Horror Literature through History
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Despite her taste for generic experimentation, Rice’s most substantial literary contribution has been within horror, returning repeatedly to familiar monsters such as the vampire, the mummy, witches, spirits, and werewolves, and reimagining them in distinct and provocative ways. Her storytelling is both personal and epic, with storylines that often privilege the first-person perspective, inviting introspection, but also positioning her characters within broader cultural and social histories that extend beyond individual books and into long-running series. The most significant of these is her Vampire Chronicles (1976–2015), totaling eleven novels so far as well as a spin-off series, New Tales of the Vampires (1998–1999), which includes a further two books. This is followed by three books within The Lives of the Mayfair Witches series (1990–1994) and The Wolf Gift Chronicles (2012–2013), which to date is comprised of two books. While these books are largely self-contained narratives, with the exception of the Mayfair Witches, which is structured in a more serialized form, they are interconnected pieces within a broad supernatural matrix, creating a fully realized and complex universe in which to position her characters and immerse her reader. The worlds of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches are also interlinked and go so far as to directly intersect when one of the witches is turned into a vampire in Merrick (2000). The historical background of her stories often spans centuries, and even millennia in the case of The Mummy (1989), harking back to the time of Cleopatra, and The Queen of the Damned (1988), which reveals the origins of vampirism as emerging from ancient Egypt. These extensive timespans can reflect the personal immortal existence of her vampires or the many generations of the Mayfair Witches, interweaving real historical moments within her fictional universe. In her work, these supernatural characters clearly exist within or on the periphery of the real world, haunting the shadows, and that is part of their allure and horror.
Novels by Anne Rice
Anne Rice has written nearly forty novels, not all of which have to do with horror. Here is a list of those that do.
1976
Interview with the Vampire
1985
The Vampire Lestat
1988
The Queen of the Damned
1989
The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned
1990
The Witching Hour
1992
The Tale of the Body Thief
1993
Lasher
1994
Taltos
1995
Memnoch the Devil
1996
Servant of the Bones
1997
Violin
1998
Pandora and The Vampire Armand
1999
Vittorio the Vampire
2000
Merrick
2001
Blood and Gold
2002
Blackwood Farm
2003
Blood Canticle
2012
Claudia’s Story and The Wolf Gift
2013
The Wolves of Midwinter
2014
Prince Lestat
2016
Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
Matt Cardin
As a horror writer, Rice undermines expectations about monsters, inviting the reader to love them while acknowledging the horrific things that they do and thus implicating the reader in complex moral dilemmas. Interview with the Vampire set the tone for her approach to the genre through its first-person narrative, told by the vampire Louis to a journalist, while its sequel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), is written as an autobiography of the vampire who “turned” Louis. Many of the later novels in the series continue to focus on Lestat, Rice’s brat prince of the vampire world—a character who flaunts his evilness and revels in vampirism—but others open up the storytelling world to recurring characters within Lestat and Louis’s universe, such as Marius, Armand, and Pandora. Together these novels encourage the reader to see the world from the vampires’ perspective, emphasizing the sensuality and romanticism of the vampires alongside their brutality. In this manner, Rice’s work stands as a pivotal moment within the evolution of the sympathetic vampire, a trajectory that runs from the Byronic heroes of Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori to the twenty-first-century vampire works of Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, as well as the proliferation of sympathetic vampires in television series such as Angel (1999–2004), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), and Being Human (2008–2013) and films such as Byzantium (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
Notably, her first vampire novel emerged in the 1970s when horror was undergoing a transition in which audiences no longer feared the monstrous outsider but rather identified with it, highlighting the destabilizing nature of horror in which the status quo is overturned. In Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the reader comes to understand vampires’ experience of the world by seeing it through their eyes and hearing about it via their voices as they take control of the storytelling, dramatically explaining their appreciation of beauty, art, music, literature, the wonders of nature, and their near-orgasmic pleasure in the kill. While wallowing in the allure of vampirism, Rice’s novels embrace the inherent moral ambiguity of their characters and confront readers with tough questions that challenge their understanding of evil. These include the questions of whether the characters are evil because they kill to survive; how readers rationalize their sympathy for characters with such passion for killing; and whether such characters, while they celebrate death, may not also offer a model of living to the fullest, as they revel in life and love as well as death.
While Rice does not always take a direct first-person point of view in each of her stories, her work is always informed by the perspective of the “other,” extending this approach to the other monsters in her creative universes, such as Ramses in The Mummy and the werewolf Reuben in the Wolf Gift Chronicles, two monsters that have generally been rendered the least knowable within horror fiction. The mummy is the regenerated dead driven by a curse and a desire for revenge and therefore often lacking in consciousness, while the werewolf is typically presented as too primal to understand, devoid of human identity when in animal form and therefore impenetrable to the reader. Ramses and Reuben, however, remain highly articulate and thought-provoking creations, offering an alternative to mainstream conceptions of life and living and raising questions about morality. For instance, rather than feeling cursed by his lycanthropy, Reuben is empowered physically and morally, savoring his newfound strength and choosing to hurt those who hurt others; his first killing saves a woman from a rapist and murderer.
Rice’s work explores existential questions about the meaning of good and evil and invites the reader to question the existence and nature of God within a world that allows such monsters to exist. This is particularly prevalent in Interview with the Vampire, but as a theme it recurs across much of her work. The very existence of her characters, whether they are vampires, immortals, regenerated dead, or spirits, challenges traditional conceptions of an afterlife that promises heaven. Her characters provide no such spiritual comfort but rather question the existence of heaven. Vampires, mummies, and spirits, after all, represent a pragmatic perception of an afterlife that is earthbound. More significantly, these monsters are also bound within their bodies, defined by their physicality rather than spiritual transcendence. For instance, the Mayfair Witches achieve their power through the support of a spirit known as Lasher that covets physical form, seeking rebirth through the pregnancy of one of the witches by entering her womb and joining with the fetus. Once born, it develops into a full-grown man and once again seduces and impregnates her and other witches within the family in order to spread its new species, all of which leads to miscarriage and death for the mothers. Through such tales, Rice explores the sensuality and horror of monstrosity, inviting readers to indulge their fascination with monsters while forcing them to question the implications of their sympathies.
See also: Devils and Demons; Mummies; Vampires; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carter, Margaret L. 1997. “The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 27–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. 1996. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 1999. “Interviewing the Author of Interview with the Vampire.” Gothic Studies 1, no. 2: 169–181.
Smith, Jennifer. 1996. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.
“RINGING THE CHANGES”
“Ringing the Changes” is the best known of all of Robert Aickman’s “strange stories.” It was first published in his fiction collection in Dark Entries (1964), then reprinted in Painted Devils (1979), which contains revised versions of earlier stories. It also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1971. It was a very significant story for Aickman’s career; Herbert Van Thal, a well-known literary agent, read it and was impressed, and this led to the publication of Dark Entries as well as Aickman’s first novel, The Late Breakfasters (1964).
“Ringing the Changes” is one of only a small number of Aickman’s tales to feature a customary horror trope, here the dead raised to a kind of life. But it is far from a conventional zombie story. Gerald and Phrynne have married after a very short courtship and go away on a belated honeymoon to Holihaven, a faded resort. There is a significant age gap between them; Gerald is twenty-four years Phrynne’s senior. As they arrive, all the churches in town begin ringing their bells to—as another character, Commander Shotcroft later explains—“wake the dead.” And the dead do wake, and dance with the living—an ecstatic revel in which Phrynne is caught up.
The story, as many of Aickman’s works do, explores the Freudian linking of sex and death, of eros (the sexual force) and thanatos (the death drive). When the dead awake, Gerald and Phrynne are making love. The morning after their terrifying experience, as they are walking back to the train station and pass a graveyard where many men are digging, Phrynne flushes with excitement.
Aickman had a sensitivity to the atavistic, to the way ancient and dark rites lie just beneath the surface of civilized modern life. “Ringing the Changes,” along with other Aickman stories such as “Bind Your Hair,” bear similarities to the films of the folk horror movement in British cinema of the era, which expressed similar thematic concerns. The plot of “Ringing the Changes” also illustrates a common Aickman technique: the literalization of a figure of speech or metaphor—in this case, “ringing to wake the dead”—to strange and uncanny effect.
In 1968 a television adaptation of the story under the title “The Bells of Hell” appeared as part of the BBC 2 series Late Night Horror. There have also been two radio play versions, one in 1980 on the CBC series Nightfall, and another in 2000 as a BBC Radio Four production that was adapted by Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss from the League of Gentlemen. “Ringing the Changes” is one of Aickman’s most accessible stories, but it is still characteristically ambiguous and profoundly unsettling.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Aickman, Robert; The Uncanny; Zombies.
Further Reading
Challinor, Philip. 2012. “Till Death Do Us Part: Some Notes on ‘Ringing the Changes.’” In Insufficient Answers: Essays on Robert Aickman, edited by Gary William Crawford, 8–21. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press.
Crawford, Gary William. 2011. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash Tree Press. Kindle edition.
“THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER”
D. H. Lawrence’s weird tale “The Rocking-Horse Winner” renders an early twentieth-century version of the haunted child trope that would later become prevalent in modern and contemporary horror fictions. Written in February 1926, the story was published in several places: the July 1926 edition of Harper’s Bazaar Magazine; Cynthia Asquith’s edited collection The Ghost Book of the same year; and the 1928 Secker edition of Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. The story might never have come to fruition if Asquith had not rejected Lawrence’s initial contribution to her Ghost Book, “Glad Ghosts” (1925), a tale in which a Lawrentian artist is visited in his guest chamber by a ghostly, sexualized figure that Asquith took to be a distasteful version of herself.
In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” an aristocratic mother, Hester, is a proxy for the Asquith whom Lawrence saw as rejecting him. Hester is cold-hearted, stoic, and recognizes her coldness toward her children, something that they too experience as unspoken but distinct. Rosemary Reeve Davies has argued that the genesis of the tale was suggested “by the tragic illness of Lady Cynthia’s oldest son John and by the Asquith marriage itself” (Davies 1983, 121). At times, Lawrence acted as a pseudo-analyst for the Asquith family, particularly for John, who may have been autistic.
It is revealed that Hester’s son Paul, who can thus be read as an extraordinary incarnation of John Asquith, has an uncanny and portentous ability to predict winning racehorses. As his powers heighten, so, too, does a disturbing refrain that echoes throughout his playroom, one that demands that he make more and more money. At the climax of this cautionary but speculative allegory—which warns against the monomaniacal pursuit of wealth—Paul dies after correctly predicting the success of the horse Malabar. While these winnings may clear debts, the family’s betrayal of Lawrentian ideals leads, ultimately, to spiritual and emotional ruin.
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” has been widely anthologized. In 1949 it was adapted as a British feature film.
Matt Foley
See also: Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.
Further Reading
Davies, Rosemary. 1983. “Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and ‘The Rocking Horse Winner.’” Studies in Short Fiction 20, 2/3: 121–126.
Hollington, Michael. 2011. “Lawrentian Gothic and ‘The Uncanny.’” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 172–184. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, Vol. 149. Detroit, MI: Gale.
ROHMER, SAX (1883–1959)
Sax Rohmer is the pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, creator of Dr. Fu Manchu, a sinister supercriminal genius and dispenser of innumerable scientific and biological horrors. A former Fleet Street journalist, Rohmer debuted with a short story, “The Mysterious Mummy” (1903). Despite the author’s frequent forays into horror, he belonged to the British thriller school of mystery fiction. Consequently, Fu Manchu was in the tradition of Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, but was a distinct distillation of the Yellow Peril theme that traced back to the eighteenth century.
His creator memorably described Fu Manchu as a seemingly supernatural figure of horror: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. . . . one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present. . . . Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man” (Rohmer 1970, 17). Introduced in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (later retitled The Insidious Fu Manchu) in 1913, the devil doctor most often battled British police official Nayland Smith and his cohorts. Contrary to accepted fictional portrayals of Asian malefactors, the character was portrayed with a strange mixture of subtle horror and sympathy. A Chinese physician and scientist, Dr. Fu Manchu was brilliant, bound by a strict code of honor, yet utterly diabolical in pursuit of his lofty goals, which typically centered around world domination by China through the Si-Fan, a secret society he controlled.
Although depicted as
a coldly intellectual embodiment of evil, Fu Manchu was neither supernatural nor employed occult means to pursue his objectives, even though, as a consequence of imbibing the elixir of life, he was preternaturally ancient and inexplicably possessed the transparent inner eyelid of a feline. The horrors inflicted on his adversaries were most often venomous reptiles and insects, exotic poisons and fungi, and sinister agents of death such as Dacoits or Thuggees. The author was skilled in weaving an atmosphere of horror about the proceedings, and so indelible was Rohmer’s portrayal of Fu Manchu that numerous imitations of Fu Manchu followed. Thirteen novels and a handful of short stories featuring the devil doctor were produced over a thirty-five-year period. By the time the series had run its course in 1959, cultural sensitivities made the iconic but stereotypical figure undesirable, if not entirely passé.
A student of the occult, Rohmer wrote a handful of short stories and novels exploring overtly supernatural themes, chief of which was his acknowledged masterpiece—praised by H. P. Lovecraft, among others—the mummy-themed Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), followed by The Green Eyes of Bast (1920), a short story collection revolving around an occult detective, The Dream Detective (1920), and others. The author was also instrumental in introducing a strain of Egyptian-themed horror into the popular consciousness of his era, and in 1914 he produced a well-researched nonfiction survey of the occult, The Romance of Sorcery. Two lesser novels, The Orchard of Tears (1918) and Wulfheim (1950), were inspired by the author’s Theosophical leanings. Sax Rohmer died in London on June 1, 1959, ironically succumbing to the Asian flu.