through this working-class focus, Herbert’s novel democratized British horror by depicting characters who were not aristocrats or intellectuals as they were in other British horror staples such as the novels of Dennis Wheatley and the films produced by Hammer Studios. His protagonists were ordinary working people with the courage to act. Moreover, his emphasis on the explicit depiction of violence, while it alienated many people—famously, high-street book chain WH Smith initially refused to sell the book—effectively opened horror up to a new proletarian readership and ushered in a new era of British horror literature.
The Rats was loosely adapted as the 1982 Canadian horror movie Deadly Eyes, which was poorly received, and which Herbert himself repudiated.
Simon Brown
See also: Herbert, James.
Further Reading
Cabell, James. 2013. James Herbert—The Authorised True Story 1943–2013. London: John Blake.
Jones, Stephen. 1992. James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Spark, Alasdair. 1993. “Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 147–160. London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press.
“THE RATS IN THE WALLS”
Written in August or September of 1923 and published in Weird Tales for March 1924, “The Rats in the Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft must have seemed, given the rather poor content of the early Weird Tales, an absolute miracle, probably the strongest American horror story since Poe. It was one of Lovecraft’s early triumphs, and it remains one of his most widely read and anthologized works.
The story in fact bears a visible relationship to Poe: like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Rats in the Walls” concerns the dissolution of the “house”—in both an architectural and a genealogical sense—of an ancient and now extinct family, whose final representative comes to a bad end. In this case, the last of the de la
Poers, whose only son has died from injuries suffered during World War I, restores and moves into Exham Priory in England, the family seat from which an ancestor fled centuries before under very mysterious circumstances. He finds himself haunted by spectral rats, which seem to be streaming by the thousands inside the walls, downward, into depths below the lowest cellars.
This is not merely a job for the exterminator, because apparently only he and his pet cats can hear the rats; but it is not a case of delusion, either, because further investigations, in the company of scientific men and Captain Norrys, his late son’s war comrade, reveal hidden grottos and caves filled with thousands of human and animal bones, plus blasphemous altars and ultimately, it is implied, a pathway to the Earth’s center where Nyarlathotep, “the mad, faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute players.” Generations of de la Poers had indulged in unspeakable cultic practices, including human (and subhuman) sacrifice and cannibalism. As the last de la Poer penetrates the abyss, he reverts to atavistic type, his mind sliding back through the centuries, gibbering first in Elizabethan English, then older languages all the way back to a bestial gurgle. Even then he does not make it all the way to the throne of Nyarlathotep, because he is overtaken in the dark by his colleagues, having apparently killed and partially devoured Captain Norrys, although he insists that he is innocent and the rats did it.
This is a story of a man overwhelmed by accursed hereditary “influences.” His attempt to live as a modern, moral person fails precisely because of who he actually is and what his ancestors have done. His reversion to the monstrous is brought on by uncovering what was best left hidden. A parallel to “The Fall of the House of Usher” recurs. In the Poe story the fissure in the wall that the narrator observes clearly symbolizes the unsoundness of Roderick Usher’s mind, so that when the house literally falls to pieces, so does he, psychologically. Lovecraft’s character, too, as he descends lower and lower through caves and tunnels, is delving into his own mind, the contents of which predate not only his own individual existence, but humanity itself. Barton Levi St. Armand’s The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft contains a cogent analysis of this story in terms of dream imagery and Jungian archetypes.